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    M. Night Shyamalan

    I saw the trailer for The Last Airbender at the pictures recently and thought it looked a bit ropey. Roger Ebert (who I must admit I don't really like much normally) confirms it:

    "The Last Airbender" is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.
    MNS will never again see a budget of more than 30 bob for a film of his. Discuss.

    #2
    M. Night Shyamalan

    What's infuriating about the man is that, technically, he can make a polished film that has the touch of distinctive craft about it. In making a film, he actually demonstrates a kind of virtuosity.

    But his smug belief that the material he comes up with is fit for placing before the lens is annoying and breath-takingly dumb. He knows how to stage and use the camera, but what he films in terms of content is absolute, self-deluding shit.

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      #3
      M. Night Shyamalan

      He started so well, but he's the Gus Caesar of film, isn't he?
      Sixth Sense was pretty good, as was Unbreakable, then we got to Mel Gibson and nasty ET, that thing with the Amish type people, Mark Wahlberg's bad wind, the wierd water shit and then this. and his plot twists have become the equivalent of a Scooby-Doo ending when they take the ghost disguise off the the fairground owner.

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        #4
        M. Night Shyamalan

        This is the film adaptation of that kid's cartoon series from a few years ago, isn't it? Ironically, that was called "Avatar". Bet the producers of this were well pissed off when they realised Cameron had nicked what must have been their working title.

        It's hard to see how Shyalaman can work his normal "creepy with a surprising twist" schtick into what was a fairly formulaic "innocent learns he has special powers and heads off to save the world from evil powers" kind of saga.

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          #5
          M. Night Shyamalan

          Apparently it's meant to be the first part of a trilogy. If that contract's already been signed then somebody at the studio is going to have a lot of explaining to do.

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            #6
            M. Night Shyamalan

            The Last Airbender was universally panned here in the US when it came out. And a lot of people were pissed that he took a story about Asian and Native American characters and the only major non-white actor in the movie was playing the villain.

            Also, most everyone complained about the 3D aspects of the movie--that it was made to be 3D after the fact, and it supposedly looked really grimy and dark. I liked the Onion's review:

            Where to start with this one? How about this: If any movie ever warranted a class-action lawsuit against the filmmakers, it’s The Last Airbender. Not because it’s a terrible movie—though it is—but because its release as a 3-D film becomes false advertising a few seconds after a comin’-atcha gush of water appears behind the Paramount logo. From there, it becomes painfully obvious—even more painfully obvious than in Alice In Wonderland—that a few 3-D elements have been added to satisfy the current 3-D craze, and the higher ticket prices they allow. Worse still, the process makes the already-dark imagery darker, and turns the action blurry. Viewers who see it in this form will pay more for an even shittier experience than the one they would have had in 2-D.
            There was a funny clip on YouTube that's been taken down, so no link...it was filmed by someone in the audience at a movie, during the previews. Apparently M. Night is a producer on a upcoming movie called "Devil," and the preview starts and goes on for a little bit, and then when the screen reads "FROM THE IMAGINATION OF M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN" or something like that, everyone in the audience groans. He's gotten to be that big of a joke now.

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              #7
              M. Night Shyamalan

              I remember that happening once in the '80s during a really cool looking preview for some action film. Then the Cannon Pictures slate came up and everyone in the place groaned.

              Cannon was run by two guys named Golan and Globus, and they were shit-picture merchants extraordinaire. A great trailer, followed by 90 minutes of pure disappointment.

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                #8
                M. Night Shyamalan

                Heh. This bit from their wiki sums them up nicely.

                During this year, Cannon Films released Robotech: The Movie (also called Robotech: The Untold Story) for a limited run in Mesquite, Texas. Cannon was reportedly unsatisfied with Carl Macek’s first version of the movie, which was almost a straight adaptation of the anime Megazone 23. It was at their insistence that footage from The Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross (the series adapted as the Robotech Masters segment of the Robotech TV series) and Megazone 23 be spliced together to produce a more action-oriented movie. Macek recalls that, although he himself was unhappy with this revised version, Menahem Golan, after viewing it, happily said: “Now that’s a Cannon movie!”

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                  #9
                  M. Night Shyamalan

                  Today's Guardian focuses on the unfortunate (and repeated) use of the word "bender" throughout the film.

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                    #10
                    M. Night Shyamalan

                    This is exactly what I was talking about in relation to The Morning Benders, Inca.

                    In a way it's admirable that American audiences can muster the earnestness to get annoyed about the racial politics - because you simply cannot put this stuff before us without the sex/gayness-doubting 10-year-old in our collective psyche bursting out, Alien-style. "I could tell at once that you were a bender." (If I'd had lucrative film deal for every time I'd heard that . . . ) "It's a bender!" " You, son will one say become a bender." It's too much.

                    That even the Guardian's laziest reviewer has caught on only emphasises this unfortunate point.

