Here’s this gem of a short film in its entirety:

(Click to watch on YouTube)

(Click to watch on YouTube)

Special thanks to Steven Bosse for pointing me to this awesome YouTube Find.

Water. Earth. Fire. Air. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Only the Avatar, master of all four elements, could stop them, but when the world needed him most, he vanished…

So begins the introduction to Nickelodeon’s Emmy-award winning cartoon series, Avatar: The Last Airbender. It ran for three seasons before coming to its planned conclusion in 2008. It has since spawned a number of video games, action figures, stuffed animals, and now a movie written, directed, and produced by M. Night Shyamalan.

The film The Last Airbender (the “Avatar” part was dropped from the title to disassociate it from the James Cameron movie) is supposed to be the first in a trilogy of movies based on the television series, which follows the saga of Aang (in the film played by Noah Ringer), the one destined to be the Avatar, as he travels around the world to master control over each of the four elements and defeat the Fire Nation. Each film in the trilogy is planned to be an adaptation of one of the three seasons. This immediately poses a host of problems. The run-time of the twenty episodes that make up the first season of the television show is over eight hours. It would’ve been impossible for Shyamalan to condense that massive amount of plot into a one hour, forty-three minute film in any kind of cohesive manner.

Despite that, he tries to do it anyway. The first season has been boiled down to its most salient plot points, which are then jumped to one after another as quickly as possible in order to not lose time. This means that the majority of the film is exposition story-telling that recounts the numerous things that were revealed over the course of twenty television episodes. A number of scenes that serve no other purpose than to set up more expository descriptions are strung together one after another, with occasional voice-over from Katara (Nicola Peltz), a water bender traveling with Aang, to fill in even more details. If this sounds like it’d be terribly uninteresting to watch, that’s because it is. By trying to fit in so much material, the movie only succeeds in diminishing the impact of each individual scene, creating an unevenly paced, slapdash montage that bears only a superficial resemblance to its source material and an even more superficial resemblance to an actual movie.

With such a shoddy foundation for the film’s overall structure, it’s only downhill from there. Apparently Shyamalan thought that one of the main problems with the original cartoon was that it had a sense of humor. With that in mind, the film has been fastidiously scrubbed clean of any gags, punch lines, or moments of levity, save for one about half an hour in. The acting performances do little to make up for their absence. Some, like (surprisingly enough) The Daily Show‘s Aasif Mandvi as the villainous Commander Zhao and Shaun Toub as Iroh, the exiled Prince Zuko’s uncle, are competently executed. Others, like Dev Patel as Zuko and Jackson Rathbone as Sokka, Katara’s brother, are inexplicably awful. One wonders why the character of Sokka was kept in the film at all, considering that his primary role in the first season of the series was as the comic relief and Shyamalan clearly didn’t think that aspect was necessary.

As for the rest of the cast, it’s hard to tell whether the actors are to blame or if the script was simply past any redemption that method acting could have afforded. In either case, the dialogue is a mostly stilted, emotionally lifeless affair. But then how could it have possibly been anything less when the pacing and exposition ensures that the viewer remains as detached as possible from the story’s events?

That just leaves the fight sequences, which are thrown in whenever the movie gets tired of flat out explaining everything. The ability to bend the different elements to one’s will allows for colorful combat, and the special effects used to render the act of bending is interestingly done, even if they don’t particularly gain anything from being in 3D. The really big battle scenes still lack a sense of being truly epic, most likely because they, like everything else, are rushed through so the movie can cram in more plot points.

I’m not familiar with much of Shyamalan’s work, so I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt when I say that this is the worse film he’s ever made. For those who have never seen the original television series, this movie will do nothing to endear you to either its plot or its concept. It’ll come across as an underwhelming kung fu action flick with decent special effects and a sweeping orchestral soundtrack that constantly tries to fool you into thinking that what you’re watching is any good. Normally this kind of schlock is something that reviewers recommend only for fans of whatever the film has been adapted from, but since I think fans are the ones who will be the most angry about what’s been done with it, I’m not sure who’d I recommend this movie to.

