Over the years I’ve heard some (IMO) harsh criticism levelled at specific people and I’ve never really seen what it was that the critics saw. I wonder if anyone here who shares the criticisms is willing to try to explain:
M. Night Shyamalam - seems to get some real haters of his work. From what I can see, some people say they like one of his movies, some people are “meh”, and a lot of people are “OMG he’s the worst ever!” If you’re one of the “he’s the worst ever” critics can you elaborate on why? (His work seems a little uneven to me, but no more than any other director/producer.)
I started re-watching Dollhouse and remembered when this was on TV a lot of people talked about what a horrible actress Elisha Dushku was. I’m not seeing it, even in the first couple of episodes. She seems like a fair actress to me. What am I missing?
I’ll say this about M. Night; The Happening and The Lady in the Water are two of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Ever. Like, they’re both firmly in the bottom five. The Village was not good. And I’ve heard The Last Airbender was terrible, too. So, while I liked The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs, I can’t ignore that he had a string of Uwe Boll level shit and that’s hard to recover from.
I think a lot of people refuse to forgive Mr. Shyamalan for not recreating *The Sixth Sense *over and over again. It’s hard to follow up such a well done, well received project and when that’s the expectation and it’s not fulfilled, people get pissy and call him a hack.
Can’t really say anything about Ms. Dushku; I’m with you, she seems all right.
Now it’s my turn to ask about the inordinate amount of hate for Nickelback. Is that still a thing? For that matter, are they? They aren’t necessarily my favorite genre but I never had the compulsion to turn the channel when one of their songs came on. The lead singer is no where near the worst of the genre. In fact, he kind of personifies it so unless the critics don’t like the rock genre at all, I don’t see the problem. Speaking of lead singer Chad Kroeger , why is he considered to be the epitome of ugly? I mean, his hair was unfortunate for a while there but to me actually looks a lot like Dax Shepard, who I don’t recall getting publicly excoriated for his looks.
I think Shyamalan is, on a technical basis, a decent director who once had a really good idea and executed on it very well. Unfortunately, it turned out that he didn’t quite get why it was a good idea, and his attempts to recapture that magic have made a mess of many of his subsequent projects. (Others were just doomed because he didn’t properly understand his subject matter.) Maybe he would have done better to distance himself more from The Sixth Sense stylistically–or maybe it wouldn’t have helped, because people wouldn’t have let him, as WOOKINPANUB suggests.
I’m one of those weirdos that LOVES M. Night. At the same time though, I can see why a lot of people don’t like his work. Night’s work is all about the metaphors. A fact that tends to elude a lot of people. So they walk away from the movie not really getting what they watched.
And even those who do get the metaphorical overtones, tend to be put off because it comes off as preachy to them.
His movies are considered bad because they are bad, not because they aren’t The Sixth Sense. Unbreakable isn’t as good as TSS, but people didn’t hate on him for that. (well, not a lot)
But the movies since then show, as Balance noted, that he doesn’t appear to understand exactly why TSS worked. He thinks we demand his movies have “twists”, but he can’t write them for shit. Plus being writer/director/producer means there’s no one to give criticism, to say no.
Not picking on you specifically, but that comment gets used a lot, and is kind of insulting. It says we aren’t smart enough to understand what he is going for.
We who think his movies are bad GET them fine, we just don’t LIKE them. We don’t think he does a good job. I personally think he has bad ideas, but I could concede that he has good ideas but just doesn’t communicate them properly. But even the best idea put into a bad film still presents as a bad film.
I am an M. Night Shyamalan double-thinker. I have his first six films on DVD, and rewatch them every few years.
The undeniably good: he has imagination and he isn’t afraid to put himself out there. In that respect, his movies are real pieces of art. They’re experimental. They’re revealing. He leaves himself vulnerable to scorn, and that gives the movies an element of magic.
The neutral: that same element can easily start to seem self-indulgent, if it isn’t carefully edited by collaborators when being released to a wide audience, and I think that after The Sixth Sense was such a huge hit, his collaborators stopped editing him effectively. “It’s M. Night; it’ll sell no matter what!” Um…well. For a while. Until too many shitty movies come out in a row. This is not M. Night’s fault; it’s the studio’s. The same thing has happened to many other, better artists.
The bad: after The Sixth Sense was such a huge hit, it seems he stopped trying to edit himself, also. The Village was one of my top three favorite-of-all-time movies when it came out. Then later, when I knew a little more about world-building, I tried to watch it and had to turn it off. It was an utterly lazy film. No intellectual effort was put into it; he was purely there to film pretty scenes. And yes, I still think it’s a damn pretty movie, but the shit-poor worldbuilding and storytelling ruins it for me. And that makes me very sad, and a little angry.
Well, that’s how I felt about the 2013 film The Butler.
On the posters, the write-ups and ads it was known as Lee Daniels, The Butler and that always bothered me.
Yes, I know that Daniels produced and directed it, but that title…
I wonder how many people who saw the title and maybe even have seen the film and thought that the main character’s name was Lee Daniels and not Cecil Gaines.
Which is especially troubling since the movie is based on the real, extroidinary life of Mr. Gaines?
I like more of M Nights films than the average person. But I can see where some of the criticism comes from. He was relying a little too much on the twist formula. And despite being produced very well, there’s only so much good film making can do to offset a ridiculous premise like The Happening. And he started getting a little too arrogant. When I saw Lady in the Water people were laughing at the opening credits:
Written by…
M Night
Produced by…
M Night
Directed by…
And he went too far in his “cameo” portraying a messiah figure and having the “critic” character get eaten by the monster. Not the king of subtlety or humbleness.
