M Night Shyamalan Talks The Last Airbender
M Night Shyamalan has been doing limited press to promote his new film The Happening, and has been talking about his big screen adaptation of the popular Nickelodeon Anime-influenced animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender.
When the hostile Fire Nation threatens to enslave the Water, Earth, and Air Nations, a reluctant and irresponsible twelve-year-old named Aang, who must forgo his selfish wandering to learn to master his latent powers and face his destiny as the Avatar, the Chosen One who can restore the world order. Night describes the film to SciFiWire:
“It has martial arts and spirituality and the supernatural, and it has Buddhist philosophy and Hindu philosophy–really, everything I talk about–all in one movie,” Shyamalan said. “It has a mythology. It’s Shakespearean. It’s all this incredible stuff, and it has a balance. All these movies are plays on magic, whether it’s Lord of the Rings or The Matrix or Star Wars even, and each one of them relates to me in a different way, in its belief system.”
Not that Night would compare the film to any of the previously mentioned films.
“I wish I could put my finger on what it is like to say, ‘Oh, it’s gonna be like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings,’ but it’s not really like that,” Night told RopesofSilicon. It’s its own thing. We have been striving to find the right balance between a fantasy world, and anchoring it in a reality you can’t quite put your finger on, but you know it’s real.”
Night also confirms The Last Airbender will be completely live-action and possibly even PG-13.
“It will be tough to keep it PG from PG-13. It will be tricky. I don’t know how to make a PG movie so that’s going to be much harder, because with R, everything was no problem,” Shyamalan told ComingSoon. “The great thing about it is it’s almost like they don’t ever really touch each other based in this world. They kind of do a form of manifesting something and then it comes at the other person and they manifest something. It’ll be great to do it as extensions of what the characters are feeling, and there’ll be much more CG.”
And Night insists in his interview with ROS that you’ll be amazed at the depth and realism that he will create with CGI:
“I feel more confident that I can make the CGI something that when you see it, like when you see two years from now and you see the trailer for The Last Airbender you will go, “Wow,” because you instinctively know that there is depth and reality to that moment of CGI.”
Shyamalan is currently deep into the design process and set construction will begin in August. I have yet to watch the animated series, but have heard a lot of great things about the series (shockingly from people you would never expect to be watching cartoons on Nickelodeon). The mix of asian philosophy, magic, and mythology has certainly gotten my interest. The Last Airbender is being targeted for a July 2nd 2010 release.
An update on the new Muppet Movie
I’ve been waiting for a good Muppet movie for years, it seems. I hearken back to the days of The Muppet Movie and The Great Muppet Caper, so while Muppet Babies and retelling A Christmas Carol with Muppets is nice and all, I just want me some good old-fashioned classic Muppet antics. So it was with great excitement that I read that the latest Muppet adventure is taking the franchise right back where I loved it. Think of Muppet Movie, Caper and The Muppets Take Manhattan as the original Star Wars trilogy. Then someone came along and made a Star Wars Christmas Special and some made-for-TV Ewoks movies, but it just wasn’t the same.
Jason Segel and Nick Stoller, who brought us Forgetting Sarah Marshall, are spearheading this Muppet revival and have just turned in their first script. I like the idea of Segel and Stoller doing this movie because they’ve proven they can do edgy humor. I’m not saying The Muppets should be rated R, but PG or PG-13 even wouldn’t be bad for the franchise. The question is if Disney can allow the Muppets to stray from kids-only fare back to their days of being cutting edge and cool. Then put them back on TV in a weekly show like we’ve been teased about for years!
The new Muppet movie promises to be about the gang getting back together to put on a show and save the studio (hey, that sounds refreshingly familiar actually) and promises to feature all the Muppet heavy-hitters and cameos galore. I just picked up Season Three of the original series (I hope Muppets Tonight gets the DVD treatment eventually, too) and it’s just as goofy and entertaining now as it ever was. I can’t help but think that under the right guiding hands, The Muppet Show could be revived and as fun and relevant today as it ever was. Just think of all the awesome guests they could have, and the fun they could have ragging on reality television, celebrity antics, paparazzi craziness and the list goes on and on. Muppets Tonight was a pretty good ’90s revival, following largely the same format as the original, but it just didn’t seem quite as sharp or witty; Kermit has to be the center of it all for it to work.
Hopefully, this new movie can find an audience in today’s market and does the Muppets proper justice. So many people forget that those original movies, and even the television show, weren’t tailored exclusively for kids. For creator Jim Henson, he had Sesame Street for his kid-oriented material, and The Muppet Show for the rest. In fact, Kermit used to pull double-duty on both, and other Sesame Street characters made appearances on the Muppet shows and the movies. Unfortunately, the two franchises are under different ownership now, so it seems pretty unlikely we’ll see Big Bird trying to hitch a ride in the new movie.
