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M gak shamalamadodah hasn't made a good film since 6th Sense.

Signs... ffs, oh, we're allergic to water! Wait, what's that? a planet with a surface covered in 70% water! GO THER NAO!!

The Village: the larp that went too far...

... what a twist!

His movies are ok for DVD watching I guess. The only one I went to see at the theatre was Signs, and I think I fell asleep watching it.

GG

He made reasonably good movies until his directing forumla was discovered by Agent 007 (Michael Agger) whose dossier report (critical analysis) of the evil megalomaniac bent on wurld domination (movie director) said there is "an uncomfortable pattern" of "making fragile, sealed-off movies that fell apart when exposed to outside logic (bad directing)."

sebster wrote:Shame, really. Shyamalan disappeared up his bottom a while ago, ever since Unbreakable his films have been poor, each slightly sillier than the one before it.

To wit:
The Sixth Sense
Unbreakable
Signs
The Village
Lady in the Water
The Happening
The Last Airbender

After Unbreakable, that's a steady freefall.

But he does have talent, and I really hoped that a really different project, like heading up a big budget adaptation, would force him to come out of his comfort zone, which might get him out of his bottom and start making decent movies again. Guess that didn’t happen, and maybe now he’ll never get out.

Agree 100%. I thought this would snap him out of it.

Sure, it could have been good, Gibson and his family were well drawn and they all performed well, and the film built tension quite well. But is it too much to require a film to make just a little sense? I mean, honestly, it turns out his wife was killed so that she could give a cryptic message about how to defeat some aliens that were killed by water… and this was enough for Gibson’s character to find his faith in God again. The God I’d have faith in would have just made it rain, and wouldn’t have killed his wife at all.

Stupid, stupid movie. That was followed by even stupider movies.

Signs has gigantic holes. I mean, huge. *RAIN* is one of them. The planet being 70% water is another. Advanced intergalactic aliens being stumped by pantry door locks is yet another one of many.

STILL, it wasn't an *inept* effort. Kind of dumb and silly, but well shot, had some good performances and was generally popular.

Then you have the Happening, where Mark Wahlberg -- a pretty decent actor -- clearly couldn't do *a thing* with that script. It's George Lucas-level bad script and handling of actors...from the guy who was acclaimed for getting that performance out of the kid from Sixth Sense. The Happening also has the cinematography and visual inventiveness of an industrial training film. I can't begin to fathom how a guy loses his talent like this. If this was baseball, it'd be one of the all-time great cases of the yips.

gorgon wrote: If this was baseball, it'd be one of the all-time great cases of the yips.

I thought the yips were a golf malady?

gorgon wrote:
Signs has gigantic holes. I mean, huge. *RAIN* is one of them. The planet being 70% water is another. Advanced intergalactic aliens being stumped by pantry door locks is yet another one of many.

Lets not forget humidity. Considering how water affects the terrifying race of aliens, even walking around outside in anything less than a desert would have been, at least, incredibly painful.

Clearly, Signs was written in the dry LA environs, rather than New York. To say nothing of India during monsoon season...

JohnHwangDD wrote:Clearly, Signs was written in the dry LA environs, rather than New York. To say nothing of India during monsoon season...

Or Colorado Springs/Denver, where the average humidity is around 0% or so.

But don't quote me on that, I'm no meteorologist, it's pretty much going by what it feels like having moved here from New Orleans(100% humidity FTL).

its funny, for the entirety of Signs, I was convinced it was all being projected "psychically" by the boy or something weird like that. Everything was too coincidental for it to be just an alien invasion....the books he read, the images inside all described the house they lived in, the inability of aliens to do anything BUT scare them....i thought it was some kind of "carrie" esque realization of the boys fears, and thought it was great, until the end...

when it turned out they REALLY were aliens. Total

Just repeating all the other comments, but an alien species capable to travelling the universe would NEVER be stupid enough to land and attempt to conquer a world were all living things and atmosphere is roughly 70% water when they are highly allergic to it. I cant believe that even got through the writers...but eh, whatever

JohnHwangDD wrote:

gorgon wrote: If this was baseball, it'd be one of the all-time great cases of the yips.

I thought the yips were a golf malady?

Yeah, I think it started there, but it's used in combo with baseball too. I think the more famous cases in recent years have been in baseball. Rick Ankiel is a great one. Dude went from a good pitcher to being unable to throw a strike and had to reinvent himself as a position player.

dogma wrote:Lets not forget humidity. Considering how water affects the terrifying race of aliens, even walking around outside in anything less than a desert would have been, at least, incredibly painful.

