I love Sunday. It is a great day for being lazy, watching football and procrastinating on homework that should have already been done the week prior. It’s also a great day for watching movies.
It is hard for my Sunday to be ruined, but this week the unthinkable happened.
As I sat in the movie theater anxiously awaiting the asinine “2012” I was treated to a few movie previews. Usually a mixed bag, previews contain some that you want to see and others that you will pass on.
This set of previews left an extremely bad taste in my mouth.
It was here that I learned there was a new M. Night Shyamalan movie coming out. It hits theaters next year.
Shyamalan is, hands down, the worst filmmaker of the past 15 years, and frankly it is a travesty that Hollywood actually allows this man to continue making movies.
There are a lot of terrible movie releases. I was about to witness one myself in “2012,”
but Shyamalan takes the cake for being the most pretentious and jumbled filmmaker with literally nothing to say.
Invariably, his films end up being a study in “let’s see how tricky and surprising of an ending I can muster up, while at the same time stringing together a story held precariously together by masking tape!”
It all started for most of us in 1999, when “The Sixth Sense” was released.
Here, we saw the plight of a boy — played by Haley Joel Osment — who was constantly haunted by ghosts of recently deceased people. These “dead people” did not know that they were “dead.” Good premise.
It was also here that we were introduced to the shoddy Shyamalan “fatal flaw,” the point at which all of his films suffer plot twists that defy all logic.
Bruce Willis plays a character that forms a friendship with young Osment. Yet, in a crazy twist that isn’t revealed until the end, Willis is actually a ghost as well — recently killed by a home intruder in front of his wife.
If Willis’ character was actually dead for most of the movie, it leaves one to wonder why he never realized it. The only person who ever actually responded to and interacted with him was Osment. How long had he been going through life “dead” with just Osment speaking to him?
Most people would realize by this point that something was amiss.
“The Village” is another piece of crap by Shyamalan demonstrating the same “fatal flaw.”
In this film, a small, isolated village in the late 1800s is filled with villagers who are terrified of the monsters in the woods. It is revealed midway that the monsters are really just the town elders dressed in scary costumes. The elders attempt to keep the townsfolk “safe” by forcing them to never venture out of the town, into the dangerous world beyond.
The father of a blind villager named Ivy sends her to get medicine from an adjacent town, telling her point blank that the monsters aren’t real. Inexplicably, despite just being told that the monsters are fake, she is terrified when a monster begins stalking her through the woods. We later learn that the person in this monster suit is actually a mentally disabled man played by Adrien Brody!
So a guy who can’t even sit still for five seconds, due to a developmental disability, has the foresight to stalk someone through the forest convincing her that the monster is real even after she is told it isn’t? Huh?
This is what I’m talking about. Shyamalan thinks he is too clever for his own good and believes his audience is stupid. Show him how stupid you really are when “The Last Airbender” comes out next year. For the love of God, stop giving this man money!
I can only willingly suspend disbelief for so long.
Gerry Wachovsky is a graduate student and columnist for the Daily 49er.