Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

Is M. Night Shyamalan for real? And if not, what's he yanking with a prank like Lady in the Water?

The Passion Of The Man Diva

Lady in the Water ( 1/2 * ) is an occasion for superlatives. Let us put a long list of petulant provocateur-cum-auteurs alongside M. Night (nee Manoj) Shyamalan. Pick a few of the past decade: Matthew Barney? Fakir. Lars von Trier? Piker. Quentin Tarantino? Shyly retiring. With his previous film, The Village (which I am willing to defend against most comers), Shyamalan manufactured a feature-length Blair Witch Project-like hoax about his past, enlisting documentarian Nathaniel Kahn (My Architect: A Son's Journey) to make a mock-doc about his "secret" (apocryphal) past. With Lady in the Water, we're offered as a complementary product, a book-length behind-the-scenes portrait of Shyamalan's hurt feelings and "inner thoughts" by sportswriter Michael Bamberger. Can any of it be believed? The hall of mirrors that the would-be Spielberg constructs reflects mostly back on himself and his immense vanity-or onto a multimedia mass of cultural constructs that mock everything about contemporary filmmaking. Is Manoj Shyamalan a performance artist working with $70 million of corporate cash to fuck with us all or what? Watching Lady in the Water, which well could have been signed by a mock-docster named C. Night Guest, one well wonders. Here's the opening paragraph of the Warner Bros. press kit: "A master storyteller can craft a single image or a line of dialogue that resonates with audiences for a lifetime. Years after seeing a film, the mere suggestion of it instantly recalls the emotional impact of the story and our experience of watching that cinematic moment unfold for the first time."

Here's a mere suggestion: Arbitrary, artless, and stunningly ill composed and muddily lit by the oft-astonishing cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Lady in the Water simply ought to be dropped in the pool out back and drowned. Or! Esteemed as the most puckish of pranks ever perpetrated by a conceptual artist posturing as a Trump-scale egomaniac. Or, the draw from the depths of the press booklet, "With Lady in the Water, Shyamalan has created a brand new mythology in the tradition of The Princess Bride, E. T. and the Wizard of Oz that encourages us to have faith in something greater in ourselves: to believe in a world of possibilities behind those we can see or fully comprehend."

Shyamalan ostensibly conceived the "world" of Lady in the Water as a serial bedtime story for his two young daughters. "'The way I tell stories to my kids is very freeform-whatever pops into my head and comes out of my mouth,'" he says of their nightly ritual," according to the Warner notes. (The film's lack of cohesion and coherence suggests there were no rewrites once out of the children's rooms.)

Paul Giamatti is stranded behind a stutter and the ungainly name "Cleveland Heep" as the super of an apartment complex, the Cove, in the Philadelphia exurbs. He's withholding, holding in some sort of dark pain of the usual banality and brutality of Shyamalan backstories. From out of the bowels of The Cove's swimming pool comes a sea nymph called a Narf (Bryce Dallas Howard), whose mythology is offered to viewers in bursts, told a six-foot-tall Korean student/clubber who draws out a childhood story from her non-English speaking mother. Among the other notable actors are Jeffrey Wright, as a man who reads clues from crossword puzzles (his character's son divines from the side panels of breakfast cereal boxes), Jared Harris (as Goateed Smoker), and Bob Balaban, who plays a film critic named Farber. Two crickets by that surname are living, the 70ish Stephen and the near-90-year-old great Manny Farber. But Shyamalan's Farber doesn't talk like a reviewer: he talks like a jerky clerk from the deepest reaches of a movie studio's development hell. Sarita Choudhury, with one of the world's loveliest faces, looks wonderful, but still doesn't get the lighting of the actor playing her brother, a meek man who's written a text called "The Cookbook," which the Narf prophesies will change the course of mankind by inspiring future generations of idealists, many years after his own murder. The messianic prophet with the big puppy eyes and loving lighting scheme would be none other, of course, than M. Night Shyamalan. The scary beasts include a Scrunt that creeps over the hedgerow and a trio of late-to-the-party but peeved Tarturics.

And - The Passion Of The Clerks ...
Almost 7,000 loquacious effing words from Kevin Smith about Clerks II.

July 22 , 2006

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