Channel Larry (EDIT: Channel Awesome renamed to just Nostalgia Critic)

[talonmalon333]

I don't particularly like the show, but I feel correct in assuming the movie is an insult to it.

[Peanutbutter]

Yeah, Avatar's not one of the best series of all time. Man, I'm gonna sing that song until the day I day.

Watching the review now though.

Calling it THE best would be wrong, but I don't see how just because you don't see why the series is great makes it undeserving of being placed in as one of the best of all time.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Here is the quote:

Mr. Shyamalan has had his own peculiar stardom. "The Sixth Sense," a deservedly huge hit, was followed by three features of decreasing quality and increasing turgidity that nevertheless earned him more celebrity by earning huge piles of money. All four films were made for Disney, so the filmmaker was stunned when Disney's Nina Jacobson and Dick Cook expressed deep reservations about his script for "Lady in the Water." And before that, according to the book, he was flummoxed by Ms. Jacobson's decision to take her son to a birthday party rather than stay home to take delivery of the script at the precise hour that Night had planned. (In fairness, the book has him eventually coming to respect Disney's candor, and to believe that their doubts strengthened his resolve.)

GIVEN THE WAY the film turned out, the book proves to be -- again, unwittingly -- a tribute to Disney's wisdom. It's more than that, though. Writers prowling around movie sets constitute an occupational hazard of the filmmaking process, and this writer, in his hapless way, has given new meaning to the notion of the tell-all book.

There are a few articles here that talk you back to his fall.

This one is from 2006 before 'Lady In The Water' proved Disney wasn't the one holding him back and that 'The Village' really was a letdown and a slip in quality. Since it isn't formatted well, I'll try to do that here.

The Fall Of M. Night Shyamalan

M. Night Shyamalan settles into a chair in his dining room, examining the movie posters from a career defined by hits -- The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village -- and wonders whether he has lost his touch.

"Maybe I've had a disconnect with people," he says. "Maybe the wine and food I like isn't the wine and food everyone else likes now."

It's a remarkable admission for a man whose four big-studio pictures have taken in more than $2 billion in theaters and home video sales. But it has been a remarkable 18 months for Shyamalan, 35. In just a year and a half, he has parted ways with Disney, the studio that distributed all of his big movies. He has cooperated with a new tell-all book, The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, that details the split and vilifies Disney executives.

But most disconcerting is a question that has been nagging at him for months: Has he made a movie no one wants to see?

Lady in the Water opens Friday with a lot of reputations at stake. Disney executives will be watching the film's performance to validate their decision to end the relationship with Shyamalan. Warner Bros. will be watching the same numbers to justify their decision to snap up the director and give him $70 million to make this film and, they hope, more under the Warner Bros. banner.

No one's credibility, though, is more on the line than Shyamalan's. Already some media outlets are blasting the director, whom they say has fallen prey to hubris.The New York Times called Voices "a full-length, unintentionally riotous puff book." Newsweek, which once put Shyamalan on its cover under the title "The Next Spielberg," is now calling for a "career intervention" to address his arrogance.

Lately, Shyamalan concedes, he has caught himself agreeing with the criticisms. "In your darker moments, you worry that your tastes have rarefied," he says. "It's very possible that's what's happening. And in the event that Lady doesn't find its audience, that's going to be looming over me." Yet for all the questions and self-doubt, Shyamalan says he has found an inner peace he rarely has known as a director. "I've never gotten to this place this close to the opening where I felt as little anxiety as I feel right now," he says. "Even if it's a financial disaster, I know it's going to work out, because I got to make the movie I was dreaming to make."

Divorced from Disney

It was a movie he planned to make with Disney, which shepherded his last four films to a box office haul of $1.6 billion domestically and worldwide.
But tensions began to mount after 2004's The Village, about a blind girl who must enter woods she believes are haunted to save her fiance. Although it took in $114 million domestically and $142 million overseas, the movie underperformed for a Shyamalan picture and was raked by critics.

The director knew Lady would be a hard sell. Born of a bedtime story he told his daughters, his newest film is a fantasy that stars Paul Giamatti as an apartment building superintendent who rescues a sea nymph, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, whom he finds in his swimming pool. The movie proved the toughest since Sixth Sense to write. Shyamalan reworked the script six times. "It's a modern-day fantasy," Shyamalan says from his office on a 40-acre horse farm that doubles as a family getaway. Lady "has a female lead with no superstars in it," he says. "It isn't a traditional scary movie for me to sell. It doesn't have a twist ending. I expected it would send a lot of mixed signals to people who perceive me as a certain type of director."

What he didn't expect was the reaction he got from Disney executives.

When Shyamalan finishes an early cut of a movie, he screens it for two dozen of his closest friends. All must fill out a report card about what works and what doesn't.Though he won't say what Lady scored, he says, "It did well. Better than I thought it would."

At a dinner at a Philadelphia hotel in February last year, however, it became clear that the movie had not scored well with Disney. Shyamalan met with Disney chairman Dick Cook, marketing chief Oren Aviv and Disney president Nina Jacobson. Shyamalan says that when Jacobson rattled off a list of concerns she had about the movie, including his decision to give himself a meaty role and a scene in which a movie critic is mauled, he lost his composure. He left the restaurant vowing that he was through with Disney, even though Cook offered to produce the film with a $60 million budget and the freedom to make Lady any way he wanted.

Though Disney executives confirmed details of the dinner and offer, officials declined to elaborate on the split. "We enjoyed a fruitful relationship with Night Shyamalan that lasted six years and yielded four wonderful movies," a press release from Disney says. "We wish him the best of luck with Lady in the Water and on all of his future endeavors." Such divorces are rare in Hollywood because the marriages are even rarer. Most directors shop their scripts to the studio that bids highest.

Shyamalan says money had nothing to do with the split. Instead, he says, he felt Disney had lost faith in him."They didn't like the movie. They weren't saying 'Let's work it out.' They weren't saying 'Tell me how you're going to fix it.' It wasn't like that," he says. "Warner Bros. loves the movie. That's important to me. Until they loved it, I wasn't happy."

Shyamalan has spent much of his life seeking approval. When he was admitted to New York University's film school, his father, he says, told him "It's not Princeton." When Newsweek put him on its cover, he says his father reminded him the magazine had a smaller circulation than Time. Disney, Shyamalan says, "was very much a parent to me, one that I wanted to please. I thought I would make movies for Disney until I was an old man. But at some point, the child has to decide to go on his own."

Faith in his movies

Will audiences follow?

Gitesh Pandya of boxofficeguru.com says that Lady could be a hard sell "because it seems to fall somewhere in between a fairy tale and a horror movie. It's not well defined, at least in the ads." He's quick to add, though, that "Shyamalan is still a director who attracts an audience by his name alone. There aren't many of those around."

There also aren't many filmmakers "who evoke such strong feelings, on both sides of the fence," says Howard, who also starred in The Village. "His movies polarize people because they're so emotional," she says. "And he's uncompromising about the story he wants to tell. I think the feelings run the gamut from obsession to hatred for him. "But whatever you're feeling, it's un-ignorable."

There was no ignoring his bolt from Disney, says Michael Bamberger, author of Voices. "You can say that he's a crybaby for walking away from Disney's offer," says Bamberger, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. "And he does have an ego. He is obsessive. But he's not cynical. He believes in the movies. And he really was hurt that they didn't believe in a movie that's about faith."

Now Shyamalan must face whether moviegoers still believe in him. He admits that the question has been pressing of late. "I don't know that I could be an independent filmmaker," he says. "I think there's something universal in the stories I try to tell. But trying to do that, you can torture yourself. The 'I (stink)' is a pretty powerful tool when I'm doing a movie."

In fact, Shyamalan has enjoyed making only one, Signs, a movie he says was made "for the Denny's crowd. I think that was fun because it was a popcorn movie. I was going for the masses." His personal favorite, however, is Unbreakable, a movie he made his way, with the clout he earned from Sixth Sense's $672 million worldwide box office haul. Unbreakable did $95 million at the U.S. box office despite shots from critics that it was too dense and dark.

If Shyamalan prefers underdog movies, Lady may soon become his favorite. He concedes that the battle with Disney to make the film might have overshadowed his reason for making it. "If this doesn't do well, maybe I'll realize that I was so worried about getting it made that I didn't realize I had something that doesn't reach audiences," he says.

There may even be something cathartic about the movie failing, he says. "Maybe what would really help is a complete disaster. Something that would clean the slate. People could trash me to oblivion, say I'm done. Then there are no great expectations. There's nowhere to go but up." But this is one film for which he'll try to tune out the skeptics, the studio execs, the box office analysts.

"People may turn this into my disaster," he says. "But it won't be for me. This is the movie my kids wanted to see get made. It's the movie I wanted to make. No matter what happens, I love this movie."

--- Night's numbers M. Night Shyamalan's The Lady in the Water, based on a children's story he wrote, is a departure for the writer/director of movies that have surprise endings.

[Avaitor]

Daymnnnn

It's a good review, but wow Doug was pitchy at points. I definitely understand his anger though.

[Nel_Annette]

Ah yes, the infamous scene where it takes six guys to lift a fucking rock and throw it. Just... just beautiful.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

It's been a while since I've seen Unbreakable, but I remember liking that film well enough when it came out. As for The Sixth Sense and Signs, I think that the former is easily his best film, and the latter has problems, but I have a soft spot for that one and think it's still a decent watch if you can look past it's problems (I think Doug is a bit too harsh on it, personally). That said, yeah, everything that he has done since then is garbage. I could forgive The Village because that was his first bad movie and it was the first time he got full reign over a film to do what he wanted. The film was terrible, so he should have learned his lesson there. After that, though, he kept getting even worse with each new release and somehow I get the notion that he is one of those people who has way too much of an ego to admit that he's honestly not that great of a director, and thus won't except anyone's feedback. I mean, when he doesn't have complete control over a movie and there are people to fix the stupidities in his writing and directing, he can turn out what I would call a solid flick (I certainly wouldn't call any of his movies great, even the good ones). But if you just let the guy do whatever he wants, it's pretty much the right set-up for a complete embarrassment of a film.

Also, in regard to the NC's review of TLA, I thought that representing Shyamalan as Amon was fucking ingenious, as was the idea of "talent" bending, in reference to how he takes away the acting abilities of actual good actors (which is so damn true). I'm also glad that the Nostalgia Critic pointed out how strange it was for Shyamalan to cast Katara and Sokka as white people, and all of the Fire Nation as Indian people (a friend of mine pointed that out to me as well, before I had seen the film). It's not racist at all to make note of that. It's just really bizarre as an adaptation for Shyamalan to go that route.

[No-Personality]

I believe you have to see the movie to appreciate the review. And I don't believe they expected people who hadn't seen the movie to be impressed with the video.

That's not the way to get the most amount of interest for a review.

This one was an exception to the rule.

Anyway, I watched NC's Les Mis review and I agree it stank. Too many old ideas that have been done to death and...they need new ideas. Has Paw ever been the FilmBrain of a crossover before? For the first 15 minutes, he kept getting the na?ve-guy-asks-stupid-questions clich?...okay, I don't need to say anymore but I keep waiting for Doug to mature as a writer. Even though I still laughed at his Jurassic Park review.

[Peanutbutter]

Here is the quote:

Mr. Shyamalan has had his own peculiar stardom. "The Sixth Sense," a deservedly huge hit, was followed by three features of decreasing quality and increasing turgidity that nevertheless earned him more celebrity by earning huge piles of money. All four films were made for Disney, so the filmmaker was stunned when Disney's Nina Jacobson and Dick Cook expressed deep reservations about his script for "Lady in the Water." And before that, according to the book, he was flummoxed by Ms. Jacobson's decision to take her son to a birthday party rather than stay home to take delivery of the script at the precise hour that Night had planned. (In fairness, the book has him eventually coming to respect Disney's candor, and to believe that their doubts strengthened his resolve.)

GIVEN THE WAY the film turned out, the book proves to be -- again, unwittingly -- a tribute to Disney's wisdom. It's more than that, though. Writers prowling around movie sets constitute an occupational hazard of the filmmaking process, and this writer, in his hapless way, has given new meaning to the notion of the tell-all book.

There are a few articles here that talk you back to his fall.

This one is from 2006 before 'Lady In The Water' proved Disney wasn't the one holding him back and that 'The Village' really was a letdown and a slip in quality. Since it isn't formatted well, I'll try to do that here.

The Fall Of M. Night Shyamalan

M. Night Shyamalan settles into a chair in his dining room, examining the movie posters from a career defined by hits -- The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village -- and wonders whether he has lost his touch.

"Maybe I've had a disconnect with people," he says. "Maybe the wine and food I like isn't the wine and food everyone else likes now."

It's a remarkable admission for a man whose four big-studio pictures have taken in more than $2 billion in theaters and home video sales. But it has been a remarkable 18 months for Shyamalan, 35. In just a year and a half, he has parted ways with Disney, the studio that distributed all of his big movies. He has cooperated with a new tell-all book, The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, that details the split and vilifies Disney executives.

But most disconcerting is a question that has been nagging at him for months: Has he made a movie no one wants to see?

Lady in the Water opens Friday with a lot of reputations at stake. Disney executives will be watching the film's performance to validate their decision to end the relationship with Shyamalan. Warner Bros. will be watching the same numbers to justify their decision to snap up the director and give him $70 million to make this film and, they hope, more under the Warner Bros. banner.

No one's credibility, though, is more on the line than Shyamalan's. Already some media outlets are blasting the director, whom they say has fallen prey to hubris.The New York Times called Voices "a full-length, unintentionally riotous puff book." Newsweek, which once put Shyamalan on its cover under the title "The Next Spielberg," is now calling for a "career intervention" to address his arrogance.

Lately, Shyamalan concedes, he has caught himself agreeing with the criticisms. "In your darker moments, you worry that your tastes have rarefied," he says. "It's very possible that's what's happening. And in the event that Lady doesn't find its audience, that's going to be looming over me." Yet for all the questions and self-doubt, Shyamalan says he has found an inner peace he rarely has known as a director. "I've never gotten to this place this close to the opening where I felt as little anxiety as I feel right now," he says. "Even if it's a financial disaster, I know it's going to work out, because I got to make the movie I was dreaming to make."

Divorced from Disney

It was a movie he planned to make with Disney, which shepherded his last four films to a box office haul of $1.6 billion domestically and worldwide.
But tensions began to mount after 2004's The Village, about a blind girl who must enter woods she believes are haunted to save her fiance. Although it took in $114 million domestically and $142 million overseas, the movie underperformed for a Shyamalan picture and was raked by critics.

The director knew Lady would be a hard sell. Born of a bedtime story he told his daughters, his newest film is a fantasy that stars Paul Giamatti as an apartment building superintendent who rescues a sea nymph, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, whom he finds in his swimming pool. The movie proved the toughest since Sixth Sense to write. Shyamalan reworked the script six times. "It's a modern-day fantasy," Shyamalan says from his office on a 40-acre horse farm that doubles as a family getaway. Lady "has a female lead with no superstars in it," he says. "It isn't a traditional scary movie for me to sell. It doesn't have a twist ending. I expected it would send a lot of mixed signals to people who perceive me as a certain type of director."

What he didn't expect was the reaction he got from Disney executives.

When Shyamalan finishes an early cut of a movie, he screens it for two dozen of his closest friends. All must fill out a report card about what works and what doesn't.Though he won't say what Lady scored, he says, "It did well. Better than I thought it would."

At a dinner at a Philadelphia hotel in February last year, however, it became clear that the movie had not scored well with Disney. Shyamalan met with Disney chairman Dick Cook, marketing chief Oren Aviv and Disney president Nina Jacobson. Shyamalan says that when Jacobson rattled off a list of concerns she had about the movie, including his decision to give himself a meaty role and a scene in which a movie critic is mauled, he lost his composure. He left the restaurant vowing that he was through with Disney, even though Cook offered to produce the film with a $60 million budget and the freedom to make Lady any way he wanted.

Though Disney executives confirmed details of the dinner and offer, officials declined to elaborate on the split. "We enjoyed a fruitful relationship with Night Shyamalan that lasted six years and yielded four wonderful movies," a press release from Disney says. "We wish him the best of luck with Lady in the Water and on all of his future endeavors." Such divorces are rare in Hollywood because the marriages are even rarer. Most directors shop their scripts to the studio that bids highest.

Shyamalan says money had nothing to do with the split. Instead, he says, he felt Disney had lost faith in him."They didn't like the movie. They weren't saying 'Let's work it out.' They weren't saying 'Tell me how you're going to fix it.' It wasn't like that," he says. "Warner Bros. loves the movie. That's important to me. Until they loved it, I wasn't happy."

Shyamalan has spent much of his life seeking approval. When he was admitted to New York University's film school, his father, he says, told him "It's not Princeton." When Newsweek put him on its cover, he says his father reminded him the magazine had a smaller circulation than Time. Disney, Shyamalan says, "was very much a parent to me, one that I wanted to please. I thought I would make movies for Disney until I was an old man. But at some point, the child has to decide to go on his own."

Faith in his movies

Will audiences follow?

Gitesh Pandya of boxofficeguru.com says that Lady could be a hard sell "because it seems to fall somewhere in between a fairy tale and a horror movie. It's not well defined, at least in the ads." He's quick to add, though, that "Shyamalan is still a director who attracts an audience by his name alone. There aren't many of those around."

There also aren't many filmmakers "who evoke such strong feelings, on both sides of the fence," says Howard, who also starred in The Village. "His movies polarize people because they're so emotional," she says. "And he's uncompromising about the story he wants to tell. I think the feelings run the gamut from obsession to hatred for him. "But whatever you're feeling, it's un-ignorable."

There was no ignoring his bolt from Disney, says Michael Bamberger, author of Voices. "You can say that he's a crybaby for walking away from Disney's offer," says Bamberger, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. "And he does have an ego. He is obsessive. But he's not cynical. He believes in the movies. And he really was hurt that they didn't believe in a movie that's about faith."

Now Shyamalan must face whether moviegoers still believe in him. He admits that the question has been pressing of late. "I don't know that I could be an independent filmmaker," he says. "I think there's something universal in the stories I try to tell. But trying to do that, you can torture yourself. The 'I (stink)' is a pretty powerful tool when I'm doing a movie."

In fact, Shyamalan has enjoyed making only one, Signs, a movie he says was made "for the Denny's crowd. I think that was fun because it was a popcorn movie. I was going for the masses." His personal favorite, however, is Unbreakable, a movie he made his way, with the clout he earned from Sixth Sense's $672 million worldwide box office haul. Unbreakable did $95 million at the U.S. box office despite shots from critics that it was too dense and dark.

If Shyamalan prefers underdog movies, Lady may soon become his favorite. He concedes that the battle with Disney to make the film might have overshadowed his reason for making it. "If this doesn't do well, maybe I'll realize that I was so worried about getting it made that I didn't realize I had something that doesn't reach audiences," he says.

