He goes by "Night," but it's hard to dispute his sunny disposition. Just a few minutes into a conversation with M. Night Shyamalan in a New York City hotel room yesterday, it was obvious to me that the director has managed to occupy such a unique niche in the Hollywood landscape because he's immediately likable. Of course, a little movie released in 1999 called The Sixth Sense didn't hurt, either.

After landing two Oscar nominations and international acclaim for his masterful ghost story, Shyamalan continued to market himself as a brand. Since then, the results have been mixed. Signs was an indisputable hit. Unbreakable has its supporters. Lady in the Water? Not so much. But that failure hasn't prevented the filmmaker from dealing with audacious material: His latest movie, The Happening, finds a married couple (Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel) thrust into a world where people inexplicably become suicidal after getting struck by an ominous, unseen toxin. Forces of evil usually remain unseen in Shyamalan's films, and The Happening is no exception to that rule. I spoke to the 37-year-old Philadelphia resident about the personal philosophies guiding his career choices, the polarized reactions to his work, and what the future will bring.

I love conceptually clever alien invasion films. I mean, Independence Day (humans fight aliens!) is fun, but something like Signs (humans fight aliens, from the point of view of one farm family) is way more gripping. And for all my problems with Cloverfield (which isn't quite an alien invasion movie, though I guess we don't really know that), its notion of an apocalyptic event viewed solely from the ground was brilliant, and the movie worked like gangbusters when it really engaged with that idea instead of focusing on the emotional tribulations of the numbskull characters.

Battle: Los Angeles (not to be confused with Battle in Seattle), which is being fast-tracked for Columbia from a script by Chris Bertolini (The General's Daughter), looks to be a movie like that. The story posits a large-scale alien invasion, but will focus on one marine platoon's role in Earth's effort to fight back on the streets of Los Angeles. I'm not sure any movie to date has tried to answer the question of what it's like for the poor military saps who inevitably get deployed against the terrifying alien attackers. (Starship Troopers is close, but not quite what I have in mind.) I mean, what about those guys who ran across the screen with grenade launchers in Cloverfield? What happened to them? Inquiring minds want to know.

Over at Cracked.com, they've made a list of the top ten worst twist endings of all time. Obviously that list has a lot of spoilers, but I'm going to attempt to write this post without revealing any of them. Why? To make sure you go over there, of course. So, if you're not worried about ruining the endings to some movies you probably shouldn't see anyway, then head over and read the hilariously confusing explanations, or attempts at explanations, and/or how some endings don't make enough sense to bother with explanations. I will let you in on the titles of the movies, just in case you are interested in seeing any of them in the future and would like to go in spoiler free. The ten, in order from "least asinine" to "most asinine", are: Stay (2005); High Tension (2003); Signs (2002); Hide and Seek (2005) and Secret Window (2004), which tie for #7, because they're considered the exact same plot (is that spoiling it for you guys? probably -- oh well, I tried); The Forgotten (2004); Basic (2003); Perfect Stranger (2007); The Number 23 (2007); Planet of the Apes (2001); and The Life of David Gale (2003).

I haven't seen the number one movie, but I can't imagine it's worse than the others that I have seen, especially Planet of the Apes. Basically, I think Cracked.com considers it the worst because it stars Kevin Spacey, who also starred in The Usual Suspects, which pretty much, along with The Sixth Sense, obviously, got Hollywood on this crappy twist kick to begin with (He was also in Se7en, which had another so-so twist ending). Look at those films; they all came out between 2001 and 2007. And what was the most common twist? The main character did it. Either he or she has a split personality, or amnesia, or suffers from some other psychological ailment. Other idiotic yet easily written twists include: aliens did it; it's all a dream (as if you need to steal from Bob Newhart, come on!); and, in the fashion of Suspects, it's all just made-up stories. Personally, I'm upset to not see my least favorite twist ending. It involved a whole crop of great actors who just so happened to be explained as existing inside the imagination of some mental patient. That one had the split personality plus the dream plus the Suspects idea that none of what we watched is real. Can you name it?

I'm not going to take this opportunity to say that I always believed M. Night Shyamalan is a hack. Sure, I never bought into the hype that he was the next Spielberg or Hitchcock, but I do like one of his films (Unbreakable) and I think he has some brilliant scenes in two others (The Sixth Sense and Signs). After two flops, though, he seems to be running out of good ideas and out of loyal defenders. Of course, he's still a talented director of suspenseful scenes, and he's still pretty young.

In a post about the biggest flops of last year, I wrote that it is probably a good time for Shyamalan to try directing someone else's script. And maybe he was reading (I doubt it), because two weeks later the announcement came that he was, yes, directing someone else's script. Or, at least adapting someone else's idea and then directing that. However, it now appears he's still trying his luck (and his own ideas). Insiders told TMZ recently that Shyamalan is shopping his latest original script around Hollywood, and so far he isn't seeing a lot of interest.

Oh, you knew it was coming. After suffering (Okay, we're partly to blame) through one week of "Mel Gibson gets busted for drinking, driving and disliking Jews" stories, some folks have thrown together one of them fake movie trailers for M. Night Shyamalan's Signs. Only they've attached to it the clever little title, Signs ... of Anti-Semitism.

In the trailer, Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix and family get all freaked out when it appears a bunch of Jews are invading the planet. Surprisingly, I found myself laughing on several occasions -- the thing looks pretty good. From the giant Jewish star carved into a field to the hilarious cameo tacked on towards the end, Signs ... of Anti-Semitism is definitely one of my favorite fake trailers to date. What do you think? (And, please, this is obviously a joke. Let's not get all serious here, okay?)

[via JoBlo]

I consider myself a fan of M. Night Shyamalan's films, and it's not just because we're both Philly guys. Despite the popular backlash, I still think The Sixth Sense is a pretty darn good movie. I also feel that Unbreakable is borderline brilliant and that Signs works well enough, even if it doesn't exactly stand up to repeat viewings. I'm also of the opinion that The Village is an indulgent mess, and it's the first M. Night movie that I actively disliked. I've not yet seen Lady in the Water, so obviously I cannot even venture an opinion on the flick ... but I've spoken to a lot of film critics (Shyama-fans and non-fans alike) and they assure me it's pretty darn terrible. (It's currently wooing a 19% approval rate at Rotten Tomatoes, and neither Kim nor Ryan was all that thrilled with the flick.)

So I thought I'd transplant one of my recent geeky phone conversations into blog form and pose the following query: Is M. Night Shyamalan a fine filmmaker who's currently going through a rough spot in his career ... or is he a one-trick pony -- an emperor, as they say, with no clothes?

One of the most common opinions regarding the guy's last two films is a pretty logical one: That the filmmaker became so popular and so powerful so fast that now he's working in a virtual vacuum, a one-man filmmaking machine that's become insular, isolated, and beholden to no one -- and that includes the producers and studio execs who just might be able to contribute something important to the process. Or is M. Night a brilliant renegade of a big-budget filmmaker, a guy who tells the exact stories he wants to tell, and damn it all if the audiences and/or critics don't "get it"?

So what do you think? Are we dealing with a filmmaker who's "hit the wall," creatively-speaking? Did the guy only have two or three good movies in him? Or will he bounce back from the criticisms of The Village and Lady in the Water and deliver another movie that recaptures some of that Sixth Sense magic? And by "magic," I don't just mean the $293 million in domestic box office.