Word: shyamalan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When Manoj Night Shyamalan was growing up in suburban Philadelphia in the 1980s, his parents--both immigrants from India, both physicians--piled on the pressure. "There was simply an assumption that I'd come first in my class," he recalls. He was also expected to follow his parents into medicine. When he told them he would instead study moviemaking at New York University, they were horrified. Now they feel a lot better. In 1997, five years after his graduation, Walt Disney Studios paid Shyamalan $2.5 million for the screenplay of the Bruce Willis thriller The Sixth Sense...
...dream jobs. Not only that, it's suddenly no longer a surprise to find Indians in the pantheon of (thinking) America's celebrities. From publisher Sonny Mehta and McKinsey & Co. managing director Rajat Gupta to alternative health guru Deepak Chopra and Academy Award-nominated director M. Night Shyamalan ("The Sixth Sense"), the influence of Indian immigrants over American society is growing, not least because tens of millions of Americans make daily use of an Internet whose growth and maintenance has relied heavily on Indian brainpower...
...been magically transformed into a Mexican. (But then again, what Indian would want to be friends with Gwyneth Paltrow? As if.) What's the deal? I'm saying it loud and clear --put an Indian in a movie and I guarantee it will be a blockbuster! M. Night Shyamalan did it with The Sixth Sense--in one totally irrelevant scene, two attractive Indians engage in a random argument over an engagement ring. But I assure you, those 30 seconds explain the movie's $250 million dollar gross. After all, every Indian in America went to see for themselves whether...
...outcasts in this world: Bruce Willis as a psychologist estranged from his wife, Toni Collette as a lonely single mom and Haley Joel Osment as her socially awkward son. But before long the film makes isolation a theme capable of transcending worlds. The ghosts in writer/director M. Night Shyamalan's world don't want to hurt the living. They just want to talk to them. And the living are just as desperate to find a willing ear. Of course, The Sixth Sense is not without the marks of a traditional horror film. There are plenty of tight close-ups into...
...Sixth Sense has been so successful is because it's wonderfully tricky--not since The Crying Game have we been so utterly fooled that we must see the movie a second time to figure out its secrets. Bruce Willis finally produced a non-stinker and he has M. Night Shyamalan to thank; the Indian writer-director carefully wove together the necessary elements of reality and fantasy to create a truly spooky moviegoing experience. It's movies like these, the ones that open out of nowhere and slowly build a following sans hype, that restore our faith in the public--especially...