Lady in the Water: C+

First off let me say that I found this movie intensely watchable and very enjoyable, but deeply flawed. M. Night Shamalayan is very good at creating worlds of creeping, crawling things that we do not see until it is too late. He builds suspense with a masterful hand and his central story is a binding supernatural tale. Here he exhibits those qualities and several new bad ones. The first half of the movie is a sharp comedy-type about a super for an apartment, Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamati, playing Heep with schlubish joy), who finds a "narf" in the pool. The narf is Story (Bryce Dallas Howard, with the quiet whisper/question of an ancient doom-sayer) and she has come to inspire a writer (M. Night Shamalayn himself) and than she must leave. However she is being terrorized by a rogue scrunt, a grassy wolf creature meant to stop her mission before it is done, not after. As you can see this is very intriuging stuff and the movie reflects that. I was riveted (until I jumped that was) to my seat for close to 70 minutes. Then things start to fall apart. 100 different little holes in the script start to consume the logic of the movie and the death of a movie critic/greek chorus to the movie, Mr. Faber, is both satirical and alittle tiresome. What remains are the central characters blabbering on and on about plot and meaning and morals and life and I found it all delightful, but again very wearisome. Not to mention the fact that logic just about throws itself out a 30-story window to splatter on the hot asphalt below. Still the final wordless scene is amazing and a reminder that Shamalayan is a technical genius, mabe he just should scale back his ponderous writings for awhile. In the end I still liked the movie alot, for all of it's flaws, and I don't know why. Chalk it up to that old movie magic.