Perhaps You Wonder...

...what the fuck happened to me? Yeah, me too.

The whole of this week, pretty much, I've been a massive bag of sick. Never bad enough to merit going to the doctor, but never good, either. So I keep doing chores and marking time and hoping things will improve, but they sort of don't. I've finished a couple of books on my to-read pile. I also saw the live-action The Last Airbender, for my sins, which A) I got for free and B) wasn't as bad as I'd heard, but wasn't even vaguely as good as it should have been. Doesn't help that every non-Indian actor in it is egregiously awful, as opposed to the Indian ones, who simply look disconnected and world-rocked by the script's bland crappishness. In many ways, it's as though Shyamalan took all the fun parts out in a blind attempt to save time, but then re-paced it overall so that everything is heavy and epic and significant, which doesn't work either, and makes it play at snooze-y semi-quarter speed. My "favourite" moment is a sequence in which Aang and Katara do tai chi at the North Pole for what seems like five whole minutes while HUGE CHORAL MUSIC plays in the background, and they're not even effin' bending, or anything. Just doing tai chi while the snow falls, hidey hidey hooo.

Another thing I became sadly fixated on is the fact that, while in the series it's obvious that it does indeed take a fair amount of time to get from one place to another A) unless you have a flying bison and B) even then, actually, in the movie they're constantly having Commander Zhao pop back and forth from the Earth Nation to the North Pole to the Fire Nation for little one-on-one chats with Fire Lord Ozai--who also doesn't do that whole "here I am being faceless behind a wall of flames! FEAAAAAAR MEEEEE!" thing; he's just a sort of puffy-looking handsome dude walking around in a vaguely Maharajah/Roman Emperor-ish outfit with Fire Nation insigniae, looking out windows and repeating thing portentuously: "Yooooouuu...think MY son...is the one the soldiers have been calling...the BLUUUUE SPIIIIIIRIT?" (Real Sokka, in my head: "YES! And 'my science' can explain why it rains!")

Since I don't recall being a firebender giving you teleportational powers, I'm just not sure how Zhao keeps doing this, and it's kind of creepy--but no more or less than Noah Ringer trying to project child-like wonder and/or Avatar-esque gravitas, I suppose. Or the fact that Dev Patel's scar is so indistinguishable from his normal skin that you wonder what the hell Zuko's going on about all the time...did they think making it the way it is in the series would freak people out, or make him less palatable, or something? Because that's the whole point: Prince Zuko, Anger-Management Boy on a Gimme-My-Honor rampage, who from Moment One on manages to be weirdly attractive in a Hong Kong Phantom of the Opera way, emo-dorky and genuinely fucking frightening, like anyone who can make his hands into blowtorches without thinking twice really sort of should be.

Anyhow. That ate up some time...