SCHAUDENFREUDE

The awful buzz I'd heard about Lady in the Water seems to be wonderfully, mercifully true. If you're an M. Night fan (I'm not), then don't read this review or this review or this review. And those are only three of a dozen or more I've read today already, each more scathing than the next.

There's a rabid M. Night cult out there that will no doubt love it, but other than admitting to his undeniably elegant visual craft, I've tired of his truly awful and derivative screenwriting on everything after The Sixth Sense (and even then, I was mostly impressed by the craft of the film -- the performances and the twist were fun, but as zombietruckstop says, the script is nothing more than a Twilight Zone remake).

All of his other films have made me more and more frustrated -- I always want to enjoy his stylish sense of film craft, and think that he sometimes flirts with what seems like brilliance -- but in the end, he ends up being nothing but hacky hoodwinkery and self-indulgence.

Based on these reviews, I'm totally not surprised that Disney passed on the script, and will look forward to sneaking into it for free to see just how bad it really is. Yay! The emperor has no clothes!

UPDATE: my favorite quotes so far are from a review in Wired magazine:

Lady is an annotated version of itself, so determined to explain every arcane detail of its mystical world that it forgets to draw us into it, to make it real.

We also see plenty of the narf... we know she's a water creature because, well, because Cleveland says she is. But -- get this -- we never get to see her swim!

That's more than a storytelling problem. It represents an inexcusable failure of imagination. How can you make a $75 million movie about water nymphs without showing them in the water?

SUMMERISLE

"Do sit down, Sergeant...

Shocks are so much better absorbed with the knees bent."

Just watched a DVD of The Wicker Man -- I'd never seen the whole thing, but remember seeing bits of it on TV as a kid and being really spooked out by it. Plus, I'd seen the trailer for the remake recently, so I wanted to make sure I see the original first.

It's a very interesting sort of "anti-horror" film -- especially considering it stars Hammer horror icons Christopher Lee and Ingrid Pitt. Not a trace of gore to be had, but tons of creepy atmosphere and great performances -- and strangely, it's partially a musical! Plus, it's got an ending that you'll either see coming a mile away or will pack a twisty wallop for you -- and either way, it's still really great.

I'm not much of a Nicholas Cage fan, but the remake was written and directed by Neil LaBute, which gives me a shred of hope that it might actually be pretty good. Here's hoping.