Cinema Freaks LIVE: The Visit (2015)

M. Night Shyamalan is something of a punchline now, and all of his movies have been reviled by everyone for years. He’s basically the equivalent of that guy in town no one likes and everyone has a story about him they laugh about over drinks - a clown not respected by anyone. It’s easy to get sucked into that, and rag on him - but he’s an easy target, so I don’t do it very much. However, The Visit is the worst shit I’ve ever seen from him. Tony and Michelle and I did a podcast about it. Check it out!

(Both the podcast and the review contain heavy SPOILERS, so if you actually want to see this for some reason, don't say we didn't warn you.)



This movie is an insane disaster, complete hot, wild garbage stinking up to the high heavens. It’s bad in every sense of the word. I could go on and on like this, but I don’t think it’s really a good form to do nothing but bitch about how bad it is with no actual criticism. Cough...yeah...I'd NEVER do that...

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Starring: Olivia DeJonge, Ed Oxenbould

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle and Tony.

The problem is...I just don’t know where to start. Pretty much everything about this is either unpleasant, grating or poorly done. I mean, what was the plot behind this? Shyamalan got drunk off some fruity cocktail drinks and then said, "I have a new movie idea: old people are bad!" And then, for some inexplicable reason, a studio gave him money to make the movie.

To make matters worse, it's produced by the people who gave us Paranormal Activity, Sinister, The Purge, Ouija and more. Which is like two Japanese Kaiju monsters combining in a horrible lab accident and forming some sort of super monster to destroy Tokyo. M. Night Shyamalan teaming up with the people who gave us Ouija and the Insidious sequels - I think superhero movies typically feature less evil villain team-ups.

The premise is that these two kids are going to visit their grandmother and grandfather in a small town, who they’ve never met because their mother hasn’t spoken to them since she was 19 years old. Also, their father is out of the picture after a divorce. Hooray, dysfunctional families!

"Bye, kids! I'm glad you're leaving so I can get wasted and have tons of irresponsible sex!"

So, okay, not TOO bad so far. I mean, it is a story at least, even if it’s a flimsy one. Until we get to the fact that it’s a found footage movie, anyway. As I’ve said before, the genre can be done well. However, here it’s a couple of annoying white kids exchanging witty quips and blathering about how they think movies should be directed. I guess it’s kind of realistic, but both of them are so obnoxious to watch that I find it hard to be invested in at all.

Unless the movie wants you to be his ear, nose and throat doctor, this shot is pointless!

It's a shame because the young actors are pretty good and I hope they do more stuff as they get older, but here, they were victims of the Shyamalan Curse, which renders any actor awful.

There’s one scene where the girl is pointing the camera at a swing and saying they need to let it swing naturally. This is important because it shows that Shyamalan’s own directing skills are the same as that of a 15-year-old amateur.

Also, the little brother is constantly rapping, and it’s awful. I know he’s just a kid, and it’s mean to discourage kids from their hobbies and passions, but whoever made that rule up never heard this kid rap. I mean, holy fuck. What was the writing process like for that? I'm guessing Shyamalan decided that him walking into the middle of the scene himself and saying in a loud voice amplified above the rest of the movie, "I hate you, audience, and I want you to die," over and over, would have been a bit much. So the rapping was the next worst alternative.

The kids have a 9:30 bedtime, because after that specific time every night, the grandma gets naked, claws the walls with her fingernails and walks around with a knife. These obvious signs of mental illness probably would have been mentioned to the kids before they got there in real life, but it makes for good gross-out gimmicky shock scenes, so that's more important than storytelling!

How do they time it at exactly 9:30 anyway? What if grandma decided to strip down and grab her favorite kitchen knife at 9 p.m. when they’re down in the living room watching Nickelodeon? Weird.

