5 Movies That Were Incredibly Self-Indulgent

4. Lady In The Water (2006, Dir. M. Night Shyamalan)

M. Night Shyamalan was once one of Hollywood€™s most promising directors following the huge success of The Sixth Sense. But after that one hit and one or two reasonably well received films that followed it, his career has completely gone down the toilet. And arguably the most embarrassing of his films is the egotistical vanity-fest that is Lady In The Water. The film is largely a fairy tale set in the real world about a water nymph named Story who is trying to return to her own world but part of the plot focuses on Shyamalan€™s character, a writer named Vick Ran. And that€™s the really egotistical part of the film. Although Shyamalan€™s role is bigger than the roles he usually gives himself in the films, it€™s not one that€™s put front and centre above all the others. But it€™s the role itself that makes this so egotistical and self-indulgent. Basically, Vick Ran learns that he is in fact a misunderstood visionary and that the book he is writing will inspire a future President and orator, change the way people view the world, and ultimately change the world for the better. But the cost of it is that his ideas will be so controversial that he will be assassinated. So Shyamalan has basically written a thinly veiled avatar of himself as a character who is almost analogous to Martin Luther King and Jesus Christ. This is almost rivalling Kim Jong-Il in terms of egotism. There€™s also a secondary character who is a film critic. He€™s portrayed as incredibly arrogant and his only real purpose is to misunderstand things, screw everything up, and then get mauled to death by a mystical wolf-like creature. Subtle, Shyamalan. As Mark Kermode said in his review of it, Shyamalan didn€™t write Lady In The Water for his children, he wrote it for himself.