So, six minutes in. So far, I've learned Sokka yells a lot, Katara's stupid because she's a girl, and poking things is supposed to be funny.
Also, that by having lots of close-up face shots, one can attempt to hide one's hit-or-miss effects budget.
0:07:00 - Noah Ringer, please stop sounding so mildly amused while discussing the death of all of your colleagues. "Oh, they're all dead and I've fucked the world over. Hyuk!"
Also, Nicola Peltz? E.MOTE.
0:07:05 - Okay, nice try for both of you, but how about less eyebrow twitches? They are not hyper-mobile caterpillars super-glued to your face. They need not rise and fall with every sentence spoken.
0:07:35 - Oh no, not THE VAGUELY BOAT-LIKE MACHINES! Might they even be...BOATS?
0:07:45 - Why does an Inuit-based village have a Torii gate?
0:08:03 - Why, Sokka, you can conduct basic deductive reasoning! Cookie?
0:08:33 - "I am Prince Zuko, son of Fire Lord Ozai and heir to the throne. And my eyebrows are AWESOME."
0:09:08 - Is that...a person of color? Possibly of Inuit descent? As a background character?
WHAT A TWIST!
0:09:41 - WHY ARE WE YELLING?
0:09:57 - Noah Ringer, blinking Is Not Acting. It merely indicates that your contacts are in wrong.
0:10:11 - Inexplicably twirly dancey move that looks a teensy bit like bending and/or Sufi whirling produces fire! Bending, in this movie, is apparently a cause-and-effect thing, instead of a manipulation thing.
Or it's a "lack of interest in making sure the CGI and choreography departments understood the fundamentals of bending."
Pretty sure it's the last one.
0:10:34 - Sokka would KILL THEM ALL.
LIKE FRANK MILLER.
0:10:40 - MANSOKKA NEED NO REASON TO KILL THEM. MANSOKKA HAS YELLY VOICE AND ANGRY FACE. MANSOKKA GOOD AT MAKING ANGRY FACE.
0:10:53 - "What do you want us to do, Katara? How are we supposed to save him? Acting? They've got Dev Patel. His movie won Oscars! Oscars! Not just one! You know what I've done? Twilight! Fucking Twilight! And I don't even have fangirls! I know you think everything is just going to work out, but I don't."
0:11:10 - Appa, like everyone else in this movie, sounds extremely constipated.
0:11:48 - "What do you want with me?" "My nephew wants me to perform a little test on you." "What kind of test?" "A screen test."
0:12:14 - Soooo....the Water Tribe lives in igloo yurt teepees?
0:12:24 - First use of the word "destiny." Take a sip!
0:12:40 - Oooh, two in one minute! Sip again. If you can pack in three, it's a chug!
0:14:25 - First solid minute and a half of ponderously scored exposition achieved!
0:15:48 - Clearly, Dev Patel's famous "kicked puppy" face is why he got this role.
0:15:54 - Shaun Toub, it's sweet that you're trying so hard, but you can stop. Yelling:Acting in TLA::Chocolate:Peanut Butter.
0:18:40 - New drinking game rule: sip every time Noah Ringer tries to pull of an Adorable Aang moment and fails miserably.
0:18:45 - And, at a little under twenty minutes into the film, Katara finally bothers to ask Aang's name.
0:18:51 - And it appears Noah Ringer is batting at a hovering hoard of mosquitoes who've conveniently disguised themselves as CGI Momo.
0:19:53 - I'M YELLING AND POUTING. AT THE SAME TIME! CAN'T YOU SEE HOW HARD I'M TRYING TO EXPRESS MY GRIEF, KATARA? YOU MUST KNOW I AM FEELING EMOTION BECAUSE I AM YELLING!!!
0:20:28 - EPIC "NNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!"
0:21:05 - Judging by its appearance, the Spirit World is also where Edward sparkled for Bella the very first time.
0:22:17 - Back on the Fire Nation H.M.S Old Woman's Shoe...
0:22:32 - Oh, Aasif Mandvi. All your presence in this movie reminds me of is how much better everything is made by adding Jon Stewart.
And this movie has a painful lack of Jon Stewart.
