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My Lady in the Water review will come out on Friday. But in the meantime, there are a few things I just couldn’t fit in to 600 words. I suppose it’s to the film’s credit that it gave me a lot to talk about. It’s not to its credit that its not all good.

- M. Night should stop casting himself. Seriously.

- The film is a little scary. But only if you avoid trailers.

- M. Night has a knack for action sequences. Whatever rumors were floating around about him working on an Indy screenplay might have actually produced something good.

- Though he throws in some nice po-mo touches, he handles the bit with the critic (you’ll know what I mean if you see the movie) very sloppily. He should have had Kevin Williamson write that scene.

- Although visually it’s on a par with any Shaymalan effort (thanks, in part, to Chris Doyle, DP on Hero and 2046), he inserts, for the first time, some really crappy camera effects. You know the ones you see sometimes in trailers where the camera will speed up suddenly and jerkily for no good reason? Or the video slo-mo which creates an almost pixilated version of real slo-mo? Not good times.

- As with Signs, he manages to keep the action largely to one locale without losing interest. Or, more to the point, its not the fact that we never change setting that’s to blame when the tension suffers. Very Rear Window (or Lifeboat or Rope for that matter).

- There’s a whole element of having to approach the story as a child (which is personified by Giamatti in one of his best scenes) which is woven quite nicely into the subtext, but a child-like state of acceptance on the audience’s part does not excuse a lack of storytelling finesse on the filmmaker’s part. In other words, you can’t be cheesy just because we’re trusting. You can tell a children’s story without insulting the audience’s intelligence. You can even make it meta. Just look at the best post-modern kid’s film of all time: The Muppet Movie.

- I liked it better than The Village but not nearly as much as any other Shyamalan film.

I’ll post a link to the full review on Friday.