Thursday 22 July 2010

Hate the game, not the playa

M. Night Shyamalan on the left shooting Lady in the Water. Leave poor Paul Giamatti out ouf this beef with him. (c) 2006 Warner Bros.

A couple of film directors are more hated than anyone right now. These include Mel Gibson, Roman Polanski and M. Night Shyamalan. But only Shyamalan is hated because of his work.

Because of the relatively cheaply made Sixth Sense made truckloads of money back in the last millennium, Shyamalan got what most film directors can only dream of in Hollywood: total creative control. Thus, he directs, produces and writes his own films. And usually even acts a role. Too bad these talents were properly utilized only in Unbreakable. From there on, I've only seen the frankly crap Signs and The Village and I'm a better person for it. Everyone else keeps saying the films get worse and worse.

Shyamalan is hated among movie viewers mostly because with Sixth Sense and Unbreakable he had potential, which went on wasted. All the while big Hollywood studios see that it perhaps doesn't pay off to give directors control over their work. Very few directors get the chance. I hope Christopher Nolan inspires both studios and talented filmmakers to aim for the skies.

One thing in the internet which I've never quite gotten is the hate towards Brett Ratner. True, he's not a very personal director. But hey, most people in Hollywood aren't. Very, very few precentage of Hollywood's directors have any vision whatsoever. I would go on to claim this includes the celebrated X-men director Bryan Singer. Ratner hasn't made any great movies, but I haven't actually seen anything absolutely horrible from him, either (then again, I haven't seen Rush Hour 3). I'm probably the only person in the world that likes X-men 3. Of course I see that the film has some problems, that stem from too much happening at the same time. But I would blame the studio system wanting to make the sequel bigger, rather than Ratner. After all, he made from the studio constantly meddling a perfectly entertaining superhero flick (stop stoning me).

I think the problem is that audiences tend to think too auteuristic of Hollywood films. When it's obvious a director doesn't have much say in the final version of the film, one shouldn't judge the quality of the direction too harshly. After all, we have Michael Bay still making movies when someone spotted that some Jerry Bruckheimer productions were actually DIRECTED by someone. If we could've just ignored him when we had the chance...

So, don't talk about Hollywood directors unless they make something extraordinary, which only an unique vision could do. This does not include Zach Snyder. And if that same unique voice keeps making horrendous new films like M. Night, just keep ignoring him. He'll have to stop at some point when no one wants to see his shit films.

M. Night Shyamalan would literally kill himself were he not so incredibly delusional

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