0:22:56 - They're gonna have one dead puppy soon, judging by Dev Patel's face.
0:23:30 - A quick and dirty photographic interpretation of Aasif Mandvi's Commander Zhao.
0:25:24 - "So, are you the Avatar, Aang? Also, fish or chicken for dinner?"
0:26:05 - Recycled sitcom laugh track!
0:26:22 - People of color typecast and locked into a certain tribe? TWIST!
0:27:12 - Sad East Asian Earthbender guy has vaguely Fu Manchu-y mustache. How delightful.
0:27:30 - THIS INSPIRATIONAL YELLING THING WORKED IN "REMEMBER THE TITANS!"
0:27:40 - I really didn't think I would reach this point, but I honestly would get great delight out of watching someone sock Aang in the face.
0:27:58 - More Fu Manchu mustaches. What the fuck.
0:28:08 - "My name is Aang. And I'm an alcoholic."
0:28:55 - ...was that firebending or the beginning of an epileptic seizure? I can't tell.
0:29:00 - On the continuing topic of facial hair, what is it with all the Fire Nation goons having soul patches? Do they also wear pukka shell necklaces and have identical "tribal" tattoos on their biceps?
0:29:37 - Sokka just did the first Sokka-like thing in the entire movie - kicking someone in the balls.
0:29:46 - I first got hints of this problem with Aang's boat escape, but the Earthbender fight makes it painfully clear: M. Night is unable to construct an action sequence that isn't a slow disjointed patchwork of parts knitted together with thread and rubber bands.
And it's at about this point where![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
brownbetty and I started talking about why exactly the action in TLA fails, so chatlog break!
Me: As it stands now, the film is just loud and pointlessly angry and poorly choregraphed.
brownbetty: I know! The segment I saw was the segment in the earbender camp?
me: Yep
brownbetty: And, like, it was choregraphed like a church pageant!
Like, "And then, all the soldiers run to the left" [pause for stampede].
me: We must make the action move slowly, or the viewers poor little minds won't be able to process it!
brownbetty: Well, and it's only how many minutes long?
How could any one look at season one of avatar and think "Damn, but nothing happens! How are we going to fill 120 minutes?"
me: My copy is 01:34
brownbetty: Yeah, it's so...
me: However, I'm a half-hour in and I feel like I'm slogging through molasses.
brownbetty: I mean, it's probably lucky, considering how bad it is, that they didn't actually make more than ninety minutes, but why would they have not packed it *full*?
me: Because it never feels full
Each scene feels perpetually on the verge of a climax, filled with momentum for action that never happens
brownbettyy: Yeah, just... what the hell thought process led to them going "How can we put less in this movie?"
?
brownbetty: How do you do something this bad by accident?
me: It's like the inverse of the thriller, where the idea is to put off the audience's anticipation until the last moment. In this case, the audience is waiting for the excitement that each scene's setup seems to promise (violent earthbending, Aang going bugfuck and entering the set of Twilight). But it never happens
brownbetty: I mean, if you're not working with a gaggle of seven year-olds and a sunday-school teacher.
Heh. Twilight earthbender.
me: (The Spirit World serious looks like the forest in Twilight where Edward sparkles for Bell the first time.)
Instead, M. Night slows his camera down to ponder scenes, to contemplate the action of the moment - a good tactic in the kinds of movie he normally makes, but awful for action sequences.
brownbetty: The Spirit World is Vancouver?
me: Shot with a heavy blue contrast filter, yes.
brownbetty: Maybe he only knows how to make one kind of movie, but doesn't know that he only knows one movie?
me: I strongly suspect so
me: Because when you stop to ponder an action sequence for too long, the suspension of disbelief fades, and you're reminded of just how improbable whatever you're watching really is. That doesn't mean you have to quick-cut a scene to death, but you need to maintain constant visual motion somehow.
brownbetty: What about bullet-time, or whatever that was when Leaping Tiger did it?
me: It worked at first (for Western viewers at least) because it was different, something so new it forced viewers to rethink how they view action. But it's still a part of the flow of action, one that was not uncommon to people used to HK films.