There’s a part in the beginning where the brother’s phone doesn’t work, which I guess is the excuse for why the characters can never call the police. But we see that Skype works just fine, and they use the Internet later to look up stuff. Shyamalan could have easily just written out the part where the phone didn't work, but I think he was deliberately doing this just to piss everyone off. He had a plot that made sense, then he decided to make it confusing and bad for no reason, like he was protesting imaginary ghosts in his head who wanted to challenge his creative process. He is a special snowflake, after all, and the laws of reality don't apply to him.

More weird stuff starts happening, which they try to tell their mom, but she shrugs it off and says they’re old. Yeah! That’s it. They’re old. You’re the best mom ever. Old people are always stripping naked and carrying knives around! You kids have got to learn the hard and brutal facts of life sometime or other.

He could be suicidal and need real help, but nahhh, just senile!

There’s a bunch of filler scenes of them running around with the camera and filming shit, and it’s about as boring as it sounds. There’s no real development of the story. The camera stuff is so badly ingrained into the story, it’s practically a square peg into a round hole. I mean fuck. Most of the time it’s just the kids filming their grandparents making breakfast, or them driving. We don't get scenes of the two kids in the bathroom, but that's probably because Shyamalan's lawyers intervened before he could do that.

I don’t know if there’s even a point in saying so, but kids don’t use a camera like this. Nobody does, unless you’re directing a real, budgeted, scripted movie. No sentient human being does this. And it's also too clean looking for what's apparently just a reel of everything they filmed in the movie's world. Real life, there’d be way more errors, breaks in the video, et cetera. I just don't get what this was even supposed to be in the movie's universe - just a collection of footage from her camera, or a finished project? If it's the latter, hoo boy, I hope she's ready to submit it to Sundance! It'll be a gem.

But hey. Shyamalan knows it’s dumb. While they’re setting up a secret camera to spy on grandma and the sister wonders if it’s ethical to do that for a documentary, the little brother quips about how there’s no cinematic standards anymore. Which I think is obvious based on this movie.

Zing!

There are multiple scenes of the grandparents telling insane stories about seeing ghosts and monsters in the lake. It goes nowhere every time, and while I don’t think the movie would’ve been better with some supernatural elements, it would have been better if our time wasn’t wasted listening to these asinine stories from a bunch of senile old people.

The twist at the end is that the two old people are NOT actually the real grandparents. After like, five fucking days, the mother finally notices that they’re staying with the wrong old fucks. The movie has shown them several times speaking with the mother via Skype, and somehow that was never noticed. The mother, by the way, has been at a beach resort having fun and partying all movie long, and she didn’t even bother to make sure her kids got to the right grandparents. Parenting: it’s easy so long as you have no brain! Are you even really divorced, or did you forget to tell him when you moved?

Oh, and I guess the two old people are escaped mental patients. Who, I guess, nobody noticed were missing from the asylum they were being held at! That's just great. Keep up the awesome security at that mental facility there, jackasses. After all, who cares if a couple of serial killers escape? Fuck it, not even worth sending out cops to look for 'em.

"But if someone's got some weed, we'll gladly arrest them!"

Also, due to convenient writing, the two old fucks were able to keep it together okay until they were found out to be impostors, at which point they went crazy and started acting like the murderous psychotics they are. Writing is easy when you don't want to try! Anyone can do it.

See?

The climax involves a game of Yahtzee in which the grandma wolfs down a bunch of cookies and then screams right into the camera, crumbs dropping from her gaping maw of a mouth. Yahtzee issued a public apology saying they were sorry they ever invented the game after seeing this, and if they knew it would have been in this movie when they first made it, they would’ve aborted the game creation and set their building on fire.

Irreparably damaged now. Shame...

Then we get a bunch of scenes of shaky-cam fumbling in the dark as the kids discover the bodies of their real grandparents in the basement. Oh, and there’s a scene where the grandpa shoves a shit-stained diaper into the brother’s face. Thanks for that one, Shyamalan. I'm sorry I don't have a joke for that. I was...completely unprepared for movie scenes about diapers thrown in little kids' faces. Next movie I see it in, I promise I'll have something.

