The View From The Mountain

Hello, I'll be your psychotic bad guy today.  M. Night Shyamalan’s fall from grace has been well documented over these past few years. The writer/director, who made such a splash with his first film, the smash hit The Sixth Sense , has fallen flat on his face with such stinkers like The Happening (watch out for them trees!), After Earth (zzzz), and The Last Air Bender (the quest for a plot). With every new film he released, I kept hoping that Night wouldn’t fall again, that he would once again knock it out of the park like he did with his far better films, like Sixth Sense, Unbreakable , and Signs (yes, I liked Signs , and even The Village , too. So put that in your pipe and smoke it). In Split , a trio of teenage girls are abducted by a psychopath named Kevin (James McAvoy) and brought to an underground dungeon where they are kept locked up in a room. As if this scenario wasn’t scary enough, it turns out that Kevin has multiple personalities--23 in all--which he displays...

You want to get out of the car and watch the rest of the movie like a normal person, or what? Shane Black made his mark early in Hollywood with his script for the first Lethal Weapon , which reinvigorated the action film genre back in the 1980s. Black reinvigorated his own career back in 2005 by writing and directing the superb Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang , which starred a pre-Iron Man Robert Downey Jr. and a post-Batman Val Kilmer as a pair of unlikely private detectives who work a tough case. Black would work with Downey again as a director on Iron Man 3 , and the success of that film enabled him to direct The Nice Guys . Taking place in the late 1970s, The Nice Guys features a team-up between a private eye named Holland March ( Ryan Gosling) and Jackson Healy, a hired muscle who breaks people’s arms for a living. In fact, that was how March and Healy meet, when Healy breaks March’s arm in an effort to warn him off of a big case. But both men soon reluctantly team up when they reali...