A couple weeks ago, Carmen Santa Rosa said to me, “You know what I saw recently and really loved? The Village. Why did you tell me it sucked?”

Well, because it did.

“No it didn’t. I thought it was an interesting commentary on innocence and the price of staying innocent. I also thought it was interesting how the elders capitalized on fear to protect their people from crime. In that way, it coud also be about the way American society functions…”

Yeah, yeah, and it’s a meditation about the price utopia too but it doesn’t make it any good.

It’s not that I don’t like Night. In fact, I quite like his films. At the big budget studio level, no one makes movies like him and his skill at creating mood, telling it with camera composition and movements, and allowing actors to act (and not editing together performances) is undeniable.

It took me a couple of veiwings with Unbreakable before I was able to disregard the comic book nerdery and actually enjoy the filmmaking. Now, I much prefer Unbreakable than The Sixth Sense (I even prefer the the first two acts of Signs - or the first 118 minutes - more than I do TSS).

But man - Lady in the Water is a hot ass mess. It’s the first of his big studio pictures that lacks the surehanded direction that guided the previous films, even The Village. In fact, Lady in the Water makes The Village look like The Godfather…III.

I thought that I could just go into Lady in the Water, disregard the story and just enjoy the filmmaking…

Oh no.  Lord no.  Please don’t let Night shock my baby with a story about a narf named Story and how the residents of an apartment complex [mankind] must protect her [the “Story”] from evil monsters called “scrunts” and “critics” so that after she delivers some messages from the Dionne Warwick and the Psychic Friends Network, she can be swept back home by a giant bald eagle.

Seriously. And I haven’t even gotten to, what Bryan Curtis at Slate calls, the “Justice Monkeys” (because that’s exactly what they are: Justice Monkeys).

Let’s recap: Narfs + Scrunts + Justice Monkeys + Critics.  Ridiculous.

You try disengaging amongst all this craziness. And if you are ever on the verge of forgetting the ludicrousity, Shyamalan tells you over and over again. All of this had a Brechtian effect on me making the type of disengagement I was planning on impossible.
That having been said, it’s actually the story that makes the movie Lady in the Water so damn fascinating, and on some levels, absolutely worth seeing, but only in a trainwreck sort of way (Warner Brothers, I can’t wait to see: “Johnny Hong Kong says, Lady in the Water is ‘…so damn fascinating…absolutely worth seeing’” on commercials and billboards).

I can’t remember a movie where you’re given such an unveiled and unprotected look into a filmmaker’s psyche. His hubris and insecurities are well documented to be sure, but here, they are explicated by the Man(oj) himself in every facet as writer, producer, actor and director. In this way, Lady of the Water can be understood as the first ever, real life portal into a man’s consciousness like in Being John Malkovich. Who knew Night was a postmodernist and that the “M” doesn’t actually stand for Manoj, but rather Meta.

On a technical note, how the hell did Chris Doyle end up shooting LotW? Forget the fact that that’s almost like Wong Kar-Wai writing voiceovers for Bryan Singer but brash, drunk, shoot-from-the-hip and punch you in the mouth Doyle working with earnest ass Shyamalan? Did Doyle steal Shyamalan’s lunch money everyday?

And I wonder how the offer went down. I imagine Doyle reading the script while drunk and getting serviced by some Asian hotttness, scoffing and calling Night, swearing at him in Cantonese, telling him that he wouldn’t deign to shoot his polk gai shit, and then accepting the offer in English when he realized the dollars that could be earned from robbing Shyamalan blind.

I guess Wu-Tang was right: “Cash rules everything around C.R.E.A.M. get the money, dolla-dolla bills y’all.”

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