The fact that these fight scenes made it into the project is dizzyingly stupid, when you consider the fact that, in the movie’s universe, this whole thing was supposed to be edited together by the sister as a documentary project about her family. What made THAT worth putting in? What kind of documentary is this?

At the actual end, they get rescued and then the daughter and her mom have a heartwarming ending where we find out the BIG REASON she and the grandparents had a falling out years ago. It’s been hinted at all movie long and now we’re finally getting the answer. So. What is it? Take a seat here, this is going to be intense and I want to make sure you all can handle this huge revelation.

Are you ready? Okay: Apparently, when the mom was 19, she yelled at the grandparents and they pushed each other around a little. Wow. That’s why they never talked again? That’s why this whole mess happened? I'd say that's underwhelming, but that's like saying most school shooters just need to have a cookie and a beer and they'll be fine. It's not an accurate statement.

There’s also this really tacked-on moral about forgiveness and family and stuff. Really, was THAT what I was supposed to take from the shit-diaper-in-face scene, or all of the scenes of the grandparents telling conspiracy UFO ghost stories? Wow. That went totally over my head! Shyamalan is clearly much smarter than we thought. I guess this was a good movie after all.

The end credits are played over a scene of the brother rapping again. This time it’s full of product placements, because I guess Shyamalan needed to whore himself out to pay for this shit heap of a movie and also, for all the diapers he needed as props. I mean, there were a lot of those!

M. Night Shyamalan, now sponsored by adult diapers.

This is practically the dictionary definition of a bad movie, and I think Shyamalan did it on purpose. There's a nauseating level of self-aware 'bad on purpose' pandering about this. I think he made this just to fuck with Hollywood and the viewers/critics who hated his other movies, because the whole thing is pretty much the movie critics who hate him THOUGHT his other movies were. Hell, he's literally smearing shit in our faces. This movie is pretty much like a bratty child frustrated that no one gets his "brilliant" ideas, so he's passive-aggressively lashing out. My mother, upon seeing the trailer for this some months back, said it looked "exhausting" to watch, and frankly, that's the best summary I can think of.

This really is up there for worst movie of the decade. It's just so, so bad; everything about it is. Nothing makes sense. Fuck, I need to go lie down.

Images copyright of their original owners; we own none of them.

REVIEW: The Sixth Sense (1999)

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Starring: STUTTERING STANLEY!

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167404/

“STUTTERING STANLEY! STUTTERING STANLEY!”

-Cole

What can you say about M. Night Shyamalan? Well, lots of derogatory things. But what about the movies he made that were actually not all out terrible as opposed to just…hollow, and without much feeling that isn’t sappy melodrama? That’s right. This is The Sixth Sense.

The film starts out with Bruce Willis and his wife celebrating an award the mayor gave him for being a great psychologist. They go upstairs to have hot steaming sex and decidedly do NOT notice the crazy man in his underwear standing in their bathroom waiting for them. That’s a real buzzkill on the sexual tension, guy. Don’t you have any tact? Next time wait till AFTER they’re done ravaging each other to go nuts. It’s just proper manners and all.

So yeah, this is apparently one of Willis’ old patients who feels like Willis didn’t help him at all and maybe even made his problems worse. He says everyone calls him a freak. He pulls out a gun from God knows where – he’s only wearing his underwear, remember; so I don’t know if I want to think about where it was before…and then he shoots Willis straight in the chest, not even giving him one chance to say anything. He then shoots himself as the camera fades to black…to “the next fall.”

We then see Willis sitting outside this house on a breezy autumn day right out of any given commercial. Haley Joel Osment comes out and runs down the street, with Willis in hot pursuit. He goes into a church to play with his toys, because that’s where you always went to play when you were a kid, right? I remember I used the holy water to make a flood on my GI Joes. And in the confessionals we played hide and seek. Oh the fun times I had.

