Thanks to an internet favorite of mine, the Totally Rad Show, I have watched a number of things for which I probably never would have thought to hit play. One of those things was the breathtakingly joyful animated TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Avatar is something I love for countless reasons: the writing, the characters, the unabashed goofiness, the action sequences, the creativity, I could go on and on. I find myself constantly defending my devotion to the show because it is widely known as being a “kids’ cartoon,” but to bill the series as simply that is truly a disservice.
I think that part of why I appreciate Avatar so much is because it is what I always thought the shows I watched as a kid could be like if they were treated in the same way that really good adult-geared shows are done: with lots of thought and respect for the audience. Even watching shows like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Captain Planet as a young person, I knew that they were layered in cheese. The story lines typically had this after school special type of a feel to them, and the writing left almost everything to be desired. Characters never seemed to have to work for the level of power they possessed and the stakes in Saturday morning cartoons rarely ever felt earned or real. When you’re little, these kinds of things can be easily forgotten with enough flash and dazzle or a well-placed fart joke.
Avatar, however, seams together the best of being a kid with the grounded quality of writing required for realism. They aren’t afraid to go for the cheesy kid joke or the over-the-top animation every once in a while [the show is meant for a younger audience, after all], but they take the time to make sure the characters are following an overall arc. The typical “throwaway” episodes - the monster of the week type of fare - remain enjoyable because they’re still working toward the overall journey of the season and they allow the players to become familiar to the audience.
Antagonists shift and change. The world of the show is bathed in shades of grey and because the people involved in making the series refused to completely gloss over some of the darker aspects of the plot, the show maintains a sense of gravity without being cruel. Voice actors are truly what they should be - actors. These characters they create, they aren’t washed in stereotypical archetypes; they are nuanced and, perhaps most importantly, allowed to retain the correct amount of maturity for their ages. It is a huge pet peeve of mine when people take child characters and make them act like adults [unless the reasons for the hardened maturity are realistically explained]. Avatar is such a show that might have been able to do that and barely get away with it; there are some pretty rough things that happen to those kids. Luckily, however, it has such a respect for the lighthearted goofy quality that underpins childhood that it allows it to course through the entire series to great effect. It not only allows the show to practically radiate joy, but it makes the more emotional moments feel all the more important and real [a trick that a guy named Joss Whedon uses quite well].
And this leads me to the latest chapter in the Airbender saga - the place where so many workers in entertainment hope to reach - the movie franchise.
Oh, this could have been so good. It could have been magical. With the kind of technology that we are capable of today, the special effects needed to recreate a show like Airbender were not only possible, but it could have taken to another level. Unfortunately, the special effects were quite possibly the only good part of this movie, and we all know that special effects do not a good movie make. Especially when all other aspects of the movie fail spectacularly.
Let us begin with the fact that this movie took it self WAY too seriously. If you’re going to make a film that tries to feel like Lord of the Rings, but you have child actors touting about as much acting experience as that kid who starred in one of the Airbud sequels, it should put up some red flags. Young actors are such a crapshoot. It’s not that I don’t think young people aren’t capable of doing some pretty amazing things, but it is absolutely clear to me that the only reason some of these people were hired were because they could kick really high and kind of looked like their respective characters.
The person they cast in the role of Katara was an absolute mess. Her narratives were flat and dull coated with an incredibly fake sense of importance, and unfortunately they were used throughout the entirety of the movie. Her emotional range consisted of what seemed like two states - normal, and quietly on the verge of tears. It was a cringeworthy performance at best, and when you compare it with the strong, dynamic performance of Mae Whitman on the TV show, the dishonor brought to the character of Katara is near infuriating.
Aang and Sokka were nearly as bad, though so much of why I felt their characters were ruined had so much to do with the writing and direction that I can’t really fault their acting abilities. The giddy happiness that so defines the character of Aang? Gone. The klutzy, sarcastic, egotistical, over-the-top goofball that Sokka is? Gone. All sense of character development in any of the four main characters [Aang, Katara, Sokka, and Zuko]? Gone. Forget all of that. Let’s make them all static and flat, give them some really terrible lines, cover all aspects of growth with fantastic voice-over exposition like “they became fast friends” and hope that the special effects and sweeping landscape shots throw enough glitter in everyone’s eyes so that they don’t notice.
