Lady In The Water @ MindSay

M. Night Shyamalan....where do I begin....

Sixth Sense: Brilliant...new, fresh and also unpredictable.
Unbreakable: Interesting not as good as Sixth Sense but certainly still a good film
Signs: Awful smelly pile of tripe.   One of this films so bad you need your money back.
The Village: Didn't watch it because Signs was just that bad.

And now.....

LADY IN THE WATER (Spoilers ahead....not that it matters)

Dear god in heaven was this ever a stinker.  I mean I know "Night" has been taking bigger and bigger roles in his films.....but saviour of America AND martyr?  A film critic who is arrogant, presumptuous and dead (If that's not a message then I don't know what is)?

Let's leave out the fact that there actually is no plot to speak of except for "A muse appears and we must protect her when an eagle comes to get her" and just have those stupid names to pick on first....I mean "narf", "scrunt", "tartutic"... let's leave aside the stupidity of them and move onto the fact that this is ALLEGEDLY a Korean fairytale.....those names sound Korean to you, no?

The fact that there's even CG here at all is a waste, you could have done much more in this film with astroturf on string and some camerawork....it's a waste because so many better films don't get the kind of CG this fiasco did.

Let's move onto the acting, oh holy hell it was bad.  Story was a one trick pony, and that was to just look meek.  The stammer on Heep was annoying at best and descended from there into a performance that smacked of a man who didn't care and just wanted a paycheck....not that I could blame anyone on the set of this film for doing that.  The Korean girl at audition must have been going up against some stiff competition, no really, because if her acting is that bad then what the hell were the rest of the people auditioning doing.

Do yourself a favour, don't go and see this movie, it's the only way we can convince studios to stop paying M. Night Shyamalan the money to make these little adventures up his arse.  Go and see Pirates of the Carribean, or Superman, heck....stay at home, get in the Popcorn and watch the Godfather again.  Please stop making these films, Night, you're killing the credibility of Sixth Sense and Unbreakable with each one.  I mean....when Stargate SG-1 is taking 5 minutes out to slag off your movies for no other reason than the whole cast hates them don't you think something is a LITTLE wrong?

ok, so i just finished my physics summer class yesterday. i think i did pretty well, but you never really know until you get the grades.

been workin' a lot more lately, which is nice. instead of 6 hours a week, i now work at least 10. yay, part time :P the assistant director told me i might even be working box office sometime soon! woo!

other than those 2 things, my summer has been pretty mellow. all the excitement took place at the beginning. i worked on my birthday, but got to go out for a good dinner with the fam the day after and to anna's tiki/pool party b-day that night. there was alcohol and there were drunk people, but i tell ya, those two things are getting real old, real fast. but, at least i tried it. you can't say i didn't try it. here's my take on alcohol (you don't have to read if you don't agree, we're all entitled to our own preferences. just be glad i'm making the choice, and not my parents or my friends or my teachers or whoever): first, it tastes bad. beer is fuckin' nasty. even "good," micro-brewed or whatever the hell beer made in boulder. bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. gross. all other alcohol drinks taste bad too. if i can taste the alcohol, it ain't good. second, i have used ethanol in every single lab i have worked in to kill every living cell on my bench. it ain't good. third, alcohol binds a certain amino acid in your brain which is what makes you sick. i learned this handy fact in my organic chemistry class. (i'll have to look this up again to be more specific.) fourth, when i'm drunk, i can't drive. i like driving. therefore, i don't like drinking. fifth, when i drink, i be stupid. i don't like feeling stupid. i don't know why people like feeling stupid (this is for the i-drink-to-get-sick people). for some odd reason for some people stupid=good. i like feeling smart. i like knowing what i'm saying or doing. i like being in control of myself. i don't like blaming the stupid things i do or say on something else, that i really gave to myself anyway, so it's actually my fault.

these are just my thoughts, a lot of you won't agree- i'm not saying you have to. but just so you know, i'm probably not going to be drinking with you in the future. i'm already drunk off life :)

ok, no more depressing stuff.

