avatar:the last airbender is pretty cool for nickleodeon pseudo-anime

the thing that bugs me the most about this guy is when he has to write stuff like comic book dialogue or newscaster announcements or official proclamations and it ends up sounding like something a 7-year-old would write.

"There appears to be an event happening"

these are the first lines of "the happening":

Woman Reading on Bench with Hair Pin: I forgot where I am.
Woman Reading on Bench: You're at the place where the killers meet to decide what to do with the crippled girl.

first of all who the fuck responds to "I forgot where I am" with anything other than a non-committal noise meant to indicate "oh that's too bad, don't know what you want me to do about it though."

second of all how the fuck do you know where someone else is in a book they're reading unless you're doing, like, synchronized reading.

Meanwhile...

Paramount keeps revising newwcomer The Last Airbender's grosses upwards because of its better-than-expected performance at the domestic box office. M Night Shyamalan's 3D epic opened to $16M Thursday from 3,169 theaters, including the $3 million from its midnight shows, and added another $16.6M Friday. But Saturday's take went down to $14.5M. Helped by higher 3D ticket prices, the pic based on the Nickelodeon animated TV series should be on its way to $40.6M for the 3-day weekend, $53.2M for the 4-day holiday and a 5-day cume of $70.5M by end of Monday and definitely 2nd place.

upwardly gross

The inevitable sequel could be even worse, and would keep the losing streak alive.

the twist is HE CAN BEND BOX OFFICES

$$$

So is "The Happening" really really bad? Like Bad Movie bad? Cos Im kinda bored today and wouldnt mind seeing a really bad, silly movie...

horrendous in a profoundly silly way

Oh yes. xp

The Happening is absolutely must see.

its really sort of unbelievable

it's a happening

this movie wasn't nearly as bad as i expected. dropping the kyoshi warriors is going to fuck up some really important plot points in book 2, if it gets made though. slumdog millionaire was good as zuko. shyamalan's best movie by a bazillion miles. he changed the climactic ending and GASP i actually liked it.

still not as good as the worst episode of the tv show though (which was 'the beach' in season 3)

also kinda shocked that a few scenes from the series were recreated exactly in the film ("he was earthbending rocks at us...it really hurt").

Well done there, M. Night:

http://community.livejournal.com/ohnotheydidnt/49028608.html

Inevitable:

http://www.rifftrax.com/rifftrax/last-airbender

LOL @ the foot massage reveal

"Do not worry about the moon's power, General."

^^^I quit watching the the rifftrax of this after Aasif's character said this line. IMO it can't be topped so why keep going? Plus it was making me fall asleep at 6:30 p.m.

The final word on the subject (of the movie):

http://agonybooth.com/movies/The_Last_Airbender_2010.aspx

"I’ll warn everybody right now, this is going to be an angry one."

Trailer for the new series The Legend of Korra, which begins next year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_VkHYtS6MY

Here's a better-looking version of the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gz8pino8lw

I'm really excited about this! AtLA was one of the best TV series I've seen in recent years, it's amazing how much depth they managed to get into what was nominally a kids' show. At first the idea of the new series taking place in a fantasy version of early 20th century Shanghai felt a bit odd to me, but if they can pull it off, it could be really cool. AtLA already did the high fantasy, so why not try some urban fantasy for the sequel?

Anyway, about the trailer, what's that thing Korra is riding? I guess in the tradition of hybrid animals in Avatar it's a polar bear wolf or something?

Korra is riding a dog/polar bear hybrid. The series is set 70/80 years later and the look of the series will be mostly steampunk.

Some info on the series released so far: http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/The_Last_Airbender:_Legend_of_Korra

Descendants of the original series' characters will definitely feature; the Avatar world has changed a lot, but a lot of those changes were defined and built by the A:TLA characters and their influence will be far-reaching. It'll be interesting to see that based on what we've learned so far.

Just finished watching this! At times quite remarkable, and totally impressed with how much moral nuance it brought to its stories.

Question: Do I need to seek out the comic sequels before I get started on Korra? I generally stay clear of these kinds of other-media tie-ins.

The storytelling over the three seasons is also really cool: it starts as a pastoral adventure story where the characters run through largely pre-industrial villages and towns, then we get the Earth Kingdom megalopolises with sprawling political bureaucracies (though the totalitarian state of Ba Sing Se is somewhat anachronistic), and finally the Fire Nation, which is full of 19th-century steampunk technology and imperialist ambitions. Sort of like the embryonic development in "The Oxen of the Sun" in Ulysses, but with political states.