What Shamaylan's doing here is angles. A metric shitton of different angles on the same sequence. Also, lots of circling (or tracking) shots.
me: It's kind of like how sitcoms are shot, actually
brownbetty: I think I lack the theoretical basis for this. Sitcoms usually have a camera on each speaker for close-up and a long shot to give you an idea of the layout?
me: Kinda. It depends on the sitcom's budget how many cameras they'll be able to afford to shoot with. What I'm more thinking about is how in a sitcom, actors are shot in on a stationary set, acting out a scene. Cameras traditionally do not intrude, instead acting as a stand-in for the viewer. With action, the viewer needs to feel equally as active (or involved) as the actors on-screen or they can lose interest.
brown0betty: Huh
me: Really good action stars, like say Tony Jaa, have the necessary physical dynamism to negate relying on cinematography to make up for the boring.
brown0betty: But if that's not you, there'd better be cinematography.
me: Exactly.
me: This problem is why, say, the Bayformers is (from a visual action perspective) so painfully boring. Because a) Bay's working with CGI, not actors, so he can't rely on them to make action interesting, so b) Bay tries to use explosions and spectacle and camera to cover up the honest stiffness of trying to make 'Bots work in real life. Thus we get the action quick-cut, which bounces the viewer around so fast and assaults their vision so constantly that they might start to feel a simulated sense of involvement.
But gold paint doesn't mean you can ship that pile of shit off to Fort Knox and expect them to take it as the genuine article.
(Oh dear god, I think I'm lecturing)
brownbetty: A little, but if it gets you through the movie, I don't mind. And I do genuinely not know this shit, so it's not redundant.
me: I hate to say it, but it almost is now. After the Earthbender camp, I'm honestly getting kind of irritated by how inexcusably bad this is.
(One way to think about this that might make more sense to you is think of how action sequences are drawn in comics. they share a lot of similarities)
brownbetty: Well, you're not actually obligated to watch this, are you?
me: No, but I'd feel like a quitter
brownbetty: True. And if you draw your action sequence like a talk-y sequence, it'll be all weird and dumb.
That does make sense!
I mean, movies don't have panels, but we could say a continuous shot is a panel.
me: It is. If you read enough Tezuka, his work leans heavily on film and how it conceptualizes action
brownbetty: I have read v. little Tezuka, but I can sort of see it.
me: Well, given how massively influential he is, his style of changing perspective has become fairly pervasive in all sequential art.
And then I started the movie again, because I was committed to finishing this fucker.
00:30:41 Scrolls, conveniently falling and conveniently being used to move the plot forward!
00:31:06 - Time to introduce and then forget all about Avatar Kiyoshi!
00:31:18 - Ineedtotalkreallyfastbecausethisissupposedtobeahighlyintenseconversationthatmovestheplotforwardandgivestheactionimpetus. Mytalkingfastismetaphoricalandnotatalllazydirectingorbadactiong.
0:31:20 - "I need to tell you something." "What is it Aang?" "My inability to express how my immaturity fucked the world over is going to fatally doom this movie to suckitude.
"Also, I'm an alcoholic."
0:32:18 - One minute of movie-advancing exposition down!
0:32:25 - I love how Shamaylan shoots this entire sequence with close face/eye shots, capturing the exact center of everyone's acting prowess - their eyebrows.
0:32:37 - Montage!
0:32:40 - It should also be noted that the score's slavish imitation of Hans Zimmer's entire catalog is bordering on creepy.
0:32:53 - Is that a village of, dare I ask it, African and Caribbean-based Earthbenders? Being saved by white kid?
0:32:39 - Yes, yes it is. And the vast majority of them have dreadlocks. Why am I not surprised.
0:33:25 - Having finished our montage(!), it's now time to move on to an even more important element of cliche filmmaking - the plot-advancing voiceover.
0:34:18 - Now with helpful subtitles, in case you've been living under a rock your entire life and are unable to pick up on the whole "desolate, deforested setting full of sand = evil" cue.
0:36:10 - I have to agree with Iroh. Zuko's virginity is an extremely pressing concern.
0:36:46 - Why act when you can make a little child actor cover your inadequacy with exposition?
