Saturday, July 03, 2010

Why does this man get paid to direct?

“This man” being M. Night Shyamalan, a one hit wonder whose career success rate can’t take any steeper trend downwards; it’s been in freefall for a few years already.

Latest evidence:  “The Last Airbender”, with Roger Ebert opening his review with:

"The Last Airbender" is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here.

and ends with:

I close with the hope that the title proves prophetic.

Amusing.  In the WSJ review, we get this bit about the lead actor:

According to Mr. Ringer's understandably slim curriculum vitae, he holds a first-degree black belt in taekwondo. To judge from an informal interview posted on YouTube, he is extremely personable, lively and humorous when he's off screen. On screen, alas, he is none of those things, thanks to the reverse wizardry of his director. (No one else can be blamed when an actor has had no professional experience.)

The review then ends with the exactly the same key question I started with (I only realised this after I started the post):

All of which brings us back to the question of expectations, and how Mr. Shyamalan keeps getting work. Eleven years ago he electrified the movie world with the emotional power and dramatic surprise of "The Sixth Sense." He followed up with two flawed but intriguing features, "Unbreakable" and "Signs." In the past eight years, though, his oeuvre has gone from bad ("The Village") to worse ("Lady in the Water") to worst ("The Happening.") Purists might argue that his last film was less dreadful than his penultimate one, but the hallmarks were the same: stilted language, robotized acting, glacial pace, ponderous style, dramatic ineptitude and negligible energy. I never meant to make this review an exercise in career assassination, but I can't help thinking of all the lavishly talented filmmakers who have earned and never gotten a shot at big-budget success. What's the secret of this guy's failure?

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