The New Yorker says: M. Night, you crazy!

Ladies and Gentleman, this just in, front page on both of the trades this morning.....(drumroll please)

M. Night Shyamalan's next project has been announced!

According to Variety:

"M. Night Shyamalan has moved to Warner Bros. Pictures for his next pic, "Lady in the Water." Story concerns a building super who finds a sea nymph in his apartment building's pool. Shyamalan wrote the script and will produce the film....blah, blah, blah"

A sea nymph living in the pool of an apartment building aye? Sounds like Splash meets Poltergeist 3.

Poor M. Night. I have to say I feel kind of bad for the guy. When your first well known piece is something like The Sixth Sense (his first script was actually Stuart Little) there's so much pressure, no? All the film nerds are just waiting for you to take a fall. People have jumped on all his films after Sixth Sense like blood thirsty hounds. I actually thought Unbreakable was great, and Signs was really strong, except for the very end. If I could just recut those last five minutes, I swear....

As a friend of mine said a few weeks ago "its trendy to hate The Village" - and to a certain extent I think that's true. I mean at this point everyone's become so familiar with M. Night's clever twists at the end of his movies, that people just sit there trying to dissect the film scene by scene, instead of just sitting back and enjoying the piece as a whole. Now I definitely have issues with The Village, but I also think it got unusually harsh criticisms because people expected the movie to be something that it was never going to be. Disney marketed that thing like it was an out and out horror film (which money wise makes sense I suppose) when really it was a historical drama/socio-political commentary. The Village had the plot of an indie film, not a big Hollywood blockbuster. There was no way that people were going to walk out of that movie and not be disappointed after the way that the trailers for it were cut. I do think there were some pacing problems in the story, and structural issues that could have been resolved in the script. But, I honestly believe that if The Village had been released as an independent film by some no name director people would have been running down the streets talking about how brilliant it was.

At any rate, I'm not really sure where he could possibly be going with this whole sea nymph thing. Is it going to be a romance between her and the building's super? I don't think I have the strength in me to endure that. Maybe he actually will make a horror film this time, and the nymph will start stalking him, and kill his girlfriend and stuff. That doesn't sound too promising either though. I think M. Night has just officially made the turn in his career that I was recently attributing to Tim Burton. He's undergone the metamorphasis from creative film maker to crazy person!