I am only thinking about him because I recently watched The Last Airbender, and was deeply mortified at how such a brilliant director ended up with this piece of shit film, and I've been seeing ads for that new movie Devil everywhere.
Back when I was really into "marketing" I read up on a lot of innovative marketing campaigns and methods that are being utilized to make us, the consumer want specific things. Of course throughout time people's way of thinking tend to evolve with the ever fast paced improvement in technology forcing marketers to also evolve with the times making certain methods look very archaic. But one thing sticks to my mind whenever I go out and stare at advertisements and that my friends is a simple concept known as "branding."
In short "branding" is what makes you buy Duracell batteries over Kirkland batteries or a piece of shit Sanrio toaster versus an actual toaster made by let's say like Black & Decker, get it? It's the association of a name and its value on an object. How much value you see in the name depends heavily on how it's marketed to you, which in turn adversely affects how much your willing to pay for the object; whether it's with time, money or even both.
So, why is M. Night Shyamalan's name being associated with the new film Devil even though he's just the producer of the film? Because M. Night also made The Sixth Sense and movie studios want you to remember that fact when you pay the inflated ticket price to go watch Devil. I think this is retarded because at this rate how will M. Night ever learn that he's not God and he needs to be slightly more open to criticism of his films rather than rejecting them, and labeling criticism as people misinterpreting his films. I only say this because I did enjoy The Sixth Sense and I thought Signs was amazing, and I would like to see M. Night get back to the top of his form. This will never happen if Hollywood keeps sucking up to him and allowing him to hog all the creative credits for his movies. Honestly, how many bad movies does it take for people to realize this man cannot handle all that workload on his own? When will numbers cease to measure the quality of a film? It's like if all of Scorsese's films made after Goodfellas was total crap but they were all advertised as "from the director of Goodfellas," yes this situation does aggravate me to no end.
I feel like the beginning of his downfall came when Time magazine called him, "the next Spielberg," even then I felt it was too preemptive to be calling such a new and young director a legend. Fuck you media.
I know this is an age old argument in Hollywood where studio heads are just looked at as money grubbing business men who have no appreciation in film, but come on!
-DK
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