Which movies do you want to see this summer?

I'm going to speak plainly in a language everyone can understand. M. Night Shyamalan's THE LAST AIRBENDER is a hate crime against film lovers. No one should ever have to endure what I was unexpectedly put through yesterday afternoon watching this murky 3-D sh#tstorm of a movie that appears to have been shot through unflushed toilet bowl water, which, upon reflection, seems 100 percent appropriate.

If you were to ask me at the beginning of the week which film I would watch twice if forced to at gunpoint, the notion of choosing a TWILIGHT film over an M. Night Shyamalan translation of a beloved animation series would have been the laughable one at the bottom of the list. I fully went into this week believing that even if M. Night failed, he wouldn’t have failed so miserably as to make ECLIPSE look like the better choice. But that’s exactly what he did. This is a catastrophic failure – a film that has sparked furious debate between critics as to whether this is the worst movie of the year or only the worst of the summer.
Worthless, mind numbing and a complete mess from minute one, this is a film best avoided based upon a show that you owe it to yourself as a geek to sit down and enjoy.

Burdened by an never-ending onslaught of expository dialogue awkwardly delivered by actors giving career-worst performances across the board, THE LAST AIRBENDER is so outrageously bad it's a wonder it ever got before cameras. Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, veteran producers who know better, should've shut down production the minute Shyamalan turned in his first draft and found a writer with a vision for the material. Or just a writer with a vision, period.

Say what you will, believe what you want, but for the first time in the history of the TWILIGHT SAGA franchise, Summit Entertainment has churned out a halfway decent, even watchable, episode of the - now slated to be - a five part series. That’s not to say that it is good, and it certainly doesn’t redeem the series for the interminable awfulness of the previous two films...This film stands as the first of three to actually have a discernable plot that exceeds the bounds of Meyer simply pining for her youthful college days when boys fought over her.

But again, my mind kept returning to those two ladies in line who made me understand a bit of why they loved the TWILIGHT material. I was envious of their passion and I remembered a time in my younger days where it didn't take much to get me that revved up about a film. So imagine my surprise when I finally saw TWILIGHT months later and felt like I'd just witnessed the birth on one of Satan's largest, most evil toilet babies.
That being said, the films in the TWILIGHT SAGA continue to improve for the pure and simple reason that there is less time devoted to the primary and secondary romances. If for no other reason, ECLIPSE is a better movie than the previous two because of the action.