i'm planning something that will hopefully be awesomely cool, and some of you will be in on it. some of you won't. just cuz. you should probably already know if you're in :P

here's a movie theatre story for you all. so when i'm ticket-tearer person, people often come up the stairs with their hands full of concession stand stuff and usually i have to take the tickets out of the palm of their hand while they're holding a drink or on the underside of their nacho tray or whatever, but today, today was different. so this lady and her guy were coming up the stairs and she was holding a bag of popcorn in one hand and she told me her hands were all buttery and the tickets were right there in her pants pocket so could i... yeah. we all got a good laugh outta that one.

you know, suddenly, when you're wearing a name tag, people have this compulsion to stick your name into the small talk. but only when you're working or something. when you're at a convention or another event, not so much. weird.

ok, so the love question didn't have a whole lot of response. i'll try again. yesterday i watched lady in the water and i got to thinking about world peace, no more violence, and all that stuff. actually, i've been thinking about world peace for a while now, especially since i started practicing the nichiren buddhist tradition. so what do you guys think? world peace. plausible? impossible? completely ridiculous? a good idea? utterly unnecessary? absolutely essential? entirely too optimistic?

Why are people making excuses for Lady in the Water?

Deservingly, it did poorly at the box office this weekend.  And all over the radio today, I have heard people making excuses for why.

"Nobody liked it because it doesn't have a twist ending."

Since when was a twist ending necessary for a movie to be likeable? 

"But people expect a Shyamalan movie to have a twist ending, and when it doesn't, they are mad and don't like the movie."

When did we start thinking so negatively of the movie going public?  People are perfectly capable of liking a Shyamalan movie even if it doesn't have a twist ending.  Case in point: Signs does not end with a surprise, but it is Night's most successful movie behind The Sixth Sense.  And when exactly was he pegged as the guy who's movies must end in surprises?  He has made six movies that opened in theaters, and only half of them have had twists (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and The Village).  His other three - Wide Awake, Signs, and now Lady in the Water - follow the typical Hollywood formula.  Hitchcock made many movies with twist endings, but people didn't expect every one of his movies to end with a surprise, and they didn't get pissed off when a movie didn't end that way.  And people aren't pissed at Lady in the Water because it didn't end that way, either.

"Yeah, but the previews billed it as something different from what it is, so when audiences saw the real movie, they didn't like it."

Yes, that's entirely true.  The previews billed it as a good movie, and it wasn't.  People aren't so brain dead that they can't enjoy a good movie even if they were expecting something different.  Just take a look at The Break Up earning 9 figures even though it wasn't the bubbly romantic comedy the previews made it out to be.  If a movie is good, people will still like it.  The reason people aren't liking Lady in the Water is because it isn't a good movie.

The problem is that characters do things that don't make sense, and things happen that really shouldn't.  The worst excuse for this I've heard is, "Well, it's supposed to be a fairytale, and fairytales don't make sense."

It's all well and good for there not to be deep character development in Goldielocks and the Three Bears, but when a director is given $60 million to make a summer blockbuster, it better make sense.  It better have resonance.

The Disney executives called a meeting with Night long before the movie went into production.  They told him that the mythology is off, the characters are obnoxious, the story shouldn't be explained via an Asian women translating from an Asian language, the main character shouldn't have a stutter, and Night shouldn't play the second biggest male role.

He totally ignored them and took his movie to another studio to make it exactly the way he wanted it.

And the result?  The mythology is off, the characters are obnoxious, the story shouldn't have been explained via an Asian women translating from an Asian language, the main character shouldn't have had a stutter, and Night shouldn't have played the second biggest male role.

I love M. Night Shyamalan.  I have spent the day with him.  I have pictures with him.  I have signed copies of all of his movies.  I love him.  I think he's a great guy.  I love his films, too.  From Wide Away to The Village, I have loved them all.  But Lady in the Water is a bad movie.  It didn't do well at the box office because it is a bad movie. 

Stop making excuses. 

This is one of the best movies I've ever seen. It did what all my favorite movies do--opened up that child-like sense of wonder I still carry around with me. It felt very much more Niel Gaiman than M. Night Shayamalan, but I was fine with that. The characters are interesting and strange--like real people, and the story is--well, since it did in fact start as a bedtime story he was telling his kids, it's still a bedtime story. I don't think I've enjoyed a film this much since I saw What Dreams May Come. It's just one of those films that makes me sit back and stare and smile a little and whisper "Wow."