There are two good things about it. One: it’ll make fans nostalgic for the television show and remind them of how amazing it was (all three seasons are available on the Netflix Instant, by the way). And two: it’s hopefully bad enough to convince Paramount to stop Shyamalan from making the next two movies in the trilogy before he can commit anymore crimes against cinema.

On a somewhat related note (and without casting aspersions or making predictions as to how good it will be), Resident Evil: Afterlife is set to release on September 10th.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to remember the life of NBC’s loveably insane and catastrophically bizarre Heroes.

For some, this death is surprising. Just as we all thought that we were safe, when we discovered that NBC needed to fill five new hours of programming per week and were going to have to scramble to come up with nonsense (quality or ratings at this point were out of the window), NBC dropped the axe, so that now we will be forced to endure five hours of crap we never liked in the first place as opposed to four hours of that, and then one hour of something we actually really used to like at one time even if it’s not as good as it used to be.

Some would say that this death is a long time coming. The health of Heroes steadily deteriorated as the ratings began to drop off. The story became more convoluted, more serialized, and considerably more confusing. Weaknesses began to show, until they started to take over. Eventually, Heroes succumbed to these illnesses, so let us pay our last respects.

Born in the fall of 2006 (probably conceived in 2004–I have nothing to back that up), we’ve shared some good times and some bad times with NBC’s occasionally-seminal original series. The days of its infancy were the days when large groups of nerdy college students would order heroes (sandwiches) and watch Heroes (people with supernatural powers). I wasn’t among these people because I had a class at the same time. It was either that or miss House. In retrospect I should’ve swapped it the other way around.

Even those of us who did not know Heroes well were probably touched by it in some way, at least enough to be familiar with the general concept: ordinary people begin to manifest extraordinary superpowers, but one guy ruins it for everybody else when his thirst for more power gets him murdering other heroes en masse. Then, despite a moment of moral panic, he decides that the human race deserves punishment for whatever it was they were doing wrong. I’m not quite sure what they were doing wrong–this being one of those details that comic books often find unnecessary–but Sylar (born Gabriel Gray) certainly had them pegged, and decided that a large portion of Manhattan should be incinerated. I guess here I cannot blame him; I have lived in Manhattan.

I fondly remember the first season, that lengthy 22 episodes or something of a near-perfect comic book-come-TV series, magnificently walking the line between supernatural soap opera and stuff blowing up. The formula seems easy enough to understand but so rarely can people manage it. We loved Heroes because people love superheroes. I can’t speak for everyone here, but I know that I secretly hope that tomorrow morning I’ll wake up and discover that I can fly or move stuff with my mind or become invisible. Or, ALL OF THE ABOVE. Nothing is impossible!

So anyway, Heroes worked because it tapped into the secret desire most of us have to be more exciting than we appear, to know a secret that the people around us can’t understand, to have the power to destroy or save the world. At times the show could be cheesy, but this was excusable–how could it not be? One can hardly become a supervillain without a mental cache of dramatic one-liners prepared for use at a moment’s notice.

What should probably be surprising is not how Heroes failed–I think a lot of us know this–but how successful it was in the first place. In season the first, its ratings were nice, its award recognition curiously high, and it was a serial drama on a broadcast network that people actually watched. It brought down the house at San Diego Comic-Con. We were looking at a successful primetime sci-fi serial. How can that happen? Seriously? Look at Firefly. This just goes to show–”successful primetime sci-fi” is a really weird thing to hear somebody say. How could something so innately nerdy have gotten so far so fast? Serialized broadcast sci-fi is like an amalgam of “things you would never try to pitch as a serious TV show that you think anyone would buy and anyone would watch.” And yet!

At one point, Heroes was on top of the world. I think, deep down inside, everyone was expecting some kind of sophomore slump, but instead what we saw was this rapid degeneration of a minor illness. The sniffle became a cough become a cold became, I don’t know, that really rare and untreatable strain of tuberculosis that guy who like escaped on an airplane and caused this whole fuss a couple of years back had. It got the swine. Something really terrible happened to it and at some point it was like every form of treatment made it worse. Its loved ones couldn’t watch as it slowly died.

