Yesterday, Abby and I went and saw Lady In The Water, the new M Night movie... She really wanted to see it. I was hesitant just because his last two movies were so-so and the reviews were pretty bad (though he was interviewed on Stern and made it sounds good)... All in all, it was better than I expected but nowhere near as good as it could have or should have been.
I liked the concept of taking these fantastical elements and plopping them down in our modern world... and of ordinary things (like crossword puzzles) taking on magical properties... but the movie just wasn't well-written. It included really dumb and onvious jibes at critics, a lot of pointless comic relief... and a lot of unneeded exposition. It also starts with a cheesy animated sequence explaining to the Lady In The Water's back story... since this is explained in the movie, that was not needed. Let us wonder who she is, and why she is here.
The good things about the movie - mostly good acting, Paul Giamatti is always good, Jeffrey Wright is also great (in a small role). The camera angles and framing in Night's movies are generally really interesting and this one is no exception. The various creatures of "the blue world" also look really good... light years beyond the alien at the end of Signs. Again, I like the general concept - it reminded me of Matt Wagner's Mage in some ways. I always thought that would be a good movie.
All in all, this movie was disappointing because it consistantly felt like it should have been a GREAT movie, but just failed... M Night needs an editor, almost everything that was bad about this movie was in the script. Maybe the failure (financial) of this will make his next one a bit better.
josh [email] said at 12:37 PM 08-06-2006: see another thing i didn't like is that i could have accepted the leaps and stuff had they handled it better...
like, if they had established that as soon as people met the water lady, it awakened something in them that was always there (which they DID allude to), but then showed somehow that now they knew more about the situation... i dunno.
abby [email] said at 5:11 PM 08-07-2006: i dont think it was the worst thing ever. the beginning was really frightening! and joaquin (?) was awesome, his character was a treat for me, so wholesome.
myriam [email] said at 5:31 PM 08-07-2006: I have to say the worst thing ever was probably City of Angels. You, Me, and Dupree comes in a pretty close second though.
josh [email] said at 5:36 PM 08-06-2006: i think it was the opposite of that... he's pandering to himself. for example, there is a sequence that exists just to make fun of critics.
milky [email] said at 6:04 PM 08-06-2006: That's pretty lame. I thought 'Signs' was pandering so I didn't see 'The Village,' cause I didn't want to be insulted.
josh [email] said at 12:29 PM 08-07-2006: i really don't think he was pandering at all... like i said, this movie seemed to be made purely to entertain himself, audience be damned
neilbert said at 1:20 AM 08-07-2006: M. Night needs someone to tell him "This sucks." Same goes for George Lucas. That's why Episode 1-3 sucked. There was nobody with enough balls to say "Hey George, about Jar-Jar," or "Hey George, doesn't that 'NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" at the end of episode three seem incredibly cheesy?" But no. Everyone that worked with GL was so enamored just to be working on the "last" Star Wars movies that nobody dared say a word.
reggie [email] said at 11:01 AM 08-07-2006: That's about how I felt too. I wasn't as disappointed as most people seem to be but it definitely had potential to be something really special. It seemed like it needed several more re-writes before going into production.
I think what Shymalan really needs is to not direct a movie from his own script for a while. Do some "for hire" stuff. Dude clearly has game but I think he's wearing out his welcome real quick. He should do an adaptation of something.
craig [email] said at 11:06 AM 08-07-2006: I saw this a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to see this because I thought the concept was cool.
I thought the same thing that you mentioned about the animation sequence, that it was cheesy, not well done, and could have been better explained by the movie itself. Since that is the opening scene, I was wondering right off the bat if I had wasted my money. I also thought it was lame that the plot ivolved this writer who was writing this political book that was going to change the world...and that writer was M. Night Shamylan. The plot would have been enough if this sea nymph simply inspired the people she met to live their dreams and to not be afraid. All in all though, I liked this movie better than the "The Village". Kiche and I saw it a few years back, and I remember us both laughing at scenes that weren't even supposed to be funny, especially the scene were the blind girl is running through the forest, wildly waving her stick around.
abby [email] said at 11:26 AM 08-07-2006: and even some moments i thought were funny. "thank you for letting me wear your beautiful shirt" made me laugh. ha-ha, guys!
josh [email] said at 12:31 PM 08-07-2006: i actually think that ron howard's kid di d a good job. that line WAS funny,. cute girl "fish out of water" humor is always funny... "she knows it's a multipass", etc...
craig [email] said at 11:37 AM 08-07-2006: One burning question: why does a water nymph get carried away by an eagle? It seems like the water should be her gateway back as well.
abby [email] said at 11:44 AM 08-07-2006: because.. she was the madame narf.. and it was like her cool entrance and because eagles are cool and dramatic coming out of the stormy sky.
i have some questions of my own! why, that first time he tried to get her back home, did she scream pointing at the pool, not the scrunt?
why was the asian girl's accent so overwrought? :(
craig [email] said at 11:52 AM 08-07-2006: It seems like it would make more sense to have a madame narf being carried away by a giant fish or whale or shark or something.
