Does anyone care?
Yay, 100th post!
I’d say a director that depends on a gimmicky thing like a surprise ending in basically every film is bound to end up feeling stale at some point. If he’d focused his efforts on creating truly original stories, and making full deep characters then his films would still feel fresh, and would still be good, but instead he spent his time thinking about what he could do to shock his audience with the ending. I’ve never felt he was more than a gimmick myself, but certainly did see something of value in Sixth Sense, and it was, at the very least, extremely enjoyable.
i think he lost his mojo a long time ago
A Rod Serling wannabe.
Genius? Are you kidding me? The guy never had any talent in the first place. And dont bring up The Sixth Sense for hells sake!
I don’t know, but what’s always amused me are the anagrams you can make out his name >
my favorites being…
Slimy Hangman Hat
Malign Thy Shaman
Gnash Thy Mailman
Nights (with the) Ham Layman
and
My Sham Anal Thing
those are great T – i like anagrams – by no sea (soybean)
is a terrible compulsion of mine. I can’t help it, Sane Boy : )
HAHAHA T.252.AM
I still love Unbreakable. The first existential superhero film.
After that, it’s all downhill.
“The Happening” managed to appear symbolic, meanwhile, it was completely pointless and unentertaining. “The Village” & “Lady In The Water” were excellent movies. What happened to him? Great question.
I don’t think he was ever that good – in my opinion, “The Sixth Sense” is one of the most overrated films of all time – but the more films he makes, the more his suckage is being revealed. “The Happening” was a complete trainwreck. “Why you eyein’ my lemon drink?” – WTF?
I kinda like The Happening better than anything he’d done before, because he finally accepted that he’s not a genius filmmaker and seemed content to make a pretty fun and good-looking b movie. I can do without everything else he’s ever worked on.
In the words of the old rock and roll song- Who put the bomp in the bompdaddomdadom, who put the sham in the shymalanadingdong?
n.b. for the record (bad pun) —it’s M. Night ShyAmalan, peeps. If we’re going to slate the guy, we should at least give him the dignity of a correct spelling. The condemned deserve exactitude, otherwise the death certificate gets filed improperly.
That said, I do agree with Armands’ comment on UNBREAKABLE. The timing was right for that film, and maybe it will stand the test of decades, when the current flux of Hollywood / Marvel disposable toilet fresheners have reached the U-bend.
2cents.
I don’t care for him at all. And I think that his lack of talent has caught up with him.
I hear there is an Unbreakable sequel in the works. I personally like that movie, and would have no qualms with a sequel. but yes, is is losing it? I stopped after signs….liked that too.
Sixth Sense was a hit that came out of nowhere. Unbreakable was strangely, almost uncannily ignored. And then the rest of his career happened, and, like, stuff. I don’t know, I love Unbreakable, I appreciate Sixth Sense, I don’t care for the rest of his stuff but I don’t bother with defending him. Unbreakable is a real neat little gem, and surprisingly demure at that. I think of that movie more often than anything else he’s ever done, and I’m comfortable just sticking with that.
—PolarisDiB
>>I don’t think he was ever that good – in my opinion, “The Sixth Sense” is one of the most overrated films of all time<<
Absolutely. I couldn’t figure out why everyone was raving about it and paying no attention at all to a superior ghost story film, STIR OF ECHOES that came out at about the same time.
I’ve liked most of his movies I’ve seen so far of his (yes, including “Lady in the Water”, I think too many people took that movie waaaay too seriously. It’s a fairy tale, come on!) although I have yet to see “The Happening”
I have heard good things about LADY (and from people who’ve hated his previous films), but I’ve yet to catch up with it.
“Lady in the Water” still remains one of the worst films ever produced by a big studio. “Unbreakable” on the other hand is quite simply, brilliant. A beautifully paced film. Shyamalan has got film-making in his DNA, he just needs to find a decent screenplay that he hasn’t written himself (unless it’s a sequel to “Unbreakable” of course).
I also love Unbreakable. But, yeah, I think the comparison with Rod Serling (and by extension the other Twilight Zone alums, Richard Matheson and the late Charles Beaumont) is inevitable. Serling made even The Planet of the Apes a shaggy-dog story, with the conclusion big in scale & highly-wrought, and the result is memorable; but Shyamalan is hooked on getting the same effect, to ever-diminishing returns. Just think: if you know for certain that a movie is going to be a shaggy-dog story in the first damned place, isn’t the final effect neutralized? Shyamalan is a fairly self-satisfied – even arrogant – filmmaker, the kind of guy who feels certain that he knows all the angles—so why wouldn’t he realize this obvious point, and stop making shaggy-dog stories?
When I see something like Frank Darabont’s The Mist (am I the only one here who loved that movie?), I think “M. Night who??”
>>Just think: if you know for certain that a movie is going to be a shaggy-dog story in the first damned place, isn’t the final effect neutralized?<<
I’d have to say so because by the time I saw SIXTH SENSE I knew that there was some Great Unexpected Twist?Shock Ending but I didn’t know what it was. But knowing there was one had me looking for clues & I figured it out by the half-way mark.
Lots of genre filmmakers have a stylistic tic – like, Michael Bay enjoys enormous fiery explosions from his practical effects people – but Shyamalan’s is going to strangle him—because in the horror business every great figure has known how to diversify: John Carpenter, for instance, has restlessly tried new approaches.
Witkacy – I love “The Mist”. Darabont is a very efficient storyteller, maybe not the most visually interesting of directors but he sure knows how to string a story together and that goes a looong way.
First off – Love The Mist. Got to respect Darabont for insisting on an ending like that, it’s not something seen in the multiplex every week!
Second – Shyamalan’s decline. I read ‘The Man who Heard Voices’ and my personal opinion is that he tried to stick with the ‘money shot ending’ formula too long, twinned with a failure to take good advice. My main issue is that technically, Night is a very good director. I think he’s got a great eye for colour and composition and he does the emotional and suspense stuff very well. One of the things that surprised me most about ‘The Happening’ was how technically inept it was, and (love him or hate him) this is not something I thought I would ever associate with a Night film: there was little or no emotional engagement, there were no memorable visuals at all, hell, even the boom dropped into shot a couple of times.
Salter – “there were no memorable visuals at all”
Really? Just goes to show that different people get struck by different things, but I thought this was the movie’s strong point. The shot from below where the construction workers are leaping off the rooftops, or the extended long shot of the man laying down for the lawnmower, or that horribly frightening look that the old woman gets as she rams her face through the window, or even the opening scene with the woman and the knitting needle. It doesn’t look like Shyamalan’s other work, true, but I consider that an advantage as it is supposed to be an extravagant B-picture.
Trees are needing to exterminate us all. They are targeting urban areas first. Then smaller locales. So it makes perfect sense, then, to flee the city and head for the…wait for it…country. Idiotic. This toxic event is airborne. Yet our group drives through the movie in a car with windows rolled down. Worse yet, they are always stopping, leaving the car, and discussing whatever. His movies are full of this bone-headed bullshit. Ok, hear this, if another soul dare refer to this hack as a “genius” I’m siccing the gore-fiends of Evil Dead on your ass. Enough, already.
Sean Walker Hutton
His last film almost won the Razzie (well deserved) and Lady in the Water (LOTW) was a failure to most critics but was decent in my opinion. His first four major films (Sixth Sense-The Village) were suspenseful, enthralling, entertaining, and showed true potential for him as an auteur. His next film is a live action movie based on Avatar: The Last Airbender with an all-white cast. Could this be a Dragonball Z
or a success. I say nay. Please return Shymalan’s genius, where have gone?