Well, you can file this one under “Miss Saigon.” Apparently Hollywood’s uber-hack M. Night Shyamalan, who has been tapped to shovel the silver screen port of Nickelodeon’s “The Last Airbender” into a theatre near you two summers from now, has managed to cast exactly zero Asian actors in his film. According to Entertainment Weekly, Shyamalan did his major casting in Texas, that bastion of Asian society. If this were a film about, perhaps, a border guard who sees ghosts in his swimming pool, this might not be a problem. Since, however, the film is an adaptation of a cartoon that deals heavily with Asian culture, fans seem to be a bit rankled.
Though the whole list has yet to be announced, the hero will be played by Noah Ringer, a young gent skilled in karate discovered at the Texas casting session. Jackson Rathbone of “Twilight” fame will play the trusty sidekick, while the title character’s sister will be depicted by Nicola Pelz, most famously seen in “Deck the Halls.” The cherry on top of this baffling sundae, however, is the perpetually prepubescent singer Jesse McCartney who will grace the screen as the film’s villain. Apparently the hero of this film is anyone with ears who is not a girl in her early teen years…
Now, while you would be hard pressed to cram us into stadium steating for anything this celluloid garbageman cranks out, this one seems to have particularly rankled fans of the series. Courtesy of “Entertainment Weekly“:
“[The report]…sent fans into a tizzy. Their beef: Asian and Inuit culture permeate the series, yet none of the film’s four leads (McCartney, Twightlight’s Jackson Rathbone, Nicola Peltz and newcomer Noah Ringer) are of Asian descent. The EW’s Dec 9 original reported generated nearly 850 predominantly negative comments, and a letter-writing campaign directed at producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall (‘Ben Button’) has begun. Paramount declined comment, other than to say casting isn’t complete.”
Thank the heavens that people are finally writing letters to the studio protesting M. Night. Now maybe they’ll finally pack him in that rocket and send him to torture the residents of Jupiter with his preditable “twist” endings and endless self-congratulation. Though it might be hard to find actors on that planet who aren’t actually from Jupiter…
