M Night Shyamalan

championo

What do you think of him? I have been disappointed in all of his movies, but somehow I will go and watch his new movie on Avatars, The Last Airbender.
I hope he does not mess that nice anime up.

Do you think he is talented or he just wants to create just do foreplay without climax in majority of his movies?

FreakyJim

He's hated more than liked because of false expectations that precede his films. Mostly because of false advertising.
He does try to make deeper and meaningful mainstream films and for example imo Unbreakable is the best super hero movie I've ever seen. His take on the subject is quite original and well executed.
Also the Village is an underrated drama/love story.

But people mostly concentrate on things like the water "plot hole" in Signs, the twists and other meaningless crap, missing the point of his films entirely.

BAMSOLA

Agree with you on Unbreakable also The sixth sense deserves a mention. However the happening was a little bit shit in fairness as was lady in the water. Desperately needs to get back to form ASAP.

Bury Red

His films have gone down hill progressively from The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, the first being an excellently made ghost story with a twist (not so rewatchable once you know the twist) and the second being a brilliant take on superhero films.

Signs was watchable but flawed. The Village was OK but tried way too hard to have the big twist at the end like The Sixth Sense but unfortunately anyone but a moron would have got it by the half way point. Lady in the Water was complete shite and The Happening looked so bad I've not bothered watching it although my wife and daughter described it as OK with the crappest ending in the whole of cinematic history.

He needs to stop trying to be an auteur and just get on with directing decent films because the harder he tries to recapture the element of surprise that made his first two films great the worse his output gets.

032Devil

'Signs' was crap.

His films leave you feeling empty (in a bad way).

Raoul

The previews for "The Last Airbender" look pretty good.

BAMSOLA

Actually now that Mark Kermode has spent the last couple of months taking the piss out of this movie(based on the title alone) I can't take it seriously.

TuTuHimm

He's the guy that is famous for making plot twists in his movies, like in The Sixth Sense where the guy with the hairpiece turns out to be Bruce Willis the whole time.

Count Duckula

Hmm, I may like it then, since Mark Kermode is an unsufferable cunt so far up his own arse he can smell the contents of his lunch.

BAMSOLA

Fair point. He does know his stuff though and is for my money the second best movie critic around assuming Barry Norman still works.

He also does a great friday night radio show with Simon Mayo.

AdZzUtd

I enjoyed Signs I really did, I mean this on the linear level - I enjoyed Mel Gibson's acting, I enjoyed the mystery and intrigue surrounding the aliens. Especially when they were at the house at night and on this basis Signs was for all intrinsic purposes a good film.

However, if you watch the film with any semblance of sanity and intelligence it eventually becomes obvious that an Alien civilisation which can transverse the indeterminable vastness of the universe with the added capability of a fully blown military invasion tagged onto the end of this gigantic journey - that these Aliens, these highly educated beings might have noticed, nay, might have detected long before sight of Earth those two really, really big pools either side of the continents. I.e. The Atlantic and the Pacific, now, dare I say these beings will probably have come across this abundant substance somewhere else, you know, on their endless voyages through space and this particular liquid substance, known as water, was, well you know....highly acidic to their skin.

The same substance which, any intelligent being would probably call our planet, "Ah look, theirs water." Not...."Aha, Earth, no water their boys...accept, those two really big blue pools of water."

M. Night Shyamalan.

Hectic

Charlie!

Grinner

If you've got a really shit idea like The Happening why would you fuck it up even more by casting Marky Mark as the lead? Or was he the only one dumb enough to think he could pull it off?

bill.s.preston

I disagree, any intelligent being would say there's, there and except. in the bolded parts above.

M. Night Pedantaman.

Just playing!

Count Duckula

And an intelligent being also wouldn't randomly put a fullstop in the middle of the bolded parts above.

Also just playing!

AdZzUtd

Meh.

dumbo

I enjoyed Signs and The Village despite them containing a lot of stupid shit. Unbreakable and 6th sense were good films.

So I still regard him as a good film maker (if you ignore some of the more stupid plot elements). I'm yet to see either Lady in the water or the Happening which seem to have destroyed any credibility he had.