"Don't you mess with the action figures. My Macaulay Culkin-esque demeanor does NOT approve!"

So yeah, this is Cole, one of Willis’ new patients apparently, who likes to follow him wherever he goes and try to get him to talk about his feelings. They have some conversations and Willis even comes back again the next day at Cole’s house, where Cole just doesn’t want to talk. Willis tells Cole that if he can guess what Cole is thinking, then Cole has to take steps forward until he’s sitting in the chair opposite Willis. Of course, Cole goes along with it, even though everything Willis asks seems to be pretty specific. I think in reality this question-and-answer exchange might go a little bit differently:

BRUCE WILLIS: You’re thinking that your mom abandoned you after your father left.

COLE: What are you talking about, wacko? I just got home from school and I want some Cheez-Its. *steps back*

Oh, and the kid also has a watch, which apparently his father gave him before he left. Hmmm…

Well, I guess we know what really happened to it. I’m glad that problem’s solved.

So after that, Cole goes to school again the next day, where his teacher asks the class what the history of the school is. Cole says people got hanged there, and the teacher says that it isn’t true. Cole thinks the teacher is looking at him funny and calls him out on it. Cole starts screaming violently at the guy, shouting “STUTTERING STANLEY, STUTTERING STANLEY!” over and over again. Yeah, apparently that’s what all the kids used to call the teacher when he was a kid. How Cole knows this isn’t yet explained, but it is really funny and probably the only part of this movie that really got a reaction out of me. I mean, it’s just so over the top goofy sounding. He just cups his ears and starts fucking screaming at the poor guy. On top of that, wouldn’t it suck to coincidentally have a name that starts with the same letter that your disability does? That’s just asking for it.

After Stuttering Stanley calls him a freak (is there no other insult in this world but ‘freak’?), Cole is sitting alone waiting for his mom when Bruce Willis comes in again. They have another conversation about Cole’s insecurity and I just have to wonder, how many times are they going to do this? It’s like the movie has such a short attention span that it thinks we wouldn’t get the point if they didn’t CRAM IT IN every five minutes that Willis is trying to help Cole out. We get it. You can do something else now. Oh, so Willis shows Cole a magic trick with a quarter? Big whoop.

So Cole gets invited to this other kid’s birthday party who he apparently doesn’t like. He shows the same trick with the quarter to some other kid, who promptly tells him it’s stupid. Cole is so frustrated at this that he leaves and goes upstairs, where a ghost is rattling around inside a cupboard. These two bullies happen to see him from downstairs, and follow him up there. Because all little kids aside from the main character are little douchenozzles with no human qualities, they lock him inside the cupboard as he screams for his life. Isn’t that just precious? Speaks volumes for the rights and protection of little children everywhere! His mom gets him out but by then he’s already fainted and has to be taken to the hospital.

Now, brace yourselves, audience. You’re about to witness one of the GREATEST…no, no, that won’t work…one of the MOST MEMORABLE…no, no, that isn’t it either…oh, I got it. YOU’RE ABOUT TO WITNESS ONE OF THE MOST OVER-USED POP CULTURE PHRASES OF THE 90S! As Willis comes into the hospital room – does he have any life besides tending to this kid? I mean, I’m glad to see a doctor taking a personal interest in his patients but GEEZ – Cole is lying there and says he’ll finally tell Willis his secret. He says “I see dead people.”

Well so do they, and look how they turned out!

Yup. That’s the big reveal. No big secret behind it, no explanation, no nothing. Just “I see dead people.” And we’re supposed to ACCEPT that, movie? We’re supposed to buy this obvious cop out of cheap writing? You expect me to just lie down and TAKE this?

…well, yeah. Yeah. That is what I’m going to do.