While its exposure to its fatal illness probably predated 2×01, its progression from stage I to stage IV was slow and labored. What’s actually kind of hilarious is that the plot of season 2 revolves around this bizarre disease that’s infecting all of these people. I’m just saying, it’s ironic in this particular paragraph. The writer’s strike hit the show pretty hard, for one. For another, somebody up there at Heroes thought that it would be a really good idea to try to replicate the first season but slightly different. I’m not even kidding here. I’m not going to cite this because hey, I recently graduated with a media arts degree and I’m enjoying the fact that I can now say things without backing them up with footnotes, but I read an interview with one of the writers where he mentioned how they thought that since people had responded so well to the first season, they decided they’d try to repeat it in some way with the second. So, while the plot itself changed, 2×01 began with all the characters separated from each other, but with a crisis that would ultimately bring them back together in the end. This was stupid. And that’s what the writer said–our bad. After that it could sometimes be painful to watch as the writers attempted to regain the glory days of the first season with no real idea how they were going to do it. It seems to me almost like watching somebody who can’t swim drown (which of course, I’ve done–who hasn’t?)–the more they struggled the faster they sank.

Because of this desire to separate all of the characters and bring them back together again, but now with the added caveat that a lot of them had each other’s numbers programmed into their cell phones, they had to add new characters. This was where I think things really began to fall down. Discord began to spread. Here suddenly we had all these new and weak additions to what used to be a really strong ensemble, and people hated them. And trust me, someone really, really, violently hated each new character enough to stop watching the show. I personally almost stopped watching the show just because of Kristen Bell’s character, Elle Bishop, who was a royal pain in the ass. I kept shouting, “DIE, DIE, DIE” at the screen when she’d show up. I couldn’t wait. You don’t understand. I really hated her. She was such a Mary Sue. (For those less nerdy than I am–check the definition of a Mary Sue in Urban Dictionary. It’s like a bad fan fiction trope. And if your actual show reads like bad fan fiction, something is rotten in the state of Denmark.) Anyway my point here is, if she had lived an episode longer than she did, I would’ve stopped watching. Seriously.

This flaw–and it applies to so many more weird patched-up characters than just Elle Bishop–deeply affected the quality of the show. Once the head honchos of Heroes realized the monsters they had created, they decided to put them down, but the manner of doing so became steadily more absurd. First they just killed them off. Then they decided they were killing off too many characters, so they had to get rid of them in other ways. Sometimes the character would simply disappear, never to be heard from again, a technique I formerly associated with David E. Kelly procedurals a la Boston Legal. My particular favorite character dismissal goes to Peter Petrelli’s weird Irish girlfriend (realistically, every girl who watched the show wanted Peter to be single). He took her into the post-apocalyptic future, and then came back to the present, but he left his girlfriend in the future. Determined not to leave her to certain death, he fixed the present to remove the post-apocalyptic future, and then, he never tried to go back to her or mentioned her again. Hilarious. Maybe this is all because long-distance relationships never work. Or there was another time when they sent Maya–who wept toxic tears that killed all the people around her whenever she cried, which was often because she was a huge crybaby–to New Jersey. I’m not even making this up. They were like, “Nobody likes Maya. We should write her off. But we’ve killed like eleven people already this episode. What should we do to her? We’ve already done ‘dropped off in barren future wasteland’ with Peter’s girlfriend. How about New Jersey?”