The asian girl's accent was a bit much, and I thought she was going to hook up with the super.
abby [email] said at 12:03 PM 08-07-2006: but.. a giant fish wouldn't fit through the trap door in the pool? a giant tentacle could have forced through it and lashed her up and taken her away, i guess. but that would be scary for the kids?
evan [email] said at 12:56 PM 08-07-2006: i loved the asian family cause i saw the movie with yvonne and i was like "that's your people! and it's so true!" especially after all the stories yvonne has told me about her mom. yvonne also had that plant lamp the chinese family had. she said it was pretty offensive, but i think that's just cause it hit a little to close to home. stereotypes are so true!
evan [email] said at 12:55 PM 08-07-2006: she was carried away by an eagle cause that's how she got there in the first place. it was in the illustrations at the beginning.
one of the scenes that most annoyed me was when paul g went down in her little lair. A) dude wouldn't be able to see shit down there. he has glasses and is underwater yet he knows exactly what to look for and finds it right away - what was that shit anyway. looked like a rock B) he is fat and outta shape. he wouldn't have been able to hold his breath that long, and seriously, if you were under there would you think "oh, i'll open this pen, use it as a straw, and suck the air out of the upside down cups"? no. stupid
josh [email] said at 1:02 PM 08-07-2006: see this is another thing i would have accepted HAD they done a better job of establishing that, when you get awoke, it also stirs up your inner strengths, etc...
they did this A LITTLE, like with his stutter, but if they had just had a few more moments showing how they got better at stuff, i would have bought that.
josh [email] said at 3:05 PM 08-07-2006: a good example of this, by m night, was in unbreakable... the scenes where bruce can lift way much more than he should... him and his son are both incredulous at it... but it works, you buy the fact that suddenly bruce is super strong...
they could have done that better here... like, suddenly Paul G doesn't need his glasses at all... and maybe he, like, unscrews the pool filter by hand then the pool guy walks up with a wrench and says "hey how'd you get that off without a wrench", etc... just something to show that these guys aren't just people at an apartment complex anymore, they have a destiny which fills them with abilities they didn't once have...
again, for a cool story along those lines i recommend Matt Wagner's Mage... great comic. the art is a bit dated now bit it's still good.
kiche [email] said at 7:34 PM 08-07-2006: you are right about that scene from unbreakable. you are watching something completely unbelievable, but you suspend your disbelief because the characters on screen are expressing their disbelief at an unbelievable situation.
i think unbreakable is the best movie i've sce by m. night. it's just that he held back too much stuff for the trilogy he wanted to make, that it didn't interest people enough for a trilogy.
kiche [email] said at 3:14 PM 08-07-2006: a major problem i have with a lot of m. night's work is that practically every movie of his i've seen ultimately relies on this mystery that continuously builds around the notion that at "THE END EVERYTHING WILL BE REVEALED!!!" then the end comes, everything is revealed, and it's a colossal let down. his name is synonymous with "anticlimax" in my mind.
he seems to be really overly impressed with his "twist" endings which are nearly always hokey.
i've heard he's an ultra-conservative christian (the village makes me believe he is). this gives me pause to believe that there is no god or afterlife; because according to christians "in the end everything will be revealed!" and it looks like m. night is preparing us for a huge disappointment.
kiche [email] said at 4:52 PM 08-07-2006: it had an extraordinarily reactionary undercurrent running through it.
i'm not sure if m. night knows a lot of early american history, but there were towns of puritans in america who literaly formed forts in order to keep "the devil" out. this is the height of reaction. you can't keep evil out. it springs up within.
the village seems to hint at this because these people have created a bubble world in order to keep evil out, but it arises from within. at first you will think that m. night is arguing that you can't keep out evil it will always come up from within. but when you look at the rest of the movie it's definitely not what he's saying.
in the village, we are presented with "the village" an idyllic little community that is an island of pastoralism sitting in the ocean of chaos and evil that is the world (this is presented to us as either the portrayal of "the ones whose names cannot be spoken" by the elders or b m. night's portrayal of the world later by showing us a dude (the head wilderness ranger) reading a newspaper detailing that present day america is just a cesspool of crime (although, america has had much higher crime rates in the past 25 years). granted the village is not utopia but it is presented as a preferable alternative to the real world. the seen at the end where the assistant ranger dude helps her back into the wildlife sanctuary he has this look of awe on his face like "wow, isn't it amazing that these are living like it's the nineteenth century, how beautiful".
well let's take a look at this pleasant alternative to the real world. the scial structure of the village is that you have a small hierarchy of "elders" these "elders" are extremely authoritarian and treat the rest of society like a bunch of children. in fact, m. night portrays the rest of their society as nothing but a bunch of children. this small inner clique controls the entire society by keeping people completely ignorant and creating a false threat for them to be afraid of. how ignorant? well, they're livning in a pre-industrial society. most conservatives want to go back to the 1950s; the people who control this society have dragged it back to the 1650s and have created the world's most expensive and complete gated community.
