Yeah, so here is what Shyamalan thinks is going on with his critical reviews, which plummeted lower and lower, bottoming out(so far) with the Last Airbender.
Quoting from here. I’ll just quote the Shyamalan part.
Yeah…or your movies really suck now.
“now”? :dubious:
“Corsair”? Sounds like someone who made Tarzan movies in 1930 or something. 
Ah, this explains everything. It’s not him, it’s us.
Yeah because it’s just like the way all those critics had nothing good to say about Hitchcock or Kubrick.
Yes.
I am apparently an outlier - I liked Last Airbender and some of his other stuff and didn’t really like Sixth Sense [not enough to turn it off, but I won’t deliberately watch it.]
In my defense, I also like foreign and older movies - the stuff of silents and golden age of Studio stuff from the 30s and 40s which most people don’t like because they have the slower pace like a Shamalamadingdong film. [Sorry dude, I like the name bash] One of my absolute favorite directors is Fritz Lang, I adore M, the old Dr Mabuse stuff; Jean Cockteau’s stuff [especially his Beauty and the Beast] and even the interminably long Russian stuff - the battle on the frozen lake sequence from Alexander Nevsky and the baby carriage bumping down the steps in Battleship Potemkin are fantastic [and also the original sequences of stuff in today’s movies.]
Maybe people should think about trying to shift their perceptions and watch his stuff with a nonAmerican point of view once and a while.
Obligatory link to No One Likes M. Night Shyamalan.
Yea… no. Bella Tarr and Tarkovsky are some of my favorite filmmakers and even I think he sucks.
I’m a non American and his movies Stink. You cannot say with a straight face that the Village, the Happening or the Last Airbender were good movies.
I loved The Sixth Sense. I also liked the Last Airbender. But I’m not a cartoon fanboy so nothing was ruined for me. It was a kid’s action movie and worked as that.
I have no problem with him as a director. I just think that after The Sixth Sense, as a writer he got too caught up in having a twist. The twist worked once and he tried to recapture that moment. It didn’t work. I think if his next few movies had be any other type his career and perception would be much different.
Screw that. I’m the audience. It’s his job to communicate with me, not the other way around. He’s a no-talent hack and always has been. He just got lucky once.
UNBREAKABLE was pretty good.
I haven’t seen that before. That’s his best since Unbreakable.
This whole Shyamalan thing has bothered me for a while. I don’t dislike the guy (although if he keeps up with the narcissistic angle on his delusional rants, the hatred will grow), I just don’t understand what’s happened to him. I mean, I guess it’s the old trope about being too successful too quickly, and letting that go to your head, but…
I mean, hasn’t he seen his own movies? On some level, he has to know. Right…?
He has seen them…many times…and is surprised by the twist everytime.
I LIKE M. Night Shyamalan. He is an excellent craftsman who has managed to be a good director, scenarist, storyteller, scriptwriter, and even actor. I mean this without any irony. Look at any individual scene of his films and it’s good, by any objective standard.
On the other hand, I have hated every movie since The Sixth Sense. I’ll admit that Unbreakable was alsowell-made, but it wasn’y my cup of tea.
But every movie since then has suffered from a shattering sense of – what? I’m not sure what to call it. It’s stupidity of premise. It’s the sort of thing that you would let go under “willing suspension of disbelief” if you were more forgiving or indulgent. but even WSOD has to be earned and the audience has to feel it’s deserved. The problem is that, once you figure out what it is in a Shyamalan movie, it seems so dumb that you no longer want to feel a party to it. and, knowing it’s a Shyamalan film and that there’s going to be some odd twist, you generally know what it is before The Reveal, andthen you feel like a jerk watching the rest of the film. We actually watched the Happening and Signs in our house with MST3K-ish comments throughout.
In an earlier thread about this, I said that Shyamalan needs someone else to write his scripts to avoid this, but apparently that didn’t help with the Last Airbender. I didn’t see it, but Pepper mill and MilliCal – big "Avatar’ fans – went to see it and were sorely disapponted. (MillCal , when she first heard Shyamalan was directing, started chanting “Please don’t suck! Please don’t suck!” as if this could prevent it. It didn’t help.)
I really don’t know what the solution is. It isn’t blaming the audience, though. “They expect a twist, so it’s ruined” doesn’t cut it. The Twilight Zone lasted for years on TV, and veryone knew there was going to be a twist. O. Henry made a career of twist endings. So did plenty of sf/f writers in the 50s. It’s to your advantage, actually – the Shyamalan name used to draw people in looking for that twist. What disappoints them is when it’s not worth it.
This is exactly it for me. It’s as if for every movie, he has some fill-in-the-blank sentences, and the blanks are filled in by blindly drawing random words out of hats.
For Signs, one sentence was, “The aliens are killed by ______________”. He happened to draw the words “water” and “baseball bats”. But for the luck of the draw he would have made a movie where the aliens were killed by “Dr. Pepper” and “Courtney Love’s Sweat”
I’m thinking that was maybe a transcription error. When I watched the video, I heard “Kurosawa.”
Here’s a pretty telling graph of his Rotten Tomatoes ratings.
The last one I saw by him was The Village. The twist was so obvious from the trailer that I wondered if it was a red herring. I spent the movie thinking of how things could be better, as well as being astonished at the laziness of the plotting. That’s not my usual take on movies: I usually go into full on suspension of disbelief mode.
There was a lot to like about the movie, but the plotting was so foolish that it ruined the experience for me. It has nothing to do with the pacing, which I quite enjoy.
I think part of the problem may be that Shyamalan has lost his ability to set a compelling mood. The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and I’ll say even The Village had this gloomy, tense feel to them that really supported the plots. Lady in the Water and The Happening both had what could have been good stories, but the mood of the films were too flat and boring. And as far as The Last Airbender is concerned, c’mon! Magic kung fu warriors, how do you screw that up?