Lady in the Water.

"Given the twerpy messianism of Lady in the Water, it's pretty clear that M Night Shyamalan regards himself as a sacred vessel," writes David Edelstein. "His new movie is like Splash reworked by a grandiose Sunday-school teacher." Also in New York: Emily Nussbaum meets Paul Giamatti and reminds that Lady is just "the start of a flurry of upcoming Giamatti films: He gives voice to an exterminator in the animated The Ant Bully, and plays an inspector general in The Illusionist, an amazing screw-on head in a comic-book TV movie called Amazing Screw-On Head [Update: Watch it here; via Drawn!], and a distant dad in The Nanny Diaries. For any fan, it's surprising and satisfying that he seems to have transformed from character actor to leading man without ever losing his independent-oddball options."

Updated through 7/21.

Which is great; but as you've undoubtedly heard, Shyamalan is busily making sure that this new movie is all about Shyamalan. To the Philadelphia Inquirer's Carrie Rickey, he "politely allows that his geographical distance from Hollywood 'may engender mutual mistrust and suspicion.' Yet he can't resist adding, 'I've made four studio movies, super-personal, from my original screenplays. Except for the Pixar films, they're the most successful four consecutive originals Hollywood has had in the last decade.'" Via Anne Thompson. Update: David Poland finds "five filmmakers who have had clearly more extraordinary track records than Night and a couple of others who are right there, whose fortunes only got better."

Caryn James has more on the not-so-stealth campaign in the New York Times and Sean Smith helps Newsweek tip-toe away from its claim four years ago that Shyamalan would be "The Next Spielberg."

As for the film, "the magic that would transport you from reality into fantasy is missing," writes Kirk Honeycutt's in the Hollywood Reporter. Writing in Screen Daily, Steven Rosen finds it "entertaining despite its shortcomings." Jeffrey Wells really, really wanted to be impressed - but most definitely was not.

Update: Time's Richard Corliss: "All filmmakers are occasionally bound to test and confound their audience. Shyamalan has earned that right. But perhaps for his young-male audience - and certainly for this critic, who's usually on Shyamalan's wavelength - Lady doesn't work." Via Brendon Connelly.

Updates, 7/19: "[N]othing will prepare you - not his previous films, not any reviews you may read, not even a lifetime spent watching Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! cartoons - for the rampant foolishness of Lady in the Water," writes Michael Atkinson. But, also in the Voice, Michael Koresky wonders, "why are so many so eager to come down so hard on Shyamalan, whose insistence on creating such ethereal, confounding universes is premised on constant invention and revelation?"

"Has M Night Shyamalan lost his goddamn mind?" the Philadelphia Weekly's Sean Burns demands to know. "That's the only logical excuse for Lady in the Water, the Philly-based writer/director/egomaniac's convulsive seizure of narcissism that's so nakedly personal - and also so unintentionally, hilariously revealing - watching the movie feels a bit like walking in on your roommate while he's masturbating... to a picture of himself."

For the AV Club, Nathan Rabin interviews Giamatti and reviews the Lady: "[I]n deconstructing his oeuvre, Shyamalan has unwittingly destroyed its magic." Also, a list, from Psycho to Hide and Seek: "Are twist endings still necessary?"

Anne Thompson: "In retrospect I wish that Shyamalan had swallowed his pride and hurt feelings and said to his studio collaborators, 'Ok, I need your help.'"

The Reeler attended the New York premiere, where he got quotage and pix from just about everyone.

Updates, 7/20: The LA Weekly's Scott Foundas: "Lady in the Water isn't awful, mind you, but it is a failure, and one that carries itself with such chest-puffing pomposity that many will take pleasure in shooting it down for sport.... There's no question that Shyamalan can do remarkable things — his last (and, to my mind, best) film, The Village, turned on an ingenuous metaphor for isolationism and self-deception, before becoming undone by so much needless trickery. But consider the totality of his career and he does not seem to have advanced."

The Philadelphia City Paper's Sam Adams meets Shyamalan, Giamatti and Bryce Dallas Howard, who draws parallels between Shyamalan's set and Lars von Trier's. As for the movie, "Shyamalan mocks up the shell of a fairy tale but only fills it with hot air."

"[T]he movie does not suck," decides Gary Susman in the Boston Phoenix. "That's not much of a blurb quote, but it's all the enthusiasm I could muster up." Susman does the junket thing as well.

Clarence Carter at the Reverseblog:

Setting aside personal preferences or general distaste of the man's films for a second, where else can we look for a young filmmaker working within the studio system who is actively trying to carve out an aesthetic idenitity amidst the myriad outside forces that work in shaping any huge production? Brett Ratner? Gore Verbinski? Please, let's be serious.

Even if the films were all bad, which they're not, they work from moment to moment better than almost anything of a similar scale in theaters.

Cinematical's Kim Voynar: "Lady in the Water isn't the entirely horrible film that critics have been salivating to sink their teeth into. It's just not a great film... It's presented as a supernatural thriller, a fable about this spooky 'lady in the water,' when, in fact, the focus of the film is Giamatti's character."

For Keith Uhlich, writing in Slant, it "is first and foremost a gaping psychic wound, a blood-spattered, pulsating tumor ripped violently from both its creator's head and, more fascinatingly, his heart, then planted onscreen, raw and unfettered, for all to come and see. That is its beauty and its limitation."

Ross Douthat in Slate: "[W]hile Shyamalan may be a narcissist with delusions of grandeur, he's also a filmmaker of rare talent and creativity (these are hardly mutually exclusive categories, after all), and however lousy Lady in the Water proves to be, he deserves to survive this summer of embarrassment and live to film again.... Shyamalan's missteps have been interesting, his mistakes worth a second look, and his obsession with the integrity of his own artistic visions, however irritating, has distinguished him from nearly all his young-Hollywood competitors." Douthat then goes on to make a few career comparisons.

Updates, 7/21: Shyamalan may have "lost his creative marbles," as Manohla Dargis proposes in the New York Times, but Lady in the Water is "one of the more watchable films of the summer. A folly, true, but watchable."

"The breeze of enlightenment that comes off his movies feels belabored, laden with meticulous details that, if you think about them even just the tiniest bit, essentially mean nothing," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Lady in the Water has the lightest touch of any Shyamalan movie, which isn't saying much: Shyamalan seizes several opportunities to poke fun at himself, only to scuttle back to the safety of his usual faux-philosophical muck."

Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat: "What's most surprising is that Lady in the Water doesn't have even The Village's slim virtues. It isn't impressively directed or visually memorable. Shyamalan has hired one of the world's greatest cinematographers, Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express), and drawn utterly unmemorable work from him - which is surely the movie's most astounding accomplishment."

It's "a major misfire," according to Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times.

The Washington Post's Desson Thomson not only likes it, he claims it's better than The Sixth Sense: Lady in the Water, a captivating amalgam of mystery, thriller and mythic fantasy, eclipses his 1999 debut for sheer inventiveness, audacity and narrative derring-do."

Posted by dwhudson at July 17, 2006 4:30 AM