Eventually, to me, a lot of the serious issues with the show that other people considered faults became things I liked about it. I started to read actual comics around this time. Not like a ton, but some. So maybe this was just really well-timed for me, but doing this, I could identify all these comic book tropes within the show and I loved that about it. In this sense, Heroes never stopped being a pretty good televisualized comic book. I guess in comic books, things like, “Well, Robin didn’t really die in this case, he was actually like revived by the Riddler who was called on by Hush to freak out Batman” make sense. It even looks like a comic book! There’s this disgustingly great shot of HRG at some point in the third season that’s like an extreme close-up of the right side of his face, and we can see, behind him in the back seat of his car, the person he’s talking to. There was space for a freaking speech bubble. I’ve actually seen this panel in comic books. It was brilliant.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we’re discovering that everybody’s related to everybody else in the series, except for half of these things are lies told to take advantage of somebody else. It is pretty soap operatic, I think, to take a character who killed his own mother in a moment of weakness, and then tell him that she wasn’t his real mother, and that he has this whole other family. Then when it’s convenient you tell him the truth, as if his psyche weren’t damaged enough as a result. Then you try to make him believe the only way he can become a Good Person is to find a love interest, which he does, but she’s a huge pain in the ass, and since nobody likes to write her, she gets killed as well. Then, after that, he discovers that the person he thought his was his real father really wasn’t his real father. Really this time. And that his real father is a total d-bag. He goes to kill his father, but, realizing that his father would have done that, and feeling strong spite for the man, he leaves his father alive because he doesn’t want to be like his biological father. Then he can’t decide what he wants, because it seems to him that everybody is a jerk. Meanwhile you try to trap somebody else in his body, because if the good/evil/good/evil/good/evil flip-flopping wasn’t enough now you have to shove another morally ambiguous character in there to confuse him further. And people wonder why Sylar is evil. I think it would actually be easier to just be evil at that point.

There are a lot of reasons we will miss Heroes, now that it’s gone. There are a lot of great characters to be mourned. And I encourage you just to remind yourself of why you liked it in the first place, if you liked it, or to at least watch the first season if you never did. Now is the time to reminisce on the good times.

For me, it’s the little things. I loved how Sylar as Gabriel Gray looked like Clark Kent. I loved that every time Hiro did something I felt like completely excited. I love how it made me start referring to people’s children as things like “Baby Matt Parkman.” I’ve actually started talking to babies like this, addressing them as “baby” and telling them important things. I loved that scene in the first season when Hiro refuses to kill Sylar because Sylar is asking for forgiveness. I loved that shot of Sylar standing on top of a skyscraper, with the Empire State Building in the foreground, as he practices detonating…uh, himself, I guess…to punish New Yorkers for being jerks. I even love all the gross injuries that Claire has sustained that they showed onscreen. I relish every one-liner from the lips of Zachary Quinto. I loved how one of the most badass characters on the show was completely without supernatural gifts, and how he singlehandedly changed the way I thought about horn-rimmed glasses. I loved discovering that the entire contents of Peter Petrelli’s fridge were water and mustard. I sometimes even miss (it’s just nostalgia) that creepy feeling I got watching Peter and Claire interact with each other while Milo Ventimiglia and Hayden Panettiere were dating offscreen. I loved that they just forgot to mention Nathan Petrelli’s wife and other two children when it was inconvenient to bring them up. And my god, I loved all of the ridiculously inventive ways they came up with to kill someone and somehow bring them back to life, anyway.

These are just a few of the things that I really loved. I will miss you, Heroes, because, on good days and on bad days, I always did care for you. For just a little while, for the first time in years and years, I began to feel occasionally suspicious that there was an entire world of people with superpowers around me. And also, thank you, for making me remember the greatest rule of superhero mythology: the crappier your power actually seems, the more amazing it actually turns out to be. You can only manifest the powers of the person closest to you? Whatever, you can learn how to use everybody’s powers no matter the distance. You have a superhuman thirst to know how things work? Okay, even I can figure out how you would turn into a supervillain, if you discovered that there were people out there with telekinesis or immortality or telepathy and all you could do was…tell if your watch was off by a quarter of a second an hour or something. That would actually probably drive me insane, legitimately. But regardless, Heroes, I love that you took this series of little truths that I had loved as a kid but forgotten and brought them back to television. I love that you gave me, for those precious few years that you were with us, the thrill of the Saturday morning cartoon back, but for grown-ups.

In the end, when all is said and done, Heroes changed something in me that makes its death beautifully cyclical and curiously ironic. Because of Heroes, I no longer see television deaths as final. Who in the principal cast of Heroes hasn’t died at least once and come back? Writing a eulogy for Heroes seems almost in vain, because, a victim of some kind of demented thematic inheritance, I am solidly convinced that, like Sylar, it will come back, someday, some way, somehow. Even if it is in a different body.

So, to quote from another show that got canceled before I was prepared: thanks, Heroes, for the fun, sexy time.

