Lady in the Water (2006) Reviews

• I know I am in the minority here, but I enjoyed it

  the_scandal_cha2006-07-22

  First off, I can see why this film is going to be a box-office flop and why critics and audiences alike will not like it. I, who usually disagrees with most audiences, at least, thoroughly enjoyed this film. The storyline itself is rather ridiculous, I must say. Some girl shows up in a pool? She's a what-a narf? I went into the movie thinking I would hate it, but I came out knowing that I had seen a work of art. That's right. It was art. First of all, it's a good family film, with enough tense moments to keep you watching, and enough laugh-out-loud moments to calm you down. It was refreshing for once to see a film with good, clean humour. The dialogue was not necessarily hilarious, but the actors, especially Paul Giamatti (Cleveland) delivered the lines extremely well. The acting was tremendously well done also. Paul Giamatti is always fantastic, and while Bryce Dallas Howard seemed to act in the same manner as she did in The Village, she was still convincing. The ensemble cast worked well together. Some might bash M. Night for casting himself in a not-so-cameo role, but he proved that he can actually act! No, his performance will not win him an Oscar, nor should it, but I think there is definite talent there. I hope to see him in bigger roles, in films not his own. The plot had many twists, maybe too many, but no matter. I kept trying to guess what was going to happen, but it I was always wrong. It was quite interesting. What most made this film a work of art was the directing. M. Night has a rare talent that will go completely under the radar for this film because no one will see it. The camera angles were inventive-that's right, inventive. I may be one of the few who actually cares about camera angles and how a scene looks, but it looked great. The final product was polished. I truly believe this film is M. Night's best work. He made the story up himself, wrote a screenplay that made us laugh, smile, cringe, and jump just a little, and directed a great ensemble cast including himself. Quite a feat. So before everyone starts ranting about how stupid the storyline is or how "so-not-scary" the film is, just appreciate the uniqueness of the film, and remember what makes this film good. Forget the crazy story. It's everything else!

• Lady In The Water - A True Bedtime Story

  banksj2006-07-17

  Bottom line: Phili must be a crazy place to live. I walk into every M. Night film knowing, good or bad, I am going to see a picture that is imaginative, original, and full of hope. This is one of very few writer/directors who actually strive to bring something new to the cinema on each different outing. So, how was the film? Good. Dare I say, great? If you like his films, this one will definitely hit you deep. You'll put it at the top of your "M. Night List", and be glad to have it in your DVD collection later this year. First, the acting. We all know Night has a habit of picking actors from the same pool. People he knows, trusts, and has worked with before. Willis has helmed two of his films, while Joaquin another two. This will be Bryce Dallas Howards second as well. We are used to Night writing his lead characters as more of a shadow of a man that once was. A tragic figure; this is no different in "Lady In The Water". Giamatti plays Heep very, very well. But, because of Giamatti's inclusion into Nights' world, we see things much lighter. Willis, Gibson, and Phoenix had a habit of turning everything dark and dreary. And while Giamatti is still a tragic figure, he is eager to believe and more than willing to take the word of a half naked girl in his home. I, personally, believe that he is the greatest actor Night has worked with. And the result? A much lighter film. Thank God. This is a fantasy. Not a horror, not a film with a twist (spoiler: there is none), which is good, because a twist would have put Night into an early grave. As a fantasy, a bed time story, Night treats us like children. Characters speak their inner dialogues, creatures with interesting names plague us at every turn, and the residents of this apartment complex are as interesting and comic as they are important. There is still the important Night message: Purpose. We all have one. We all are meant to be somebody. Now, all we have to do is figure that out. Even the intro reads like a children's' book; illustrations dance about in order to create a younger element to this tale. The plot is simple. Nymphs, beasts, guilds, healers, etc. Almost like a role-playing video game in a sense. The music and cinematography? Night kept his all-star team, and the project was helmed and sculpted beautifully. The faults? I dare say Night could have done with less characters. They all seemed important, but it crowded the screen, and left us with a question: Is this that persons' only purpose? That's sad. But, have fun with this film. It's a treat, as rare as Nights' films are. Night brings a world of reality into a world of dreams, and the saddest point of the film, was when we had to wake up.

• One bizarre evening

  mstomaso2006-08-02

  I can't rate this film. When I go to see a Shyamalan film, I expect to be entertained and stimulated, but I never know exactly how this will be accomplished. Shyamalan's films use ambiguity aesthetically and he draws his audience through the seduction of interpretive participation. Of all of his films, perhaps Lady in the Water does this most profoundly. Although I understood the entire film - the plot, the themes, the method - I walked away asking "what the hell did I just see?" It's easy enough to categorize the film. Lady in the Water is an absurdist comedy. But it makes you ask yourself why you are laughing. With Shyamalan's talent as it is, it is impossible for me to believe that any aspect of the humor of this film was unintentional. Yet the other side of LITW is dark fantasy, in the tradition of Michael Cohn's Snow White. With a cast David Lynch would have been happy with, Shyamalan tells a fable from East Asia as it is experienced by a superintendent (Giamatti) at an apartment complex full of mundanely odd characters. A strange and beautiful young woman (Howard) has emerged from the complex's pool, apparently seeking contact with the surface world so she can find folkloric archetypes who can protect her from the evil creatures that hunt her and return her to her world beneath the waves. Giamatti, Howard, and Shyamalan himself are all very entertaining. Howard - a very unusual looking and uniquely pretty woman - is shot so beautifully that it is very difficult to take your eyes off of her. M. Night's performance is so bizarre, it is hard to tell whether or not he is acting. LITW is definitely the strangest film I have seen from Shyamalan. I have been up and down with him since the beginning of his career, enjoying his early films, very much disliking Signs, and being impressed with the Village. I believe that with the Village and LITW, M. Night is establishing a new and unique direction for himself. And if he keeps going this way, I will gladly follow.

