This line made me skim over Strauss once again, and my newfound maturity made me aghast that his ideas were once taken as seriously as they were. They’re so simple and mean.

However, standing as we all are in the dark, lengthening shadow of Chomsky, perhaps we should fragment Strauss’ ideas about myths and the public good. It seems the backlash against “political correctness” and relativism was powerful enough to knock us all back down to more fundamental forms of discourse. Anyone here think that liberals should work more towards creating their own cohesive mythical narrative and move away from the relativism that has dominated their rhetoric for decades? Just a question…

Amen, brother. I have posted in numerous places that Hollywood is the American Right’s greatest friend, because for every buck Babs Streisand gives to a liberal cause there is a Hollywood blockbuster that gives everybody the impression that the Good Guys Always Win When Given A Gun.

I make sure my brain is too disengaged to even soak any of that crap up permanently. I wish our pundits, especially the ones blabbering about “Shane” and “High Noon” would have done the same.

Hollywood films serve to entertain, yes, and entertainment is simply a form of pacification.

And on the subject of comics… they may be “shit” but two recent films made from comics have been the most subversive and intelligent ever produced by hollywood. Both “V for Vendetta” and “Sin City” had disturbing plot scenarios and pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric that pushed notions of personal justice, individualism and redemption to us instead of simple pacifying pablum.

The question is: were those notions of revolutionary justice in those films to simply pacify us further? To make us say “It’s good that films like that are being made, it means we’re not all brain washed,” and then carry on being brain washed?

I’m new here, but I have to say that I’m a little disapointed that so many of you were so enthusiastic about MNS’s films when this blog is reportedly an “intellectual” one. His films are simple, “postmodern” tricks to keep you in the seat. He might be a bit deft with suspense, and with conceptual narratives filled with clever (if not at all new) devices, but overall his films leave a sour, egotistical taste in the mouth, I feel. It’s quite telling that he places himself in his films in roles whose characters serve as explanatory forces, as subjects to reveal the inner workings of the narrative. It’s almost as if he has to step into the frame of his films himself to tell you what’s going on, or how to interpret them.

Signs had me until the God-did-it ending. The last fifteen minutes ruined the film.

If I was a middle-aged guy living alone and I saw a mermaid in my pool my first reaction would be:

1) Jesus I need to get laid.

Upon discovering that she isn’t just a figment of my ever-more-desperate libido my next reaction would be:

2) Hey, is getting laid a possibility here?

If the movie does not, and from the previews it apparently doesn’t, pursue this particular line of inquiry then I’m gonna have a hard time with that old suspension-of-disbelief.

I liked Sixth Sense, and no I never got it unlike the happily-full-of-himself Mr. Farber, as for me the whole point of sitting down and watching a movie is to give my brain a break. I’m not really looking to see if Bruce Willis produces vapor trails or not.

I stand by my “Village-as-approving-parable-of-Straussian-theory” conviction.

Comic books are wooden characters, wooden art, and wooden stories. Superman is the dullest character in the history of fiction. Talking about them in the context of one’s personal history, fine. But as adults, can we just all agree that they are shit and move on (and look, I spent five years, as an adult, working in comics, so don’t tell me I just need to check out the latest Gaiman title for my ephiphany)?

No doubt comic nerdry has a fair amount to do with the love for Unbreakable here and many other places on the internet; us nerds is everywhere. Still, granting the (admittedly arguable) premise that superheroes and comic books are worth telling stories about, look at that film again. One, it’s about comic books. Two, it tells a comic book story. Three, it features a comic book hero. It weaves all of these together into an (I think) fairly compelling drama that catches up not just a couple of strange characters but an ordinary family working through their problems as well. So far so good, right. Then comes the final two minutes of the film. BAM! Suddenly, all us nerds realize that, this isn’t just a twist like in Sixth Sense, we haven’t misunderstood and/or been misdirected by something central to the plot of the movie: we have, in fact, made or been led to make a category mistake about the plot of the movie! Unbreakable isn’t using comic books to tell a story; it is a comic book story. For me, the final frame of the film, when we’re informed that Mr. Glass has been sent to an “institute for the criminally insane,” is what sealed the deal. (Because who ever gets sent to institutes for the criminally insane, anyway? Comic book supervillians do! And what do they do at those institutes? THEY ESCAPE! I hadn’t spent the previous two hours watching a movie that realistically played with all sorts of comic books elements; I had, in fact, been watching a filmed comic book. I was floored.)

But I guess if you don’t get it, you don’t get it.

I thought both Sixth Sense and Signs were fairly melodramatic and often forced in terms of plot, but both nonetheless worked as thrillers, at least up through their final twists. Sixth Sense’s twist resulted in something mushy and supposedly romantic; I liked it well enough. Signs’s final “twist,” on the other hand, was just too ham-fisted for my tastes. Overall, I like the movie and the characters very much (Gibson’s confrontation with Shyamalan’s character in the truck was fantastically done), but as a friend of mine put it, an alien invasion is just way too big a McGuffin to put into your film, plot-wise, if all you want to achieve by way of suspense and release is a little story about faith.

I haven’t seen The Village. I was hopeful that The Lady in the Water was going to be a G-rated, up-front fairy tale; that is, something genuinely different from Shyamalan at last. Not yet, I guess.

Being lazy, I’ll just repeat some of what I said here a few days ago: My problem with Shyamalan is that I have umpty years of experience editing and reading fiction, and I have a pretty good feel for where plots will go unless you’ve very good and original (Geoff Ryman, say).

“He’s made one good movie (6th Sense), one passable movie (Unbreakable), and at least one bad movie (Signs).”

So, I have a different ranking. I liked Unbreakable quite a lot; it’s one of the still relatively few good superhero films ever done.

I thought 6th Sense was well-executed, more or less, but found it unbelievably boring and tedious to sit through, because about ten minutes in I said, okay, so&so is dead, I get it. And sat through the rest of the film tapping my fingers, waiting for it to end. I did the equivalent with The Usual Suspects, which I found equally mind-numbingly boring, I’m afraid.

Trick-ending stories are one-trick ponies if they depend on the “twist ending” to work, and if you see the “twist” at the beginning of the movie, they’re agonizing.

On this basis, I read the reviews and saw the ads for The Village, and figured out what the plot obviously was, which I confirmed a while later via googling. Never even bothered to see it.

Signs I also skipped until I finally had it on in the background on tv while reading, a couple of months ago when it was broadcast by a network. Gibson was okay, as were the other actors, but otherwise: eh—so what? And the notion that the aliens would be driven off by water: jeebus, he wasn’t around to watch everyone in the sf community laugh themselves sick at how moronic it was when the aliens in V were invading Earth because we had, gasp, water! Like, y’know, they couldn’t just grab some of the most fucking common compound in the universe anywhere.

[...]

I certainly haven’t seen anything about Lady in the Water to rouse my interest.

But Unbreakable was fun. [....]

The whole series of events that led to the blind girl having to go outside of the village to get help shows the failure of the utopian experiment. In the end, you can’t keep out things like violence and jealousy because you’re going to have them as long as you have people.

Perhaps I am giving S. more credit than he deserves, but my reading of The Village is one in which the events in the narrative problematize the consensus of the village elders. That the village elders figure that the events in the movie will only help “business as usual” doesn’t mean that the village elders are right.