As far as Dukshu, she’s fine, and she’s great in certain roles, but the part really called for a different sort of actor with a bit more range, as evidenced by how outshined she was by her costars, but as a producer and friend of Joss she got to cast herself in the lead role. Which wasn’t an issue for me as many shows have leads who are purposely outshone by their cohorts (HIMYM).
I don’t know about Nickleback but I suspect it is mostly a popular meme gone feral. Its possible the lead singer comes across as a dick and that overshadows the music as well.
Definitely on the YMMV thing. Comments like these make me wonder how stupid I am, because I don’t get it. I like his movies, some are better than others. But that’s true for everyone else’s movies that I see. “Can’t write them”… the writing seems fine to me. “can’t communicate”… I understand them just fine so I wonder what isn’t being communicated. Do either of you have any specific, concrete examples? You can use Split if you want, because it’s current (and I just saw it and can easily re-watch it).
I like most of M. Night’s films. Lady not so much. I did like The Happening, even, but I read it more as an homage to Hitchcock like films (Birds, etc), and took it from that perspective. Those things made no sense either. That’s just me though.
Elishja (sp?) - eh. She was ok on Buffy. I think she’s fine. Not great. Not terrible. It probably just depends on the project.
I think Night is the king of the fridge moment. His films are so well made that you get drawn in and almost buy it, but then you get home and realize how stupid the premise is that it ruins the original enjoyment that comes from the production and editing prowess (scene editing that is, is well done, obviously the script needs more work).
From what I’ve seen, the gist of it is that their success has outstripped their talent: they sell a ton of albums, despite being a fairly ordinary, formulaic rock band. And, IMO, the songs of their which I’ve heard have very predictable lyrics about sex, drugs, and alcohol.
Well, the only way to judge an artist’s work is to see it.
For me, it went like this… The Sixth Sense - saw it first run in the theater, enjoyed it! Unbreakable - saw it first run in the theater, liked most of it. Signs - saw it first run in the theater, liked it until the very stupid ending The Village - saw it first run in the theater, didn’t think much of most of it, but especially the extremely poor ending Lady in the Water - despite being let down with his previous films, I saw it first run in the theater,…what a mess. The Happening -okay, I’d been burned three times in a row, but thought I’d give it a shot and saw it first run in the theater. In the 45+ years I’ve been seeing movies, this film EASILY is in the top ten of the worst I’ve seen in my life.
That was it, I wasn’t going to waste any more of my time and money on M, having been burned 3, 4 times in a row. BUT - his next film WASN’T based on anything he’d written, so what the hell, I’d give it a chance. The Last Airbender - - saw it first run in the theater, wow. This not only proved to me that he was a lousy film maker, but he was a lousy adapting film maker.
Okay, but as I’m sure you can recall, there was no shortage of people balking at Signs: “Gah! How lame. Aliens that can be killed by water? Why would aliens go to a planet that’s two-thirds water?!”
It’s comments like those that lead me to believe: “Yeah, you’re not getting it.”
You’re not stupid. You and I just take different things out of a movie. Me, I think AI is an awesome movie, but I feel that me and Spielberg are the only people that “get” it.
There’s no absolute rule on whether a movie is good. But there are some things that can be objectively applied to any movie. And the one I go by is, does the artist clearly communicate his intentions? You can hate a movie’s point, but first you have to understand it. If the fans of a popularly hated movie have to tell the non-fans that they don’t “get” it, then I say the movie has failed. The artist has failed to communicate. (there is of course a large grey area in the middle. But I simplify for purposes of this thread.)
Look at Signs. If the film was meant as a metaphor for faith, I submit M went about it all wrong. It’s presented straight up, as a movie that’s occurring in the real world, but with aliens attacking. Stupid aliens, to boot, but that isn’t the bad part. The part about faith is that Mel learns to beat the aliens by using something his late wife said before she died. “Swing away”, she said, which, as advice to the future, has very limited applicability. It only is useful if the aliens are attacking, and you only have a baseball bat, and there is a convenient glass of water nearby. That’s a lot of crap to wade through just to give a metaphor.
Or the Village. It has an M Night “twist” (that everyone can see coming), but for what purpose? A twist is supposed to make you reevaluate what you’ve watched (as in TSS, or The Crying Game) and see the whole movie differently, But yet, a twist movie is supposed to also make sense when you know the twist. The movie has to work both ways.
What are the villagers doing, lying about “monsters”? That would have been a good story - people who reject the modern world, but have to lie to prevent people from leaving., A good moral dilemma.
But that isn’t the movie we got. We start with an apparent story about a group of people threatened by monsters (like a good horror film), and how that affects the society they live in (is it in our world? past? Future? A fantasy allegory for something?) It starts out intriguing. But the twist actually reveals that they are simply a bunch of selfish assholes. And so the movie fails - are we supposed to sympathize with these people? Hate them? I know which I do, but is that M’s intention? I get the feeling that is it not, that he sympathizes with the Village.
Shamalayan went through a “twist” phase, where every movie had some silly twist at the end, and that was the entire point. Case in point: The Village. One of the worst movies I have ever seen. No redeemable qualities. Boring, predictable, and there’s that formulaic twist: It was the 20th century the whole time! A moment of novelty does not redeem two hours of boring.
Unbreakable was okay. I’ve yet to see another one of his movies that rated above “really really bad”. But I stopped watching them about ten years ago so maybe he has improved. But I don’t have any interest in finding out.
