Lady in the Water

(NOTE: I do get to spoiling the fate of a few characters in this review, so please proceed with caution or the notion that this review is more entertaining than the actual movie, and I say this in all modesty, something I never do) There are two types of M. Night Shyamalan films-wonderful and terrible. As a director, he has made two great films that I have seen, and a lot of terrible trash. Now, a lot of people don’t hate his third major film, Signs, but I have not seen it yet. The two good films are The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, and the two terrible films I’ve seen are Lady in the Water and The Last Airbender, one of the worst movies of ever. And now, after I have completely summed up the only four M. Night films I have seen, let’s talk about the most recent one. Lady in the Water, based off of a fairy tale M. Night used to tell his kids. Seriously? Even hearing about that the film is based off of an unofficial fairy tale gets my Spider-sense tingling, and that isn’t even the half of it. Starring Paul Giamatti and Bryce Dallas Howard, Lady in the Water is the tale of a handyman at an apartment complex named Cleveland (Giamatti) who encounters a water Narf named Story (Howard) as she tries to get back to her water world, but she is being hindered by a wolf-like creature who is on a mission to stop her from this mission. There is a lot more complicated stuff to this story, which was actually published as a children’s book that I might read, because the principle and moral of the story aren’t bad, the filmmaking is. The problem with Lady in the Water is that is contains long, tedious, melodic tracking shots, which is something Shyamalan does a lot, something I noticed heavily in Unbreakable, but I am afraid I never got to comment on it during my review for that film. But where in Unbreakable the tracking shots showed the fragile, delicate monotony the characters are in risk of losing, but in Lazy in the Water, the tracking shots are just to show monotony. And monotony is boring! The film’s first live-action shot is that of Paul Giammate cleaning a drain. Who wants to see that? I know I don’t. But besides the fact that this movie shows a man who is completely incompetent in filmmaking, there is a character in here that is a film critic, and, much like in the work of fellow incompetent filmmaker Roland Emmerich, he is portrayed as the most arrogant, pretentious snob since...me! The character shows a pretentious unsociable nut, who, in a scene where he is facing certain death, begins to count the reasons he will live in the story. He is then mauled to death. Now, I don’t know if Shyamalan is trying to be cute or funny with self-referential humor (leave it to the pros like Community, Shyamalan), or if he is being arrogant himself and saying that all film critics are pretentious monsters, and he is giving me the finger, then I give that finger back and say-Shyamalan, you know why we hate you? Because you make crap movies, and then call US stupid. The most redeemable quality about Michael Bay is that he APOLOGIZED for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Spielberg APOLOGIZED for ruining the DVD print of ET: The Extra Terrestrial. You know why we hate George Lucas? Because he doesn’t learn from his mistakes, he just makes them worse, and then he calls us stupid. Be careful Shyamalan, you’re already treading on thin ice as of 2006, so in 2012, I have to say-be careful, you could be the next George Lucas.
3/10