I’m of South Asian descent, and in fact Tamil like Shyamalan (at least partially in his case). I don’t think this criticism holds water. “M Night” is not his real name and has no etymology in South Asian languages. It’s an Anglicized version of his actual name, Manoj Nelliyattu. I think mild ribbing of his onscreen name is absolutely fair game. Especially as he is no ally of South Asian workers in Hollywood, or other PoC workers in general. His films overwhelmingly star white protagonists and he was responsible for the reprehensibly white washed Avatar: The Last Airbender. I think the Waypoint crew was perfectly in bounds with their jokes in this case.
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My definitive podcast document on M. Night Shyamalan is the first season of Blank Check with Griffin and David, because they REALLY dig deep into Shyamalan and never dismiss him as a filmmaker. He has made a couple most irredeemable movies, but when he’s good, he’s good!
So far, Be Good and Rewatch It is most interesting when it discusses narrative structure and theme. With all respect, the Waypoint team ain’t seasoned film critics, and they tend to get broad and vague as they discuss direction. I don’t think that makes them any less valid as film critics, just different. But Shyamalan…his issues are in his writing and his sleaze, not his direction. Even in The Happening, there are visual choices I love in terms of camera movement, production design, and staging the opening violent suicides.
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Ciabatta tossed me into the twilight zone. Austin and Natalie explaining the experience that I had currently been thrust into made the feeling sink in deeper.
Love me a good sandwich. Hot dang.
As always love the WP folks explaining sports as the way the Patriots are discussed really helped me UNDERSTAND. Like I knew…but I couldn’t explain it. Thanks! Basketball is a much funner sport to watch than football but the way the league is structured I don’t know if that the payoffs come from the on court actions. Watching the Warriors do their business is rad. Watching Lebron take control of a game is rad. The arc of any team’s season? I don’t know, I personally have a hard time getting invested. But the off court stuff between trades, free agency, ect. is WILD and the stuff that changes teams complexions and narratives in an instant.
Knicks stink.
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it’s only a bad look when it’s presented next to equally hack lines like how they don’t deserve credit for directing things you think are “great” while at the same time deserving of ridicule for centering PoC storytellers in a story about PoC storytellers. after hearing it all loudly repeated over and over for twenty years my bullshit detector starts to go off because odds are when i hear one line the rest are sure to soon follow (as was the case here)
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It maybe says something about me as a person that when they were talking about Bill Belichick being able to adjust strategy based on what players he has available and that other coaches aren’t as good at that, that I had the thought “the NFL should hire some gamers, I bet people who are way in to strategy games could be good at that”
I’m enjoying the longer podcast episodes recently, although it lead to a problem today where I wanted to listen to the podcast but also wanted to play Apex Legends and I definitely can’t do both of those at once, but I think that’s ultimately a good problem to have.
Ok, I’m not sure what exactly you are trying to say here. I never heard the crew deny Shyamalan credit for anything. Like most directors, the crew liked some of his movies and hated others. Not sure how that equals not giving credit. And I guess your statement about PoC storytellers is referring to Lady in the Water? If that’s the case, I can say that that movie is a piece of narcissistic garbage regardless of the director’s ethnicity.
And not for nothing, three of the people on the pod have nonwhite heritages (Austin, Natalie, and Rob), so maybe consider that their criticisms were fair minded (if exaggerated for comedy’s sake) rather than prejudiced.
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does After Earth (a PoC centered movie that broke even) get made at the budget it did without the success of Last Airbender? is After Earth as good as it is without the experience of managing a movie of that type beforehand?
there are so many interesting critical avenues to go down when discussing Shyamalan’s career and how it intersects with race and culture, but by all mean just follow the crowd and ridicule any of the movies that attempt to narratively center PoC while laying full blame to a single individual for the ones that don’t
After Earth gets made regardless because it was a Will Smith vanity project to make his son a movie star. And as a massive fan of the original Nickelodeon show, I’m personally offended that you’re trying to pawn off Shyamalan‘s garbage film as anything approaching “success”.
Shyamalan is at best a hit-or-miss director. But using his ethnicity as a shield to deflect the many many many legitimate criticisms of his work feels disingenuous. In fact, as a brown person, it feels patronizing.
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i just mean success in the literal sense (and not a particularly great one based on available information). not trying to pawn it off as anything or do any of the other things you are claiming
We’re going off the rails here but I’m feeling punchy today.
