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+--- Thread: Shyamalan's New Film! _Lady in the Water_ (/thread-813.html)
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Shyamalan's New Film! _Lady in the Water_ - Terry Willacker - 03-30-2005
1. The Sixth Sense
2. Signs
3. Village which I have not seen because I saw...
4. Unbreakable
I may still see Village. It got a bad review from my wife and a good review from my son (age 30).
My wife and I loved Sixth Sense. So when we had a couple, who love scifi as much as we do, to our house for the first time to watch a movie on our new big screen TV, we rented Unbreakable. All agreed that it was painful. We kept waiting for it to get better. It never did.
Shyamalan's New Film! _Lady in the Water_ - shoggoth666 - 04-01-2005
sounds cool love his films.have you seen the new lovecraft figs made by sota?they are fantastic.click the link and scroll down.
http://www.sotatoys.com/news.asp
Shyamalan's New Film! _Lady in the Water_ - jimbow8 - 04-01-2005
shoggoth666 Wrote:sounds cool love his films.have you seen the new lovecraft figs made by sota?they are fantastic.click the link and scroll down.Those are cool, thanks.
http://www.sotatoys.com/news.asp
Shyamalan's New Film! _Lady in the Water_ - Daniel Flowers Bunkowski - 04-08-2005
I am a big Shyamalan fan. I've at least liked everything, and absolutely loved one or two. I liked SIGNS best because of its fantastic Joaquin Pheonix performance and the fact that it was really a meditation on faith that was disguised as a monster movie. I almost went back to church after seeing SIGNS, but my hypocrasy goes only so far. I digress...
The rest of my personal order of his films is The Village, Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Wide Awake.
That said I have a major problem with Unbreakable.
If it had ended after David Dunn returns home, hangs up his rain coat and goes to bed with his wife after a sweet exchange of words and a fade to black, it would have been possibly my favorite film of all time. It probably would have won some Oscars, and would have at least been nominated in the following categories: Best Film, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Editing.
But it didn't end with that scene, and it didn't get nominated for diddly squat. I saw the film at the first critical screening in Hollywood at the El Capitan theater. At the end of the bedroom scene, when the camera drifts up in the black and the soundtrack swells the entire audience stood teary-eyed and applauded furiously. It was a standing ovation from CRITICS!
And then something really odd happened: the credits didn't roll. Instead we are treated to the breakfast table scene, which was a nice scene, but completely anticlimactic, so the film couldn't end there, either, so it lunged forward towards its lugubrious death by way of a pretty ridiculous explanation of events and a freeze frame. As a theater full of critics suddenly stopped clapping and slowly sat back into their seats, I knew that this film was going to be torn apart. Not because it was bad, but because it cheated us all after a promise of greatness, by substituting hubris and cleverness for common sense. When the credits did roll, everybody exited the Disney owned theater on Hollywood Blvd., shook their heads, lit up cigarettes and walked defeated into the night. The mighty Casey had struck out. Why didn't it have the good sense to end while it was great? The end tied up loose ends that didn't need to to be tied; scenes better served as DVD extras than as the clunky tacked on ending to an up-til-then brilliant film. I can just picture M. Knight arguing with studio bosses that the breakfast table scene is the "actors' scene" in the film and if you were to cut that out, you'd not only be cutting Bruce Willis' finest actor moment, but cutting the best scene in the picture. I can see them turning that little tid-bit over in their heads and ultimately agreeing, the seeds of destruction having taken root. If Shyamalan had not written the screenplay himself, he would have, as a director, cut the entire ending because the telling of the story -the real story- was done. No need to prolong the film and kill the momentum. But since he was unable to objectively view his own work, he killed it, like a child lavishing too much squeeze as affection to a small pet.
Sometimes, as in the Sixth Sense, this works. In the Sixth Sense it was necessary that the director be totally conscious of every written and photographed implication lest he give away the gimmick. With the writer and director in one body, it guaranteed the integrity of the piece.
Not so with Unbreakable.
Sorry to prattle on for so long, but I've been waiting a long time to get that off my chest. Some truth just needs telling.