And now, because it is almost midnight here, I head to bed. I shall continue Wednesday night, where I hope to at least make it an hour in before taking a paring knife to the nearest fleshy object.
Also, that by having lots of close-up face shots, one can attempt to hide one's hit-or-miss effects budget.
0:07:00 - Noah Ringer, please stop sounding so mildly amused while discussing the death of all of your colleagues. "Oh, they're all dead and I've fucked the world over. Hyuk!"
Also, Nicola Peltz? E.MOTE.
0:07:05 - Okay, nice try for both of you, but how about less eyebrow twitches? They are not hyper-mobile caterpillars super-glued to your face. They need not rise and fall with every sentence spoken.
0:07:35 - Oh no, not THE VAGUELY BOAT-LIKE MACHINES! Might they even be...BOATS?
0:07:45 - Why does an Inuit-based village have a Torii gate?
0:08:03 - Why, Sokka, you can conduct basic deductive reasoning! Cookie?
0:08:33 - "I am Prince Zuko, son of Fire Lord Ozai and heir to the throne. And my eyebrows are AWESOME."
0:09:08 - Is that...a person of color? Possibly of Inuit descent? As a background character?
WHAT A TWIST!
0:09:41 - WHY ARE WE YELLING?
0:09:57 - Noah Ringer, blinking Is Not Acting. It merely indicates that your contacts are in wrong.
0:10:11 - Inexplicably twirly dancey move that looks a teensy bit like bending and/or Sufi whirling produces fire! Bending, in this movie, is apparently a cause-and-effect thing, instead of a manipulation thing.
Or it's a "lack of interest in making sure the CGI and choreography departments understood the fundamentals of bending."
Pretty sure it's the last one.
0:10:34 - Sokka would KILL THEM ALL.
LIKE FRANK MILLER.
0:10:40 - MANSOKKA NEED NO REASON TO KILL THEM. MANSOKKA HAS YELLY VOICE AND ANGRY FACE. MANSOKKA GOOD AT MAKING ANGRY FACE.
0:10:53 - "What do you want us to do, Katara? How are we supposed to save him? Acting? They've got Dev Patel. His movie won Oscars! Oscars! Not just one! You know what I've done? Twilight! Fucking Twilight! And I don't even have fangirls! I know you think everything is just going to work out, but I don't."
0:11:10 - Appa, like everyone else in this movie, sounds extremely constipated.
0:11:48 - "What do you want with me?" "My nephew wants me to perform a little test on you." "What kind of test?" "A screen test."
0:12:14 - Soooo....the Water Tribe lives in igloo yurt teepees?
0:12:24 - First use of the word "destiny." Take a sip!
0:12:40 - Oooh, two in one minute! Sip again. If you can pack in three, it's a chug!
0:14:25 - First solid minute and a half of ponderously scored exposition achieved!
0:15:48 - Clearly, Dev Patel's famous "kicked puppy" face is why he got this role.
0:15:54 - Shaun Toub, it's sweet that you're trying so hard, but you can stop. Yelling:Acting in TLA::Chocolate:Peanut Butter.
0:18:40 - New drinking game rule: sip every time Noah Ringer tries to pull of an Adorable Aang moment and fails miserably.
0:18:45 - And, at a little under twenty minutes into the film, Katara finally bothers to ask Aang's name.
0:18:51 - And it appears Noah Ringer is batting at a hovering hoard of mosquitoes who've conveniently disguised themselves as CGI Momo.
0:19:53 - I'M YELLING AND POUTING. AT THE SAME TIME! CAN'T YOU SEE HOW HARD I'M TRYING TO EXPRESS MY GRIEF, KATARA? YOU MUST KNOW I AM FEELING EMOTION BECAUSE I AM YELLING!!!
0:20:28 - EPIC "NNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!"
0:21:05 - Judging by its appearance, the Spirit World is also where Edward sparkled for Bella the very first time.
0:22:17 - Back on the Fire Nation H.M.S Old Woman's Shoe...
0:22:32 - Oh, Aasif Mandvi. All your presence in this movie reminds me of is how much better everything is made by adding Jon Stewart.
And this movie has a painful lack of Jon Stewart.
0:22:56 - They're gonna have one dead puppy soon, judging by Dev Patel's face.