RIP: Heroes (NBC): 2006 – 2010. Dearest, darling, dead.

For now.

Here is AFI’s list from 2005:
# – Quote – Movie Year
1. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. GONE WITH THE WIND 1939
2. I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse. GODFATHER, THE 1972
3. You don’t understand! I coulda had class. I
coulda been a contender. I could’ve been
somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I
am. ON THE WATERFRONT 1954
4. Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas
anymore. WIZARD OF OZ, THE 1939
5. Here’s looking at you, kid. CASABLANCA 1942
6. Go ahead, make my day. SUDDEN IMPACT 1983
7. All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup. SUNSET BLVD. 1950
8. May the Force be with you. STAR WARS 1977
9. Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night. ALL ABOUT EVE 1950
10. You talking to me? TAXI DRIVER 1976
11. What we’ve got here is failure to
communicate. COOL HAND LUKE 1967
12. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. APOCALYPSE NOW 1979
13. Love means never having to say you’re sorry. LOVE STORY 1970
14. The stuff that dreams are made of. MALTESE FALCON, THE 1941
15. E.T. phone home. E.T. THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL 1982
16. They call me Mister Tibbs! IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT 1967
17. Rosebud. CITIZEN KANE 1941
18. Made it, Ma! Top of the world! WHITE HEAT 1949
19. I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore! NETWORK 1976
20. Louis, I think this is the beginning of a
beautiful friendship. CASABLANCA 1942
21. A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, THE 1991
22. Bond. James Bond. DR. NO 1962
23. There’s no place like home. WIZARD OF OZ, THE 1939
24. I am big! It’s the pictures that got small. SUNSET BLVD. 1950
25. Show me the money! JERRY MAGUIRE 1996
26. Why don’t you come up sometime and see me? SHE DONE HIM WRONG 1933
27. I’m walking here! I’m walking here! MIDNIGHT COWBOY 1969
28. Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.’ CASABLANCA 1942
29. You can’t handle the truth! FEW GOOD MEN, A 1992
30. I want to be alone. GRAND HOTEL 1932
31. After all, tomorrow is another day! GONE WITH THE WIND 1939
32. Round up the usual suspects. CASABLANCA 1942
33. I’ll have what she’s having.
WHEN HARRY MET SALLY1989
34. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?
You just put your lips together and blow. TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT 1944
35. You’re gonna need a bigger boat. JAWS 1975
36. Badges? We ain’t got no badges! We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any
stinking badges! TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, THE 1948
37. I’ll be back. TERMINATOR, THE 1984
38. Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. PRIDE OF THE YANKEES, THE 1942
39. If you build it, he will come. FIELD OF DREAMS 1989
40. Mama always said life was like a box of
chocolates. You never know what you’re
gonna get. FORREST GUMP 1994
41. We rob banks. BONNIE AND CLYDE 1967
42. Plastics. GRADUATE, THE 1967
43. We’ll always have Paris. CASABLANCA 1942
44. I see dead people. SIXTH SENSE, THE 1999
45. Stella! Hey, Stella! STREETCAR NAMED
DESIRE, A 1951
46. Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We
have the stars. NOW, VOYAGER 1942
47. Shane. Shane. Come back! SHANE 1953
48. Well, nobody’s perfect. SOME LIKE IT HOT 1959
49. It’s alive! It’s alive! FRANKENSTEIN 1931
50. Houston, we have a problem. APOLLO 13 1995
51. You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?
DIRTY HARRY 1971
52. You had me at “hello.” JERRY MAGUIRE 1996
53. One morning I shot an elephant in my
pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t
know. ANIMAL CRACKERS 1930
54. There’s no crying in baseball! LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN, A 1992
55. La-dee-da, la-dee-da. ANNIE HALL 1977
56. A boy’s best friend is his mother. PSYCHO 1960
57. Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. WALL STREET 1987
58. Keep your friends close, but your enemies
closer. GODFATHER II, THE 1974
59. As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry
again. GONE WITH THE WIND 1939
60. Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into! SONS OF THE DESERT 1933
61. Say “hello” to my little friend! SCARFACE 1983
62. What a dump. BEYOND THE FOREST 1949
63. Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me.
Aren’t you? GRADUATE, THE 1967
64. Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room! DR. STRANGELOVE 1964
65. Elementary, my dear Watson. ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, THE 1939
66. Get your stinking paws off me, you damned
dirty ape. PLANET OF THE APES 1968
67. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the
world, she walks into mine. CASABLANCA 1942
68. Here’s Johnny! SHINING, THE 1980
69. They’re here! POLTERGEIST 1982
70. Is it safe? MARATHON MAN 1976
71. Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet! JAZZ SINGER, THE 1927
72. No wire hangers, ever! MOMMIE DEAREST 1981
73. Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico? LITTLE CAESAR 1930
74. Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown. CHINATOWN 1974
75. I have always depended on the kindness of
strangers. STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, A 1951
76. Hasta la vista, baby. TERMINATOR 2:
JUDGMENT DAY 1991
77. Soylent Green is people! SOYLENT GREEN 1973
78. Open the pod bay doors, HAL. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY 1968
79. Striker: Surely you can’t be serious.
Rumack: I am serious…and don’t call me
Shirley. AIRPLANE! 1980
80. Yo, Adrian! ROCKY 1976
81. Hello, gorgeous. FUNNY GIRL 1968
82. Toga! Toga! NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE 1978
83. Listen to them. Children of the night. What
music they make. DRACULA 1931
84. Oh, no, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast. KING KONG 1933
85. My precious. LORD OF THE RINGS: TWO
TOWERS, THE 2002
86. Attica! Attica! DOG DAY AFTERNOON 1975
87. Sawyer, you’re going out a youngster, but
you’ve got to come back a star!
42ND STREET 1933
88. Listen to me, mister. You’re my knight in
shining armor. Don’t you forget it. You’re
going to get back on that horse, and I’m going
to be right behind you, holding on tight, and
away we’re gonna go, go, go! ON GOLDEN POND 1981
89. Tell ‘em to go out there with all they got and win just one for the Gipper. KNUTE ROCKNE ALL AMERICAN 1940
90. A martini. Shaken, not stirred. GOLDFINGER 1964
91. Who’s on first. NAUGHTY NINETIES,
THE 1945
92. Cinderella story. Outta nowhere. A former
greenskeeper, now, about to become the
Masters champion. It looks like a mirac…It’s
in the hole! It’s in the hole! It’s in the hole!
CADDYSHACK 1980
93. Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death! AUNTIE MAME 1958
94. I feel the need — the need for speed! TOP GUN 1986
95. Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your
lives extraordinary. DEAD POETS SOCIETY 1989
96. Snap out of it! MOONSTRUCK 1987
97. My mother thanks you. My father thanks you. My sister thanks you. And I thank you.
YANKEE DOODLE DANDY 1942
98. Nobody puts Baby in a corner. DIRTY DANCING 1987
99. I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too! WIZARD OF OZ, THE 1939
100. I’m king of the world! TITANIC 1997

