Telescope Eyes
Ugh, keep M. Night Shamkjnsdf;oiwqrgfo8erjmvpoirjgm45poig away from children's stories.
Lady in the Water is fucking awful. It's boring, pedantic, jumpy, stupid and all caught up in M. Night moreso than anything else he's ever done (his role in the movie is significant and the character he gives himself is ridiculous self-masturbation). It's just a disaster of a movie. It can't decide whether it's a Paul Giamatti vehicle or a quirky ensemble piece and the two are constantly at odds - the ensemble is actually one of the biggest problems with the movie. It's random recognizable actors playing tiny, random roles with no real purpose other than to fit into the bullshit "archetypal fairy tale" crap that M. Night is trying to tell.
It's no surprise that this is a movie that developed from a bedtime story he was telling his kids. Original bedtime stories tend to meander and contort as the teller spontaneously adds things to the story and the kid drifts in and out of sleep. That's pretty much the movie. The mythology is not only terrible, it's completely nonsensical and changes course randomly as the movie needs a suspenseful scene or a plot point.
Just fucking ugh.
Oh, and the dumbass animation at the beginning just makes everything worse. Though one could make the argument that it's a warning that you're about to sit through a stupid, poorly conceived and poorly constructed movie, it's a little late once you've sat there that long.
Now, Clerks 2, on the other hand, is a bit more interesting. It's funny as a motherfucker, brilliantly obscene in places (and kind of boring in others) and terrific as a casual little afternoon movie, but it's got an interesting subtheme that one might take as a commentary on Kevin Smith's filmography. He's had such a weird career wavering back and forth between extremely promising movies (Clerks, obviously, Chasing Amy, probably obviously as well) and self-indulgent randomness. Clerks 2 is clearly self-indulgent, but it seems almost like a decision by Kevin Smith to just keep doing whatever the fuck he wants to do, prestige-be-damned. It'll be interesting to see where he goes from here.
Speaking of prestige, specifically, The Prestige, I'd be more interested in an old timey "real magic?" movie if there weren't two identical movies coming out at the same time being shown as BACK-TO-BACK TRAILERS. That's stupid. I hate these twinned concept movies that keep popping up. They can never sustain themselves as individual movies as they're always tied to the other film and whatever interest they might generate is dulled considerably by the piled on publicity. Terrible planning / marketing / whatever. Unless they're linked somehow and come together in the final scene in some sort of crazy megamovie way that gets resolved when Edward Norton and Christian Bale go on a havoc-wreaking magical quest to conquer the mundane world.
In fact, Scarlett Johansson and Hugh Jackman are also in Woody Allen's Scoop, also tangentially related to stage magic and ghosts (sort of?). Plus, Christian Bale and Michael Caine linked again. I see this turning into a time-traveling magic adventure EPIC spanning centuries and literally decades of tie-in films in the future.
Man, Hollywood. Fuck you. Seriously. Fuck off.