[Freya-dæg] All About The Last Airbender

{The Last Airbender's movie poster, found on Wikipedia.}

Plot Summary
The Good
The Bad
Judgment
Closing

M. Night Shyamalan, a director best known for movies like The Sixth Sense and The Village should stick to what he knows, or at the least to doing what he does best: creating an engrossing plot that strings the audience along until they reach some crucial twist.

Not only is adaptation outside of his wheelhouse, so too are movies where his signature twist is missing. Put the two together, and, somehow, you get the live action adaptation of the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Last Airbender

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Plot Summary

Based on the idea that each of the “books” referred to in the title cards of the animated series could be turned into a movie, The Last Airbender follows the plot of “Book One: Water.”

For those unfamiliar with the Nickelodeon show about a world where people can bend water, earth, fire, and air to their will, this section of the story introduces Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) of the Southern water tribe shortly before they discover Aang (Noah Ringer) frozen in a glacier with his sky bison. He winds up freed from the ice, and after a brief encounter with the reviled Fire Nation, the three of them set out to help Aang realize his potential as the Avatar, the one who holds the four elemental forces of the world in check.

Ultimately, Aang, Katara, and Sokka end up at the city of the Northern Water Tribe, so that Aang can master water bending, and also so that they can help to defend it from an upcoming Fire Nation assault. As General Jao (Aasif Mandvi) of the Fire Nation plots to kill the spirits of the moon and ocean, thus robbing the water tribe of its bending power, defeat looms over the last truly free city in the world and only our three heroes can help to avert it.

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The Good

As you might expect from a movie about a world where people can bend the elements to their will with movements that Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan would be proud of, the choreography in this movie is decent. And the effects are fairly well done. Whatever else may be said about it, it has no shortage of spectacle. Especially when the fire and the water fly in the final battle.

Also, and this was more a surprise than anything else, but Dev Patel does a good job of playing the brooding, exiled Fire Nation prince Zuko. His character is softened, but it's still really obvious that he's absolutely brimming with conflicting hatreds and loyalties and desires.

Aasif Mandvi's appearance was also a very pleasant surprise. He didn't play anything up for laughs, and a movie based on an animated series (other than Avatar: The Last Airbender) might not be expected to offer up the chance to show your dramatic chops, but he definitely hits it out of the park as General Jao.

{The Daily Show's Senior Hollywood Correspondent goes a little too deep undercover for his exposé on bad adaptations. Image from a screen capture}

Seychelle Gabriel also works well as Princess Yue of the Northern Water Tribe – she even puts some feeling into her lines.

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The Bad

Cool World is not a very good movie. However, having seen The Last Airbender, it seems as though the quotation used to introduce The Bad in it was used too soon.

The biggest problem with this movie is the absolutely bizarre pronunciations of names and things that are pronounced in entirely different ways in the animated show.

Where the series pronounces Aang as “(r)ANG,” and Sokka as “Sock-ah,” the director of the movie (Mr. M. Night himself) has them changed to “Ah-ng” and “So-ka.” At one point, a character even refers to the "Yang" in "Yin and Yang" as “Yah-ng.” So, first off, why not just follow the pronunciation that fans have become familiar with over the course of three television seasons?

The next biggest problem (a very close contender for the title) is that all of the character arcs that are presented throughout the show's many episodes are almost entirely shaved away to make sure that this movie is feature length. This is an understandable change, but, if The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask teaches one thing about building character, it's that it can be done in a limited space and a limited time.

Rather than trying to pack the movie with all of the side plots and diversions that the show presents so wonderfully, why not just have Aang, Katara, and Sokka interact with people in the Northern Water Tribe city as stand-ins for the characters they meet in the show? It'd even be possible to just move some of those characters into the city so that they could still be interacted with.

To be fair, the movie doesn't try to pack everything in, but it skips over so many key moments for character development that the characters are left to develop through dialog that's not only written so it conveys almost no subtlety but that's often delivered as if it's being read for the first time.