So apparently Cole sees ghosts everywhere and they try to talk to him. He’s afraid of them, so Willis tells him – apparently not questioning this at all or thinking about the repercussions of telling him to keep indulging in his could-be-insane-fantasies – to try and actually help the ghosts next time. The movie, ignoring the fact that this could be a potentially awesome plot for an entire other film, mostly shoves this into the last third of its running time. We see several ghosts roaming his house, including one kid that was shot in the head by his own father and a sick, diseased looking mom that slit her wrists trying to escape her abusive husband. So yeah. Those would make for interesting plotlines, right? These will really give the film the extra edge it needs to forever etch itself inside the viewer’s mind, right?

Too much oatmeal...

No, instead they go ONLY with the little girl whose mother poisoned her until she died, which I have to say is a much less interesting plot. What kind of fucked up parent would do that? Why? Well, I looked on the Wikipedia page for this movie and it claimed that this is actually a form of child abuse called Munchausen syndrome by proxy. How did Shyamalan know enough about this disease to include it in his movie? My guess is he spent a day looking through medical textbooks for some obscure disease that nobody in the mainstream would know about. But at least somebody’s being creative…not like you’d see that from him again in the future too much.

Then in the car later he tells his mom that he can see ghosts, citing that his grandmother comes to visit him all the time from beyond the grave and tells him that she’s proud of his mother every day. This provokes an extremely sappy and overdone scene that mostly makes me roll my eyes and tap my feet on the floor waiting for it to end.

Meanwhile, while that’s going on we get Willis’ side of the story. Apparently his wife doesn’t like the person he’s become after he got shot in the beginning of the film. Gee. I wonder why that is? It couldn’t possibly be because he’s been spending every waking moment with a little kid who claims to see ghosts, could it? Maybe she wouldn’t cheat on you if you actually gave her the time of day! Maybe if you…oh, wait, I’m sorry, we have a big stupid plot twist interrupting: HE’S BEEN DEAD THE WHOLE TIME AND HAS NOT BEEN ABLE TO ACCEPT IT! Through a montage of scenes we already saw in the movie, Shyamalan guides us safely through this whole thing without any confusion at all. Because, as the viewers, we are far too stupid to figure it out for ourselves. Aw. How nice of him.

So yeah, The Sixth Sense; it’s pretty much lame and yet everyone loves it for some reason. Admittedly, this is a lot better than most of the bullshit I review on this blog. It’s decently acted, the story is told OK and the recurring themes and elements are well done for a pop film intended for wide audiences. It might not be the most intelligent or the most emotional film out there, and it doesn't delve as much into Cole's psyche and problems as I would have liked, but I can at least kind of see why people like it so much. Even if I think it’s pretty boring and silly. But enough of that shit. It’s time to review the Cube movies.

AHHHHHHHH!

Review: The Last Airbender (2010)

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Starring: Noah Ringer, Dev Patel, Nicola Peltz

Website: www.thelastairbendermovie.com

This review was co-written by my friend Tony Collazo, who hated this movie with a passion, as he is a huge fan of the Avatar cartoon series. Hope you enjoy.

I was going to come up with something big to celebrate the end of the year, but I don’t really have anything. So we’re just going to review The Last Airbender instead!

Man, and I mean man, did this film cause a stink. Everybody hated this one! Me, I never cared much for the original Nickelodeon series it was based on, and I never liked director M. Night Shyamalan one wink, but apparently a lot of people missed the memo on that and were actually surprised when Shyamalan botched this film up. Here’s some news for you, people. He has always sucked. He has sucked in copious amounts ever since he started out. This is not the first time he has released a film that falls below expectations – that should be old news to everyone. But since it isn’t, I figured I might as well give this film a piece of my mind.

Our first scene starts with two pasty white kids walking around aimlessly in the middle of the snowy wastelands when the brother, Sokka (pronounced Soak-a, like a water gun made for three year olds or something), hears something in the ice. Logically he decides to start bludgeoning the ice right under their feet with his tool, because THAT’S not dumb, right? Then his sister Katara breaks this big ball of ice that comes up through the ground like a big old pimple, releasing…a tiny Asian kid with tattoos on his head! Uh, well…at least you can’t call them unoriginal, right?

