First in line

I don't usually go to see movies on opening night. But when I do, you'd think it would be a movie I was really jazzed about. You know, like the tweens who had their parents drive them to the theater for the 12:05 a.m. screening of Twilight: Eclipse, or the geeks who camped out for weeks before Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

Nope, not really. In fact, last night was just the latest movie I saw on opening day/night despite having only mild interest in it. I should say, I had mild interest going in, and heavy interest coming out. Yeah, Piranha 3D was "super fun," as I said to the friend who saw it with me.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I guess my thinking goes like this: If you go to see almost any movie during the primetime slot of its opening night, it's going to be a clusterfuck. Every movie has some subset of the viewing population that's interested in seeing it, and these are the people who will come out for that primetime Friday night show. That's nice when it means you're surrounded by like-minded individuals who plan to cheer and applaud; it's not so nice when you get stuck in the front row, because you bought unassigned seats earlier in the day, but didn't get there in time to claim something good.

And so I've developed something of a policy toward seeing movies on the day of their release: I'll see only ones I don't really care about.

Here are some recent(-ish), funny examples:

Surrogates (2009, Jonathan Mostow). Released: September 25, 2009.

I didn't even know if I planned to see this in the theater, but I'd written one of my Friday morning pieces about it, and I was hankering for an after-work screening, so I hit whichever one started in the 4 o'clock range. As might be expected, the screening was fairly sparsely attended -- the movie ended up grossing less than $40 million, and I think I may have liked it better than anyone else in the world, except possibly Jonathan Mostow.

Splice (2010, Vincenzo Natali). Released: June 4, 2010.

I had gone through a bit of a rollercoaster in my feelings toward this movie, at first thinking it would be an exciting genre buster, then thinking it would be a completely interchangeable startle-scare horror film. I ended up going Friday afternoon because my boss had failed to comp me the afternoon on the previous Friday, before Memorial Day weekend, as he usually does, but had forgotten to this time. So I got out around 1 o'clock that day and took myself over to the theater. I don't know that the movie actually busts its genre, but it is unforgettable in a number of other ways -- some good, some I'm not so sure about.

The Last Airbender (2010, M. Night Shyamalan). Released: July 1, 2010.

This one doesn't quite count, because I actually saw it on July 2nd. The whole time leading up to it, however, I thought they were releasing it that Friday. Then for some reason they moved it up one day to Thursday. This was a similar situation to what was supposed to happen with my Friday-before-Memorial-Day early release, except on the Friday before July 4th, it did actually happen. This screening was also sparsely attended -- maybe everyone already knew that the movie had been ripped to shreds. Me, I thought it started out abysmally and then improved enough in the last 45 minutes or so that I thought it was fine. But because my failure to hate The Last Airbender is not what I came to talk about today, I'm not going to say any more about that.

Piranha 3D (2010, Alexandre Aja). Released: August 20, 2010.

And then there was last night. A friend and I had been trying to find some common ground on a movie -- a movie my wife didn't have any interest in seeing, at that -- and Piranha was what we came up with. We were trying to jam it in before my wife goes into labor (could happen anytime in the next 10 days to two weeks) and before he goes to Burning Man (next weekend). Plus, yesterday was his last day of work on a gig that was located down near where I live. So he got off work, we met for dinner, then went to the movie. In fact, we dilly-dallied enough that I thought we'd shot ourselves in the foot, getting to the theater only 15 minutes before the show was scheduled to start. But instead of having to crane our necks at the 3D from the front row, we hadn't actually needed to buy tickets in advance at all. Strangely, the theater was only half sold -- and this was a prime location on the Santa Monica Promenade, albeit a theater that probably hasn't been renovated in 20 years.

That could have been some kind of forewarning about the quality of this movie, but it wasn't -- at least not for me. My friend wasn't as enthusiastic about it as I was, but I was enthusiastic enough for the two of us. It was a rollicking good time -- exactly what I wanted it to be. Awesome piranha carnage and lots of hilarious gore -- stuff that made our audience howl, squirm and grimace. Some of the gore was truly horrifying -- I can't get that image out of my head of the woman being scalped by the outboard motor, pulling her face right off -- but Aja's tone was such that it was "all in good fun." Besides, the idiotic spring breakers who had come to the fictitious Lake Victoria were portrayed as so vapid and so obnoxious, it all really seemed like their just desserts.

A movie like Piranha 3D really argues for that opening Friday night showing. Even though we were only half full, we were the ones who were really excited for that bloody mayhem up on the screen -- and we probably enjoyed it a lot more than we would have during that 1:35 showing next Thursday afternoon.

