I remember seeing The Sixth Sense and being deeply impressed, not by the movie necessarily, but by the very obvious imprint by it's director and writer.
That was the year before I moved to Los Angeles to pursue filmmaking. I'd only started seriously studying directors about 3 years earlier. I loved movies but I was mostly a Hollywood movie fan, independent films and the influence of the filmmaker was new stuff to me so it was exciting. I remember meeting Eduardo Sanchez at a screening of Blair Witch in Orlando. It just felt really possible I could make it too.
And here was this new voice that not only impressed me, but showed that people of color could actually get a movie made with a decent budget without it being about their perceived culture (a hood film by a black director, a martial arts movie by an Asian, etc). I'm black and I've never identified much with my "culture", though I do respect it. Every time I would tell someone I wanted to be a filmmaker, they assumed Spike Lee was my idol or something. That really annoyed the shit out of me because I don't like limitations being placed on me. My idols were Spielberg, Lucas, and later Tarantino, the Coens and Soderbergh...I liked some of Lee's work, but felt he was a bit too militant in his perspective and obsessed with race relations.
Anyway, as I moved to LA I followed Shyamalan's career with great interest. I didn't much care for Unbreakable (felt it was slow for the sake of being slow, and a little too dour), but I did recognize the skill that went into making a very good film...Shyamalan, wrote, shot and edited his movies very much unlike contemporary Hollywood was doing at that point...he was the anti-Michael Bay and that was thrilling. I felt like he really GOT the nature of cinema, much like Hitchcock and Fellini and was using it to it's full potential.
Signs brought my faith back. It's still one of the best and scariest times I've had in a theater. When the alien walks across the alley in the kid's birthday video, I actually screamed, something I've never done before or since in a theater. It has its flaws, but I feel it's the height of Night's directorial skill. And when I was having trouble making it in Hollywood, I would go back to the well of Night, reading about him, watching behind the scenes, to renew my faith.
The Village was troubling...it's when the first signs that something was seriously wrong started to become apparent. The movie was fine up until the ludicrous ending, which didn't work at all with the information the audience had at that point. How could Night judge his ending (and as a result, the entire film) so poorly? Every director has a misfire, several usually, so I shrugged it off and awaited the next release.
I honestly don't remember why I skipped Lady In The Water upon release. I think it was probably because of the critical drumming the film took and I didn't want that coloring my reaction. Plus I'd read the book The Man Who Heard Voices, which is kind of a scathing indictment of Night...but at the time I just enjoyed it as an in depth look at the film business and appreciated all it revealed about Night's process.
When I finally did see Lady, I was in shock. I still, to this day, have not finished the movie. It's too painful to watch. Lady is not only a terrible film, it's an indication Night may have either been switched with a lesser talented double, or sold his soul to the devil to gain his success. It's as if someone else made the movie. Everything that was wrong with the ending of The Village, was spread through this entire movie. Whole sequences were shot incompetently...angles were missing that would be standard for any other film. I know Night likes to edit in camera like Spielberg and John Ford and Soderbergh, giving scenes more dramatic and emotional weight and nuance (a technique I agree with), but this time, he took it too far.
I was one of Night's biggest champions before Lady. I would defend him against "haters" out for blood, making fun of his name, calling him a hack. I chalked it up to jealousy, racism, immaturity, whatever. But I'd now seen the light. Had these people seen something in Night I'd been ignoring for so long?
I kind of stopped thinking about Night after the Lady fiasco, because it was too painful. I know it sounds like I'm exaggerating, talking as if about some long lost love, but I do love movies, and I take my heroes very seriously. If Spielberg ever nosedived this severely, I'd need to go to therapy.
Then The Happening...happened. I didn't see it upon release, but I was able to see some of it on dvd. Again, I couldn't finish the movie. I just couldn't. It was not only bad, it was stupefyingly bad...it was as if Night had become completely tone deaf. The performances were wretched, but all the actors are good to decent, so it had to be Night directing them into oblivion.
When Last Airbender came out I hadn't thought much about Night in years. The only reason I wanted to see it was because my roommate's friend had a small part in it. But she was eventually cut from the film. I didn't think Night could get worse, but he did. How, I have no idea. It was as if he was willfully making a bad movie just to show people he could and have it still make hundreds of millions, which it did. Every scene was laughable...beyond laughable, existentially humiliating to watch as a film of not only Night, but cinema. It was a big budget Corman movie.
I honestly want answers as to what happened to this man. What got to him? Money? Power? Fame? A double? Is his head really so far up his ass that he can't spot a bad decision when he sees it? I'd heard the theory of the artist inside a bubble, so off in his own world, he refuses to listen to reason and surrounds himself with yes men... mostly from George Lucas stories, but this was absurd.
I've seen Night talk about filmmaking technique. He knows his shit. His career is not a fluke...you can't make his first three films on a fluke. So I ask, again, what the fuck happened to this man?
