Shyamalan's Glass has good box office opening despite mixed reviews
New York, January 18, 2019. Glass, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, has gotten mixed early reviews. The horror movie opened yesterday, in over 3,800 theaters in the U.S.
Glass, a sequel to "Unbreakable," (2000), is part of a comic-book-inspired series. It brings together two old foes – David Dunn, played by Bruce Willis, and Elijah “Mr. Glass” Price, played by Samuel L. Jackson. They are in a mental asylum with Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), a character with multiple personalities from Shyamalan’s 2017 movie Split.
Glass grossed about $4 million on its preview day. It is forecast to take in about $50 million in the first weekend. Shyamalan wrote, directed, and financed “Glass,” which had a $20 million budget.
Trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95ghQs5AmNk
Reviews of Glass
The New York Times, January 17, 2019
Early in “Glass,” an enjoyable new whatsit from M. Night Shyamalan, Samuel L. Jackson keeps winking at the camera. It’s a character tic, but it’s nice to think that Jackson is signaling that he’s hip to the absurdity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/movies/glass-review.html
The New Yorker January 28, 2019.
Shyamalan’s Superhero Puzzle
“You have to admire Shyamalan’s efforts to deconstruct a genre that he evidently loves, yet there is little to haunt or to fool us in the result.”
WIRED January 18, 2019
There's one big question at the core of writer-director M. Night Shyamalan's new movie Glass: Who gets to be a hero?
https://www.wired.com/story/glass-review/
CNET January 18, 2019
“You know what to expect from a superhero movie, right? Punching. Colorful costumes. Skyscrapers crumbling. More punching.
Not if M. Night Shyamalan has anything to say it.
To say the storyline of Shyamalan's superhero team-up Glass is unexpected would be an understatement… I love to follow a writer's logic and guess what's going to happen next. Through years of watching movies, I'm usually not far off. But I was taken by surprise when I watched Glass…”.
Polygon January 18, 2019
Glass’ twists speak to M. Night Shyamalan’s superhero philosophy. The strange conclusion to M. Night Shyamalan’s superhero trilogy.
USA TODAY January 16, 2019.
'Glass': M. Night Shyamalan answers all our burning questions
“The great part was I got to kind of have a conversation about the meta, the culture of comic books and why it's an obsession, and it gave validity to the basic premise of the movie,” Shyamalan says. “There's a wing of a hospital that treats people with this growing disorder, which is people that think they're comic-book characters. It feels like, coming out of this time period, this would naturally happen.”
Variety, January 18, 2019.
Box Office: M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Glass’ Cracks $3.7 Million on Thursday Night
VOX January 18, 2019
deeply unsatisfying
The movie ends the trilogy that began with Unbreakable and Split — and diminishes both in retrospect.
Shyamalan tweets about the color changes in the movie
M. Night ShyamalanVerified account @MNightShyamalan Jan 11More
Finally, I chose purple for Mr Glass because this color has been associated with royalty. Majestic qualities. Elijah sees himself as important. A main character of comics.
29 replies331 retweets2,443 likes
M. Night ShyamalanVerified account @MNightShyamalan Jan 11More
I chose ochre or mustard for The Beast because this color is associated with religious ceremonies. Hindu and Buddhist. A monks robe. I see The Beast as an evangelist. A preacher who wants to help save The Broken.
33 replies306 retweets1,856 likes
More
3. As the characters believe in the comic book world the primary colors in the film become more dominate. As they stop believing they fade to a monochromatic world. The pink room where they do therapy is pink, red fading to white, bec this is where they stop believing.
81 replies415 retweets2,944 likes
M. Night ShyamalanVerified account @MNightShyamalan Jan 11More
Finally, I chose purple for Mr Glass because this color has been associated with royalty. Majestic qualities. Elijah sees himself as important. A main character of comics.
29 replies331 retweets2,443 likes
M. Night ShyamalanVerified account @MNightShyamalan Jan 11More
I chose ochre or mustard for The Beast because this color is associated with religious ceremonies. Hindu and Buddhist. A monks robe. I see The Beast as an evangelist. A preacher who wants to help save The Broken.
33 replies306 retweets1,856 likes
M. Night Shyamalan was born in a family from Kerala
Shyamalan was born in a Hindu household in Puducherry, India. His father, Nelliyattu C. Shyamalan, is an Indian Malayali physician belonging to a famous "Thiyya" tharavad from Mahe, Kerala. His mother, Jayalakshmi, is a Tamil Indian and an obstetrician and gynecologist by profession. In the 1960s, after medical school (at the Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education & Research in Puducherry) and the birth of their first child, Veena, his parents moved to the United States. His mother returned to India to spend the last five months of her pregnancy with him at her parents� home in Chennai (Madras).
Shyamalan spent his first six weeks in Puducherry, and then was raised in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, an affluent suburb of Philadelphia. He attended the private Roman Catholic grammar school Waldron Mercy Academy, though he was a Hindu (they chose it for disciplinary reasons), followed by the Episcopal Academy, a private Episcopal high school located at the time in Merion, Pennsylvania. Shyamalan earned the New York University Merit Scholarship in 1988. Shyamalan went on to New York University�s Tisch School of the Arts, in Manhattan, graduating in 1992. It was while studying there that he adopted Night as his second name.
Shyamalan had an early desire to be a filmmaker when he was given a Super-8 camera at a young age. Though his father wanted him to follow in the family practice of medicine, his mother encouraged him to follow his passion. By the time he was 17 the Steven Spielberg fan had made 45 home movies. Beginning with The Sixth Sense, he has included a scene from one of these childhood films on each DVD release of his films, which he feels represents his first attempt at the same kind of film (with the exception of Lady in the Water).
career
Shyamalan made his first film, the semi-autobiographical drama Praying with Anger, while still an NYU student, using money borrowed from family and friends. It was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12, 1992, and played commercially at one theater for one week in rural Woodstock, Illinois. When the film debuted at the Toronto Film Festival, Shyamalan was introduced by David Overbey who predicted that the world would see more of Shyamalan in the years to come. Praying with Anger has also been shown on Canadian television. Filmed in Chennai, it is his only film to be shot outside of Pennsylvania.
Shyamalan wrote and directed his second movie, Wide Awake, in 1995, though it was not released until 1998. His parents were the film's associate producers. The drama dealt with a ten-year-old Catholic schoolboy (Joseph Cross) who, after the death of his grandfather (Robert Loggia), searches for God. The film's supporting cast included Dana Delany and Denis Leary as the boy's parents, as well as Julia Stiles, and Camryn Manheim. Wide Awake was filmed in a school Shyamalan attended as a child and earned 1999 Young Artist Award nominations for Best Drama, and, for Cross, Best Performance. Only in limited release, the film grossed $305,704 in theaters.
That same year Shyamalan co-wrote the screenplay for Stuart Little with Greg Brooker. In 2010, he directed The Last Airbender, based on the Nickelodeon TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender.
In 2008, Shyamalan was awarded the Padma Shri by the government of India.
personal life
In 1993, Shyamalan married psychologist Bhavna Vaswani, a fellow student whom he met at NYU and with whom he has two daughters. The family resides on a sprawling estate in Willistown, Pennsylvania, near Shyamalan's usual shooting site of Philadelphia. His production company, Blinding Edge Pictures is located in Berwyn, PA.
