Topic: M. Night Shyamalan's last movie?

[Pugnate]

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100630/REVIEWS/100639999

Similar reviews from everywhere. 8% score overall on rottentomatoes.

It may be a sad end for Shyamalan, unless this movie does really well at the box office.

[Quemaqua]

I don't dislike him as much as everyone else does.  He isn't perfect, but he's made some good movies... mostly just movies that were seriously misrepresented about their content prior to release.  Still, this didn't seem like a very good idea from the get-go.  *shrug*  Whatever, man.  Best of luck to him.

[Pugnate]

Actually Signs, Sixth Sense, and Unbreakable are three of my favorite movies.

That's why this makes me sadder.

But you are right, this was probably not a good idea from the start, which made it harder for him to film his first action film.

Casting all the Asian characters with white actors was just weird.

[Cobra951]

Hmm.  That's a shame.  I was hoping this would turn out well. 

[Xessive]

Oh man, it is such a shame. I loved the Avatar animated series and was really looking forward to the film. Damn.

[angrykeebler]

so I saw this for free at Paramount.


I'm not really get into it but it was pretty much an abortion of a film.

[Pugnate]

Do tell.

[K-man]

Never been a huge fan of his.  I mean Unbreakable and Sixth Sense had basically the same gimmick. 

I don't wish any ill will toward him though. I mean it cannot be easy to go from such an acclaimed filmmaker to whatever it is he's considered now.

[Pugnate]

I agree that the 'gimmicks' are part of what made his movies so appealing, but his first three or four films had a lot of heart. Signs in particular...

[K-man]

Yeah I've only seen those two movies.  I'm assuming those aren't good ones to make a complete judgment off of.

[Pugnate]

Well, those are two of his best, so I don't know what to say. I thought Signs was his best movie overall, even if Unbreakable was my favorite. I know people argue about the logic of its plot, but I find those arguments silly because the movie was told from the perspective of a small town family, and not from a larger point of view.

I can't say much more without getting into spoilers, but I think you should rent Signs first.

As for Last Airbender, the movie has apparently already grossed nearly 60 million, having been made on a budget of 150.

Of course, that could still be because of the strength of the franchise, and in spite of the quality of the film. I hope it at least hits 200 mil. for his sake. I find that when he is on song, he makes great pictures.

[Quemaqua]

I think his primary problem is that all his movies were represented as being something very different from what they actually turned out to be.  A lot of them it was like "Oooh, scary movie!" and none of his movies were anything even resembling scary.  I didn't like Unbreakable all that much, but I thought The Sixth Sense was a good flick, Signs was an interesting movie for what it was, and Lady in the Water which was almost universally hated I thought was really quite entertaining and had a nice underlying message beneath its surface of totally ridiculous characters and fairytale qualities.

[Pugnate]

We've discussed Lady in the Water before, and I realize it is a fairytale, a fantasy, and that all fantasies are ridiculous to some extent, but as they say, the proof is in the pudding.

There was a whole lot of talk with little to show in Lady in the Water.

For example, a great fantasy movie is The Wizard of Oz. How good would it have felt, had the entire movie just been a narration from a single character, while they nursed some injury or whatever it was that happened to the lady from the lady in the water?

I love books, but when I watch a movie, I want to see substance, at least when it comes to a fantasy. My imagination works when I am reading Alice in Wonderland, but when I see the movie, I expect to see the filmmaker's mind at work.

Another example is The Usual Suspects. Verbal's entire story was acted out for our benefit. It would have been very dull had he just talked and then left.

Honestly, a lot of Lady just felt like the actors were in the middle of improv. class, reading off a script one of them had written the night before.

I am not knocking on the story or script of Lady, but at that level of lazy filmmaking, it would have been better off as a book. I am not sure how that story was better served as a movie.

I am not sure if he didn't have the budget, but it was like cramming a fairytale into the narrow confines of Shyamalan's telescope.

Shyamalan exercises a lot of control in his movies. Movies like Signs and The Sixth Sense were told from very limited points of views. In Signs, the alien invasion was told from the point of view of a small town farm owning family.

That sorta thing works wonderfully well for his work in horror and suspense films. But it makes little sense in a fairy tale film.

[Quemaqua]

Actually, Signs had nothing to do with aliens whatsoever.  It was a story about the personal demons and interpersonal relationships within a small family.  The aliens were merely a contrivance in which to fit the story with a twist rather than without one, like most of his movies.  And again, none of these movies could be classified as horror.  Suspense... barely.  Sometimes.

