Yeah. Shyamalan's live-action movie was as piss-poor as it could be, especially considering the quality of the source material. Even my husband commented on the racefail, and he usually doesn't have an opinion about casting in movies.
Wow, finally a Writer's Block question that goes straight to the primitive reptilian parts of my brain, where the adrenaline is produced and the rantiness could just come spilling out like the great Mississippi flood.
Everyone who knows me is probably lucky that I'm travelling and have no damn idea where my notes for my adaptation of The Lord of the Rings for American television might be. I've always thought that what it really needed was, like, 26 longish installments, minimum. And an approach nothing like that . . . that . . . thing Mr. Jackson produced. In a better world, he would totally have done The Last Airbender, leaving LoTR for somebody who understood the books.
Well, to be a little more reasonable and fair, I think that all of these projects are in essence translations of the original, and all translations are going to have ways in which they fail to reflect that original. So really, the ideal solution is to have multiple versions that can be read (as it were) in parallel; only the realities of copyright and economics get in the way. In an ideal world we would have a dozen versions of each project, and a richness of competing visions.
And in that world, we might find in the end that even Mr. Shyamalan's version had something worthwhile to add to the mix -- okay, maybe not, but maybe. And Jackson's LOTR unquestionably would, even if some few cranks still hated it.
I feel compelled to point out that Peter Jackson has no better a track record when it comes to race than Shyamalan, and I feel like whoever got the honor of redoing The Last Airbender should be someone who has proven they can handle the multiracial, multi-ethnic, multicultural aspects of the story (because it's not just that it's Asian and Asian-American based, it's that it's a story based in the fact that "Asian" and "Asian-American" are not monolithic identities). So, uh, nobody currently popular in Hollywood, basically
( ... )
Yeah, I pretty much don't trust any director with casting. I feel like if they actually, you know, stuck to the source material and the volumes and volumes of research that got put into it ... well, you're still probably right, but it wouldn't be as bad as what M. Night Shyamalan did.
I actually don't think I'd want a live-action TV series, it'd feel even more redundant than a movie to me, but the movie is a little more desireable because of all the casting opportunities. (I don't have any faith that an A:TLA movie would actually every be that good, but I think it could have been enjoyable.)
1) Animated 2) Set after the series (as opposed to trying to jam an eire seasons worth of plot into a 2 or so hour movie) 3) Been about Azula trying to conquer the Fire Nation/world and the Gaang get's back together to stop her.
I always wanted Avatar: The Search for Ursa. They could be parallel plots for much of the movie though, the Gaang looking for Ursa, Zuko trying to hold on back home.
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Everyone who knows me is probably lucky that I'm travelling and have no damn idea where my notes for my adaptation of The Lord of the Rings for American television might be. I've always thought that what it really needed was, like, 26 longish installments, minimum. And an approach nothing like that . . . that . . . thing Mr. Jackson produced. In a better world, he would totally have done The Last Airbender, leaving LoTR for somebody who understood the books.
Hiss. Snarl. Rancor, it's what's for breakfast!
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And in that world, we might find in the end that even Mr. Shyamalan's version had something worthwhile to add to the mix -- okay, maybe not, but maybe. And Jackson's LOTR unquestionably would, even if some few cranks still hated it.
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Yes, exactly!
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I actually don't think I'd want a live-action TV series, it'd feel even more redundant than a movie to me, but the movie is a little more desireable because of all the casting opportunities. (I don't have any faith that an A:TLA movie would actually every be that good, but I think it could have been enjoyable.)
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1) Animated
2) Set after the series (as opposed to trying to jam an eire seasons worth of plot into a 2 or so hour movie)
3) Been about Azula trying to conquer the Fire Nation/world and the Gaang get's back together to stop her.
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