AFI is a trademark of the American Film Institute. Copyright 2005 American Film Institute. All Rights Reserved.

Here is a video link of the same list:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=594Oxq4c0XA

AUGUST 9 -16, 2010

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Meg Askey, Flagstaff Film Festival Director & Program Coordinator

Email: meg@flagstafffilmfestival.org

FLAGSTAFF FILM FESTIVAL 2010 ACCEPTING ENTRIES NOW!

Submit Your Film!

The First Annual Flagstaff Film Festival is calling for entries for all categories including Student submissions, Feature submissions, Short Film submissions, Webisode submissions, and now Screenplay submissions.  To submit your entry online, link to: http://flagstafffilmfestival.org/submit.html

The Flagstaff Film Festival is offering Fee Waivers to any Short films that discuss border issues or immigration topics.  Recently, Arizona has been going through a tough time with new legislation being passed regarding immigrants and border matters.  By focusing on these issues, filmmakers will have the opportunity to showcase their own perspectives and hopefully ignite discussion and reflect on the current situation.

The Flagstaff Film Festival will be hosting a variety of specialty film selections that also allow for Fee Waivers including Road Movies (we are, after all, historic Route 66 territory), Science and Skepticism Films, as well as Border and Immigration Films.

About the Flagstaff Film Festival

The mission of the Flagstaff Film Festival is simple – we want to showcase quality independent films and filmmakers without all of the pretention of big city festivals.  In our first year the Flagstaff Film Festival is growing and developing new partnerships, making new friends, and exhibiting independent films from international filmmakers.  There will be panel discussions, premieres, frolicking good times, and so much to take in, so come along and join us.  Like we say, be there from the beginning and take part in the First Annual Flagstaff Film Festival.

About the Flagstaff

Beautiful and historic Flagstaff Arizona is hosting the first Flagstaff Film Festival, and we could not be happier!  Situated on classic Route 66, Flagstaff is the place to go for history, science, endless nature, and some pretty darn cool indie folks.

About the Venue

A classic town of unprecedented gorgeousness, Flagstaff Arizona has a theater that is just as perfect as the Flagstaff weather in August.  The Orpheum Theater, originally constructed in 1911, boasts plentiful seating, a balcony, a full bar, and even a lounge for filmmakers to mingle with one another.

For more information, questions, and submissions, please contact us.

Meg Askey: Festival Director and Program Coordinator: meg@flagstafffilmfestival.org

Valerie Richarme-Grotto: Marketing and Promotions: valerie@flagstafffilmfestival.org

Recently I had a discussion with a friend, actually a rather heated debate, about who the better actor is: John Cusack or Bruce Willis.  What erupted were names of films and prominent roles for each, ending with a confused third party in the room calling John Cusack a wimp (corrected by me who informed the lady that Cusack has actually been kickboxing for years and is NO wimp).  The dispute plagued me and I continued to ponder the two and their acting chops long after the dispute had ended. Based on their films and their respective roles, which is the better actor?

No one asked John Cusack to play John McClane in Die Hard, nor would they. In 1988 Cusack was still playing awkward high school misfits.  Bruce Willis, however,  triumphed in the role and made John McClane one of the most memorable characters in movie history. On the other hand, it would be hard to imagine brawny Bruce in a character-driven role like Craig Schwartz in Being John Malkovich.

The mid-nineties and early 2000′s were booming times for both men and each one solidified their A-list status.  Willis was busy making  Pulp Fiction (1994), 12 Monkeys (1995), and The Sixth Sense (1999) while Cusack  made Bullets Over Broadway (1994), Con Air (1997), and High Fidelity (2000).  From 2000 on, the two saw success in weird films like Tears of the Sun (2003) and Serendipity (2001), though neither seemed like a proper use of the actors’ skills.  Cusack in a formulaic romantic comedy like Must Love Dogs (2005) is just wasteful, and Willis’ turn in The Whole Nine Yards (2000) was easily forgettable.  Willis’ career has undoubtedly been on a stronger trajectory than Cusack’s with monster hits like Sin City (2005), Lucky Number Slevin (2006), and Tarantino’s Grindhouse flicks (2007), though he does have a tendency to play the same lunk-head roles since Armageddon (1998).  Though Bruce Willis is more relevant in pop culture than Cusack, is he really the better actor?

John Cusack has made some Armageddon-esque missteps in his career (War Inc. was just awful), though if I were casting a film that required an actor who could pull off a complex character, I would certainly turn to Cusack.  Proving his worth over and over again with roles like Lloyd Dobbler in Say Anything… (1989), Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), and Being John Malkovich (1999), Cusack lets me know that I am watching a craft on the screen, that acting takes method and some form of connectedness to the character.  Then he does 2012 (2010) and screws the pooch on my whole pro-Cusack campaign.

After much thought and consideration, I have come to a decision about Cusack vs. Willis: Willis is more effective at what he does than Cusack is, however, Cusack is the better actor overall, though he fails to consistently produce quality work that is worthy of praise.  Bruce Willis will live on forever as John McClane and John Cusack will always be Lane Meyer.  Maybe there is no need for a comparison to be made at all.  Erik, let’s call it a draw, though I refuse to give you Bruce Willis points when you cite The Fifth Element as a great movie.  I will also not accept Hudson Hawk on general principle.