• Pedantic, contrived exercise in tedium and boredom

  strikefire832006-07-24

  As someone who loved The Sixth Sense and Signs, and who liked Unbreakable, I've got to say it's disappointing where Shyamalan seems to be taking his movies. Lady in the Water has none of those attributes. For one thing, it's boring, something none of his other movies were. Here we have a sloppily unstructured mess of a film filled to the brim with incoherent bedtime story "mythology" that changes from one minute to the next, so even if you try and follow the world of the story your efforts will only be met with frustration. The film's flaws are many, and as others have and will point them out with much more dexterity than me, I'll simply list the films greatest foibles. 1) Shyamalan casts HIMSELF as a John the Baptist character who will inspire "a great leader who will change everything" from a hastily constructed presumable political treatise entitled, of all things, The Cookbook. Give me a break! As someone who styles himself as a modern day Hitchcock, M. Night should take a page from that man's book and continue to play cameo roles, not central ones. 2) His supporting characters are a mish-mash of ethnic and cultural stereotypes. The "Asian" student who attends university but cannot string together a coherent English sentence. Of course the otherworldly "mythology" is the remnant of some vaguely Eastern legend based on truth. The old Jewish woman is tackily dressed and her husband is always in the bathroom. Please. 3) The film/movie critic is one of the ONLY interesting and rounded characters, and Shyamalan kills him off as he rattles off trite contrivances. This character's appearance seems like a defensive self-conscious way to preempt the critical panning of this film. When a writer forces one of his characters to go on the defensive in dialogue, you know something has got to be wrong with a movie. 4) Shyamalan continues his now hackneyed convention of having a protagonist who's suffered tremendous loss in the form of familial death. Enough Already. Paul G is a great actor, the unnecessary back story about a dead family and a lost medical practice trite and out of place. The list goes on and on, but suffice it to say this movie is a waste of celluloid, or hard drive space if you'd prefer. Avoid like plague.

• The audacity of the man

  wozza102006-08-26

  M Night Shyamalaan is an excellent film-maker. OK, the twist in The Village was obvious after minutes, but it was a film that did not deserve some of the lashings it received. But 'Lady In The Water' is a different story. It is a film that fails in everything it's trying to be. Primarily it's trying to be a family, fantasy adventure movie and I cannot imagine what kind of child (the primary audience for this genre) is not going to be bored out of their mind from the off. The reason it fails is Night and Night alone. Again he has made a slow burning dialogue heavy movie set completely in "reality". Where this film should be bright, lively, fun, exciting, magical it is instead dull (this is the worst work Chris Doyle's done), lifeless, turgid, bland and, dare I say, boring. The world of the movie is inappropriate for the genre it's living in. The reason that this style doesn't work is that the whole point of the movie is that's it's a fantastical bedtime story, yet it's devoid of anything fantastical. This film should be set in a world like ours, but not ours. Night - not everything in your imagination can happen in Philadelphia! This movie also feels like it's only ever gone thru two drafts. First draft was a straight up bedtime story which Night has read back and realised "man, this doesn't work... at all. It's terrible" so he's written in a whole layer of character (allegedly... horrifically inaccurate caricature's more accurate) and dialogue who are there solely to justify how bad some things are. sadly he doesn't seem to have read draft 2 to realise that the layers justifying how rubbish everything is are even worsely executed meaning the script is two layers of $h1t on top of each other. And then you have the complete audacity of the man in casting himself as the man who will (essentially) write the second bible. This would be ego gone insane if he was actually any good, but his performance is the one in the movie that really isn't anywhere near what it needs to be. There's a moment when the character finds out what his fate will be, a scene which an actor of quality would have been able to wrench your heart with, but a moment where Night actually looks like he's realised the film he's made could destroy his career (although I hope not)! Man, I could go on and on from the backstory being explained to you chunk at a time for no reason other than to flesh out the idea beyond what it ever deserved in such a way that it feels like Night's rewriting the rules of his own film as he goes because he's never had any solid idea of what the rules are at the start to the film critic who's only film criticism is "it sucked" which instantly destroys the attempt to set him up as an arrogant highbrow critic (he also gets possibly the worst cinematic death ever) to how blatantly obvious the red herrings are. I genuinely cannot see what anyone can see positively about this movie (as a whole), unless they are so sure Night's a genius they cannot see beyond the name to the film that's actually there.