This video is the very embodiment of film nerdiness. First, because it’s Star Wars. Second, because it’s goofing on silent cinema:

A small sample of the reaction around the InterWeb to The Last Airbender:

I saw the movie and I was pissed. I was yelling in the movie theater and I saw like 7 ppl return their tickets to go see another movie

Another:

I DEMAND SHYAAMALANS BLOOD

There are a few brave souls standing by it but not many. A self-described fan on deviantART piles on:

In terms of movie making, this movie was as bad as it gets. It was terribly paced, poorly explained, visually unimpressive, and the acting and writing was amateurish and cheesy. How can anybody make a movie this bad? Do these people not watch their own movies? There was no heart, no humor and nothing particularly likable about these versions of the beloved cartoon characters. It’s amazing how bad this movie is. It’s like they tried to make it suck. I recommend, don’t see it in theaters, heck, don’t see it on DVD. Don’t see it at all.

I went to see The Last Airbender last Friday (7/2/2010) and dutifully wrote a review of it for Canted. The short and sweet version is this: it’s horrific. Don’t see it. If you really have to, whether you’re a fan of the original Nickelodeon television show that wants to see the butchery that’s been done in its name or an outsider who’s curious about just how bad it could be, at least don’t blow the extra money to see it in 3D. But even if you fall into one of those two categories, you shouldn’t see it anyway.

I summed it up by saying:

A number of scenes that serve no other purpose than to set up more expository descriptions are strung together one after another… If this sounds like it’d be terribly uninteresting to watch, that’s because it is. By trying to fit in so much material, the movie only succeeds in diminishing the impact of each individual scene, creating an unevenly paced, slapdash montage that bears only a superficial resemblance to its source material and an even more superficial resemblance to an actual movie.

From what I’ve read so far, I have the nicest review of it on the Internet. Christopher Orr, in his review for The Atlantic, was scathing:

At first, the project seemed to promise an experiment of sorts: Has Shyamalan truly emerged as one of Hollywood’s most awful directors, or merely one of its most awful screenwriters? Alas, the experiment was corrupted by the studio’s decision to let Shyamalan write his own script, so it is impossible to determine the precise origin of the awfulness. But rest assured, it’s there.

He later adds, “If there has been a duller, more stagnant action film released this decade, I managed, thank God, to miss it.”

Fans of the TV show, of which I count myself among, saw this wreckage coming a long way off. Our ears perked up when we heard the possibility of a movie after the show’s season finale, and then we collectively cringed when we heard the words “live action.” When we heard it was to be directed by M. Night Shyamalan, the cringe turned into a spine-tingling shudder. Still, there was a lingering hope that, in spite of Shyamalan’s dismal record as of late, it wouldn’t end up being too bad. If there was going to be a trite Hollywood rendition of the show we loved, perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad as to be an embarrassment.

Well, it was a nice thought anyway.

The Last Airbender, as an adaptation, does raise some curious issues. Often when considering film adaptations, we think about them in terms of how similar they are to the original source material. This is in turn is expressed in terms of fidelity—how “faithful” is the adaptation to the original work?

This is a fallacy though. Anytime an adaptation brings a work from one medium to another it’s impossible for it to remain exactly as it was in its original form by virtue of the construct that is the new medium. As I pointed out in my review of The Last Airbender, it would have been impossible for Shyamalan to have made a movie that was completely faithful to the first season of the television show for the simple fact that the twenty episodes of the first season are together over eight hours long and the movie is only an hour and forty-three minutes.

What metric should be used to measure the success of an adaptation, then? Should we judge it not so much on the similarity to the original plot and more on how the adaptation successfully embodies the spirit of the original work? Or on its ability to maintain the uniqueness of the characters? To what degree do we accept that the adaptation will diverge from the original? To what extent do we allow for the person making the adaptation to bring in his or her own original vision or interpretation of the work?

There are no hard and fast answers to any of these questions. In recent times there have been quite a few instances where a large built-in fanbase calls for adaptations that are as “faithful” to the originals as possible, particularly in the realm of comic book adaptations. If memory serves, the makers of Watchmen were adamant about keeping the storyline as close to the original graphic novel as possible. So were (I’m told) the makers of Kick-Ass. The success of an adaptation can’t reliably be drawn from how similar or different it is from the original. Both can work.

