A defense of Uwe Boll and M. Night Shyamalan

A recent Steve Newton blogpiece on Uwe Boll has me thinking about how certain filmmakers, once they alienate critics, can have a hell of a time repairing their reputation.

Boll is a particularly interesting case - he's been behind some colossal failures, like In the Name of the King, the scope of which understandably overshadows his successes - which tend to succeed on a much smaller scale than his failures fail on. Still, he's made at least three solid films in recent years: Rampage, Darfur, and his new one, Bailout: The Age of Greed - also possibly known as Assault on Wall Street - which at the very least is an earnest and interesting attempt to make an angry, politically minded exploitation film. I don't think it entirely succeeds - it's remarkably unsubtle, and the ending borrows a little too much from genre films like The Punisher - but nor does it fail by a long shot, and I respect that it tries; so many Hollywood films either have no political conscience whatsoever, or else toe the most reactionary line imaginable, that it does the heart good to see Boll "sticking up for the little guy," and taking many, many shots (figurative and literal) at the bankers and brokers and Yuppie exploiters who constantly fuck his central little guy over. Darfur is similarly politically earnest and impassioned (if, again, unsubtle); while Rampage is one of the most gleefully misanthropic films I've seen, starring the highly talented Canadian actor Brendan Fletcher as a man in homemade body armor who goes on a shooting spree in a small town. I admit that it adds to the fun for me that the film was shot in Maple Ridge, the small town where I grew up, nurtured my own misanthropic fantasies, and where I now find myself stuck, but I think anyone with a taste for darker cinema would have a lot of fun with it. Katherine Isabelle, currently enjoying some buzz for American Mary, is in it, too!

Doubtlessly critics (like Steve Newton) who still want to abuse Boll for Alone In The Dark or such have not seen these films. You can't really blame them: why would anyone who has had to watch three or four grand-scale cinematic car-wrecks by Boll knowingly seek out an unheralded, direct-to-video, no-buzz low budget film by him? Whose word could Mr. Newton possibly take (other than mine, of course) that the man responsible for Alone In The Dark is finally hitting his stride as a filmmaker - particularly when he continues to crank out sequels to some of his worst films? (In The Name of the King 3 is slated for release this year).

Even more interesting than Boll is the case of M. Night Shyamalan. I'm no great fan of Shyamalan's films, but find it sad that, while making no truly awful films (even the laughable Signs had effective moments, and was very entertaining and original, even when ridiculous), he's turned into a figure of universal abuse. Plus two of his most abused movies, Lady In The Water (24% on Rottentomatoes) and The Last Airbender (a staggering 6%) are, by me, brilliantly entertaining, visually rich, and highly inventive and original films. It's no great mystery that Lady In The Water failed to impress critics, of course: Shyamalan, ass still sore after the drubbing he received for his previous film The Village - admittedly one of his weaker efforts - offers a return salvo in the movie, in the character of an arrogant, wrongheaded film critic (delightfully played by a stuffy Bob Balaban, pictured below) whose presumptions about storytelling nearly lead to disaster, and who suffers, as a result, A Very Nasty Fate, which Shyamalan clearly enjoys immeasurably. It takes a certain type of film critic to not take the bait, there - and a certain type of independent-mindedness to be willing to even approach the film, when almost everyone professionally writing about it assures you it's lousy. In fact, it's so entertaining - Paul Giamatti is great in it, too - that everyone I know who has actually seen it has expressed nothing but bewilderment that it should be so savagely treated by reviewers. It's no great work of cinema, but it certainly deserves more respect than it got.

Sadly, I'm not immune to the effects of such critical dogpiles, myself. Even after discovering that, hey, Lady In The Water is pretty entertaining, I stayed away from The Last Airbender for some three years, largely because of its uniformly lousy reviews. I only just watched it this very night. I can't speak to its fealty to the source material, which I gather has been a source of controversy for some, but taken on its own, the film is a delightful fantasy, very inventive, with many fresh and exciting images (like people who can manipulate fire, air, earth and water using their powers to wage elemental war on one another, while doing what looks like Tai Chi... That's the stuff of some great effects sequences - of which the film boasts several). It feels more like a Miyazaki than a Shyamalan, in fact - something along the lines of Princess Mononoke, except it's far more concise and elegant than that film, which I always felt sprawled a bit. I'm not sure what to make of certain aspects of it - Shyamalan uses human race in an odd way, ascribing his different elemental peoples a distinct ethnicity (the fire tribe is South Asian, the water tribe Caucasian, the earth tribe Japanese, and the air tribe maybe Tibetan); what any of that is supposed to mean is a mystery. Nor am I sure if the film is attempting to make any real-world statements about warfare (the aggressive fire tribe standing in for the Bush administration, say; Shyamalan was pretty prudent to not make them the white folks). Receiving it merely as an entertainment, however, I was very much entertained, and could watch it again easily...

If After Earth is still playing next week, I just might make time to check it out... It's currently running around 11% on RT, but this seems pretty meaningless as a measure of the value of the film, considering...