Dev Patel works well as Zuko, and Seychelle Gabriel does an alright job of playing Yue, but the actor that was cast as Sokka just doesn't seem to get it. In the show, Sokka is a goofball of an older brother who's always hatching plans and making schemes that have some hole or other in them. He isn't solely a comic relief character, but he often is the one that audiences are meant to laugh at – at least early in the series.

As the three travel together and their characters develop, Sokka does become more serious, but that seriousness is always undercut with a bad pun or a silly gag. Instead of this nuance, Jackson Rathbone plays Sokka as some kind of straight man who hardly ever smiles. And when he does – especially when Yue is telling him about how she died when she was born and is alive because the Moon Spirit gave her its life – it's really poorly timed.

{Maybe Rathbone's Sokka is off because his timing, the heart of comedy, is off. Image from a screen capture.}

Aang and Katara are a little bit better, but again, because we see them in so few situations compared to the show, they aren't as nuanced as they are in the original. Aang's Monkey-King-like energy and playfulness are replaced by a more sullen, “I-don't-wanna-be-the-Avatar-because-then-I-can't-have-a-family” nature, and Katara is, well, just Katara. By the end of the first book in the series, it was already clear that there was some chemistry between these two characters, but in the movie there's practically nothing to suggest this.

Mercifully, Zuko's absolutely mad sister Azula, is only shown briefly in only two scenes. But, these two scenes set her up as more of a giggly little girl than as the scheming, psychologically twisted monster that she is in the series.

And, to end on a minor detail, a running joke in the series is that everywhere Aang, Katara, and Sokka go, they wind up upsetting a man's cabbage cart. Even the new series Avatar: The Legend of Korra, includes a scene where a cabbage man is dispossessed of his cabbages.

It might be fan service, but it would at least show the fans that you care about something that they admire, Mr. M. Night. And, including the scene would also have assured people familiar with the series that you had actually watched it and not just written your script based on some sort of terribly truncated SparkNotes summary.

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Judgment

The Last Airbender is not the movie it could have been.

Now, it's unrealistic to expect any filmmaker to be able to condense 20 episodes of a television show (about 6 hours and 40 minutes) down into something that's less than two hours while retaining things like characters, a coherent story, and a fully realized world. But there are ways that such an adaptation could have been made to work.

The discovery of Aang could have happened during the opening credits. Then a voice over could give the background of the setting and what had happened up to x-point as the characters did something (maybe fly somewhere on Appa, or walk between villages with a group of people trailing them since Aang is, you know, the Avatar and all). From there, most of the movie could be based in the Northern Water Tribe city with flashbacks to fill any gaps, fully realized relationships with the city's inhabitants to develop characters, and simply more dialog that revealed the story in an organic way, rather than lines that even the actors seem to balk at from time to time.

Unfortunately, M. Night Shyamalan's adaptation was not so bold as to make this many changes. Instead, he seems to have taken a more scissor-happy approach, trimming away everything excess until only the bare outline of the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender's plot remains.

Some of the actors were definitely well picked, and the spectacle that the movie offers is quite impressive. But the four elements of Patel, Gabriel, Mandvi, and spectacle alone aren't enough to save the world of water, earth, fire, and air.

Freya, feel free to shed a tear as you fly over this one, but do no more save let it remain.

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Closing

Check back here next week for more creative writing, an editorial on the newest news, and a hunt for the good in, and hopeful redemption of, another generally despised movie.

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[Freya-dæg] A Whole Cool World Is Just too Aloof to Care About Explanations

{Cool World's movie poster; the first sign of things to come. Image from Wikipedia.}

Plot Summary
The Good
The Bad
Judgment
Closing



Before Brad Pitt made it big, he starred in a number of TV movies and features that didn't make it to theaters. He was even on a few episodes of the hit series Dallas (check out Wikipedia for his full filmography).

One of the movies from this early part of Pitt's career is the Ralph Bakshi picture known as Cool World, a move that, just like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? in 1988, splices real footage with animation.

