Twenty-six views of Mount Fuji

...No?

Well, OK then, would you settle for two reviews of The Last Airbender?  (Or three, I suppose, this being something of a meta-review.)

First up, Howard Tayler's review at Blógünder Schlock.  Money quote #1 (and his Twitter review):

If you love the Airbender anime, the movie is abominable.  If you don’t care, the movie is merely “very bad.”

Howard suggests that this may be M. Night Shyamalan's last movie.  In an ideal world, he'd probably be right.

I can’t imagine the people who hire directors looking at this film, seeing the byline which states the film was “written, directed, and produced by M. Night Shyamalan,” and deciding to ever give him responsibility over the disposition of their particular intellectual property.  Or money.  Or a camera.

But then again, we're talking about Hollywood.

Now that you've seen the god's-eye view from Howard Tayler, next up comes Charlie Jane Anders' view from the trenches. And she is savage.

And The Last Airbender is a lavish parody of big-budget fantasy epics.  It's got everything: the personality-free hero, the nonsensical plot twists, the CG clutter, the bland romance, the new-age pablum.  No expense is spared — Shyamalan even makes sure to make fun of distractingly shitty 3-D, by featuring it in his movie.

From Anders' description, Shyamalan screwed up The Last Airbender as badly as ... whoever, I can't even remember who directed it and don't really care, screwed up I, Robot, which ended up as your basic generic Hollywood interchangeable-hero blow-lots-of-shit-up action flick that had virtually nothing whatsoever to do with the Isaac Asimov stories it was ostensibly based on.  Time after time, it aimed itself directly and unmistakably at a scene directly out of one of Asimov's stories, and with unerring accuracy, completely missed the mark every time.  Shyamalan appears to have achieved much the same with Airbender, except for the part about I, Robot being a decent generic mindless action flick if you pretend the title is sheer coincidence.

All the story beats from the show's first season are still present, but Shyamalan manages to make them appear totally arbitrary.  Stuff happens, and then more stuff happens, and what does it mean?  We never know, because it's time for more stuff to happen.  You start out laughing at how random and mindless everything in this movie is, but about an hour into it, you realize that the movie is actually laughing at you, for watching it in the first place.

Plus, even if Dr. Susan Calvin was recast from a brilliant but socially crippled spinsterly-genius roboticist into a generic supporting hottie, at least the human cast of I, Robot had some acting skills and put a little effort into giving a damn.  Airbender?  Sadly, not so much.  But then, perhaps you can forgive them for being disinterested, when half the movie happens in voice-over.

Oh yeah - that's another one of the ways in which this movie pokes fun at the very idea of epic fantasy: the endless confusing voice-over, in which tons of important story developments happen off-camera while we're looking at a picture of a tree or a CG mountain.  Because why do we privilege the story of the hero's progress over the tree?, Shaymalan asks.  Why does the original Star Wars insist on showing us Luke Skywalker training with a lightsaber, instead of telling us that Luke Skywalker trained with a lightsaber while showing us a tracking shot of some rocks?

The casting fail continues, apparently, with the dialogue-crippled Katara being cast as the sole blue-eyed Caucasian mysteriously arising from an entire village of comic-opera Eskimos.  It's not Katara whom I think is miscast here, it's the entire rest of the Water Nation; the Water Nation, in the anime, always came across to me far more as Finns and Lapplanders than as Inuit.  So, from my perspective, Shyamalan actually made one casting decision right (well ... OK, three; there's also, as Anders notes, Zuko and Toub, though I'm not sure Shyamalan's Toub looks jovial enough), but made up for it by completely screwing up casting the entire rest of the Water Nation.

I trust Howard Tayler on this one:  If you love Airbender the anime, skip Airbender the movie.  But you won't ever regret reading all the way to the end of Charlie Jane Anders' review.  It's savage, yes, but it's not just a review of Airbender itself, it's also an analysis of the meta-movie, and a brilliant and incisive dissection of what's wrong with the "creative" process in today's Hollywood.

Just when you thought we'd entered the age of literacy ...

Wait, literacy was a long time ago, wasn't it?  So was the Age of Reason.  And science.

Apparently, none of these things has percolated through to Bob Jones University yet.

Relevant page scan reproduced here for the full horrific effect:

( Cut for your protection )

"Creation Science" is one thing.  But Bob Jones University is outright flat lying here.  "Electricity is a mystery."  That might have been true in 1710, ninety years before Alessandro Volta invented the first battery.  By 1810, electricity was being widely studied all over the civilized world.  But in 2010?  Look, let me be straight with you here, I don't even believe that Bob Jones has been alive for two hundred years in order to have spent them all under a rock.  "Some scientists think the sun may be the source of most electricity.  Others think that the movement of the earth produces some of it."  There is no lie so convincing and dastardly as that which knowingly contains a grain of truth placed there to mislead.

I'm not sure which is worse — the idea that there are people ignorant enough and gullible enough to swallow a piece of a-wizard-did-it crap like this, or the idea that there are people in positions of (at least within certain communities) trust who are mendacious enough to take advantage of the poor bastards by feeding them this kind of bullshit and presenting it as fact.  I can only conclude that Bob Jones "University" is actively, knowingly, and intentionally in the business of turning out people utterly unprepared to deal with the realities of the modern technological civilization on this planet.

(Speculation upon possible agendas behind such a venture is left as an exercise to the reader.)

X-Ray Spex

Have you ever wished you could see what our galactic neighborhood looks like in the X-ray band?  Or in gamma rays, or microwaves, or deep infra-red?

Well, now you can.

In which the King defied Parliament

There was an Act, you see, which was very popular with the Commons and the Lords, but did not meet the favor of the King.  And so Parliament voted on it, and it passed both houses, whereupon the Whip and the Prime Minister brought it to the King for his signature.  And the King looked at the Act, skimmed it briefly, declared "The measure fails," and handed it back to the Whip.

Well, the Whip took it back to Parliament and informed them that the King had rejected the Act.  This annoyed them considerably.  So they voted on it again, and this time the vote was unanimous in both houses.  The Whip took the Act and the record of the vote, and returned to the King, along with a deputation consisting of the Prime Minister and several of his Cabinet.

"Sire," the Whip declared, "Parliament has passed this bill by unanimous accord.  You must now sign it into law."

The King glanced at the Act and the record of the vote, excused himself for a moment, and went to the bathroom.  Upon his return, he seated himself upon his throne, looked the Prime Minister directly in the eye, and declared again, "The measure fails."

"But upon what possible legal grounds?" the Prime Minister protested.  "The vote was unanimous!  By law, you MUST acknowledge the expressed will of Parliament!"

"It's perfectly simple, and quite inarguable," the King replied calmly.  "Everyone knows that a royal flush defeats a full House."