I had one of those moments last Friday during the trailers preceeding Inception:
The trailers were rolling, and everyone had high expectations. It was a sold-out show and you could feel the anticipation in the air. A trailer begins, it presents the intriguing plot of a group of people stuck in an elevator, and one of them is not who they seem.
There is dead silence as our collective excitement builds over what they're going to tease at in the trailer, and then the text on the screen reads "From the mind of M. Knight Shyamalan" and a deafening simultaneous groan rises from the crowd. We had not all planned to groan, nor did we groan loud enough for the whole theater to hear. Virtually every single solitary patron in that theater let out a genuine groan to express their frustration and disappointment in Mr. Shyamalan.
Then we all laughed in surprise, because we were not alone in our sentiment, and because we were probably all thinking the same thing: Does M. Knight know that the mention of his name generates that type of response from an audience?
I laughed again when I saw that this was not an isolated occurence in theater 14 of the AMC Boston Common:
http://consumerist.com/2010/07/why-do-they-keep-using-m-night-to-advertise-movies-if-this-is-how-people-react-to-his-name.html
http://filmdrunk.uproxx.com/2010/07/shyamalan-name-is-the-turd-in-audiences-punch-bowl
and there are no shortage of other links to similar experiences. Just Google "Shyamalan groan".
Take heed, Mr. Shyamalan.
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