The "Send M. Night Shyamalan back to film school" fundraiser

[PaddedPaws]

The Last Airbender infuriated me. I think the best way to sum up how I felt about that movie is the fact that he randomly changed the pronunciation of some of the main characters names. WHY?? What purpose did that serve except to tick off the fans? You think you know what will work better than the creators of a successful series? The arrogance of that drove me up the wall.

Well, he said it was to be more authentic to the Asian roots of the series, which struck me as being completely silly and ridiculous, considering some of the other choices he made wrt the film.

Well, to be fair, the changed pronounciations do make more sense. In east asian cultures there is no "ah" sound. And the western pronounciation of "avatar" makes sense when talking about the little picture on a forum, but not so much when talking about what an avatar is actually supposed to be - the incarnation of a spiritual being.

I'm not saying I'm a big fan of his or anything. But I do agree with the choice to use non-western pronounciations.

And, yeah, I think the casting of the races was off, especially for the water tribe.

[blahblahblah]

Well, to be fair, the changed pronounciations do make more sense. In east asian cultures there is no "ah" sound. And the western pronounciation of "avatar" makes sense when talking about the little picture on a forum, but not so much when talking about what an avatar is actually supposed to be - the incarnation of a spiritual being.

I'm not saying I'm a big fan of his or anything. But I do agree with the choice to use non-western pronounciations.

I'm not saying that the changed pronunciations in and of themselves didn't make sense*. I'm saying that they didn't make sense in light of, as you mention, M. Night's decision to change the races. What, so he cares about being authentic to the show's Asian roots, but not enough to not whitewash the characters? What sense does that make?! Argh. (Any frustration coming across in my comments is not directed at you, just to make that clear.)

* Although, I have heard from other Asian people that his changes didn't actually make that much sense and were all over the place, linguistically speaking. It was like he was operating on some pan-Asian phonetic scheme, which is just silly because different Asian languages use different phonemes. In any case, the nations in TLA weren't all solely based on East Asian cultures. Heck, the Water Tribe were modeled off the Inuits. So not only did Shyamalan's decision to change the pronunciations seem hypocritical, but the pronunciation changes themselves were nonsensical, regardless of his claims that they had a linguist come in to supervise.

[Wavicle]

I agree with MrsJWine that this is reasonable criticism. It may not be kind and I can see not liking it, but it isn't really rude since this is about his professional persona.

I think the reason people dislike him is because he follows a formula of having twists, and in his later movies he gets really lazy with them and they don't really relate to the rest of the movie. Turning a movie completely around in the last bit doesn't count as a twist.

Its kind of funny seeing how his stories get worse with time.  The Sixth Sense was awesome, the twist was tied into the whole movie and was thought out carefully. I liked Signs, but it was a bit sloppier. The Happening was entertaining mostly because I love apocalypse movies, but the ending was just tossed at the end and had me raging (can I nominate a fundraiser to send him to a high school biology class? I know it was a movie but that ending sooo did not work as something that could happen like it seemed like it was meant to).