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                      #11
                      M. Night Shyamalan

                      And so on, for almost two hours. Each time, the response from the auditorium was deafeningly immature, and brought many of us to a state of nervous collapse. By the end of the film, I felt like a bit-part player in some feature-length adaptation of Viz comic – Springtime for Finbarr Saunders, perhaps. This scene will inevitably be repeated in every cinema in the land showing The Last Airbender. For Friday and Saturday night showings, the police may have to be called.
                      It's not the film's fault that British people use this word to mean something else.

                      I get annoyed when people laugh about the club Deportivo Wanka as well.

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                        #12
                        M. Night Shyamalan

                        Incandenza wrote:

                        It's not the film's fault that British people use this word to mean something else.
                        I agree, Inca, but it might be the film's fault that they are never engaged enough in the film itself not to pick up on it.

                        (I must admit that I haven't seen it ... but I must also admit that I don't intend to, I'm afraid, as my experience of the bloke's films, after the promising start - as described above - is a negative one).

                        And I agree with ian - he seems to have all the film-making craft, but will insist on filming his own ideas. Someone of his confidence should tell him.

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                          #13
                          M. Night Shyamalan

                          erwin wrote:
                          I agree, Inca, but it might be the film's fault that they are never engaged enough in the film itself not to pick up on it.
                          True, and like I said, I heard the film is utter shit.

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                            #14
                            M. Night Shyamalan

                            erwin wrote:
                            Incandenza wrote:

                            It's not the film's fault that British people use this word to mean something else.
                            I agree, Inca, but it might be the film's fault that they are never engaged enough in the film itself not to pick up on it.
                            It doesn't take much research to find out these things. One of the stars of the film is a British male teenager, I'd find it hard to believe he wasn't sniggering every time they called someone a bender, like one of the centurions in Pontius Pilate's palace every time he said "Biggus Dickus".

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                              #15
                              M. Night Shyamalan

                              Apparently "Flamer" meant something completely different in contemporary New York slang in about 1995 than anything in England - when I had an American girlfriend at the time she thought it was hilarious that Burger King had something called a "BK Flamer" on their menus over here.

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                                #16
                                M. Night Shyamalan

                                What does "bender" mean in your slang?

                                The slang meaning of "bender" here is a prolonged period of extreme intoxication, usually alcohol, but not necessarily. In The Simpsons, Bart and Millhouse consume an all-syrup Slushy and refer to that as a Slushy bender, during which Bart accidentally joins some knock-off version of the Cub Scouts and then makes an effort to weasel out of it. Marge disapproves and Homer says "Don't discourage the boy Marge, weaseling out of things is what separates us from the animals....except for the weasel." One of my all time favorite opening thirds of a Simpson's episode ever.

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                                  #17
                                  M. Night Shyamalan

                                  It does get used for drinking sessions, but chiefly it's a term for a gay man.

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                                    #18
                                    M. Night Shyamalan

                                    Which of course means it is deliberately misconstrued for both slang meaning, as in
                                    "I'm in no fit state to do that, I've been on a bender all weekend."
                                    "Hurr hurr, I bet you were."
                                    Last edited by Sean of the Shed; 06-01-2019, 09:08.

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                                      #19
                                      M. Night Shyamalan

                                      Actually it's probably an abbreviation of the term gender bender.

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                                        #20
                                        M. Night Shyamalan

                                        Of course, there's only one real Bender

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                                          #21
                                          M. Night Shyamalan

                                          In Argentine slang, 'pajero' means 'wanker'. A peculiarity which led the Mitsubishi 4x4 of that name to be rebranded when they started selling it here.

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                                            #22
                                            M. Night Shyamalan

                                            I've watched the cartoon with my daughter for a few years when she was younger and it was a good show. We saw the film a few weeks back and the first 5 minutes looked like it was going to be very bad, but it picked up. I don't know why it would get panned by the critics as much as it did other than them wanting to dig into M Night or maybe they never saw the cartoon and didn't realize that the film basically follows the cartoon. In general, I would say that he didn't do anything to make the movie really bad, although it was weird how he re-cast the brother and sister as white (BTW the avatar himself is not white in the cartoon nor is he in the film). I don't know if the film would have been better if someone else made it. It was good enough.

                                            In terms of the bender stuff, it's a term that was used in the cartoon as well; it refers to the ability to move things (air, water, earth, and fire).

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                                              #23
                                              M. Night Shyamalan

                                              I ended up at the pictures a couple of weeks ago with the kids, and they spurned The Last Airbender in favour of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which turned out to be a slick but utterly generic piece of fantasy CGI fare. Personally, I'd prefer a movie that's a bit rough round the edges but at least has a spark of originality over another tedious FX-fest.

                                              Which isn't to say that The Last Airbender isn't a tedious FX-fest.

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                                                #24
                                                M. Night Shyamalan

                                                Surely M. Knight shymanlamilaminans totally lost it with "lady in the water", tried to sit through it a couple of weeks ago and it was one of the worst films I've seen this year, and I watched "deathwish 4: the crackdown" the same weekend so, y'know, I've form in that regard.

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                                                  #25
                                                  M. Night Shyamalan

                                                  You really should set your heights a bit higher. How bad must your local DVD rental shop be? Have you seen Police Academy 6 yet?

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