0:23:30 - A quick and dirty photographic interpretation of Aasif Mandvi's Commander Zhao.
0:25:24 - "So, are you the Avatar, Aang? Also, fish or chicken for dinner?"
0:26:05 - Recycled sitcom laugh track!
0:26:22 - People of color typecast and locked into a certain tribe? TWIST!
0:27:12 - Sad East Asian Earthbender guy has vaguely Fu Manchu-y mustache. How delightful.
0:27:30 - THIS INSPIRATIONAL YELLING THING WORKED IN "REMEMBER THE TITANS!"
0:27:40 - I really didn't think I would reach this point, but I honestly would get great delight out of watching someone sock Aang in the face.
0:27:58 - More Fu Manchu mustaches. What the fuck.
0:28:08 - "My name is Aang. And I'm an alcoholic."
0:28:55 - ...was that firebending or the beginning of an epileptic seizure? I can't tell.
0:29:00 - On the continuing topic of facial hair, what is it with all the Fire Nation goons having soul patches? Do they also wear pukka shell necklaces and have identical "tribal" tattoos on their biceps?
0:29:37 - Sokka just did the first Sokka-like thing in the entire movie - kicking someone in the balls.
0:29:46 - I first got hints of this problem with Aang's boat escape, but the Earthbender fight makes it painfully clear: M. Night is unable to construct an action sequence that isn't a slow disjointed patchwork of parts knitted together with thread and rubber bands.
And it's at about this point where
brownbetty and I started talking about why exactly the action in TLA fails, so chatlog break!Me: As it stands now, the film is just loud and pointlessly angry and poorly choregraphed.
brownbetty: I know! The segment I saw was the segment in the earbender camp?me: Yep
brownbetty: And, like, it was choregraphed like a church pageant!Like, "And then, all the soldiers run to the left" [pause for stampede].
me: We must make the action move slowly, or the viewers poor little minds won't be able to process it!
brownbetty: Well, and it's only how many minutes long?How could any one look at season one of avatar and think "Damn, but nothing happens! How are we going to fill 120 minutes?"
me: My copy is 01:34
brownbetty: Yeah, it's so...me: However, I'm a half-hour in and I feel like I'm slogging through molasses.
brownbetty: I mean, it's probably lucky, considering how bad it is, that they didn't actually make more than ninety minutes, but why would they have not packed it *full*?me: Because it never feels full
Each scene feels perpetually on the verge of a climax, filled with momentum for action that never happens
brownbettyy: Yeah, just... what the hell thought process led to them going "How can we put less in this movie?"?
brownbetty: How do you do something this bad by accident?me: It's like the inverse of the thriller, where the idea is to put off the audience's anticipation until the last moment. In this case, the audience is waiting for the excitement that each scene's setup seems to promise (violent earthbending, Aang going bugfuck and entering the set of Twilight). But it never happens
brownbetty: I mean, if you're not working with a gaggle of seven year-olds and a sunday-school teacher.Heh. Twilight earthbender.
me: (The Spirit World serious looks like the forest in Twilight where Edward sparkles for Bell the first time.)
Instead, M. Night slows his camera down to ponder scenes, to contemplate the action of the moment - a good tactic in the kinds of movie he normally makes, but awful for action sequences.
brownbetty: The Spirit World is Vancouver?me: Shot with a heavy blue contrast filter, yes.
brownbetty: Maybe he only knows how to make one kind of movie, but doesn't know that he only knows one movie?me: I strongly suspect so
me: Because when you stop to ponder an action sequence for too long, the suspension of disbelief fades, and you're reminded of just how improbable whatever you're watching really is. That doesn't mean you have to quick-cut a scene to death, but you need to maintain constant visual motion somehow.
brownbetty: What about bullet-time, or whatever that was when Leaping Tiger did it?me: It worked at first (for Western viewers at least) because it was different, something so new it forced viewers to rethink how they view action. But it's still a part of the flow of action, one that was not uncommon to people used to HK films.