Count Duckula

I watched The Happening on the flight back to London from Buenos Aires, because there was fuck all else on. It was so unutterably shite, I can't even begin to do its shitness justice.

bill.s.preston

I deleted some text and missed the punctuation.

I am officially crap at grammar policing.

Grinner

The cunt also has the most annoying name of any director. How the fuck do you even pronounce it anyway?

Sca11ywag

Sorry, but I believe that accolade goes to "The Mist"

BAMSOLA

Shy-am-moo-lan. or Shy-am-ma-lan.

BAMSOLA

Not sure about the mists ending is like but surely it can't be worse than Spielberg's War Of The Worlds.

Spammy

He gets a lot of stick because it's obvious that he does have some smatterings of talent as a film maker, but as a writer he seems to display a worrying lack of judgement and is devoid of any self-awareness.

In The Lady And The Water or whatever it is called, he cast himself as a revolutionary writer who's writing was set to change the world. He also created a character that was a film critic and had him killed, which was fairly embarrassing.

Wibble

The Sixth Sense was a very good film. Everything else has been almost unwatchably bad. Although Signs had some unintentional laughs.

Hectic

Who knew there was an Unbreakable 2 in the works?

Wibble

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooo

Wonder Pigeon

The cartoon he's adapting this new film from was recommended to me recently. Its pretty good, I mean, relatively speaking, it is a kid's cartoon. Shyamalan's movie doesn't seem like its being marketed with kids in mind though...my prediction is that it'll flop.

Spammy

He can build tension very well, then he just destroys it with some religious guff.

Elliott

The Happening was easily one of the noughties' top comedies.

championo

That is the thing about him though, every preview of his films looks so good and intriguing and then you go and sit down to watch and at the end it was the fucking trees releasing toxins. I mean what the fuck man?
I doubt I will be able to forgive him for the happenings. Poor Mark Wahlberg, he seems to get shitty movies.

Sir Matt

I remember going to see a movie, I don't remember which, and seeing the preview. The first part was interesting and then it says "M Night Shymalan." I went from thinking WTF to this is going to be ridiculously bad. My friends and I started laughing immediately. I guess that's an adequate perception of his films.

But seriously, Markie Mark and killer trees? What the hell?

BAMSOLA

I hope not, because on current form he's probably gonna fuck that up.

Count Duckula

I'll admit it's been a while since I saw that film, but doesn't it end in exactly the same way as the book? The aliens get human diseases and just die of their own accord? You can't blame Spielberg for that - blame H. G. Wells.

Wonder Pigeon

Maybe he means the way that Cruise's son turns up at the end, totally fine, after having ran into a battlefield that was blown to bits by the aliens. For me that was one of the stupidest things I'd ever seen in a movie.

Count Duckula

Oh yeh, I'd totally forgotten about that. It annoyed me so much in the cinema that I'd blanked it from my mind

Hectic

Yeah, his son made it home before his Dad, and in better condition too.

It's quite understandable really, he followed a road which went over a hill, despite there being a war there, giant alien killing machines and tanks, which all resulted in a giant explosion, which even the tanks couldn't survive, but it's alright, it's Tom Cruise's son.

Also, I have to question Cruise's judgement, where either of the children really worth saving? I don't think so.

Spammy

I'd have killed the son myself, personally.

Hectic

I wrote that before I posted that actual response.

I think I would have killed him at least three times.

1) Once when I was playing catch, little bastard thinks it's alright to smash my windows? Boom.

2) When he wants to run over the hill, you are a spastic child, in the middle of a alien war, which you can see is not working very well, so what do you want to do? That's right, you want to jump into the fight, despite having no training, or purpose, or reason to live. Boom.

3) When he lives at the end. Fuck off and die, I'm sorry, but no son of mine is going to show me up like that. He's not even a real Cruise and he's already trying to steal the day. Boom, headshot.

Wonder Pigeon

If I was Cruise, my one regret would have been not being able to feed that prick to Tim Robbins' character.

So...yeah, Avatar The Last Airbender. As American cartoons go, its pretty good, up there with Samurai Jack imho. I still think this film will flop.