Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Lightdeossk Captivating movie !

Glucedee It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

swilliky M. Night Shyamalan went for a meta approach to his fantasy film. The movie strives to deliver twists from the previous film but it fails on several accounts and ends up being rather dull. Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) is the handyman around an apartment complex fixing broken sinks and killing pests. He has a tragic past that he doesn't like to tell the residents about. When a woman named Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) appears in the pool, she tells Cleveland extraordinary things that lead to a fantastical adventure.Hunting the lady in the water is the Scrunt, a grass-covered wolf. There are lots of rules and mythology brought into the movie but none of it comes to very much and the characters are almost as confused as I was watching it. The movie takes its time to introduce each resident living in the apartment complex including crossword puzzle solver Mr. Dury (Jeffrey Wright), movie critic Harry Farber (Bob Balaban), and the young college student Young-Soon Choi (Cindy Cheung) whose mother knows of a fairy tale and serves as an expositional tool.Check out more of this review and others at swilliky.com

ejamessnyder M. Night Shyamalan, the director of this film, started his career off on a high note with The Sixth Sense, which was his first film that anyone can remember. It was clever and everyone loved it. Unfortunately, his follow-up films kept getting progressively worse and worse, although none seemed truly terrible until his career took a real nosedive with Lady in the Water.There are a few of movies I've seen that start with the characters in the film watching a different film or TV program. The action opens on the fictional film-within-a-film, and the audience is momentarily tricked into believing that it's the film they came to watch, as in Blow Out and Sullivan's Travels. It's usually pretty easy to spot, because the film-within-a-film often feels fake. Just as films rarely feel quite like real life, the film-within-a-film rarely feels quite like a real film. In the case of Lady in the Water, I kept waiting for the moment when we realized that we were just watching a fake film that the characters in the real movie were watching. That moment never came. The whole film just felt so strange that I couldn't believe it would be made, marketed, and released as a real movie. I felt betrayed by the director and the theater for taking my money and wasting my time.Lady in the Water is based on a bedtime story that Shyamalan wrote for his kids. He should not have made it into a film, but I guess he thought it would be a good idea, so he did. Even after the strange beginning, the movie just keeps getting weirder and weirder, and it's never particularly enjoyable. However, it's never quite as boring as it could be, as the strangeness has its own appeal in a way. I just couldn't believe what I was seeing and found myself wondering what nonsense they would throw at us next. How would they outdo themselves in the next scene?Still, it's only appealing—for lack of a better term—for so long, after which it just becomes tiring and nauseating. At one point in the film I decided that my time would be better spent doing something else, so I decided to close my eyes and take a nap. Sleep is very important, you see. I woke up during a scene in which the lead characters decipher secret codes that are hidden in the text and images on the backs of cereal boxes. I thought I was dreaming. I really thought that I must have surely been asleep and dreaming, but I was not. I'd slept through the gradual increase in weirdness and had taken too big of leap all at once. And my brain couldn't handle what my eyes were seeing, so it told me I was dreaming.Lady in the Water is not the worst movie I've ever seen, but it's certainly one of the worst. Still, I have to respect the director's decision to make the film he wanted to make despite how different and strange it was. It's just too bad that it turned out so terrible.

WisdomsHammer No intentional spoilers.So underrated. I'm not quite sure why this gets panned so hard.The title of my review is how I sum up this movie. A bunch of misfits, each with their own special gifts, fight dark forces to save a creature out of fantasy who inexplicably lands in their midst.It's a fantasy set in an ordinary place with ordinary people, but at the end of it all, nothing is ordinary. And I don't mean there's a twist ending, there isn't. I just saw this place and these people differently at the end, and it was such a wonderful thing.Look at the cast! Amazing! James Newton Howard's score was impressive and moving, too. M. Night has made his mistakes, I agree, but this isn't one of them. This is a beautiful movie. Open your mind and your heart and check this one out.Edit: After I wrote my review, I read a few other peoples'. (I try not to read other reviews before writing my own.) This movie was severely polarized between people who really enjoyed this movie and those who really didn't! At least for most people who wrote reviews.The people who didn't like the movie tended to use words like "boring" and "contrived." People who enjoyed the movie seemed to really like the characters and the overall story.Draw your own conclusions from that. I just thought that was really interesting.

jb_campo Besides Paul Giamatti, not much to get excited about in Lady in the Water.Giamatti plays the manager of this apartment complex. He has had something happen in his past that brought him to this place in life. He knows all the various players who live in his complex. He knows all their foibles and faults and good qualities. He's insightful.One night this girl comes out of the pool, Bryce Dallas Howard. This was a disappointing performance, compared to The Village where she was great. She plays this nymph who is going to do something for the planet. Giamatti guards her. All she does is look sad and cower and sometimes smile, and speaks in a soft voice. No much of a role for her, or a performance.This Korean woman and her mother play key roles because the mother seems to know something about a story about a nymph. Giamatti pulls it all together and thinks he knows how to save the day, but does he?There's also a supernatural bad guy who is trying to stop everything. But the tension, well, it's not much IMHO. At the end, a bit of a twist, but not like The Sixth Sense type. Shyalaman loves to get the twists in though. I liked this movie, but it's just OK, so 6/10 covers it. It is what it is, a simple story that was told. Giamatti was great, but otherwise, nothing you will remember.