Shyamalan’s Live-Action “Avatar” Abortion Gets a Cast
File Under: Things Which Bring My Piss to a Boil / Phillip Stephens
Trade News | December 12, 2008 | Comments ()
You may have noticed that in my “Avatar: The Last Airbender” writeup that I elided any mention of M. Night Shyamalamadingdong’s upcoming live-action rendition of the show. I’m trying not to think about it, and any attempt to inform me of this film’s existence has been greeted heretofore with fingers in the ears and a chorus of “LA LA LA LA LA!”.
The show was perfectly fine in an animated medium and the existing voice cast was exceptional - why sully things with a bound-to-be-clumsy live film, let alone one helmed by the increasingly disastrous Shyamalan? But shit, if we go around believing the industry capable of that kind of circumspection, we may as well start crushing Paxil into our Cheerios
But, anyway, if schadenfreude or boredom has you interested in the project - Shyamalan, has lined up a primary cast: 12-year-old karate kid Noah Ringer will play Aang; Jackson Rathbone (of Twilight) is Sokka; Nicola Peltz (of Deck the Halls) will be Katara. What’s irritating here is not that these kids are mostly unknowns or had bit parts in retarded movies, but that they’re all whiter than Mormon Jesus. “Avatar” self-consciously created a world and characters from non-Western cultures, they being the source of philosophy and metaphysics the show drew upon. Shyamalan and Co., in taking us to honky-town, have stripped one of the more original elements of the story.
Oh, but this isn’t the most unkind cut of all. Guess who is in negotiations to play Zuko, the angsty, rage-filled, self-hating prince? Jesse McCartney. Name not ring a bell? This is the fuckstick who polluted our ears, homes, and hearts with “Beautiful Soul”, which somehow played every ten seconds on the WB/CW a few years back, a pop ballad so ass-demolishingly lame that even the ten-year-old girls it was meant to arouse were given pause. I’d post a link were it not expressly forbidden by the Geneva Convention.
If any of you have the mind to beat any or all of these people about the face with a cudgel, I sure as hell won’t stop you.
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