The thing is that when your writing and acting is piss-poor, it makes everything else so noticeably, hideously obnoxious. Because this entry is already incredibly long, I am going to simply list some of the main points that made me grow angrier and angrier as the film droned on.
1. The 3D was terrible. Stupidly flat when it could have been spectacular. Not worth it, don’t do it.
2. What was up with all the weird pronunciations? All of a sudden, all of the vowels became long. It was a bizarre choice, and became gratingly annoying.
3. If you’re going to pay homage to something like Avatar, you should know that there will be hell to pay if you get rid of iconic aspects of the show, like Katara’s hair loopies. Or just how important Appa is to Aang. And where were our damn “Yip Yip”s?! I think I heard it once?
4. Why did they make Appa look so weird?
5. The fight sequences were stilted and awkward. When you watch the cartoon [and granted, I know that making things happen in a cartoon can be much easier than doing it in real life] the fighting is kinetic and fluid and energized and dynamic. In the film it was a series of move, pause. Move, pause. Move, pause. It played like a chess game and with only a few exceptions felt very poorly choreographed. I can almost see what they were trying to do [and it was likely much cheaper not to have the bending going through the entire sequence of forms], but it was poorly executed indeed. A shame, too, when someone like Noah Ringer has a talent that could have shone so brightly.
6. So. Much. Caucasian.
7. Uncle Iroh. Not that he isn’t a good actor or that the character wasn’t handled as well as he could have been given the clumsy-at-best script, but ugh. This movie is filled with odd casting choices, and yes, Uncle Iroh probably would have been one of the hardest people to cast, but this felt like a cop out.
8. Commander Zhao felt like a B Movie villain.
9. The score. It’s not that the score was bad, per se, but it felt like too much of a departure from the awesome, awesome music used on the actual show. Avatar already had such a distinctive, solid base of themes and music to pull from, and it really pains me that they didn’t build on that and use it in the movie. The score in this film felt generic, and because of how bad everything else was, at times overdramatic.
10. The mythology and cannon of the show felt warped and weird. I understand that there has to be some shaping and cutting and honing for whole season of a TV show to fit into the span of a movie, but, for example, the transitions into the spirit world were strange and seemed to come out of nowhere.
11. Why in the name of Zeus would anyone allow M. Night Shayamalan write the script for this movie? THE SCRIPT MIGHT HAVE BEEN THE THING THAT COULD HAVE SAVED THIS MOVIE. I don’t pretend to have any real concept as to how Hollywood operates, but I seriously demand to know how and why someone who has proven to helm such a crappy string of movies like M. Night was given permission to pen this one.
Things that I enjoyed.
1. Momo. They got rid of his character quirks almost entirely, but I liked the way he looked on the film so at least that was something.
2. Dev Patel as Prince Zuko. Probably the only main player, besides the Shaun Toub who I couldn’t get completely on board with because of aesthetics, who tried to get into character, even if the script really didn’t allow for any deviation from Angry Zuko. If there is a second movie [and I really hope that there is and that they get rid of M. Night] I’ll be interested to see where he takes things.
3. Damon Gupton as Monk Gyatso was probably the brightest, happiest character in the film and, for me, the person who most embodied the essence of any of the characters from the TV show. The flashbacks were, by far, the most emotionally moving scenes for me.
That’s just about all I’ve got. I’m still trying to rid my mouth of the bitter taste I get whenever I think about just how angry this movie made me. I’ve since read a few reviews of it, and from what I’ve read almost everyone who’s writing hasn’t actually seen the TV show. I can’t say that I’m terribly surprised, but it makes me really sad. Maybe the movie would have been a lot more enjoyable if I didn’t know how good it could have been. Most reviews seem to apathetically state that this is another crappy M. Night film but at least it was mildly entertaining and the action sequences were good, but I can’t even take that stance because the show was seriously THAT much better.
When Harry Potter was just getting started, the acting left a little bit to be desired but the books were so beloved that they took a lot of trouble to make sure that the overall atmosphere of the films felt true to what was created in JK Rowling’s world. There was no way that they were going to be able to bring in everything that everyone loved from the books, and they knew it, but the FEELING was there. The HEART was there. I always used to make fun of the Heart ring in Captain Planet because it felt like such a lame power [and, being honest, it still kinda was on that show], but it’s so incredibly important. The Avatar series has so much heart, and it shone through everyone involved. The creators, Mike DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, speak about it with such passion and an undeniable sense of love, achingly similar to that indefinable quality that surrounds John Lasseter’s work. It’s no small surprise that that kind of dedication filtered down and inspired the awesome work brought forth by everyone else, from the animators to the sound designer to the voice actors and the score writer. It was a labor of love, and it made the show such an incredible thing to enjoy and experience. To see something so great brought to such ruin on the screen was, as overdramatic and silly as this going to sound, nothing short of heart-wrenching.
