Not Getting It

Conditions: Cold

I Demand An Upgrade!

People are getting more and more intolerant of life's little setbacks, I feel. Example A this week is of a man in an economy seat on a Qantas flight, who decided he wasn't going to take any more.

"The 23-year-old Israeli male passenger, surnamed Ariel, became 'emotional' after complaining about the food and other services," a police spokesman said.

There were reports today the man complained about his seat in economy class.

"He asked to be moved to business class because he wasn't happy with sitting in economy," a passenger, David Peace, told News Ltd.

He then asked to be seated with the pilot on the flight deck, Mr Peace said.

"When that was refused, he said he was going to open the door and get off," he said.

Police said they would not charge the man as he did not cause any damage or harm other passengers.
[...]

The man was understood to have ignored a number of directions from the crew and was sectioned off from other passengers under staff guard until the end of the flight.

He was not violent and no passengers were reported to be harmed.

- smh.com.au/

We've all been there, stuck in a difficult crappy situation for a long period of time. It's tough, I know. But sometimes we just have to keep our cool in the face of unfairness instead of blowing our stacks. Because where's that going to get you other than dumped at the next stop?




Film Review: The Last Airbender

Adaptations can be very difficult to pull off effectively. Distilling the essence of a longer body of work into a 2 hour film requires a bit of skill in knowing what to cut and what to change. And so it is that an adaptation has the added risk of not only being bad, but also being offensive to people who are fans of the source material. I was a big fan of the Nickelodeon show that ran for three seasons and is the basis for this movie, the first of three. Set in a world made up of four nations, where each nation has people capable of manipulating, or "bending" a natural element - Earth, Air, Fire, Water, the new Avatar - the only one who can bend all four elements and is meant to keep the peace - has awoken after being missing, frozen in ice for a hundred years. In his absence the Fire nation has launched a campaign to take over the world.

Prince Zuko, the banished and scarred Fire nation prince, is tasked with chasing after the Avatar. And helping the Avatar are the two kids from the Water nation who found him and will help him travel to the North pole, on his flying bison. in order to learn water bending with the goal of eventually taking on the Fire Lord. Now, this is a lot to explain, and a lot to process. So it should not be that surprising that M Night Shymalan's movie adaptation feels a little rushed, and a little lacking in detail. The characters and the world are introduced very quickly, and the actual process of getting to the North pole, evading Zuko and another Fire nation general, and having the Avatar deal with being away for so long is all compressed down into a too-short period of time. Crucial character moments where the Avatar and Sokka and Katara grow and learn and adapt to their mission are really not given enough time to register.

Predictably, what is given plenty of time is the action sequences where people battle by using Kung Fu moves to hurl the elements at each other. And while these CG effects are pretty good, there seems to be more of a disconnect between the character and the elements than there was in the cartoon. Shymalan's directing choices are also unusual. He does not shake the camera, and I profoundly thank him for that, but in action sequences he wants to move the camera around the characters as they fight each other, which on paper sounds pretty cool. But what I noticed was that it seemed as though the actors had to wait for the camera to get into position before they could make their moves, which seemed awkward and jarring. In the end the essence of the show is there in the movie, but the missing details make it a much more shallow of an experience that it should have been. Two water whips out of five.



- Peace out