Let Shyamalan Cook
The filmmaker who became synonymous with twist endings has finally carved out a nice niche in Hollywood.
M. Night Shyamalan became a household name 25 years ago thanks to his classic film The Sixth Sense. Since then, he’s been revered and reviled, yet he’s stuck around, asserting more independence over his filmmaking in the past decade. It’s a surprisingly redemptive journey for a filmmaker who wanted to be seen as an heir apparent to Spielberg or even Hitchcock, and instead settled nicely into a distinct identity making small-scale original thrillers in a marketplace that largely favors IP-based blockbusters.
His latest film, Trap, shows what Shyamalan brings to cinemas that no one else is doing right now. The thriller genre has largely disappeared from cinemas since they typically exist at a mid-budget price point, usually rely on a major movie star to lead them, and typically don’t spawn franchises in the way that horror (its closest genre cousin) does. For all of these reasons, similar to the romantic comedy, there’s far less room for thrillers than there was in previous decades, yet Shyamalan continues to make the genre his bread and butter. Like Hitchcock, Shyamalan is a master of suspense, and he’s sharp enough to find clever premises that suit the genre. Even though his last two movies, Old and Knock at the Cabin, are adaptations, Trap shows Shyamalan still has original ideas for how to keep audiences captivated.
What’s more, I don’t even mind if Shyamalan isn’t reaching the heights of Sixth Sense/Unbreakable/Signs. First, for him to even keep turning out films at a steady clip is a victory considering how unpopular he was in the late 2000s and early 2010s. He put a critic character in Lady in the Water just so it could be eviscerated by the creature. The Last Airbender should have been a slam-dunk adaptation but instead ended up being a complete misfire. The Happening is laughably terrible to the point where we’re left to wonder if Shyamalan forgot how people talk. I remember being at Comic-Con one year and they showed the trailer for Devil, a movie Shyamalan only produced, and 6,000 people booed.
So for him to come back with more control over the movies he makes and fill a gap in the kinds of movies going into theaters is a feel-good story. Does that excuse any faults in films like Trap? No, but I also don’t mind the narrative shortcomings as much since he’s A) putting his own money on the line by either fully financing or partly financing his movies through his Blinding Edge Pictures banner, and B) success or failure doesn’t reshape the marketplace in the same way as Disney paying a ridiculous sum for new Avengers movies. Instead, with Trap, we have Shyamalan showing that he remains a skilled craftsman, he knows how to hook an audience, and he’s writing interesting characters for underutilized actors like Josh Hartnett.
Hollywood can be unforgiving. Some directors hit dizzying highs only to plummet back to Earth and spend the rest of their years anonymously churning out TV episodes or perhaps doing journeyman work in B-movies. Instead, Shyamalan’s name still means something, and perhaps it now means even more as he’s picked up some battle scars and left behind anonymous efforts like Last Airbender and After Earth. However you feel about Shyamalan, “An M. Night Shyamalan Film” remains a unique stamp on pictures.
Recommendations
Fair warning: we’re 90 days away from a Presidential election, so this newsletter is gonna get more political for at least the next few months. I’m a pretty liberal guy, I know what I’m about, and so if that’s going to irritate you, you can click the unsubscribe button and there will be no hard feelings.
That being said, I wanted to recommend three terrific newsletters that I’ve recommended in the past, but they each touched on topics I considered writing about myself. However, these writers handled it so well that you should just go read their coverage.
First, you may have heard some uproar about Algerian boxer Imane Khelif at the Olympics. While normal people were simply enjoying the games, right-wingers needed to find some new dumb thing to be mad about, so they made one up. Khelif is a woman, and she identifies as a woman. It’s illegal to be transgender in Algeria. And yet because she doesn’t appear as feminine as weirdos online demand, a gigantic fake controversy emerged about trans athletes in sports even though there is not a trans person in this story. Parker Molloy breaks it all down at The Present Age:
It’s one thing for the New York Times to take a center-right position or chase the latest idiotic controversy as they did earlier this year in the war against college presidents. It’s another for one of the biggest publications in the world to run a headline as bad as “Trump Agrees to a Fox News Debate with Harris on Sept. 4.” Wow! What a headline! Guess there will be a Fox News Debate on September 4th.
