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Reviews
Lady in the Water (2006)
A turkey
I saw this at a screening among people who work in the film industry. Many audience members were laughing at the muddled self-indulgent mess on the screen. And no wonder. Myself, I was mostly moaning, wishing I had sat closer to an aisle or an exit. And I actually went into this film expecting to like it......The script is incomprehensible and illogical. I realize this is "meant" to be a fable, but it's mostly the director --- who mugs his way through a key role in his own film, getting his own good side most of the time --- who's really out to lecture us. In passing, we get a middle class housing project in "Philadelphia" which seems to be situated with suburbs on one side and a national wildlife preserve on the other. We meet a mythical beast which looks like a crocadoggy, which appears at a building wide party but no one notices. Paul Giammati, who wears glasses in the film, manages what seems to be a hyper-athletic underwater dive without glasses or goggles that would have taxed an experience scuba diver. A film critic gets torn apart by the monster in a building corridor but no one notices (is M-Night suggesting something here?) and there is a really nasty racial sterotype of an Asian girl, a "college student," who speaks we-all-sound-same funny-rice-girl English. Uh, why funny accent for Asian girl, Mr. Filmmaker, when Indian-American film director-actor talk so good? Funny accent no essential to plot, so why include, hey? And, Yo, Shammy, that Eagle at the end? A Philadelphia Eagle? I don't see Dead People here, but I'm starting to see a writer/director who has shot his creative wad.
In the Mix (2005)
Worse than awful.....
.....For a while this was ranked the #2 worst film of all time. What more do you need to know? This one is a muddled mess, thanks largely to an absolutely atrocious script (from what I can see, the writer is mostly to blame here) which puts forth the story in clichés, racial and ethnic stereotypes and purely unimaginative writing. It's not even good bad writing. It's bad bad writing. If you really watch this film --- for as long as you can ---- you can see that the acting isn't so bad, the music is okay (or great depending on your POV) and the direction is passable to good. And Usher is...well...Usher is Usher, okay? So what makes this one such a clinker? Watch and listen for ten minutes. Try not to laugh at the insipid dialogue and plotting. Then you decide where this turkey went off track. Then continue along to something better....which shouldn't be difficult to find.