I never really understood why Disney felt the need to take the Muppet franchise in the direction they did once they acquired the original rights to it. Disney has plenty of childrens’ properties, so why turn the Muppets into just another children’s franchise? The original charm of the Muppets was that they lived in “our” world, interacting with people and our environment. Muppets on the subway, or trying to flag a taxi is much funnier than Muppets on a pirate ship to me.
Offering only classic remakes and genre films featuring those characters takes away from what made them work in the first place. I’m not saying never do something like that, but for too many years those films and representations have been the only appearances the Muppets have been making. Kermit and Piggy and all the rest are great because of their established “real” personalities. And as they are all “actors,” they can take on these other roles seamlessly, or not so seamlessly to even more humorous results.
And then big screen success can lead to small screen revival. And if they’re ever looking for a snarky incredibly handsome television blogger to make a guest appearance on the show, I’m just a bicycle or balloon ride away.
Get Outta Here: Brett Ratner’s Beverly Hills Cop 4 to be PG?
The PG-13 Effect: Brett Ratner’s officially “blowing ‘em where the pampers is.” The Miami-born maverick tells MTV that his Beverly Hills Kindergarten Cop 4 will be out to impress kids who can’t get into PG-13 movies. Is there another franchise that has ever consisted of three R-rated films (two of which are really good) and then had a PG sequel?
“Ten-year-old kids, 12-year-old kids don’t really know the old Beverly Hills Cop. So it’s an opportunity to make it new for kids,” Ratner said. “The same way it felt for me watching Beverly Hills Cop when I was a kid, that’s what I want to do for kids today.”
The youth have gone wild on Avenue Crazy. Ratner doesn’t go out and say it will be PG, no, but he didn’t include 13-year-old kids in that above quote either. But let’s say it’s PG-13. What is going on? Terminators blow smaller bullet holes into revolting humans, John McClane can’t say his signature line anymore because it will corrupt Justin Long, and now Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley, a DETROIT COP/wiseass won’t ratatat purpled language?
This trend of teening down makes me appreciate Rambo even more, and that’s not even possible. It’s silly to get mad about ratings, I agree with some of you in the comments, but damn, this is not what Ol’ Dirty Bastard meant when he said he did it “for the children.” Seth Rogen and a bag of weed can only do so much for moviegoers of rollercoaster height. Don’t worry, though, Ratner knows Foley…
“We’re trying to revitalize the franchise. He was one of my favorite movie characters of all-time, Axel Foley, by far the coolest movie character,” he said. “It’s an honor to be able to direct another Beverly Hills Cop film.”
At least he didn’t bring up The Dark Knight. Some people have emailed to say he might have been kidding, to which I replied, so he’s not Brett Ratner afterall?
WHAT?!?: Has the Ending/Mega-Spoiler For Terminator 4 Been Revealed?
“I have arrived to destroy your Internetz!”
We’ve held off on posting about the gargantuan Terminator 4 spoiler that hit AICN yesterday because it just seemed so ‘tarded. Then again, this is a PG-13 Terminator with a subtitle that belongs on a Madonna biography, so anything can happen. 
Well, CHUD has connected the dots based on their own inside info and the verdict is that the ending/mega-spoiler may very well be legit. In their words, AICN just kicked McG’s film (the new first in a new trilogy) “in the balls.” Need I say that everything below this point is glowing radioactive with SPOILERS so do not read if you think your exoskeleton will melt.
Discuss: Please let us know what you think, you daring spoiler-seekers. Do you still have doubts (about the spoiler’s authenticity)? If it is indeed legit, do you feel this twist is a zany dealbreaker, because I do?
Here’s the original spoiler…
“Alright so the main character is a cyborg named Marcus. For some background, Marcus was a criminal who was executed in 2003. He donated his body to Project Angel which was involved with SkyNet. They take his body and make a terminator out of him so he’s a terminator skeleton but has living muscle/skin and a beating heart too. At the end of the movie John Connor is fighting a T800 model 101 and loses. He dies and the top resistance people come up with a plan to help the resistance keep fighting on. The resistance feels that it’s important to keep the image or idea that John Connor is still alive so the resistance keeps going. So they rip off Marcus’ skin and put John Connor’s on the skeleton so now Marcus is John Connor.”
Like I said, this post is dipped in spoiler substance, and no, it’s not safe to continue reading. Okay, so I liked Face/Off for what it was, but, if true, this is just too much. Devin at CHUD checked with numerous sources and came back with this…
“The rest of AICN/Mori’s spoiler - about the fate of Christian Bale’s John Connor - is stuff that I cannot confirm as solidly as Marcus the cyborg, but is what I had come to believe after talking to multiple sources. You may remember that I ran with the story that Bale would be playing a Terminator… well, I was sort of right. The confusion arose from the fact that by the end of the film, Connor is dead and Marcus, the cyborg Terminator, is impersonating him. “
There’s the possibility that the spoiler originates from an earlier draft, but if not, CHUD says “it’s on the money.” More on this as it develops.