Lady in the Water (2006)

...Because I keep my promises.

Actually, Lady in the Water wasn't as bad as I'd feared. Don't take that as praise, though, even of the very faintest sort - my expectations before watching were crashingly, staggeringly low. I've never seen one of M. Night Shyamalan's movies before, but I've read a lot about them, and he seems to peddle a particularly tedious, pompous sort of mysticism that's too ridiculous to be taken seriously but which lacks even the faintest spark of levity to make it bearable.

Regular readers may have noticed that I have any amount of pet peeves when it comes to movies. The biggest and angriest of these, then, is one that carries over into pretty much every aspect of my life. People, do what you want, but do not make me complicit in your own stupidity. Everybody's stupid sometimes, and that's okay. Some people are stupid pretty much all the time, and y'know what? That's okay, too. What's not okay, however, is when somebody is so dim that they lack the self-awareness to realise that the people around them might be able to see through them. It's that moment when, say, a line manager lies to you through their teeth and office etiquette requires that you nod and smile along even though every fibre of your being is screaming at you to call bullshit, or when a relative spouts racist guff down the phone because they know you're too polite to hang up.

It's that moment when a filmmaker decides to write a halfassed fairytale and not only writes the bad guy as a movie critic but casts himself as the eventual saviour of all mankind. Really, Mr. Shyamalan, what did you think was going to fucking happen?

Perhaps, in the hands of a decent edit crew, the film could have been saved. The cast, for the most part, give the script far more respect than it deserves, and if all the effects shots take place in both the dark and the rain, then at least it keeps the film visually okay. None of this, however, can save the viewer from the all-embracing awfulness of Shyamalan's overarching vision. What could have possessed him to make him think that he could make a general-audience movie out of an improvised bedtime story for his kids? Did he really believe that nobody would roll their eyes at the use of terms like narf and scrunt? It's not that I have anything against fantasy genre pieces - far from it - but there has to be some sort of cohesive central mythology to support the terminology. Here, it seems as though the writer-director is creating his fantasy world on the fly, and trying to keep viewers sympathetic to his cause by relying on such old chestnuts as the tragic backstory, the implausibly diverse group of protagonists and the metric fuckton of PG:13-rated female nudity.

Perhaps I'd have been a little kinder to Lady in the Water had it only been a little worse. There's something to be said for the noble failure, I think, and some rubber suits and a little more racial stereotyping would just about have tipped this one over into the territory of the eye-wateringly awful. As it is, however, it's a well-made, utterly heartfelt monument to the power of the Writer, brought low by the fact that the Writer in question is a bit of a tit.

In loving memory of movie critic Harry Farber, 1950something to 2006.