What Shamaylan's doing here is angles. A metric shitton of different angles on the same sequence. Also, lots of circling (or tracking) shots.
me: It's kind of like how sitcoms are shot, actually
brownbetty: I think I lack the theoretical basis for this. Sitcoms usually have a camera on each speaker for close-up and a long shot to give you an idea of the layout?me: Kinda. It depends on the sitcom's budget how many cameras they'll be able to afford to shoot with. What I'm more thinking about is how in a sitcom, actors are shot in on a stationary set, acting out a scene. Cameras traditionally do not intrude, instead acting as a stand-in for the viewer. With action, the viewer needs to feel equally as active (or involved) as the actors on-screen or they can lose interest.
brown0betty: Huh
me: Really good action stars, like say Tony Jaa, have the necessary physical dynamism to negate relying on cinematography to make up for the boring.
brown0betty: But if that's not you, there'd better be cinematography.
me: Exactly.
me: This problem is why, say, the Bayformers is (from a visual action perspective) so painfully boring. Because a) Bay's working with CGI, not actors, so he can't rely on them to make action interesting, so b) Bay tries to use explosions and spectacle and camera to cover up the honest stiffness of trying to make 'Bots work in real life. Thus we get the action quick-cut, which bounces the viewer around so fast and assaults their vision so constantly that they might start to feel a simulated sense of involvement.
But gold paint doesn't mean you can ship that pile of shit off to Fort Knox and expect them to take it as the genuine article.
(Oh dear god, I think I'm lecturing)
brownbetty: A little, but if it gets you through the movie, I don't mind. And I do genuinely not know this shit, so it's not redundant.me: I hate to say it, but it almost is now. After the Earthbender camp, I'm honestly getting kind of irritated by how inexcusably bad this is.
(One way to think about this that might make more sense to you is think of how action sequences are drawn in comics. they share a lot of similarities)
brownbetty: Well, you're not actually obligated to watch this, are you?me: No, but I'd feel like a quitter
brownbetty: True. And if you draw your action sequence like a talk-y sequence, it'll be all weird and dumb.That does make sense!
I mean, movies don't have panels, but we could say a continuous shot is a panel.
me: It is. If you read enough Tezuka, his work leans heavily on film and how it conceptualizes action
brownbetty: I have read v. little Tezuka, but I can sort of see it.me: Well, given how massively influential he is, his style of changing perspective has become fairly pervasive in all sequential art.
And then I started the movie again, because I was committed to finishing this fucker.
00:30:41 Scrolls, conveniently falling and conveniently being used to move the plot forward!
00:31:06 - Time to introduce and then forget all about Avatar Kiyoshi!
00:31:18 - Ineedtotalkreallyfastbecausethisissupposedtobeahighlyintenseconversationthatmovestheplotforwardandgivestheactionimpetus. Mytalkingfastismetaphoricalandnotatalllazydirectingorbadactiong.
0:31:20 - "I need to tell you something." "What is it Aang?" "My inability to express how my immaturity fucked the world over is going to fatally doom this movie to suckitude.
"Also, I'm an alcoholic."
0:32:18 - One minute of movie-advancing exposition down!
0:32:25 - I love how Shamaylan shoots this entire sequence with close face/eye shots, capturing the exact center of everyone's acting prowess - their eyebrows.
0:32:37 - Montage!
0:32:40 - It should also be noted that the score's slavish imitation of Hans Zimmer's entire catalog is bordering on creepy.
0:32:53 - Is that a village of, dare I ask it, African and Caribbean-based Earthbenders? Being saved by white kid?
0:32:39 - Yes, yes it is. And the vast majority of them have dreadlocks. Why am I not surprised.
0:33:25 - Having finished our montage(!), it's now time to move on to an even more important element of cliche filmmaking - the plot-advancing voiceover.
0:34:18 - Now with helpful subtitles, in case you've been living under a rock your entire life and are unable to pick up on the whole "desolate, deforested setting full of sand = evil" cue.
0:36:10 - I have to agree with Iroh. Zuko's virginity is an extremely pressing concern.
0:36:46 - Why act when you can make a little child actor cover your inadequacy with exposition?
And now, because it is almost midnight here, I head to bed. I shall continue Wednesday night, where I hope to at least make it an hour in before taking a paring knife to the nearest fleshy object.
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