M. Night Shyamalan - you either love him or you hate him. I belong to the former category. Sure, we all loved The Sixth Sense. But true fans also enjoyed Unbreakable, The Village, and The Lady in the Water. I loved them all. (I passed on Signs - oh, how I loathe Mel Gibson).

I think the premises of his movies since Sixth haven’t been quite as surprising, but there is still sweet magical quality that he imbues to all of his movies that resonates with me, and probably with many of his fans that have stuck with the director even when the tomatoes went rotten. No one seems to make dark and eerie feel so compelling, either; he has a great sense for lighting, timing and score.

Harmony Korine (Kids, Gummo) has said we tend to remember characters in a movie long after we’ve forgotten the plot, which explains why his later films tend to be meandering and plotless, but provide deep studies into the main characters’ temperament. I would go a little further and say that great movies will leave a lasting impression of a feeling or sensation, either adrenaline-infused terror from a great horror flick (my boyfriend’s hands still get sweaty at the mere mention of 28 Days Later) or the warm, sunny optimism of a sanguine feel-good flick like As Good As It Gets, long after you’ve forgotten the nuts and bolts of the storyline.
Shyamalan’s new apocalyptic thriller, The Happening, opens at the end of this week (Friday the 13th). Here’s a trailer:

I’m embedding but not watching - I need for this to be the surprise that The Sixth Sense was when I watched it (I was living in Eastern Europe at the time, so I was thankfully sheltered from the buzz around it.) I also studiously avoided any trailers and writeups about his later films and thanked myself later.