Lady in the Water

To sum up, it's pretty good. Not Shymalan's best, but not his worst either. I liked it better than "The Village" and "Signs", but not as much as "The Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable".

The reason I put the summary first, is because it's hard to explain this movie without spoilers. Okay, that goes for a lot of Shyamalan's stuff. But while most of his movies have a twist in the last five minutes, this one has its twists throughout. Or rather, it doesn't have any big twists a la "Sixth Sense", but the overall plot is the movie's secret. This is why most of the trailers only show footage from the first five minutes. So anyway, if you haven't seen it, and still intend to, you can stop reading now.

There is a fine line between silly and artsy. For instance, my favorite horror movie is "The Grudge". Normally I'm not afraid of naked Japanese boys who meow; but The Grudge had the right direction, mood, lighting, pace, etc, and it made it work. However, not everyone was able to get "into" the movie to the same degree, and the result is that it either comes off silly or scary, no in-between. If you don't watch The Grudge in the right mindset - you gotta turn off the lights, give it your full attention, etc - then you're going to giggle a lot more than you jump. One of my friends said The Grudge was one of the stupidest movies she'd ever seen; later I found out she watched it with her talkative grandmother and fast-forwarded through the "boring" parts.

Lady In The Water is the same way. If I were to tell you the story straight out, you'd think I was describing an animated Disney film. It is a movie about a fairy tale, a bedtime story that turns out to be based in reality. The characters even identify themselves with characters in the fairy tale, to the point that the movie even makes some in-jokes about how stories are written. Think "Wes Craven's New Nightmare". And these were my favorite parts of the movie. The writer in me loves jokes about dialogue and exposition.

The main character, Cleveland (played by Paul Giamatti), plays his part like a young Richard Dreyfus in "Jaws". He was very entertaining to watch, except for the fact that Cleveland has a stuttering problem. But that's just one of my little pet peeves; I never could stand watching Porky Pig cartoons either. Shyamalan himself has a fairly large role in this one, and he does a good job.
The movie starts out quickly. I was expecting Cleveland to ponder the mysterious swimmer for half the movie before he ever saw her, but 10 minutes into the movie they're already on speaking terms. It was a bit unbelievable how quickly Cleveland accepted he was in a supernatural situation, and it was even stranger how everyone he told immediately believed him as well. But that's nitpicky, and we're all tired of seeing the same old "nobody believes the hero" crap movies have been re-hashing since 1958's "The Blob".

It's a very clean movie. Not much cursing (actually I don't remember any at all, but better safe than sorry), no nudity, very little blood. There are a couple of scenes that will scare the young'uns, but it's definitely not a horror movie. I'm actually a bit peeved at the cleanliness... I consider myself neither pervert nor prude, but I hate it when movies are cut for ratings purposes, rather than for art's sake. The "Lady" has several nude scenes that are shot from some very clever camera angles, but I'll never know if that was for art's sake, or to keep the PG-13 rating. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and go with art, but only because of an inside joke they make about it later.

Lady in the Water is not very deep, no pun intended. It's interesting, but not that memorable. I'm glad I saw it, but I'm also glad I saw it as a matinee.