Two examples from the world of film noir exemplify this point. The 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor is by far the best of the movie adaptations of Dashiell Hammett’s novel of the same name (the other two having been made in 1931 and 1936). Of the three, it’s also the one that sticks the closest to the original plot of the novel. A lot of dialogue has been trimmed in the interest of time, but only a handful of scenes have been cut entirely, and the characters in the movie are identical to the ones in the film.

By contrast, Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler’s adaptation of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity (1948), which was a series of magazine shorts before they were collected into slim 130-something page novel, diverges a great deal from its original source material. Plot-wise they’re both very similar up until about halfway through, at which point they’re no longer anything alike. The ending to Wilder and Chandler’s version of it is a world apart from Cain’s. The characters are the same, but the vast majority of the dialogue—including Walter Neff’s numerous one-liners that the movie is famous for—are drawn from Chandler’s head and don’t appear in Cain’s story at all. Other aspects of the film, like the voice-over Neff provides into the dictaphone that helps structure the entirety of the film’s narrative, are the sole creation of Wilder and Chandler. The result is a much more organized and compelling story than the original, and that’s not just my opinion—James M. Cain thought so too.

I myself am not a stickler for film adaptations to be “faithful” to the works they’re based on. Film is a very different beast from novels or television, and I don’t think it’s fair to judge movie adaptations on that criteria. I was expecting Shyamalan to bring (pardon the phrasing) his own original twist to the TV show when he set out to make The Last Airbender. If you read his interview with Wired, it certainly sounds like he intended to do just that:

It’s an opportunity. I don’t have to make the film for little kids on Cartoon Network; I’m making it for the world. And 85 percent of the people who are going to see this movie have probably never seen the show, and I want it to be legitimate.

The problem is that he doesn’t. In fact, there’s not even an attempt to. The changes Shyamalan does make to the original are largely insignificant (albeit incredibly annoying) ones, like changing the pronunciation of the names of several main characters. Aside from that, it’s a complete re-hash of the first season of the television show. And since it’s impossible to condense that much material into a single movie, the effort inevitably falls flat on its face.

Since I am a fan of the show and I have that prior knowledge, I’m not coming to the table completely unbiased. In my review for Canted I specifically acknowledge the perspective of a fan and compare it to the television show because it’s impossible for me to not have that perspective. My overwhelming disappointment (among other emotions, like rage) with the movie stems not from its divergence from the source material but from its single-minded adherence to it. During the making of this film, did anyone bother to ask why condensing the first season into a movie would be a good idea? If people really wanted to know what happened during the first season of the show, couldn’t they just watch the first season of show? They’d invariably be better off for it because the show actually has the eight hours needed to explain everything that goes on in the plot.

Worse than taking a giant risk by bringing his own version of the world and characters that Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko created, Shyamalan instead took no risks at all. The end result is an intolerably stilted, boring movie that spends most of its time just trying to explain everything that it wants to include because it can’t possibly fit it all. Minus the repetitive, unimaginative dialogue, the humorlessness of the characters, and the mediocre action sequences, this might have been tolerable if Shyamalan was hoping to get the back story out of the way in the first movie before diving into the meat and potatoes in the planned second and third movies of the trilogy. But since the second and third movies were correspondingly supposed to be based on the second and third seasons of the television show, it’s hard to see them not running into the exact same problems.

It’s hard to see, really, why Paramount didn’t realize this movie trilogy would be a massive blunder right from the get-go. The fans certainly saw it coming from a mile away.

Since seeing the movie Kick-Ass and writing a review of it for Canted, I’ve met a lot of resistance to the idea I originally presented of it being not good. It’s an odd film in many ways that I’ve elaborated on elsewhere, so I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s developing a cult following.

That being said, there was something about it that irked me. From the point of view of someone who loves movies enough to spend his undergraduate collegiate career studying them, seeing a movie that at best I could describe as “all right” while others loudly proclaimed it to be four and a half metric tons of awesome sauce bothered me. It even led to an in-depth conversation over lunch with a friend of mine last week who tried to pitch me the argument that today’s American audiences don’t care about plot as an explanation for why people don’t seem to be bothered by the somewhat schizophrenic nature of the tone and story of Kick-Ass—an argument which I really didn’t buy in the least.