[Pugnate]

Yea horror wasn't the right choice of words. He described his The Sixth Sense movie as a psychological thriller, which I guess is apt, though it was so much more than that.

As for Signs, while it was definitely a story about the personal demons and interpersonal relationships within a small family, I wouldn't say aliens had nothing to do with it whatsoever. Actually, the threat of the invasion featured prominently. I wouldn't simply describe it as a movie about an alien invasion though, but I don't think think there was anything incorrect about my sentence "In Signs, the alien invasion was told from the point of view of a small town farm owning family.", in context of my critique of Shayamalalalan's (that's a made up name, so I can make fun of it) directing of Lady.

I saw some bits of Signs on TV a few weeks ago, and I really did like that birthday home video thing. It felt realistic and was hair raising.

But yea, the movie isn't simply about the alien invasion, which is why I don't get the complaints that:

(click to show/hide)

...It was illogical for aliens vulnerable to water to invade a planet covered in it. It wasn't the sort of movie to address the science of that issue. I am sure they could have presented any excuse like the aliens were desperate, suicidal etc. I just never felt the need to know because it wasn't that sort of movie.

[MysterD]

While I loved Unbreakable and Sixth Sense, I think that was MNS (M. Night Shyamalan) at his best.
While I did like Signs and thought it was good, it was NOT as nearly as great as his previous two, if you ask me.
The Village was a film I considered one of his worst (first half) and one of his best (second half, after the knifing incident).
Lady In The Water just had horrible pacing more so than anything else.
I have not seen The Happening - can't speak on it.

I did NOT expect much from The Last Airbender (movie), but damn - this response for this one is even FAR WORSE than I had expected....

Ugh...what the hell is happening w/ MNS? 

[Quemaqua]

Well, I don't feel Signs had anything to do with the aliens whatsoever.  It would have been almost exactly the same movie had they removed that plot device and added another one.  Most of his movies are sort of like that.  Smoke and mirrors... he tries to make you think it's about something when it really has nothing to do with the movie on the whole in any way at all.  The Sixth Sense was like that in a lot of ways.  The main crux of the movie didn't really have anything to do with a kid who could see dead people.  It was a plot device, sure, and thus part of the film, but ultimately it didn't have much to do with what the movie was trying to do and say.  Some movies have a twist that comes at some point and skews your vision of the plot or whatever, but for him, his twist always seems to be that the movie doesn't really even care that much about what it builds at the outset.  At the end, the story becomes something entirely different.

[Pugnate]

I see what you are saying, and I do agree with you that the heart of the stories had little to do with the supernatural elements, which could have been interchangeable, really. Calling Sixth Sense, a movie about ghosts, and Signs, a movie about aliens would be selling them short, but in the end those elements were in those movies, and while there were only three or four of such scenes in the Sixth Sense, Signs dealt with it from a small town point of view regularly.

At the risk of pulling a D and putting a game into the middle of a normal conversation, I just want to mention the game F.E.A.R. I always thought it was inaccurate to describe it is a horror game, or even a supernatural shooter, like many people did. While it had a lot of supernatural bits in the story and on top, the actual game was about combating super soldiers, who behaved very humanly.

Anyway I see what you are saying, and our only disagreement is whether the fact that the supernatural elements in M Night's movies were interchangeable, affects how we should define them. Let's leave it at that, because I don't think we could convince the other, and it isn't a huge point of contention anyway.

Just to further chat on his formula, his best movies have always had plenty of heart when it came to the crux of the movie, as you put it. While the side plot devices have been good enough to thrill and intrigue a bit.

The Village I felt was sorta where it started to go downhill a bit and I don't think it was just us getting tired of his work.

D, I saw The Happening. After hearing the terrible reviews, I expected the worst, and strangely, started thinking that my low expectations would let me enjoy the film more. That wasn't to be, and I thought the movie was pretty bland overall.

[Cobra951]

You can have a movie that has nothing whatsoever to so with the New York transit system.  But if someone in the movie gets on a fucking subway, and the engine has a face and chugs along singing "I think I can I think I can", don't you think the entire movie will be regarded in a different way?

[gpw11]

You can have a movie that has nothing whatsoever to so with the New York transit system.  But if someone in the movie gets on a fucking subway, and the engine has a face and chugs along singing "I think I can I think I can", don't you think the entire movie will be regarded in a different way?

Ahahahaha.  Props.