"The arrow on my head points where my career is going after this..."

They take him back to their ice village where they establish no character development before the Asian kid is stolen by a bunch of guys who say that if he doesn’t go with them, they’ll destroy the whole village. Their leader is Zuko, played by that kid from Slumdog Millionaire because I guess he really was out of cash after the Indian government didn’t let him have any of the proceeds from that film. His character is basically angry all the time, with little other emotions at all. It’s revealed that he’s the son of the Fire Lord and that he’s been looking for a mythical figure called the Avatar all along.

Meanwhile, our two ice zombies, since they have about as much personality really, have a vapid talk about responsibility, saying that the kid was their responsibility all along even though they knew him for less than 5 minutes. Their grandmother comes in and seems to have been created solely for the purpose of spouting exposition. We get a lot of backstory here about spirits and the different tribes and legends and all sorts of meaningless mumbo jumbo that would probably water-bend the kids’ brains into mush by the time it was over if this film was at all realistic. I mean seriously, lay off the exposition! It’s not a college course!

While that’s going on, the Asian kid escapes the Fire tribe so quickly that I wonder why they even had that plot in the movie to begin with, and finds Katara and Sokka riding his giant flying pet water buffalo – hey, don’t look at me, I didn’t write this movie. Apparently this monstrosity of nature is called a Sky Bison in this world, and although it’s never really explained how it exists or anything, I guess it’s the Asian kid’s companion or something. They go to this other place that is apparently an Air Temple, where the kid reveals that his name is Aang, and that he was an Airbender. Apparently Aang used to live here, and thinks that he’s only been gone a little while, and that his monk friends are all still there waiting for him…cue tragic pay off in 3, 2, 1…

Yup, he’s actually been in the ice for centuries, whodathunkit? He goes through the usual tragic stuff and all, although you’d be hard pressed to tell, as his acting is so wooden that I think the actual trees do a better job. Also, while we’re on him, what the hell is up with the pronunciation of his name? It’s very clear in the cartoon version that his name is pronounced Aang, with a long A. But here it’s like Ung, with a U. How do you mix that up? Did these people even watch the original version at all?

But it’s OK, we’re interrupted by a random gender ambiguous Asian child running onto the set! He’s being chased by some Firebenders, but since this movie is allergic to character development – like, even the most simple, basic version of it like telling us a character’s name – we just learn that he is being arrested because he threw rocks at them. Oh no.

They then go to a village full of Earthbenders held captive, who for some reason do not fight back…and the stupidity of this is even noted by Aang himself; isn’t it lovely when even the characters don’t buy your shitty writing? He reveals he’s the Avatar, but this one dude doesn’t believe him and asks him if he can do other kinds of Bending and use other special powers. This prompts Katara to go push him down and shout at him about being rude to poor Aang. This scene is just ridiculous because…well, it’s actually a legit question! Why should anyone believe he’s the Avatar anyway? It’s not like there’s been any real proof yet and…oh, wait, I don’t really care. We then go through a very tepid, confusing fight scene in which we see wondrous special effects that I’ve seen done better in several early 1980s movies.

So Aang goes to this other temple where he meets a monk who leads him into this open area and then betrays him. Even though he’s supposed to be the savior of this world, he gets betrayed anyway. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! Totally ungrateful.

Aang gets kidnapped a second time, chained up, and then saved by a mysterious masked man who wants to save him. Who could it be? We get a fight scene outside with some guards where Aang bravely and heroically sets up shields around him to pick off the bad guys one by one, letting his savior fight off all the rest of the guards by himself. They escape, split up and the whole scene was completely pointless!

