Minutiae

Everybody has some experience with the creepy house down the block. Legend has it that the place is haunted, and even though all the kids know that nobody lives there, the window shades somehow are open one day and closed the next. There's even websites dedicated to all the creepy places that people claim are haunted (scroll about a quarter of the way down the page, and see the high school my sister went to in Drexel Hill). It should be no surprise, then, that this almost universal childhood experience made its way into a movie. The only real head scratcher is why Monster House, a brilliantly balanced family-comedy- meets-horror-film, was released in the middle of the summer and not at Halloween.

( Actually, it's so the DVD can sell then, but that's not the point... )

You have to give M. Night Shyamalan credit for his body of work. He's often panned as a one-hit wonder, that hit being 1999's The Sixth Sense. But Shyamalan has created entertaining films in Signs, The Village, and the criminally underrated Unbreakable. Though his latest effort, Lady in the Water, may not join the ranks of his other films - it's by far his most self-serving, egotistical venture to date, and it doesn't have the fresh bite of Sixth Sense - but it certainly doesn't deserve the beating it's getting from critics.

Based on a bedtime story that Shyamalan told his children, which in itself is possibly an amalgamation of other fairy tales, Lady in the Water tells the tale of Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), the superintendent at a Philadelphia-area (if you say so, M. Night) apartment complex called The Cove. The tenants complain to Heep about an unseen late-night swimmer in their community pool, and one night, he finds the cause: Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), a young sea nymph from the Blue World. Together with the residents, Heep must find a way to get Story home before a terrifying beast gets to her.

( An interesting Story peeks out of a Heep of bad scripting... )