M. Night Can't Catch a Break

Poor M. Night Shyamalan. The dude just can't catch a break. His new Will Smith-starring sci-fi pic After Earth adventure is currently scoring 13% on Rotten Tomatoes. Variety has called it "listless", a "non-happening", "a leaden affair". Twitch says it's "apocalyptically bad". Film Freak Central gave it ZERO STARS, describing it as "a thinly-sketched, unbearably haughty survival story that cites Moby-Dick as it steals from Suzanne Collins". And so it goes. None of this is surprising of course, given the steady, consistent decline of the Shyamalan brand over the last six films he's made since his breakthrough hit The Sixth Sense. The marketing team at Sony were well-aware of this too, pre-empting any damage wrought by audience expectations ("It's that twist guy again!") by scrubbing his name clean from promo materials to focus on Will Smith. So what happened to M. Night Shyamalan? Have a read of Nick Schager's piece at Village Voice. After Earth comes out in NZ on June 20. Oh yeah, M.'s still talking about doing Unbreakable 2...

Dead in the Water

I'm not gonna trash M. Night Shyamalan at length here, but I have to admit the guy's plummeting career trajectory fascinates me like the best (or worst) of celebrity trainwrecks. Has he become the Michael Jackson of filmmaking? It seems like whatever he says or does these days is ammo for derision, though not undeservedly so. His latest blockbuster The Last Airbender, a big-budget, CGI-laden adaptation of the popular Nickelodeon cartoon series, is one of the worst reviewed films of the year, even worse than his last film, The Happening, which was already bloody awful. The steady promise he showed with his earlier work, such as The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, has all but evaporated - check out this graph put together by Marginal Revolution from ratings sourced from Rotten Tomatoes:

It's hard to see his name getting anyone excited anymore. Will "from the director of The Sixth Sense" still put bums on seats? (I doubt anyone will rush out to see Airbender because it's another M. Night movie...)

A couple other related things...

Shyamalan trying to defend his career at a press conference:



Trailer for Devil, an upcoming high concept thriller he's produced: