Review: M. Night Shyamalan's "Trap" is a B-Movie and there is No Shame in that

by Cláudio Alves

Over the past 25 years, M. Night Shyamalan has built his reputation on twisty tales that sting with some nasty surprise before the end credits roll. Depending on the picture and the public's willingness to accept the director's oddities, his strategy has resulted in a handful of triumphs, a slew of mediocrities, and a couple of outright disasters. Going into Trap, one expects much of the same, but, in the biggest twist of all, Shyamalan has presented his audience with a fairly straightforward affair. The premise is simple, if ludicrous, the tone is sincere, and, for once, you feel the filmmaker's focus on entertaining rather than pulling the rug from under the viewer. M. Night Shyamalan's Trap is a B-movie that makes no apology about its ambitions or lack thereof…

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Weekend Box Office: Shyamalan and the Brady Ladies Dethrone Avatar

By Ben Miller

It only took eight weeks, but Avatar: The Way of Water is no longer the top film at the box office.  M. Night Shyamalan's Knock at the Cabin and the award-winning ladies of 80 for Brady both managed to top James Cameron's sequel, though not with any overwhelming numbers.  Both films managed just north of $14 and $12 million, respectively.  More than anything else, it's just nice to have some competition and new things to watch in theaters.  Studios are releasing less and less these days...

Weekend Box Office (actuals) Feb 3rd-5th 🔺 = new or expanding /  ★ = Recommended /  = Oscar Nominated
WIDE (OVER 800 SCREENS)	LIMITED / PLATFORM
KNOCK AT THE CABIN	PATHAAN
1 🔺 KNOCK AT THE CABIN $14.1 *NEW* 3,646 screens	1  PATHAAN $2.6 (cum. $14.2) 683 screens
2 🔺 80 FOR BRADY $12.7 *NEW* 3,912 screens	2 THE WANDERING EARTH II $624k (cum. $4.1) 172 screens

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Pushing Linksies

• The Reveal "The Gotham City liveability index" through Batman projects. Hee
• Vulture interviews Lee Pace about Pushing Daisies for its 15th anniversary. Of all the shows being rebooted, shows that didn't get long runs should be at the top of the lists
• AV Club gets righteously snarky about theater chains upping their prices for The Batman. Cosign
• Letterboxd curating a fat girl cinematic canon
• Dread Central "a timeline of women monsters in film"

More after the jump including Austin Stowell, Paul Dano, M Night Shyamalan casting news, and Disney's disgusting anti-gay politics...

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One For Them, One For Me: M. Night Shyamalan's "The Sixth Sense" and "Stuart Little"

A New Series by Christopher James

Take bets: Who did M. Night Shyamalan find it was easier to write for - a human child or a mouse child voiced by a 38-year-old man?

Do one for them; do one for you. If you can still do projects for yourself, you can keep your soul.
— Martin Scorsese: A Journey

Even from the get go, M. Night Shyamalan’s career was idiosyncratic. He went from Oscar nominated wunderkind to punchline all within the span of less than ten years. With his most recent movie, Old, Shyamalan seems to have figured out a way to own his poor reviews. At a time where the definition of “camp” is constantly argued, Old feels like pure, grade A camp. He’s also regained a lot of his box office cred with Split and Glass, which connected to one of his earliest films, Unbreakable. 

In 1999, Shyamalan earned tons of accolades, including Best Director and Original Screenplay Oscar nominations, for his smash hit, The Sixth Sense. At that point, Shyamalan had only directed two movies, a personal indie called Praying with Anger that he starred in and a movie called Wide Awake that stars Rosie O’Donnell as a baseball fanatic nun. Few things could’ve prepared people for The Sixth Sense’s level of success. However, it wasn’t the only financial hit of the year for Shyamalan. He had done uncredited rewrites on movies like She’s All That, so he wasn’t above doing “one for them” to earn some money. However, he was credited as the writer of the Visual Effects nominated children’s film Stuart Little.

Is there anything that connects The Sixth Sense and Stuart Little together, other than coming from the mind of the same writer? Let’s take a look (age old spoilers ahead)...

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Review: "Glass"

by Chris Feil

M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass is a film that has been a long time coming, clamored for in some circles ever since Unbreakable’s mystery box unleashed a superhero origin story unlike any other. Two years ago, Split arrived after hopes had diminished and reignited interest by announcing itself as belonging to the same story in a quintessentially Shyamalanian twist. Here we come full circle with Bruce Willis’ train crash-surviving vigilante David Dunn and the nemesis that birthed him, Samuel L. Jackson’s Elijah Pierce, AKA Mr. Glass.

Trouble is: Shyamalan is now a vastly different filmmaker today than when this saga began. What was once enigmatic and fuss free about the director’s approach to superheroes has given way to tedium and the mundane. Perhaps the spark is gone because these kinds of stories have gone from a fascination to foundational in the near twenty years since David boarded that fateful train. But no - that pop cultural shift is where Shyamalan fully distracts himself here, spinning the story’s tires into a lot of leaden world-building and thesis-making.

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