If the sheer length of this post alone hasn’t clearly demonstrated the amount of affection I have for Avatar, I’m not sure how else I can convey it. I can’t recommend that you go see the movie, but please, if you want to be whisked to a world that is, simply put, incredibly special then do yourself a favor and check out the TV show. It might start out a smidge slow, but trust me when I say you’re in for an absolute delight.
Yip yip!
[All three seasons of Avatar: The Last Airbender are available for Instant Watch or Disc Shipping on Netflix. You can also find episodes for download on iTunes. DVDs are sold at most electronic retailers.]
![Favorite Photo of the Moment
I can remember when N64’s used to be hot shit. We weren’t allowed to have game consoles [my brother and I], so whenever my friends had them I would always try and get as much face time in as possible when I was staying over. The day when one of my best friends in elementary school introduced me to the original Super Mario Bros. was the day when she realized we were never going to play with Barbies again.
In the case of my brother, he grew up never really caring about video games and continues to maintain minimal contact with technology, aside from watching the visualizer on iTunes whilst placing his music on shuffle. [I will cop to this being addicitively mesmerizing. I recommend both the iTunes Visualizer, and Jelly.] In the case of me, I currently own a Wii, an XBOX 360, and a PS3. Apparently, about 19 years of video game squelching could not squelch the gamer out of me.
Anyhow, the N64 is a system that was released right about when all of my contemporaries and I were hitting puberty. This means that “hanging out” at boys’ houses suddenly became something that had connotations requiring double quotes. If a girl was going over to a boy’s house, she wasn’t just going over there to shoot the shit and play Ninja Turtles. She was going there to do something far more nefarious. Something that none of us yet fully understood.
I only had a handful of female friends who were in the possession of an N64 system [or the soon to follow Dreamcast system] and that was because they had male siblings. The girl geek had yet to become a “thing” in general society, and believe me when I say that other girls did not think it “cool” when you came over to sit around and read Teen Bop and discuss boys and you ended up playing Mortal Kombat and Mario Kart with their brothers. It’s not that I didn’t find reading articles about Jonathan Taylor Thomas appealing. I mean, let’s be real, I was a teenage girl during the height of his popularity and to this day the initials JTT make me shriek internally just a little bit. He was our Bieber. Our Pattinson. Just better looking and far more justified as a teen-girl crush, in my opinion. But I digress…
What? Sorry, I was watching the iTunes visualizer.
Anyhow, all I really remember playing a lot of on the N64 were Mario Kart and Mortal Kombat, and even those I didn’t get to play that much. So, when we were over at Cyrus’ friend Charles’ house and he had this bounty of games strewn across the floor in his room, the adolescent geek girl inside me squee’d just a little bit. I don’t remember why Charles had all these N64 games. I think he’d gotten them off eBay or Craiglist or something? Regardless, I was a little excited to see what I’d been missing during my teenage non-gaming days.
The answer? Apparently not much. You know how the original 8 bit Super Mario Bros. remains cool in a charming, retro sort of way? I guess that if I had ties to most of these games they would retain more of a nostalgia for me, but man. The N64 holds weird control schemes, some poorly thought out games, touchy camera controls that started to make me sick after a bit, and graphics that make the Wii look like blu-ray. I did get a laugh from having to blow out one of the cartridges to get it to work, and there was a rather heated debate about whether Slippy Toad is a boy or a girl. [That is one confused amphibian.]
I took a picture of the pile of games, partially for posterity’s sake, and partially because it was just cool looking. In a burst of trite inspiration, I decided to doctor it up in Photoshop a bit to give it that sepia’d, fuzzy, vignette’d look we equate with oldness.
So the N64 gaming night wasn’t met with as many fond memories for me as it was for all the boys who had grown up with the systems. It was fun, though, and at the very least I went home with a new appreciation for our current generation of gaming.
