Starring: Paul Giamatti, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jeffrey Wright, Bob Balaban, Sarita Choudhury, Cindy Cheung

Co-hosted by writer Edward Douglas

In 2005, M. Night Shyamalan was coming off a number of huge hits for Disney with The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs, but he decided to do something different, an original fairy tale he could show his young daughters.

In the movie, Paul Giamatti plays Cleveland Heep, caretaker of an apartment complex filled with eccentric characters, who discovers a mermaid named Story (played by a fairly new Bryce Dallas Howard) who needs his help protecting her from a number of fierce creatures. The movie was mostly panned by critics, not helped by the release of a tell-all book about the making of the movie, though it may still be one of Shyamalan’s more original concepts with many out-there ideas that people just didn’t get. It probably didn’t help that the filmmaker cast himself as a Messiah-like character either.