Ben Affleck’s blue-collah, sophomore directawrial effit The Town landed in the tawp spawt at the bawx awfice this weekend, earning an estimated $23.8 million on 3,500 screens.  That’s more than Gone Baby Gone‘s entire run and only three million less than the opening of The Departed.  How ya like them apples?  Maybe not as much as that daygo Scoahsese’s, but still pretty good fer some hahd on from Southie.  GO SAWX.

Meanwhile, Easy A skated to a respectable second place with $18.2 million on the strength of largely positive word of mouth (thereby proving a female-led teen movie can be successful, provided it’s, you know… good).  Industry analysts say Emma Stone is poised to become the next big thing, but caution her against “pulling a Lohan.”  (*pantomimes BJ, chugs invisible wine*)

In a shocking turn of events, Devil was kind of disappointing.  Its $12.6 million opening was the lowest yet for “an M.Night Shyamalan-branded horror movie.”  Which I guess means it did worse than The Happening.  It’s strange that the film didn’t do well, because the marketing plan seemed fool proof:

Step 1: Present film featuring no stars and a concept worthy of a six-minute sketch.

Step 2: Mention that it comes “from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan”, America’s favorite filmmaker.

Step 3: ???

Step 4: Profit.

Don’t blame yourselves, guys, no one could’ve possibly seen this coming.

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I was planning to wait for a non-buttcam version of this joke to show up online, but it hasn’t happened, so I’m posting it anyway.  I just liked that even while Devil is still putting “From the mind of M. Night Shyamalan” in their trailer (please tell me that was in his contract), the Shyamalan name has become a joke.  I exaggerate so little when I say that. His name actually came up during the David Hasselhoff Roast. Even worse, it wasn’t even the punchline, it was the setup:

Pam Anderson’s vagina is like an M. Night Shyamalan movie: 10 years ago everyone wanted to see it. Now when people see it, they come out and they’re like, what the f*ck was THAT? Was it an alien?  Was it dead?  And what was Mark Wahlberg doing in there?

Whitney Cummings, everybody.  I would argue her segment wasn’t quite as good as Gilbert Gottfried‘s, but she did a Magic Johnson’s-AIDS-blood joke that endeared her to me forever.  According to her blog, she did another one about Lost (for you TV fans) that didn’t make the broadcast:

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M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender opened in the UK recently, and according to reports, audiences are laughing at many of the film’s climactic scenes.  Of course, that wouldn’t be news.  The news is that for the first time, it seems something besides Shyamalan’s terrible writing may be to blame.  Writes the Guardian:

Each nation has a certain type of people, a favoured race different from the rest, people with the Jedi-like power to control or “bend” the elements. Firebenders. Earthbenders. Waterbenders. And airbenders. At the cinema showing I attended, the British crowd reacted derisively at key dialogue moments. One wise old lady says solemnly to a young man: “I could tell at once that you were a bender, and that you would realise your destiny.” One character tells another wonderingly: “There are some really powerful benders in the Northern Water Zone.” Another whispers tensely: “We want to minimise their bender sources.” A key figure is taken away by brutal soldiers, one of whom shouts cruelly: “It’s a bender.”
And so on, for almost two hours. Each time, the response from the auditorium was deafeningly immature, and brought many of us to a state of nervous collapse.

Strangely, I found it much too boring to be funny. The Economist explains what I was missing:

“Bender”, of course, is a crude British pejorative for “homosexual”. So why, indeed, didn’t they just check the script? Turns out they didn’t need to. One of its stars, Dev Patel, is a Brit who certainly knew what was going on.  Patel, who plays a young prince, said of the term: “When I came onto the movie, I was like, ‘Really’? Benders?’”
Asked why he did not inform the director of the British slang connotation of the word, he told The Times: “It was too integral to the movie. We couldn’t call them fire or air manipulators. It would have been moving too far from the source material.”

I guess you can add to the growing list of reasons Manny shouldn’t be allowed to write his own movies the fact that he couldn’t think of a word that would keep his movie from being called “The Last Sky Queer” and his characters from constantly gay bashing each other.  Then again, maybe he knowingly left it in there, realizing it was the only thing remotely interesting about it.  In related news, British Tom Cruise just had a panic attack.

Over the weekend I saw the trailer for Devil in a theater for the second time, and for the second time, the crowd laughed and jeered during the “from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan” title card.  Point being, his last few movies have sucked, and there’s no need to pile on.  But it seems every day there’s a new story about Shyamalan responding to “his critics” (i.e., everybody).  Is that because he won’t shut up and just go away for a while?  Or is it because the studio is making the poor bastard get out there and promote Last Airbender in foreign markets to earn back the budget, leaving him to face adversarial journalists everywhere he goes, even though he and everyone else involved knows the movie is a turd and he’d rather just stay home?  I don’t know.  But I know quotes like these aren’t helping:

“I don’t know what’s going on with me and the critics in the United States. They’ve never got me and it’s getting worse!” said the filmmaker.

“I’ve always had a European sensibility to my movies, so the pacing is always a little bit off for (Americans). It feels a little stilted, they need more electricity.”

“I’m very used to getting on a plane from the US having been savaged by them and going to – in this case – Japan next, and then they’re like ‘genius!’, he added. [ITN]

Oh, you didn’t like it?  You probably just didn’t get it.  Have you ever lived in Europe?  No?  Well there’s your problem.  If you’d been to Europe, you’d probably love it.  Expository dialog is a delicacy over there.

I think my problem is that I didn’t see Eat, Pray, Love BEFORE The Last Airbender.  All that privilege and world travel probably would’ve helped put things in perspective.  They should do a co-branding push.  My aunt saw Eat, Pray Love first, and when she saw Airbender a few days later, she said loved it.  During the closing credits, she queefed so hard it blew popcorn on the people in front of her.  True story.

M. Night Shyamalan has directed precisely one 3D movie, The Last Airbender, which wasn’t even shot in 3D (it was converted in post, like Clash of the Titans).  About which people said:

• “Shown in murky, cut-rate 3-D.” -NY Post

• “The movie looks no worse if you take off your 3-D glasses. (It looks better only if you close your eyes.) The default color is murky purple. -WallStreetJournal

• “As for the 3-D, I’m tempted to leave responsible critical language behind and say, quite simply, that it sucks — except that the 3-D visuals in this movie would have to exist before they could be called terrible.” -Entertainment Weekly

• “A ghoulish simulation” of real 3D. -BostonGlobe

• “Puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D. …a disaster even if you like 3D. …the drabbest, darkest, dingiest movie of any sort I’ve seen in years. …looks like it was filmed with a dirty sheet over the lens.” -Roger Ebert

And now for the punchline: that same Shyamalan, who presided over one movie in which 3D conversion was done badly by someone else, has been announced as the keynote speaker at a 3D Entertainment Summit sponsored by Variety.

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