There may even be something cathartic about the movie failing, he says. "Maybe what would really help is a complete disaster. Something that would clean the slate. People could trash me to oblivion, say I'm done. Then there are no great expectations. There's nowhere to go but up." But this is one film for which he'll try to tune out the skeptics, the studio execs, the box office analysts.

"People may turn this into my disaster," he says. "But it won't be for me. This is the movie my kids wanted to see get made. It's the movie I wanted to make. No matter what happens, I love this movie."

--- Night's numbers M. Night Shyamalan's The Lady in the Water, based on a children's story he wrote, is a departure for the writer/director of movies that have surprise endings.

Man, that's one great read you managed to find Desen.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

The new NC editorial is up. This week is Doug's analysis of the ending of The Graduate. I pretty much agree with Doug's take on the ending, here. I always saw that bus ride as a harsh realization of the bitter reality of the situation. The reason it wouldn't work for me too well as a happy ending is precisely because I never bought that those 2 characters were ever in love. I mean, why would they be? After only a single date or so, there was really hardly anything between the 2 of them to indicate that they really had time to develop any romantic feelings for one another, so to me it felt more like something that they thought they wanted just because their parents didn't want it.

[Avaitor]

This review should just be called Bridge to Terabithia cause it makes kids cry!

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I never saw that movie, but I found this review to be surprisingly entertaining. If nothing else, it proves that you don't need to have seen the film to get the jokes in the review.

[LumRanmaYasha]

I don't usually watch Bennet the Sage (or, ever, really), but apparently he's doing a review of [adult swim] anime all this month, and this week he happened to review both The Big O and Trigun: http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/bt/the-sage/anime-abandon/40668-anime-abandon-the-big-o-and-trigun

I definitely agreed with everything he said about Trigun, especially about Vash's character and the final fight with Knives (although I might slightly prefer the manga's ending, but just slightly  ).

As for The Big O's second season... I dunno why people dislike it so much. I watched it immediately after finishing the first season, and it just seemed like a natural progression of the story, and the characters didn't really change in personality considerably (Roger did still joke around, as far as I recall). The digital coloring was a little jarring at first, but it wasn't that bad. And I LOVE the ending myself; it made sense with all the details they set up beforehand, and was full of moments of awesome, although I will admit that the entire plotline of The Big O is a little convoluted, although I still think it functioned very, very well. Guess I'll just have to disagree with the popular opinion. 

I'll probably check out his Cowboy Bebop review. Maybe the InuYasha one as well, but honestly...InuYasha is so much better as a manga (overlong as it is) it isn't even funny. As someone who hated the anime as a kid but then read the entire manga last year and loved it, well...let's just say I'll have a shit-load of mixed feelings if I decide to watch his review of it.  Heh, as a fan of all things Rumiko Takahashi, I might even explode from conflicted fanboy rage... 

EDIT: Oh, and fuck yeah do I wish Livio/Razlo and Elendira were in the Trigun anime. Seriously, if any of the fights involving Livio were animated, they would be epic in it's purest form. Makes me wish for a new Trigun anime faithfully adapting Maximum...

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Just saw the NC's review of The Shining  miniseries. Now that made me laugh out loud.

[No-Personality]

He really glanced over a couple of strengths the film had in the final 3rd. If he chose to spend so much energy and time complaining that nothing happened, why did he ignore the very spooky scene where Wendy saw the wolf mask on the swinging doors to the bar and the fact that the incredibly brutal attack of Jack on Wendy was legitimately intense and well-played? These are among the few things no one can deny Mick Garris has done brilliantly. (Oh yeah, he was the director btw. Not Stephen King.)

[Avaitor]

Doug's doing vlogs for Adventure Time now.

Man, idk about you, but there's at least a dozen other shows I'd rather see him do this for over AT. Like anything Whedon, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Archer, HIMYM, a bunch of older Cartoon Network originals, SSM, etc