So.... The Last Airbender was pretty terrible...

It is. It's easily Shamyanldingdong's worst movie. It's waaaay worse than Lady in the Water. I mean it. It makes Lady in the Water look like Forrest fucking Gump.

The main thing is the writing. The dialogue is awkward-sounding that it makes even the two good actors in this film (Patel and Toub) look bad. The pacing's pretty crappy too. I mean, the movie is an hour and a half. This needed to be around three. So, as a result of the film's meager length, there's a ton of montages, narration and the removal of all side-characters. Even the really important ones like Suki, Jet and all the dudes who were holed up in the air temple. This movie violated the golden rule of storytelling: Show, don't tell. He does a shitload of telling and not nearly enough showing.

The acting really was just another thing to add to the pile. No one really seemed to be trying, except for Patel and especially Shaun Toub. His Iroh is also the only character that even remotely resembles his counterpart from the series. Not so much in appearance, but how he acts. Seychelle Gabriel also did a fine job as Yue. Also, why was Sokka a badass? He didn't become a badass until Book 3. This movie so desperately needed some kind of comedic relief.

Have you ever seen that episode of Family Guy, where Peter goes to see a really boring and depressing play and he just screams "For God's sake, somebody throw a pie!". That's how I felt watching this. It's so gloomy, angsty and depressing. All the fun that was in the series just isn't here.

Shamwow really can't direct an action scene worth a damn either. Whoever was in charge of fight choreography should've been shot. The movements were so long and drawn out and the bending that said movements brought out was usually pretty dinky compared to how elaborate the motions were. In short, a big windup for a tiny punch.

Ideally, this movie should've been handled by someone who had A. directed a martial arts movie before and B. stuck a little closer to the source material (I.E. No white folks. Except Christopher Lloyd as Bumi). The thing about the "racebending" thing though is that I'd have been cool with the cast if they could act, but they really can't.

The saddest thing is that sometimes, you can see how good of a movie this could have been. It could have been the next big movie franchise. Another trilogy to add to the debate. But now, I don't even see how a sequel could work with this movie. There's so little material from which to draw from in this film. Like I said, there's no side-characters, no Ba Sing Se, no nothing.

That's my two cents.

This Post is Gonna Be Pretty JLI-Centric.

Have I ever mentioned that my all-time favorite DC comic series is Justice League International and it's assorted sequels? Because it's oh so true. I bring this up because DC launched a new series starring a good portion of the team as part of it's Brightest Day event. Justice League: Generation Lost written by Judd Winick and Keith Giffen with an alternating artist every week. I've only read the first four issues, but so far I can easily say that this and The Flash are the two most interesting books to come out of Brightest Day.

But JSA was pretty funny recently with Obsidian's joke about being "cured".

I'll give a rundown of JL:GL and a brief review of it so far. It starts off with nearly every superhero and every government agency on the lookout for the recently-resurrected Maxwell Lord. Every hero except Booster Gold, who's been kicked off the manhunt due to the fact that most of the community thinks he's still a joke and that he's too close to Max to think effectively.

But Booster manages to find Max before anyone else does. He finds him in NY, hiding out in the old JLI embassy there. Unfortunately, Max quickly incapacitates Booster. Before he blacks out though, he sends out a distress signal on the old JLI band and Skeets picks it up. He alerts Fire, Ice and Captain Atom. They show up and resuscitate Booster just as Lord uses his powers to an extent previously unseen. It causes the group to blackout and when they awake, Lord is gone and Superman has shown up. He asks what the trouble was and when anyone who was present at the event mentions Maxwell Lord, Superman asks who that is. Max has convinced the entire world that he no longer exists.

That's the first issue. The rest of the series, so far, has seen the group dealing with Lord's alterations to the world. He's convinced everyone that Fire is psycho, that Ice is a menace, and made Captain Atom into a military fugitive. All he did to Booster was make everyone think that Ted Kord, the former Blue Beetle, committed suicide. At the end of the third issue, a contingent of OMACs attack the home of Jaime Reyes, the current Blue Beetle.

The team, sans Fire, rushes to the scene and fend them off, only to wind up in Russia in a botched attempt to follow the OMACs. They find themselves in the middle of a battle between the Rocket Red Brigade and a rouge Rocket Red in a homemade armor. Following the battle, the team realizes that Max has been playing them the entire time. He brought the JLI together once again.

Also, Max's powers have changed. His recent attempts at pushing people have killed the victims and turned their corpses into Black Lanterns.

It's a very interesting story. I hope we get an issue with some art by Kevin MacGuire. It's nice to see the team in a very serious story, but I do miss the humor. I'm also curious as to how much of the story is Winick's and how much is Giffen's.

It's still a great read and actually has something happening in the book, unlike the flagship title of the Brightest Day.
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Also, Kamen Rider OOO looks kind of neat. That's really all I have to say about that at the moment, because I've only seen around 8 seconds of footage and two pictures of the series.

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Next week, there's gonna be a totally sweet (And probably mean) review of The Last Airbender. It's gonna be fun on a bun.