Except, no. That headline isn’t even a marginal reflection of reality. What happened is that Trump ran away from the debate conditions he had agreed to with Biden for a debate on September 10th on ABC, but said he would do a debate on September 4th on Fox News. That’s not, by any definition, an “agreement,” which requires at least two parties. After two more revisions, the Times finally approached a reasonable headline, but as Margaret Sullivan points out, an outlet as big as the Times making such an egregious error is bad news for all of us.
Finally, Dave Karpf commented on yesterday’s news that Vice President Kamala Harris tapped Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. I agree with Karpf that this is a great selection, but what I like about this piece is how he gets to the need to push the Republican Party away from Trumpism:
One of the main points I’ve been making in my political writing for the past few years is that only the Republican Party can fix the Republican Party. The current version of the Republican Party has no room for politicians who accept the basic premise that (as Adam Przeworski puts it) “democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.” The elected Republicans who stood up to Trump after January 6th were kicked out of the party. Project 2025 is both a fever dream and a to-do list for a party that doesn’t want elections to have consequences any longer.
At some point in my lifetime, a Republican will win the Presidency again. It is unlikely that we’ll have eight years of Harris followed by eight years of Walz followed by eight years of AOC, Buttigieg, Shapiro, etc.
It is vitally important that the fever breaks within the Republican Party network before that happens. Elections should not be quite so existential as they are right now.
Karpf argues that Walz may not lock down Pennsylvania like selecting Governor Josh Shapiro could have (and even that argument is dubious since it’s rare for a VP pick to automatically net their state), but he plays to a broader electorate as a non-threatening Midwesterner who isn’t afraid to provide good soundbites trashing Trump and Vance as weirdos. You need to run up the score rather because just squeaking by isn’t going to cut it.
What I’m Watching
The Season 2 finale of House of the Dragon aired this past Sunday, and hoo boy. This whole season was some bad television. When your show only airs eight episodes every two years, not a single episode should feel like filler, and yet so much of HOTD’s second season felt like it was stretching for time. My current theory is that the season came out so poorly because it was made during the writer’s strike. The show went into production in April 2023 and the writers went on strike in May. You could argue, “Well, they had completed scripts!” But that’s not how television (or movies, for that matter) work. You want writers around to help finesse story points and see where things can be made stronger. The writers’ room doesn’t pack up and go home the second cameras start rolling.
Otherwise, you get storytelling that feels like a first draft. It’s stunning how much of House of the Dragon was either underexplained or overdone. Characters we needed more time with like the new dragon riders struggled to make much of an impact whereas we kept getting Daemon’s dumb visions at Harrenhall. But most damning is that, unlike Game of Thrones, there just aren’t interesting characters are storylines here. There’s nowhere to run where you’re excited to see what Tyrion or Arya or Brienne is up to. For example, I know pretty much nothing about Daemon’s daughter Rhaena other than she keeps chasing some dragon near The Vale. Yippie.
We’re going to get two more seasons of this show, and maybe Season 3 can bounce back, but I’m also probably going to need two years to wash the taste of this season out of my mouth.
What I’m Hearing
John Ganz’ When the Clock Broke is currently on my reading list (this assumes that one day I will finally finish The Power Broker), but until I can get around to it, I liked listening to the interview he did with Chris Hayes on Why Is This Happening?
What I’m Playing
I’m jumping around a bit. I’m enjoying Metroid: Zero Mission as part of the Game Boy Advance selections on Nintendo Switch Online, and I recently played a bit more of the terrific It Takes Two, which is like if Pixar made a video game.