Bonus Comment of the Week

This is one for the ages:

"I have never understood the popular/critical love affair with this hack.

The Sixth Sense was a movie where if you guessed the 'twist' during the first fifteen minutes, the rest of the movie was a tedious, crashing, awful bore. Unbreakable is one of the funniest movies I've ever seen, thanks in part to a priceless scene where Bruce Willis loses a fistfight with a pool cover, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't meant to be a comedy. I have to admit I never saw any of Shymalan's films after that--but Sense and Unbreakable were the only two to get good reviews, so what does that tell you?

So I'm a little put off by the critics seeming surprised that a crappy director has made what is apparently a crappy movie, or that they're putting this down to being part of some kind of 'streak' when, as far as I'm concerned, the 'streak' is MNS' entire oeuvre. When Robot Chicken turned random appearances of a Shymalan doll exclaiming 'What a tweeeest!' into a running gag it was probably the first time I'd seen anyone in the mass culture get it right.

The guy's a hack. An utter fucking hack.

I mean, by comparison take The Usual Suspects for a second: even when you know the tweeeest it's still a fucking incredible movie that works as a heist caper built around Gabriel Byrne's charisma and Kevin Spacey's devious performance. And a lot of it is the fact that Bryan Singer actually knows how to make a good movie, as opposed to a mediocre or even bad movie that's betting everything on the audience getting wowed in the third act by a tweeeeest that Rod Serling would've passed up unless he just had a deadline he wasn't going to make otherwise. ('Wait--I've got to write fifteen more Twilight Zone scripts by Tuesday to make the production schedule?!? Fuck it, call Dick Matheson and Chuck Beaumont and tell 'em they owe me five teleplays each while I grind out some crap about a dead guy who doesn't know he's dead... speaking of which, call those French guys who did the Owl Creek Bridge short and tell 'em we're buying the broadcast rights from 'em.')

Sorry: am I on a rant? Yes I am. Because I fucking hate M. Night Shymalan. The man is a bloody hack and his career should have ended ten years ago, and almost all the critics who are pounding Airbender now probably ought to shut up because it's at least partly their fault Unbreakable wasn't a straight-to-SciFi's-Saturday-Night-Movie release instead of a fucking feature. If they'd noticed how inept a filmmaker he was in the mid '90s maybe MNS would be drinking Sterno in a gutter already, the fucker."

-- Eric, commenting on the abysmal reviews for the new M. Night Shyamalan movie