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Plot Summary

Immediately we're introduced to the movie's hero, Frank Harris (Brad Pitt), as he returns home to his mother after WWII. But, Frank's post-war life is cut short when he crashes his motorcycle after swerving to avoid a drunk couple in what might be a strange nod to Manos:The Hands of Fate. However, just as the ambulance pulls up, Dr. Vincent Whiskers brings Frank into the animated “Cool World.”

Skip ahead 47 years to 1992 and we meet Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne), the creator of Cool World, as he finishes off a prison sentence. But Jack's life isn't about to get any easier, since his most famous drawing, Holli Would (Kim Basinger), keeps bringing him into Cool World in the hopes of having him make her real. As Cool World's top cop, Frank can't let this happen, and a mad pursuit follows.

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The Good

It's always a welcome experience to see big stars in their early roles, and this is no exception. Pitt isn't fantastic here, but it's instructive to see someone like him in a movie like this. It inspires a certain amount of hope.

On the point of the power of individuals in movies, David Bowie also wrote a song for the movie entitled “Real Cool World.” It's a decent example of Bowie's work in the 90s, but it's precise part in this movie will be addressed later on.

As a Ralph Bakshi film, there's definitely a fair deal of trippy animation and visuals, which are good. But only up to a point.

Also, some neat ideas do come up over the course of the movie. Particularly in many of the early exchanges between Jack and Holli – the creator and the created. Actually the entire relationship between Cool World and the real world is rather interesting.

But. Neither of these ideas are particularly developed.

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The Bad

To quote the one-time open mic stand up comedian Doctor Pepper (Patton Oswalt repeats his best bit on Feelin' Kinda Patton): “I don't know where to start or where to begin.”

There are a lot of problems with this movie.

None of the mechanics of the universe are explained. We never get any more information about which came first, the Jack Deebs or the Cool World. We never know if Cool World was created by Jack Deebs from nothing, or if Cool World existed in some kind of realm of ideals and Jack simply pulled it into the real world with his comics.

There's never a reason given for why there are 47 years between the time when Frank gets pulled into Cool World and when Holli starts stirring up trouble.

We never get any real background or idea of what Frank's character is actually like.

We're never told why Holli wants to be made real aside from it allowing her to get power, and “be real.”

Too much time is spent on pointless animated vignettes that scream at the audience “Hey! We're in a cartoon world, isn't this wild!?”

But, on top of all this, the David Bowie song (part of the soundtrack that was better received by critics than the movie itself) is reserved until the end credits. It's not played in parts through the movie, it's not hinted at by any kind of guest appearance. It just plays over the end credits like a minstrel found by house hunters in a secluded closet.

In short, the first hour and fifteen minutes of the movie could be cut down to 20 and the only effect would be that this movie would be about 42 minutes long instead of 98.

{An apt expression to pull after watching Cool World. A screenshot from the movie.}

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Judgment

Cool World is a movie that presents a handful of neat ideas, but those ideas are hidden under sheets and cells of animation that do almost nothing to forward the plot.

This movie would have greatly benefited by starting with the chase scene at the hour and twenty minute mark, and then telling the story in flashbacks, or with some other sequential shuffling.

It also wouldn't have hurt if a reason was given for why it took 47 years for something to happen in Cool World with Holli, or why it took her until the end of Jack Deeb's prison sentence to start trying to get him to make her real.

Or even some kind of explanation of why Holli wanted to be real, and what the purpose and/or origin of a spike on top of a random Vegas hotel was would have helped. But, to quote the good Doctor Whiskers himself, “the spike...is beyond our understanding.” And so too is much of the motivation within and for this movie.

Freya, fly high, and when you pass over this one, make sure that you don't look down, unless there be a thick covering of cloud.

To help wash away the terrible taste of this movie from your mind, check out this music video for Bowser and Blue's “Just A Cartoon.” It does so much more with the idea of human/cartoon crossovers than the entirety of Cool World.

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Closing

Next week, check back here for another variation on Monday's entries, an article on the newest news, and a hunt for the good in M. Night. Shyamalan's The Last Airbender

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