Narfapalooza

I thought the Village was quite good. For most of the picture, those-of-whom-we-do-not-speak were off screen or barely glimpsed. Pretty scary, I thought, and easily superior to Signs and maybe even Unbreakable.

Haven’t seen Unbreakable but I second what catfish says.

I think The Village had the potential to the be an excellent film, if only Shyamalan had dropped the notion of a twist ending and made the truth about the villagers’ situation obvious from the get-go. I was especially struck by Bryce Dallas Howard’s performance (it really was her film) and by the romance between her character and Pheonix’s.

But it really does seem that Shyamalan has only one story – worse, only one format – in him. There’s a rumor that he’s been approached to direct the next Harry Potter film, which strikes me as an excellent idea – it’s time for him to get away from his own scripts.

I actually really loved the Village,

I thought it had an excellent sign of a good director–even after we know that the monsters are fake, we get scared when the girl is surrounded by red berries toward the end.

My guess for the end of this next movie–she wakes up, it was all a dream and Bobby had never been shot….

Has everyone gone bonkers? Haven’t seen the Village, but I would rank them as

Sixth Sense, Signs, Unbreakable,

with Unbreakable in the rear by a few yards.

C’mon people!

Unbreakable is very, very good, yes. But.

Signs is scary, pleasant, interesting, a great mood piece – with two crucial problems. The car crash bit, in which Shyamalan himself appears as the other driver, is dumb and cliché. And the ending is preternaturally, unforgivably stupid. (The most supernatural element of the film is its sheer banality at end.) Not just because it turns the film into a ‘patterns are design’ piece of feel-good bullshit, but because it turns it into a ‘PAD’PoFGBS with a massive, laughable, impossible-to-ignore plot hole at its center (i.e. They come to a planet that’s 80% fatal to Them – because they are idiots). I have no idea how someone can like the film after its 3/4 mark. (Though I loved Mel Gibson in it.)

The Village was better than people initially claimed, though it’s ultimately a failure as a suspense film. The film’s stagey, convoluted, unnatural language (‘You can write this stuff, but you can’t say it’) is actually an impressive creation on MNS’s part, given its political motivation. And as a cheery little fable it does its job well enough. But MNS needs to develop a sense of humour (i.e. he needs to learn to be funny instead of clever, as his American Express ad shows). He’s no Spielberg, not least because Spielberg has a rampant inner child (cf. A.I.).

Rumour has it that Lady is ludicrous shit. I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t have a twist ending at all – that Shyamalan tried to make a straight suspense-fantasy film, a fairy tale like the posters say, and that he ends up way out of his element (‘You’re like a child, who stumbles into a conversation…’) without the check-out-my-cleverness aspect working for him. I’m prepared to be wrong but don’t expect it.

Two flaws in Signs that pushed it into “laughable” territory:

1) One of the obvious themes throughout is the value of faith, in the sense of belief without proof. Mel Gibson’s lost it because of his wife’s death. But how does he get it back? Well, aliens show up and obvious supernatural coincidences make his wife’s death into the instrument of his family’s salvation. Well, who wouldn’t have faith then? I mean hey, I’ll start believing in miracles when crazy shit like that starts happening. But that’s not some profound statement about “faith,” it’s just that you’d have to be dumb as rocks not to believe in magic and aliens & stuff by that point.

2) The structure of the “twist” was terrible. Compare it to Sixth Sense, in which a viewer is watching a perfectly coherent storyline — an eerie and mysterious one to be sure, but one in which everything more-or-less seems to fit — when suddenly there’s a revelation which forces the viewer to reinterpret a lot of what s/he previously thought. Signs has a superficially similar structure, but there’s a big difference: the elements that turn out to be significant after the twist — the wife’s dying words “swing away” and the daughter’s obsession with fresh water — were just utter anomalies, total non sequiturs, until then. They had no significance in the “pre-twist” storyline. And that made the whole thing dumb. I mean, I could write a screenplay where there are mysterious cucumber and cheese sandwiches lying around everywhere throughout the first hour and a half, and then it turns out that the magical creatures attacking at the end are allergic to cucumbers and cheese, but…so what?

So that’s that.

I didn’t see The Village, because I assumed after Unbreakable and especially Signs that Shyalaman was a one-hit wonder. Does anyone actually believe that he will ever make anything as good as The Sixth Sense again?

NY July 10, 2006
Books of the Times | ‘The Man Who Heard Voices’
Snubbed by Disney, What’s Shyamalan to Do? Walk (and Diss)
By JANET MASLIN

New work by important filmmakers is always hyped by early publicity, some of it flattering enough to have been written at gunpoint. Now M. Night Shyamalan has set a new high-water mark for this sort of sycophancy. He has deigned to allow Michael Bamberger, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, to follow him adoringly through every stage of the filmmaking process. The upshot is not just a puff article but a full-length, unintentionally riotous puff book.

Who is M. Night Shyamalan? The point is that you’re supposed to know already. By some lights (namely his own and Mr. Bamberger’s) he is an A-list Hollywood legend whose work is ablaze with beauty and wisdom. By others, he’s the guy who made a mint with “The Sixth Sense,” starred in an American Express ad and has now directed “Lady in the Water.” The book makes landfall on July 20, a day before the movie does.