And also, a new appreciation for just how terrible a game Turok: Dinosaur Hunter was. We gave up on that one after approximately five minutes.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l685f7o8jT1qaxksko1_500.jpg)
![Favorite Photo of the Moment
Where the hell has this month gone? I logged onto tumblr thinking it’s only been a few days, maybe a week, since I last posted and the internet was all, “Ha HA! More like two weeks!” July is flying by at the speed of a cheetah with its ass on fire and it’s all I can do to hang on.
So, given my delinquency I’m going to go ahead and post another picture up here. This was taken out on the deck during the week that Cyrus and Sasa stayed over at my house because their air conditioning was blown.
For those who have not suffered through a summer on the east coast before, you should know that things don’t just get hot out here. They get humid. The difference between a dry summer and a humid summer is the difference between sweating through your tank top and sweating through your tank top whilst sitting in tepid bath water. Air conditioning isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity.
Unlike the considerably more temperate west coast, things don’t cool off here at night. The dewpoint hovers somewhere around the 10,000,000 mark and so far as I’m concerned, that moisture heats up throughout the day and then emits the absorbed heat ALL NIGHT LONG. In the same way that wind chill can make a day go from cold to I’m-so-numb-right-now-you-could-punch-me-in-the-face-and-I-wouldn’t-feel-a-thing, humidity can give you this sticky, I’m-sweating-without-sweating feeling even though the thermometer says it’s only 85 degrees outside. And this is what it’s like just south of the Mason Dixon line. I cry tears of perspiration for our neighbors further south.
The point of all this weather-ranting is that when we get a nice evening in Virginia, we carpe noctem the shit out of it. Deck furniture gets dusted off, grill covers are removed, and even the most timid summer dwellers are sipping beverages of choice outdoors.
We were graced with such a night shortly into what would turn into a week of house-guesting whilst Cyrus and Sasa waited for the air conditioning guy to come around and make their house suitable for human life again. So, we lit some candles, poured some wine, brought my iPod dock outside, and set up their hookah on the deck.
I love these nights. Comfortably warm with a light breeze, glowing lights softly splashing across faces, and laughter drifting into the trees as friends kick back and appreciate each others’ company. It’s taken me a while to get accustomed to the humidity out here [twenty-six years, actually], but it’s still these nights that I will carry with me. When time suspends itself and the warmth gently caresses your skin. When everything is at peace and the blackness of the night offers a void of possibility instead of uncertainty.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5xyv7ur411qaxksko1_500.jpg)
![Favorite Photo of the Moment
The engine in my mom’s car burnt out on the highway during an eight hour drive back from Ohio, so my parents had a decision to make. After a minor cardiac arrest over the potential repair bill they decided to cut their losses and buy a new car, which led to the purchase of a brand spankin’ new Honda Civic hybrid. It’s gorgeous, and all the new technology features also mean that I’ve been explaining how to use said car for the past month or so. [I think she’s got the hang of it now.]
About a week after getting acquainted with the new wheels, my parents thought it would be a good time to take it on a solid ride and so I found myself joining them for a jaunt up to Annapolis, Maryland. Annapolis, for those not in the know, is mainly known for its crab. As an avid non-eater of seafood, this means that I was there for mostly the scenery and to take a few pictures. We skipped past the art and dining district and headed to the harbor, which is about as touristy as it is dirty - not so much that it makes it unpleasant, but enough that you notice. The harbor is a smallish area, and you can loop around it rather quickly. It was also blazing hot outside, so we quickly convened and came to a consensus that the trip was going to be a short one.
On the way to search for a restaurant [and air conditioning], I saw this scooter parked on the curb and I knelt down to get a shot. In the midst of attempting to capture the angle I wanted, a flock of seagulls went shooting by overhead and I swear to Thor, y’all, I came this close to coming face to feces with some seagull scat. In my frantic leaping after seeing the splat, the camera got tilted at a rather severe angle and this was the result.
They say that getting poo’ed on by a bird is a sign of luck, but I’m going to say that my real luck was both in narrowly missing said poo and hitting this angle, which I love. Sometime I may go back and edit it, as I suspect it may look good in black and white, but for now, I’m appreciating the composition [accidental as it may have been] enough to throw it up here.
Also, I am appreciating having made it back home, as I additionally suspect that my mother may not have let me back in the car had I actually been shat upon. New car smell > daughter’s well-being. It’s how we roll.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5xuotEVNU1qaxksko1_500.jpg)