Ok, let’s talk literal success. The movie was a “success” such that it barely broke even when taking in worldwide gross compared to making and marketing the movie ($300 MM all in cost). It sank a franchise that was so well loved and they never made the sequels that were already written. It holds a 5% on Rotten Tomatoes, and was almost universally considered the worst picture of 2010.
Avatar should have been its generation’s Star Wars, that is how good that show is, and Shyamalan turned it into a joke. He couldn’t even get the actors to pronounce the characters’ names properly for godssakes!
So yeah, not even a “literal” success.
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I too spent most of the podcast in wonder at the mystery of “sobata bread”
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As someone who recently got a stand mixer but has failed several attempts at bread making (I haven’t even bothered with cake decorating that stuff looks hard) I’d be all the way down for rob baking content. Or, at the very least maybe he could point out some good introductory stuff that he used to learn. I can do my family’s various recipes for non-frosted varieties of cake alright but anything else is basically wizardry to me.
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I’m wondering if I should start a spinoff thread where we discuss the future hit cooking show Snackny with the Zacny
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Is it possible to put in chapters or time codes in the show notes so those of us that dislike sportsball talk can skip it easily?
Speaking of show notes, I noticed this typo in them (there instead of their):
"So, listen, we recorded this while Respawn Entertainment–creators of Titanfall and Titanfall 2–were teasing there soon to be released battle royale Apex Legends. "
I don’t see there mistake their.
Catching up with the end of this episode - I believe that Kingdom Hearts 3 MUST have been content locked sometime in late 2013 or early 2014.
-Zootopia was a movie in freefall - it had gone through several revisions and changes in direction, and it was projected to be a disaster. Its massive financial and critical success probably owe most to the quality of the casting.
-Big Hero 6 was projected to be the successful Disney movie of the moment. Obviously, it was also a big hit, but probably isn’t as well remembered as Wreck-It Ralph.
-Inside Out was thought of as the smaller movie compared to the similarly disastrous The Good Dinosaur - Monsters University just had come out to positive reception.
-Moana was maybe a twinkle on the horizon. Same to Coco and the tombstone that is Dead Men Tell No Tales.
-The future of Disney, these damn live action remakes, DEFINITELY hasn’t begun yet, because the degree to which original Disney KH worlds are left out of KH3 is pretty wild. Maleficent comes out in 2014, Branagh’s Cinderella in 2015, and Favreau’s Jungle Book in 2016. The only one that really exists in that modern sense is Burton’s Alice.
Hoping we see all of these in Kingdom Hearts 4 - even The Good Dinosaur, honestly! Many of these movies are deeply flawed in terms of politic, plotting, and purpose, but they’re all visually distinctive and would be fun to explore in Kingdom Hearts. Obviously, I don’t want the expanded versions of, for example, Birth by Sleep’s Cinderella world to take after Branagh’s movie, but if those remakes mean I get to explore the original game’s Disney worlds, I ain’t gonna complain!
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Patrick’s track is really a few noticible seconds ahead of everyone else’s audio tracks. Starts like 1:30-1:40? Leads to overlapping conversations.
I was about to type “Sora fursona” but didn’t he turn into a Lion King lion at some point?
Zootopia is for sure a political mess, like I don’t think it’s a bad faith attempt but the underlying message ends up being twisted and fumbled to the point where its uncomfortable.
I just really enjoy its characters, acting, and visual design. They say they’re working on sequels, maybe they can turn it into something I can actually champion.
I’m very much with you - it’s not whatsoever surprising that Zootopia is primarily conceived by white middle-aged men. They get a lot wrong and it sucks the air out of a film that might have more breath if the creative voices were as diverse as the world they’re attempting to address. But I think it’s a blast - seeing it in a theater full of kids who danced at the ending Gazelle song confirmed for me that it’s a riot. And I think it gets things wrong in the way modern Spike Lee films get things wrong more than the way Split and Glass seem to get things wrong - it’s a mixed bag more than outright offensive, but the wrong decisions can be really glaring and upsetting. (I’m more talking about Chi-Raq than BlaKKKlansman because BlaKKKlansman ends on such a sour note.)
Hopefully a Disney that made a successful film in Moana can make a sequel that is more inclusive - probably by having a more inclusive creative team.
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Yup I think you nailed it. Not necessarily holding my breath for it but I’d love for them to greatly diversify their team and either tackle it with a much more deft hand (paw?) or avoid the subject matter in favour of something they have a better grasp on.
Anyway this was initially in reference to KH worlds, sorry for hijacking it to talk about Zootopia ^^"
I don’t play the games but it’d be great if the city featured in the film could be a world in KH, for the thematic issues of the film it has lovely world design and art.
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