“The Man Who Heard Voices” isn’t really the filmmaker’s fault. His only serious misstep was allowing it to happen. It was Mr. Bamberger who met the auteur at a dinner party (“Night’s shirt was half open — Tom Jones in his prime”), became awestruck (“What kind of power could he have over me?”) and started taking deeply embarrassing notes.

How could Mr. Shyamalan have known that his Boswell would place him in a biblical light? The book finds some relevance for Night (as Mr. Bamberger calls him) in the fact that the word night, like the word day, shows up early in the Book of Genesis. It also describes an actress in Night’s presence as “like Moses before the burning bush.”

(snip)

I thought it had an excellent sign of a good director—even after we know that the monsters are fake, we get scared when the girl is surrounded by red berries toward the end.

Agreed. It was a strangely sympathetic moment, given she was unable to perceive the threat. It had exactly the same effect that every effective horror movie does when an on-screen character can’t perceive a danger that’s visible to the audience, but it proved the real punch to that mode of suspense is not just anticipating some catastrophic event, but generally just knowing you have some knowledge a character would desperately want and having no way to share that knowledge.

I figured The Village deserved a free pass on awkward phrasing. It could have been a nice, tense movie throughout if not for the “twist” that tried to impose some compatibility with 20th-century reality. No such relationship was necessary or useful or all that interesting. Carrying out the fable would have been far more effective (though I was secretly hoping the sick guy had actually come down with syphillis due to some taboo exploit, souring the romance when she learned from the mystic/apothecary/village official in disguise sent out to carry on another layer of masquerade).

I thought the idiot-savant-as-monster concept was a well-played hand throughout the film. It could have been enough of a twist to hold the movie together without any preservation-on-a-reservation nonsense. If I believe there is a monster and I am it, and you believe there is a monster and I am it, and I have the capability to enact monstrosity, there doesn’t need to be a monster, much less a ranger outpost with antibiotics. Heck, just include monster-appearances after the savant is clearly disabled — force the audience to contemplate who is donning the costume and why.

You know, one of my biggest problems with Signs and suspension of disbelief is that I found it silly that, thanks to the baby monitor, we learn that aliens who have overcome all of the engineering hurdles of interstellar travel communicate on single channel, unencrypted VHF.

Andrew, that reminds me of a joke made in the first season of the Stargate TV Series, where a character says that it would be impossible and implausible to upload a virus into the approaching enemy alien ship.

(Which of course, is what happens in the movie Independence Day…)

THe reason why I stopped enjoying his movies is the same reason I stopped enjoying O. Henry stories- when _every_ story has a “twist ending” it’s no longer a twist ending but a gimmick, and pretty soon not a very interesting one.

Signs is unforgivably stupid, but it also, for the first three quarters of its run-time, an incredibly adept, effective suspense film. The simulated Brazilian birthday part video was one of the most unnerving scenes in a movie I’ve ever seen. Just look at the way Shamayalan combines elements to make the initial introduction of the alien as upsetting as possible: verite filmmaking, jostling camera, the inherited authenticity of third-party video, and a gaggle of hysterical kids speaking a language at the audience (in the U.S. and U.K. at least) probably doesn’t understand. When the alien walked through the frame the first time I saw it, I literally got gooseflesh on my arms. That has never happened to me at a movie before. That alone was enough to make me forgive the retardedness and the glib Christian apolegetics.

Why hasn’t anyone mentioned that the Village, in addition to being ridiculous, is also a reactionary piece of Straussian “Noble Lie” horseshit?

As for Unbreakable, for the life of me I really don’t understand the love it gets. I suspect it has something to do with comic book nerdery.

Almost as wrongheaded as aliens not having prepared a defense against water (couldn’t they have worn bathing suits or something?) is the fact that the aliens are technologically advanced enough for space travel, while also being stupid enough to get stuck in a kitchen closet.

The beliefs and opinions of a character in a work of fiction do not necessarily reflect those of the creator. The creators of the utopia may be happy with what they’ve done, but how the community is maintained undercuts their stated good intentions.

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.

I thought this was fairly funny, though when I said so at Unfogged, no one commented, so maybe not. (Although above someone quoted a bit of it, with no link, oddly.)

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. [….]

Matt C (and others):

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.

Thanks, Russell, that actually sheds a lot of light on it for me. Mind you, I’m as nerdy as the next guy, but comic books have never been my particular nerd-sphere.

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

The Village would have been great, had it been twenty five minutes long and in black and white, like all the best Twilight Zone episodes. I also like Unbreakable and willgo further and say it’s Bruce Willis’ best film since Pulp Fiction.

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

>remember that hollywood is the GREATEST form of propaganda

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.

Yeah, The Village actually made me quite furious, now that I remember. I was in disbelief at how it ended, much in the way I felt cheated with the ending of Signs. I went into Signs thinking it was a cool horror flick, but the twist turned out to be that the audience was actually sitting in sunday school, not the fact that the aliens were allergic to water (so, so lame).

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…