Lady in the Water

When I saw its teaser trailer, I loved it--I loved the choice of music and its ambiance. I thought that Night Shyamalan was finally ready to tell a straight story without his signature 'surprising ending.' But subsequent trailers gave me the impression that he's back to his old bag of tricks.

And I was sooo right. Disney passed on the script for this movie, which I can sympathsize--with execs no less! Actually, I don't understand why the man talented as Night Shyamalan decide to make this weak story, thinly veiled as a fairy tale. A Korean (!!) fairy tale. (You will understand if you've seen this movie.) No, I'm not aware of any Korean fairy tale resembling this story. It sounds more like a version of Little Mermaid.

There are so many things that went wrong with the movie, but the biggest problem is the premise: why did narf-haunting Bryce Dallas Howard, decide to show up and caused this whole mess in the first place? What did the main characters learn from this other-worldly encounter? Nada, zero, nothing.

Secondly, for a Korean-American that I am, why did they cast Chinese for Korean characters in this movie and why can't they speak lick of either English or Korean? What's with the Buddha statue and burning incenses? Talk about cliches! And yet Indians, including the director himself, live modern American setting without any incenses or funky Indian music in the background.

There's no doubt that Night Shyamalan made some good movies that portrayed ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. However, I'm afraid that he's losing his touch as a writer, if not a director. He got a book basically explaining his 'calling' to make this movie. Bad move. If your movie can't stand on its own, no amount of explanations will save your movie. That's how I feel it, anyway.

The Village was disappointing. But this movie is huge let down that I don't know if I could give next Shyamalan movie a chance.