Fortunately this dilemma of mine has been resolved by the box office receipts of the past weekend, when Kick-Ass took in $9.5 million—a sharp 52% drop from what it took on its opening. From TIME‘s Box Office Weekend:

These numbers drove a stake through the collective heart of those fanboys who had expected that Kick-Ass‘s imaginative rethinking of the superhero ethos would translate into big bucks at the Bijou. A week ago, the movie was in a tight race with [How To Train Your] Dragon, finally claiming the top spot with $19.8 million. But, as Nikki Finke, the asp-tongued blogger at Deadline Hollywood, pointed out, “Lionsgate unethically inflated its opening numbers by including last Thursday midnight’s take in order to grab the No. 1 title last weekend.” (Seems to us that most studios with midnight-preview showings of their movies count those earnings as part of the Friday take, but we’re reluctant to make a point of that. The combative Ms. Finke might have someone bust our kneecaps.)

I readily admit that the box office take is a terrible indicator for whether or a movie is any good or not. But maybe plot does matter to American audiences after all.

What’s even better is that How To Train Your Dragon took the #1 spot at the weekend box office, a movie I adore (and in spite of the fact that it’s entering its fifth week of release).

Now up on Canted: reviews for How To Train Your Dragon (if you haven’t seen it yet, go now—right now) and Kick-Ass (if you haven’t seen it yet, don’t unless you really have nothing else to do today). Valerie also waxes philosophical about Jack Bauer and shares some InterWeb finds about Glee and Bob Odenkirk.

I’d like to add on to what I said in my review of Kick-Ass by talking about some of the other issues at work in that film, beyond the basics of what does or doesn’t make it a good movie (and more so the latter, in my opinion). A friend of mine has informed me that the film is based on an original comic book series and is faithful adaptation of it as far as the overall story-arch goes. I’ve never read the original comic book series so I can’t comment on that one way or the other. My review is therefore from the perspective of someone who knows nothing about the original comic.

With that out of the way, let me say—by way of introduction—that I was a victim of false expectations. By and large Kick-Ass has been marketed as a silly movie, a comedy with crime fighting mixed in for good measure (“Superbad with costumes” is the way I worded it in the review). It’s not. After the first third or so of the movie, the comedy takes a backseat to the action and only comes up again in places where it feels either ill-timed or out of place. It doesn’t even trend dark comedy because the comedy clashes instead of compliments the action. It’s just dark.

Let me rephrase that: it’s darker than dark. When I first walked out of the theater and was thinking of a way to sum it up, the word I seized upon was “disturbing.” The more I think about it, the more that fits. Kick-Ass is legitimately one of the most disturbing films I’ve ever seen for a number of reasons. I don’t think I’m ruining anything for those of you who haven’t seen it yet by telling you that the first scene is of a would-be superhero trying out a pair of self-fashioned wings and accidentally committing suicide by leaping from a tall building while testing them out. Our first person narrator then callously remarks that the person who’s just died is not him, it’s “some Armenian guy with a history of mental health problems.” Already we’re embarking on some pretty dark territory.

Then there’s the character of Mindy Macready, played by the thirteen-year-old Chloë Grace Moretz. I remember having a discussion in one of my Media Arts classes about the scene in The Dark Knight when Harvey Dent, having become Two Face, threatens a child with a gun. If anyone found that unnerving, then Kick-Ass would cause a psychological meltdown. The very first scene that introduces Mindy is of her with her father (played by Nicolas Cage) as he trains her to take a bullet with a bulletproof vest on. Aside from what they’re actually doing, it’s something of a heartwarming father-daughter scene. It doesn’t change the fact that he’s shooting her at point blank range with a pistol.

This, of course, doesn’t even hold a candle to later scenes when she’s doing some Tarantino slice-and-dice on the bad guys, or when she’s likewise getting the living crap beat out of her by said bad guys. When you then take into account that her killing sprees are an act of revenge that her father has made her believe are necessary, you have a sordid picture of wanton child manipulation and abuse.

Then there is the world of the film itself. Gotham City may have been bleak, but there were beacons of hope here and there. In Kick-Ass there’s not only no hope, but there’s not even beacons. Lawful authority figures aren’t just ineffectual. They’re non-existent. Aside from a friend Cage’s character has inside the police department that gives him insider tips and the occasional sirens in the distance, you will never see cops in action. They’re all either incompetent or in the pocket of the mob. This means you can stab, steal, and kill without having to ever worry about the consequences. From the school yard bullies to the mob bosses running the city, everyone gets away with everything. You can be a vigilante with a Myspace (who the hell still uses Myspace?) and nobody will stop you. (There’s a throwaway line in the film about changing the ISP address so it can’t be tracked, but I feel like in today’s age of technology there would still be a work-around if you needed one.)

Ordinary citizens aren’t much help either. In many of the scenes depicting crimes in progress, the film repeatedly cuts away to people looking on and not helping. In Kick-Ass’s (now there’s a weird possessive proper noun) first major fight, everyone reaches for their cellphones, but not to call for help. Instead they all try to record what’s happening. It then becomes one of the most watched videos on YouTube. People are obsessed with superhero and celebrity culture to the extent that they’re detached from the actual world of crime and violence.

The extent of this detachment is what makes the world of Kick-Ass truly dystopic. From the beginning the movie suggests that any effort to take the law into your own hands and stand up for yourself is doomed to failure. You’ll inevitably be beat up, discarded, and hurt or endanger those who care about you most. It’s better to just stand back and watch because no one will ever help you, and those that do will have ulterior motives. But by the end, the movie makes it clear that standing up for yourself is the only option. The world is so awful and uncaring that the only recourse is the extreme, the violent, and the near impossible. It suggests that since there are no moral boundaries, you will only hinder yourself if you hold yourself to them.

Like I said, it’s a dark, dark world.

Where the film takes a leap though is when it expects you as the viewer to buy into this detachment as well. It expects you to not care about the fact that the police are corrupt and useless, that a young girl is warped into a killing machine, that people are pathetic and self-serving. If there’s any consolation to the so-called ultra-violence of Kick-Ass, it’s that it’s so dystopic that it nears surreal proportions. The fact that it never addresses the meaning of justice or morality (it never seems to so much as cross any of the minds of the main characters) feels like a function of poorly written script crafted by someone who thought such ideas were too boring to be given screen time, rather than the immorality or amorality of the movie world itself.

Such a recourse is hardly satisfying though, and no matter how you work through it, Kick-Ass leaves an uncomfortable taste in your mouth.

Tom Smith of Johnsonerson fame asked me to help out with a project he was shooting shortly before Thanksgiving break. I jumped at the chance to play Pete, a haunted house worker obsessed with his job, because–1. in spite of my limited range I do enjoy acting, and 2. villains and douchebags are the best characters to play, and this definitely fell into the category of the latter.

We were shooting one scene from a script Tom had been working on and considering doing for his senior film next year. If how this one scene turned out is any indication of what the rest of the movie will be like, I think he should shoot the whole damn thing:

(Click here to watch this video on YouTube)

That’s Michelle Luz starring opposite me as Sam. She’s a BFA theater acting major and was great to work with. Allen Manesco did a bang-up job as the dying guy, especially considering how messy working with fake blood is. He was wearing only a t-shirt and jeans while being drenched in blood syrup when it was forty degrees outside (that’s four and a half degrees Celsius for those of you outside the States) as we shot the last bit of the scene around 1:30am. That pained look on his face is one part good acting and one part reaction from the horrific taste of the stuff as he tried to hold it in his mouth before being cued to spew it all over my shirt.

A special thanks to the guys who helped out with shooting this. I had a lot of fun.

Brass Goggles, which follows all things steampunk, posted about this movie from Tim Burton and Shane Acker: 9 (click here to watch the trailer).

It looks like it’s going to be the best film to be titled after a single digit since Se7en.

The 9 Scientist’s online laboratory, an excellent flash website, can be explored here. Like everyone else, he’s also on Facebook.