Posted on by Dunc

Drive-by movie news: The Last Airbender blows, Transformers 2 sucks, Avatar leaks, and Alice in Wonderland… Burtons?

At least the effects are good. The first trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s live action adaption of Avatar: The Last Airbender is not the most captivating teaser ever, but it only blows in the literal sense. (And, well, there’s still that whole racebending thing…) The trailer unveiling (it’s attached to Transformers) also unleashed the film’s official site and a flurry of set visit pieces: MTV, SciFi Wire, io9, SuperHero Hype and IGN. But the movie isn’t out for a year, so don’t go expecting too much just yet.

Oh, Michael Bay. Everyone hates Transformers 2! (Really!) Including Roger Ebert, in fine form. For some reason, this warms the cockles of my black little heart…

The other Avatar. Footage of James Cameron’s Avatar, the 3-D one, was screened in Europe.

And since we’re on a name-brand director jaunt… First look at Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.

6 Replies to “Drive-by movie news: The Last Airbender blows, Transformers 2 sucks, Avatar leaks, and Alice in Wonderland… Burtons?”

  1. After seeing the Transformers 2 trailers in front of Star Trek, my brother and I theorized about Michael Bey films. I suggested you could rename them ALL “Forty Explosions and a Big Boom”, my brother suggested tightening that to “Everything Goes Boom” and then we realized that you could just save ink and rename all of them “BOOM” and it would work.

    However, that trailer makes me halfway interested in seeing The Last Airbender, which is odd as I don’t get into cartoons not made by either Disney/Pixar or Miyazaki so I didn’t watch the show, and I don’t get into M. Night Shyamalan films, either. (However, can we officialy ban the title “the chosen one” from all works of fiction? Forever? It was already cliche and Anakin Skywalker killed it.)

  2. TF2 is awesomely awful, surpassing even the prequels in fast-forwardable content-to-watchable fxporn ratio. Bravo!

  3. Honestly, I don’t think they ever called Aang “The Chosen One” in the show. It’s definitely a special role and only one person is born into it, but it’s more a reincarnation cycle than being “chosen.” I think they just used that for the trailer because it’s a familiar term that gets across that kind of uniqueness.

    Oh, and am I the only one amused by the fact that the heir apparent to the late, great Don “The Movie Trailer Guy” Lafontaine is James Garret, who just happens to be the voice of Avatar Rokku? So that voice we hear as we watch Avatar Aang in the trailer is the original Avatar Rokku! :)

  5. So did io9. Their review is the only one that makes me kinda want to see it.

    Not that I will. At least not until HBO shows it.

  6. “And every single performance is so ridiculous that it looks down on ‘over the top’ as if from a great height.”

    Best line of the review. And I also loved Speed Racer, so I appreciated the allusion.

    Basically, the Transformers effects are incredible, and the story doesn’t matter. And it features what may be the coolest camouflage ever depicted on film.

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