Or this, from the Chicago Reader's Cliff Doerksen: "The current national priorities should be as follows: reduce carbon emissions and stop funding the films of M. Night Shyamalan."
Like the menacing creatures lurking in the dark woods of the filmmaker's The Village, like the ominous aliens skulking through the cornfields of his Signs, the Shyamalan haters are out there, loud and legion.
"Yeah, it's a phenomenon - that's a kind way to put it," says the director, laughing it off last week at a Starbucks close to his Chester County farm. "It's something that I've thought about forever. . . . It feels a little bit personal."
He may be onto something there. In 1999, The Sixth Sense, his somber shot-in-Philly ghost story, earned six Oscar nominations (including best picture and best director), $672.8 million worldwide, and a Newsweek cover story touting him as "the next Spielberg." And it proffered the pop-cult catchphrase "I see dead people."
Since then, the director's movies have continued to fare well. Certainly, none have approached The Sixth Sense's mega-numbers, but with the exception of 2006's Lady in the Water (in which Shyamalan gleefully kills off a character who happens to be a movie critic), none have tanked, either.
But tell that to the bloggers, critics, Twitterers, and message-boarders whose seething contempt for the filmmaker pulsates on the Web.
"M. Night Shyamalan is kind of like the Rodney Dangerfield of directors - he can't get no respect," says Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box office division of Hollywood.com. "When your first mainstream film is so brilliant and such a huge box-office and critical success, you're going to work your whole career chasing that cachet . . . and I think he's really had to do that.
