by Chauncey Telese

Well it’s summertime and the livin’s easy. Season 3 of “True Blood” and Season 6 of “Rescue Me” are well underway, The LeBronathon has begun, and it’s time for Fourth of July. A time where we all get together to BBQ, spend time with family, make some margaritas, and celebrate our independence by blowing up a small part of it.

It’s also the second busiest time for movies (behind Memorial Day), and while this used to mean that Will Smith had a new movie coming out, times have changed. Now, I know I promised that I’d have “Grown Ups” last week (and I did), I didn’t want to send it in because I had a feeling that this summer’s 4th of July offerings would be abysmal (and they were), so I felt I’d give you “Grown Ups” and one of the 4th of July movies (it was between “Twilight” and “The Last Airbender” guess what I picked). I’m going to flip a coin and see if you get the good news or the bad news first (flipping coin) and the winner is….The Bad News!

“The Last Airbender”: Contains All the Elements for a Craptacular Movie

I had a bad feeling about this one from the get go. There were so many red flags, the biggest being that it was written, produced, and directed by M. Night Shyamalan who has become the most disappointing filmmaker of the last decade. As you know he hit it big with “The Sixth Sense” (probably one of the best ghost movies ever) and followed that up with the underrated “Unbreakable”.

Then he did “Signs” which yeah, made a ton of money, but was in the pantheon of worst alien movies ever. He followed that up with the trifecta of awfulness “The Village”, “Lady in the Water”, and “The Happening”. Night has lost whatever magic he had and I think he knows it so he’s resigned himself to sell out by adapting “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and, while I’m not familiar with the show, I can tell by the product on screen that this movie basically pistol-whips the show’s fan base.

Everything Night does with this film is as poorly executed as BP’s efforts in stopping the leak. The characters are all essentially underdeveloped, the dialogue sounds like he typed it up the night before his deadline was up and rushed it. The visual effects looked awful, the fight scenes and action sequences were lazy, and the worst part is that all of these things could be forgiven if the movie were fun in any way shape or form. This is a major pity because this movie could’ve been absolutely amazing.

The story goes like this, there are four elemental tribes (fire, water, earth, and air), and in these tribes certain members can bend their respective elements. Every 1000 years the avatar (not to be confused with that movie with the blue people that came out last year), is reincarnated to one of the tribes and he or she can control all of the elements thus keeping balance in the world.

The current reincarnation of the avatar is a boy named Aang from the air tribe who disappears and the fire tribe goes to take over the world. Two kids from the water tribe stumble upon Aang who was frozen and thus unaware that he is the last member of the air tribe and he also doesn’t know how to control all of the elements yet. Okay, there’s a lot to digest and the first thing Night does to screw this movie up is not properly explaining the rules of the universe. The second thing is that he doesn’t make us care about any characters so we don’t feel for Aang or any of the other kids in the film. By the time the story moves along you really don’t care about anything going on which is a bummer considering it is obvious that this is supposed to be a trilogy.

Nickelodeon must have thought that they were going outside of the box by signing Night and in a sense they were right. The problem is that they thought they were getting “Sixth Sense” Night but instead they got “The Happening” Night. This is basically the same thing as when the Cavaliers traded for Shaq last year. They assumed that they’d get L.A./Miami Shaq but instead they got Phoenix Shaq who was older, slower, lacked any type of explosion, and was a divisive force in the locker room.

What’s funny is that last year at ComicCon this guy was trying to boycott the movie because the movie’s casting was racist because all of the good guys are white and the bad guys are South East Asian. While he kind of has a point, this to me was the only interesting thing about “The Last Airbender” and that’s sad. Hopefully if Nickelodeon does decide to complete the trilogy they should fire Night and find someone that could salvage this. Oh well, onto the good news.

“Grown Ups”: Adam Sandler’s SNL Reunion is the Summer’s Best Comedy Before I start this I want to make this clear. I am a die-hard Adam Sandler fan. I own all of his movies, his best of SNL disc, and my favorite movie of all time is “Big Daddy”. While yeah, his movies aren’t the most cleverly written and at times can be a little dumb but they make me laugh to no end.

I also think he’s underrated as a dramatic actor as “Punch Drunk Love”, “Spanglish”, and “Funny People” showcase how talented he is. Okay, now that we got that out of the way let’s talk about “Grown Ups”. While it does have a mountain of faults like a lack of character development, moments that try to hard to evoke emotion, and doesn’t have a real plot it is one thing “The Last Airbender” wasn’t. It was fun! You’d be surprised how important that aspect of a movie can be. This movie basically stemmed from Sandler’s SNL years because he shared an office with Chris Rock (my favorite working stand-up comic right now), David Spade, Chris Farley (my favorite SNL star of all time and a hero of mine as a kid), and Rob Schneider (great as a bench player, terrible on his own).

The story of “Grown Ups” goes like this. Lenny (Sandler), Higgins (Spade), Kurt (Rock), Rob (Schneider), and Eric (Kevin James, essentially filling in for Farley), were members of the only championship basketball team at their school. They remained friends but drifted apart as life went on. Lenny became a hot shot agent with a fashion designer (Salma Hayek) for a wife and spoiled kids, Higgins became a womanizer, Rob a new age healer with an attraction towards much older women, Kurt became a house husband, and Eric a suburbanite with overly sensitive kids.

They all go back to their hometown for their coach’s funeral. They reconnect at a lake house with their families and work out their problems, and that’s the story. While that doesn’t sound entertaining, the way that these guys bounce off each other is worth the price of admission by itself. The movie also has other SNL vets such as Maya Rudolph, Tim Meadows, Colin Quinn, and Norm MacDonald, as well as Sandler regulars Steve Buschemi and Blake Clark.

I wanted to submit the review for this on Friday because I saw it on Thursday but I couldn’t send it in because something was missing from what I was writing and that turned out to be my own friends. The other reason this movie works for me is that because my friends and I are in our twenties, I see my group in the movie. We are all starting to embark on our separate lives and while we haven’t drifted apart we could. That is something most people will subconsciously see because one of the hardest parts of growing up is not having your best friends around everyday because of careers, family, etc. To me this movie is a reminder that while your friends may not always be there 24/7 that the connection is there and true friends can never lose touch with each other.

If either of these movies don’t sound like viable options then there is that goddawful “Twilight: Eclipse” movie. I thought about ranting about it but I won’t, instead I will share a “Twilight” anecdote. When I went to see “Grown Ups” for the second time with my friends Justin and Jimmy and all the Twihards were wrapped around the block for the midnight and two a.m. showings. Now, I was wearing my “I Killed Edward” shirt that my friend Bryan got me for Christmas. Bryan by the way won’t admit it but he is essentially dragging his girlfriend to see “Eclipse”. Anyway, I’m walking around the theater all the girls are glaring at me like they want me dead and all of the guys are giving me fist bumps and head nods. This one girl yells at me “I kissed Edward” and I shouted back to her that I hoped she contracted a certain disease. Justin kept saying that he killed that werewolf guy (I tried to tell him to yell Jacob but he couldn’t remember it) and Jimmy just sat back and laughed, all in all good night. By the way the next night Jimmy and I saw “The Last Airbender” at midnight and unlike the “Twilight” people they dressed up in costume. Okay enough about “Twilight” all I’ll say is that I hope Wes and Andrew survive having to sit through it this week.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned as next week I have another double feature for you with “Despicable Me” and “Predators”. As always you can catch these and other fine films at your local Edwards.