I really just don’t get it; was this really how these scenes were written? It’s like they just threw them in at a random order, no coherence at all. There’s no flow between these scenes. They just sort of…happen, one after another, without anything really feeling connected. Did Shyamalan’s dog just eat the script and then by the time he shat it all out, it was time to film already?

Okay, so he meets up with his buddies again and they go to this ice kingdom place where we get more special effects and Sokka hooks up with a Barbie doll. I’m sure she has a name and all, but really she’s just a giant talking Barbie doll, nothing else. As Aang is meditating, Zuko comes in again and fights with Katara, knocking her out and kidnapping Aang again. Man, this kid gets kidnapped a lot! Is he like a little Asian version of Princess Peach or something? But he escaped quickly again, making the whole thing pointless, more padding for this worthless cinematic carcass. Meanwhile, and here’s a surprise, THE FIREBENDERS ARE ATTACKING AGAIN, because I guess they got bored doing their knitting and croquet for the afternoon, and because they haven’t attacked or invaded anybody in the last five fucking minutes. They get antsy when they don’t do that!

"This is why I'm hot."

So because the Firebender general guy wants to kill the moon spirit, who is in the form of a common fish in the pond…just smile and nod your heads, audience…he goes to the cave and stabs the fish! I guess Occam’s Razor wins the day. But seriously, the all powerful spirit of the moon is in the form of a little fish? Even if I was going to sit back and assume that everyone in the known world will leave it at peace and not disrupt the space-time continuum, what if some random natural disaster happened that killed it? What if some unknowing little kid whose parents just forgot to tell him about it cooked it and ate it? This is stupid!

And check out those action scenes, man. I have never seen such pointless, gratuitous slow motion use in a film. I mean, at least 300 had them used consistently. Here we get banal sequences where it alternates between slow-mo and regular speed in the same sweep of motion, like Aang is sweeping a kick to another guy’s head, and it goes from slow-mo to regular about three times in that one kick. Am I supposed to be enthralled? It’s like riding a roller coaster and having it jerk and stop at completely random points. Does that sound fun to you?

The Barbie doll goes to the cave with Sokka and tells him she has to sacrifice herself to revive the dead moon spirit, or…something like that. This leads to some of the most contrived, passion-starved romance scenes ever. They last for all of a second and a half. Shyamalan then decides mid-scene that he’s bored already and dissolves to a shot of her already walking through the water. She lies down in the water and everything starts glowing…hey, it’s the new soup menu: girl-and-fish stew, everybody! Have some. It’s good for ulcers.

"There, there, now; even if the movie bombs, they will at least make cheap action figures of all of us. Don't worry. The future is bright."

Aang eventually gets up and summons a huge tidal wave to scare all his opponents in the water. It just kind of hangs there, not doing anything, like Shyamalan fell asleep before he could tell the special effects guys what to make it do. The movie then ends with the leader of the Firebenders telling his daughter that she is the most powerful secret weapon they have and that it’s her turn now…and that’s how the movie ends, with a fucking cliffhanger. I wasted two hours watching this shitfest and you’re telling me you don’t even have the balls to PROPERLY END IT?! That’s…asinine! You can’t be serious! All that wasted time and we don’t even get a real ending? How incompetent are you?

But it’s not like I really care too much, because I was never invested in this pile of lard to begin with. There’s no character development, a hackneyed plot, shithouse acting and no sense of direction. It’s just a shitty film from beginning to end. And the fact that they got so much from the show wrong is just unforgivable, and although I’m not a fan, many people are. I can really understand all the anguish from the fans of this show, as M. Night Shyamalan’s version is just a big slap in the face. A crap film from a crap director, it should come as no surprise that The Last Airbender is the cinematic version of a ride on the short bus to school. Purely incompetent and disgustingly worthless. Do not ever waste your time, money or energy on this slop.

Well, that was 2010, people. It's been a great year and I hope you all have a good festive end of year party and avoid movies like this one! Happy trails and I will see you in '11!