You can just jump right into Korra after Avatar.

though korra was v boring, also h8 the character design

all adults have "serious adult voice" like they're a voiceover in a PC point-click game giving yr character advice ("you MUST find the crystal shards, or else, I fear... all hope shall be lost!"). the "kids" sound (and mostly are i think) like 30+ ppl trying to sound cool but sounding more like poochy the dog or the "cool" guy in a made for tv disney movie. every villain just does the same throaty mark hammill received pronunciation almost british non-accent. despite the attention-grabbyness of the "steampunk" elements and all the cgi the animation looks really cheap and frame rate is jerky and ugly as fuck. the queer elements seem very self-congratulatory -- maybe we're in a similar phase in entertainment to e.g. the obligatory very special episode about AIDS in the late 80s wrt to gay shit and have to have this initial awkwardness which might not be recognized by the target audience as being awkward as such. just feel like the creators were trying to do something cool but just have terrible taste.

I didn't care much for Korra either. With Avatar, I was totally engrossed throughout (though the first half of S3 was slightly uneven), and when it was ending I thought "Gosh, I'm really gonna miss these characters!" But with Korra, I stopped watching during S2 and never even felt the slightest compulsion to get back on board. The romance in particular felt very forced and tacked-on.

Korra was really uneven for the first two seasons, but it actually got better: season 3 was a huge improvement over season 2, which was the worst of the series, and season 4 was pretty good. I think they actually listened to the criticism the first two seasons generated, because they dropped most of the teen relationship drama, the romance subplots in the last two seasons are more downplayed and organic and less obtrusive. And more importantly, the villains of the last two seasons are more human-sized and three-dimensional, which I thought was great after the generic doomsday big bad of season 2.

Also, I gotta disagree on the queer stuff being "very self-congratulatory"; if anything, it was too subtle, because many viewers apparently didn't even notice it. The had to make official blog posts that "yes, character X and character Y are indeed a queer couple!", because some people wanted to see them as "just good friends" or something. Apparently the subtleness was because Nickelodeon standards didn't allow them to be any more explicit about their queerness, which I think is kinda sad, but OTOH it actually stops it from getting into "a very special episode" territory, because it's never made into a big deal... Being queer isn't what defines these characters, it's just one part of what they are.

Anyway, I started a separate thread for Korra, maybe this discussion could be moved there, especially since it might spoil the series for those who've only seen AtLA.

The Legend of Korra (the sequel series to the Avatar: The Last Airbender)

Who knew?

A reimagined, live-action “Avatar: The Last Airbender” series is coming to Netflix!

(ᴄᴏɴᴄᴇᴘᴛ ᴀʀᴛ ʙʏ Jᴏʜɴ Sᴛᴀᴜʙ) pic.twitter.com/YsMoE4UguV

— See What's Next (@seewhatsnext) September 18, 2018

AND I can confirm that the original creators, Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, will be back to take on the live action. THIS IS WHAT WE’VE BEEN TRAINING FOR ALL THESE YEARS. https://t.co/Pi5M1TDTZc

— NX (@NXOnNetflix) September 18, 2018

Was just about to post this!

My first reaction was, "Oh god why?" But having the creators involved softens the blow.

Even with the creators involved, surprised anyone wants to sink money into live-action Avatar, given the movie. Then again, BBC/HBO are re-doing His Dark Materials too, so maybe 2019 is the year of redeeming shit live-action movies

The Dragon Prince, involving a lot of the same folks as Avatar, is up on netflix now. It's good, nothing too original.

It's good, nothing too original.

Yeah, pretty much. Humor is a lot more forced and cringey.

I really disliked the few eps I watched of that and mostly because it's direly unfunny (and therefore a terrible comp to Avatar)

I'm rewatching this, and oh god I will never be ready for Iroh's part of "Tales Of Ba Sing Se."

Finally got the Blu-ray set for cheap the other day.

had a co-worker who watched the movie avatar and this series and thought they were related

Ugh and "Appa's Lost Days" is up next, back-to-back emotional devastation.

So much for that

https://io9.gizmodo.com/avatar-the-last-airbender-s-creators-just-left-the-liv-1844700980

Damn, that sucks. I rewatched the original series with my daughter a few months back. It's such an amazing show. I didn't need a live-action remake or update or whatever, but I thought it might be cool with the original creators involved.

Ugh and "Appa's Lost Days" is up next, back-to-back emotional devastation.

Feeling this. What a great show.

i've been watching this slowly with my kid, it's pretty good! good mix of action/humor/emotion. some of the character design (mostly for minor characters) is kind of ugly but that's only a minor criticism.

it is funny how much appa is just totoro + catbus

Return of Avatar, part 2 (3?): https://kotaku.com/avatar-the-last-airbender-nickelodeon-aang-katara-zuko-1849066817