Yeah, and given that M. Night grew up in SE PA, I haveta think he's familiar with humidity. We don't get the New Orleans-Houston level mugginess, but it's nothing to sneeze at here.

I mean, wouldn't a rubber suit have helped?

HiveFleet wrote:its funny, for the entirety of Signs, I was convinced it was all being projected "psychically" by the boy or something weird like that. Everything was too coincidental for it to be just an alien invasion....the books he read, the images inside all described the house they lived in, the inability of aliens to do anything BUT scare them....i thought it was some kind of "carrie" esque realization of the boys fears, and thought it was great, until the end...

when it turned out they REALLY were aliens. Total

That's funny. I actually went one step farther. Early on, I thought the whole thing was a story about paranoia and how it can spin out of control. I mean, the early "evidence" is mostly silly and obviously suspect. You had crop circles (which are manmade phenomena) and some funny noises on a baby monitor. Then there's lots of rumors and things spread through conversation and the media. I thought it was all kinda interesting as a story about how we let paranoia take over and see "signs" everywhere when we want to. And then NOPE, there's an alien! Just walking around! Hey, there's one locked in a closet!

I wonder if that screenplay had some major late rewrites, because I agree with you that they were taking that story in a completely different direction early on.

This covers everything you ever need to know about signs.

Yeah...M. Nite Shyamaloon's Ovatar (that's how they pronounce it in the movie...not Avatar. Ovatar. feth my life.) was entertaining but otherwise...it was pretty damn bad.

JohnHwangDD wrote:@Relapse: They're not drawn as Anglos. The fact that you incorrectly perceive them that way, merely demonstrates your ignorance.

The fact that he perceives them as anglo-saxon demonstrates that anime and manga characters are too simplistic in their design to reasonably be considered any particular race from their facial features alone. Clearly, they're asian. They live, almost to a man, in Japan. However, to an outsider, do they look asian? No. They have eyes, ears, a mouth. A nose if they're lucky. None of these look particularily Japanese. They also don't look caucasian. But they're reminiscint enough of what people looklike that we don't see an abomination of anatomy when we look at them, we see a person. And if we're used to seeing white people, we'll see a white person. If we're used to seeing Japanese people, we'll see a Japanese person.

It's not ignorance to see anime or manga characters as being Anglo-Saxon. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

Honersstodnt wrote:... what a TWIT!

Fixed it for you.

WARBOSS TZOO wrote:

JohnHwangDD wrote:@Relapse: They're not drawn as Anglos. The fact that you incorrectly perceive them that way, merely demonstrates your ignorance.

The fact that he perceives them as anglo-saxon demonstrates that anime and manga characters are too simplistic in their design to reasonably be considered any particular race from their facial features alone. Clearly, they're asian. They live, almost to a man, in Japan. However, to an outsider, do they look asian? No. They have eyes, ears, a mouth. A nose if they're lucky. None of these look particularily Japanese. They also don't look caucasian. But they're reminiscint enough of what people looklike that we don't see an abomination of anatomy when we look at them, we see a person. And if we're used to seeing white people, we'll see a white person. If we're used to seeing Japanese people, we'll see a Japanese person.

It's not ignorance to see anime or manga characters as being Anglo-Saxon. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

Thank you for putting that so well. I look at shows like Naruto, see blonde people with round eyes, and figure they drew Anglos in the mix. In the Airbender show, I again see people with round eyes, almond shaped eyes, blue eyes, and different cultural dress and habits and figure it as a mixture of races.
It's nothing to get worked up about the way some people have been getting. It's just just the perception of a lot of people, as you so ably point out. Not everyone who likes the Airbender show see's it as entirely Asian oriented.

Honersstodnt wrote:

LOLOLOL. Nelson mandela as appa.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7bnxmYdMj8&playnext_from=TL&videos=oLtY4prQxBE&feature=sub
This pretty much says woah oh..... for me :/

Yeah. I was trying to figure out what her shirt said, I wasn't even paying attention to what she was saying.

she always wears funny shirts. but i think the rating of 3/10 pretty much condemns the movie. they don't give much below a 5 although it is reliable if you can pick which person to listen to

gorgon wrote:To wit:
The Sixth Sense
Unbreakable
Signs
The Village
Lady in the Water
The Happening
The Last Airbender

After Unbreakable, that's a steady freefall.

This is a little graph showing the score his movies have gotten on Rotten Tomatoes.

STILL, it wasn't an *inept* effort. Kind of dumb and silly, but well shot, had some good performances and was generally popular.

Yeah, the suspense built up nicely, where they're watching the amateur footage on the tellie it was edge of your seat stuff, same for the scene where they're hiding in the basement. And the family dynamic worked pretty well.