Shyamalan's Last chance - really

I can't believe I've had a blog for 18 months (almost to the day), and I have yet to write a post about M. Night Shyamalan.

His latest movie, The Last Airbender, comes out today. (I thought it was supposed to be tomorrow, but it appears to be today, so I'm moving this post up a day.) I actually think it looks like it will be, or at least could be, good. I have such faith in it, in fact, that I'm planning to see it tomorrow afternoon, assuming I get the traditional early release on the day before a three-day weekend.

But if it's not good, like the overwhelming evidence of the last six years' worth of Shyamalan movies would suggest, can we finally put this guy out to pasture?

Some people would even extend Shyamalan's streak of crapitude back further, but I happen to like Signs. I didn't much care for Unbreakable, though I did respect it. But let's say you take a person who didn't like Signs, and also didn't much care for Unbreakable -- like my wife. That person sees a writer-director who's made a career's worth of god-awful movies, on the strength of just one great one.

Because really, does anybody like The Village, Lady in the Water or The Happening?

I'm suggesting we need to pry the clapboard out of Shyamalan's hands, but if we did, we'd be deprived future instances of the sublime hilarity of these three films, each of which has contained at least one extended section that left me aghast at its ridiculousness.

In fact, so sure was I that Shyamalan was done after Lady in the Water, I was amazed to hear that someone had greenlit The Happening. Then, so sure was I that Shyamalan was done after The Happening, I was amazed to hear that someone had not only entrusted him with yet another movie, but had doubled or tripled his budget as well.

Now, one clear thing The Last Airbender has going for it is that it is based on material that did not originate in Shyamalan's head. By needing to adhere to the basic structure of a popular children's series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, the man is less likely to botch a basically good idea with bursts of his trademark flaws: the overuse of twists being one, his developing God complex being another. (He cast himself as a writer who would be the savior of mankind in Lady in the Water.) What I'm hoping is that the brilliant direction that has made an appearance, however brief, in each of his films, will get a chance to shine here, and the writing won't get as much of a chance to torpedo the movie.

But if Shyamalan is being allowed to branch off in a new direction, and this also turns out to be professionally disastrous for him, how, I ask you, can Hollywood keep giving him work? The fact that he's doing something different, and still fucking it up, would certainly seem to be the Last straw, wouldn't it?

And it's not like Hollywood doesn't understand that he sucks. He's been dropped by studios and worn out his welcome on projects, and he was even the recipient of two Golden Raspberries for Lady in the Water: worst director and worst supporting actor (for the aforementioned writer-savior role). But -- at least for Shyamalan -- a hit shines more than a dud stinks, and The Sixth Sense has still been shining strong for Shyamalan some 11 years later.

IMDB does not currently have another directing project listed for Shyamalan, but I've been fooled by that one before. It does mention the first of three movies that Shyamalan is going to be writing and producing (but not directing) called The Night Chronicles. (For another sign of the man's ego, I invite you to look no further than here.) The first one, subtitled Devil, is about a group of people trapped in an elevator with the devil. Like most of his movies, it sounds interesting. But like most of his movies, it comes with a cloud over its head, symbolizing the high likelihood of its suckiness.

And even though the footage from The Last Airbender looks good, the guy just can't seem to escape controversy. The movie was criticized for using a predominantly white cast in an Asian-themed film. To be fair to Shyamalan, I'll have to reserve comment here until seeing the movie. At a glance, I don't necessarily see what the fuss is about, as the film features Indian actors Shaun Toub, Aasif Mandvi and Dev Patel (from Slumdog Millionaire), and Maori actor Cliff Curtis. And while those may not be Asian Asians, at least they are not white, per se. Then again, if all the heroes are white and all the villains are non-white, I guess the critics have a point. Besides, you can't really call it "branching out" for an Indian-born director to cast Indian actors in his films.

At least we can say one thing for sure about The Last Airbender -- if it's incompetent, it won't be incompetent in the same ways his other recent films have been incompetent. I think we all need a break from that particular brand of incompetence.

Because as much as I've laughed at Shyamalan's recent work, it's not like I've stopped watching. I too continue to be drawn in by the long-ago promise of The Sixth Sense, and to a lesser extent, Signs. As much as I blame Hollywood for forever giving M. Night Shyamalan one last chance, I've been doing the exact same thing myself.

Then again, I'll see anything, so I don't really count.