Then you've got that ending, the whole water thing is pretty silly, but the bigger mystery is how it's supposed to be some kind of message about faith. I mean, killing a Preacher's wife so she can say 'swing away' and that allows the son to know to hit the water at the alien. God could have made it rain, or told him the message without killing his wife, or one of a million other things.

It's a really stupid piece of writing.

If this was baseball, it'd be one of the all-time great cases of the yips.

Yeah, I can't think of anyone else who's dropped so steadily.

For me the ending of Signs had the feel of "We need to end this somehow..." So Sham went to the War of the Worlds style ending, "Surprise! something in the air/ about this planet killed the aliens." It came across as contrived and forced and ruined an otherwise suspenseful film.
Going the Twilight Zone style (it was all mental projection) or the Paranoia route (Night that Panicked America - great movie) would have been a master stroke.

Allright....against all sense of logic and my better judgment I went to see Airbender tonight. My oldest(7 year old) really really wanted to go and see the movie. So I said what the heck I'll get some movie theater popcorn and watch the train wreck.

After going in with the idea that this movie would totally suck, I was a bit surprised. NO this wasn't grande cinema, and it certainly had it's George Lucas "phantom Menace" type of stuff going on, however I have to say, and I really do hate to say this... I was actually entertained.

The acting was mediocre to aweful, the dialog was about the same as watching the Star wars prequels, wooden acting and all, but I was still entertained...not edge of my seat biting my fingernails entertained, but a night out with the kids to eat some popcorn entertained.

This movie would be ideal at the drive in.

GG

Just about everyone I know that went to see it, fairly intelligent people, liked it also.

I watched it online today. It wasn't very good. I watched until about twenty minutes in, and then just gave up on it. Pretty bad acting. Like, sci-fi channel acting...

I tend to think that Sixth Sense and Unbreakable were flukes, because Signs was unspeakably bad, and I hear The Village is worse. While I found The Lady in the Water and Airbender both to be tolerable, they are not the masterpieces that M. Night somehow became famous for.

The Village has grown on me the more times I've seen it.

The problem for M. Nnight Shamalamalamanamaa is that he did Sixth Sense with another screeenwriter, he then went off on his own, and, well, he's pretty average.

The Last Airbender..


Cramming 400 minutes of episodes, into 90 minutes of movie, auto fail.

Oh, and it's an American series, not Asian, so people talking about how they were drawn should inform themselves better.

Bob Chipman's review from The Escapist


http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/escape-to-the-movies/1849-The-Last-Airbender

I saw this ridiculous movie a few days ago.

Nervous doesn't begin to describe how I felt when I heard Shyamalan was at the helm of the project, which would determine the future of this beloved property. When the reviews came trickling in, I wasn't surprised but I was disappointed. And then I was angry: none of the many super-negative reviews seemed to be written by someone familiar with the series. There was too much criticism of the Avatar setting as unbelievable--these people have had no problem with six Harry Potters?--and the other criticisms regarding acting or pacing seemed forgivable mainly because I had expected them. So I resolved to go see the film to prove these critics wrong.

But they were right. So right. Maybe for the wrong reasons but still so, so right. The movie was pathetic. The only redeeming quality was the way Shyamalan's team brought the Avatar world to life--costumes, backdrops, and (some) sets looked great. But this is hardly enough to save a picture where absolutely everything else went wrong. EVERYTHING. The Escapist review is . . . amazingly generous, especially regarding the action sequences--which are boring and not even as well-thought out or compelling as those in the kids' show. As for the acting, it's so-so. Nothing too worthwhile from anyone. I have a hard time believing this film is better than the new Twilight movie, although I have never seen any of them. I have a a hard time believing that the Last Airbender is better than almost any movie.

About the race controversy: I'm not mad that they cast Aang, Ketara, and Sokka as white. (Whatever angry anime fans might say, these characters are ambiguously drawn and could be either white or Asian.) But having seen the film, I am puzzled that every other Southern Water Tribesperson and Air nomad is Asian--except GranGran and Monk Gyatso, (who was inexplicably black?). At first, I thought Shyamalan was trying to tell us that color doesn't matter except aesthetically. You could have people of the same "nation" belonging together who look nothing alike and don't notice that they look nothing alike; a real American dream, that. But of course, the uniformity of the browness--the intentional South Asian-ness--of the Fire Nation sort of sinks that one. And of course having three white leads who allegedly come from otherwise (almost) all-Asian communities? Talk about mixed-messages.

I can only hope, for Shyamalan's sake, that The Last Airbender is a textbook example of the mean ole studio executives getting in the way of the director's vision. If what I saw in the theater was truly Shyamalan's vision then all this faddy trashing of him might prove to be spot on.