let's look at this, a small elite controls society, keeps the people ignorant while creating imaginary threats in order to cause fear amongst the populace (who are considered children by their rulers) in order to control them. does this sound familiar to you? the system set up here is very close to many of the most authoritarian governments of modern times and you ould look at it as an apology for the bush administration too. the scene where they had a town meeting in order to get people to come up in order to confess there sins against the community is straight out of the play book of another "turn back to a simpler" "isolationist" movement. the khmer rouge. hey, they made up fake threats to the community too. wow, that's something else. it's sort of like authoritarian systems all fall into a similar pattern.
what sort of seals it for me though this movie expresses, is that about 15 to 30 minutes into the movie, you figure out that this is all happening in the modern so you spend the rest of the movie waiting for the truth to come out and their little authoritarian system to come crashing down around their ears when it runs up against the modern world. we don't get this which is a big let down. you know it's gonna happen some day, but you don't get to see it. in it's stead we get emotional music and a park ranger staring off in blissful wonder that their is an authoritarian oligarchy protecting it's people from knowledge and the modern world. sort of like a little saudi arabia.
this is one of the most reactionary movies i have seen in a LONG TIME.
josh [email] said at 5:15 PM 08-07-2006: he has this look of awe on his face like "wow, isn't it amazing that these are living like it's the nineteenth century, how beautiful".
well, you are inferring that, i took his look to be a "what the hell is going on" look.
also, i think your interpretation of the movie is pretty off...
i dont think it's reactionary because i dont think m night thought about it as deeply as you did.
its a twilight zone episode with less depth...
but the village and the elders are definitely depicted as misguided and negative - they are sacrificing their kids lives because they are scared of the outside world... even when they realize their experiment failed, they stick with it, because they are scared.
i have only seen it once, but i didn't get the same things out of it AT ALL as you did... and, again, i don't think m night thinks his films out on anywhere near as deep a level as you think he does.
kiche [email] said at 5:52 PM 08-07-2006: i dont think it's reactionary because i dont think m night thought about it as deeply as you did.
i agree with you that he did not think about it as deeply as i thought about it. but that does not necessarily mean that the movie isn't reactionary. it means that it isn't consciously reactionary.
if you read old books you will regularly encounter racism and misogyny. the author is often completely unaware of their racism or misogyny; but that doesn't mean it isn't there in the work.
i digress, though. you may be right that i am reading too much politics into this movie. the thing is, though, m night takes this movie places that need to be explored deeper. he doesn't. when he doesn't you are left with a very simplistic view of what's going on.
if you ever see the movie again, remember my take on it. everything i've said is in there. i suppose some one could say that the movie is an unsuccessful critique of authoritarianism and isolationism.
reggie [email] said at 11:54 PM 08-07-2006: i suppose some one could say that the movie is an unsuccessful critique of authoritarianism and isolationism
That's exactly what it is. As I understood, The Village was a supposed to be an allegory about the dangers of that kind of reactionary behavior. It was a direct response to the go get'em cowboy attitude of the Bush administration. Although I don't think it's aimed directly AT the administration it's just suggesting that manipulating an entire group of people to spread the grasp of your own authoritarianistic designs probably ain't the best way to go about things.
milky [email] said at 11:06 PM 08-07-2006: its a twilight zone episode with less depth...
Dude, I think they said this exact same thing in an episode of 'Robot Chicken.' They did a whole episode about how lame the Village and Signs were...with the aliens from Signs kidnapping M Night.
*And the heavy-handed scene of Mel ANTI-JEW Gibson putting the collar back on in Signs really SUCKED.
josh [email] said at 3:34 PM 08-07-2006: this movie isn't like that.... and really, neither was unbreakable... or signs.
unbreakable pretends that there isn't a twist until the end... and the movie would work without the twist (which is relatively minor compared to the sixth sense or the village, in terms of how it changes your view of the story... it's more of a revealed origin than a story concept change.)
as far as signs go, the "twist" that "everything has a purpose" is more of a crappy moral than a twist... it doesn't make you re-evaluate the story you've been watching at all. honestly, it felt more like a crappy deus ex machina way to tie the third act together than a twist that was integral to the story.
kiche [email] said at 6:03 PM 08-07-2006: in both unbreakable and signs you are waiting for this big thing to happen.
in unbreakable, it never comes. but i think he was saving it for what would have been the later movies of that trilogy. i know iwas certainly waiting for the stakes to be upped in that one. such as his family being threatened or him becoming entangled with law enforcement.
in signs, i was waiting for the end "epiphany" moment. when it came it was lame. real lame. also, i didn't by mel gibson's crisis of faith. i think people who have felt they had a calling to enter holy orders rarely suffer crises of faith over something as simple as the death of a loved one. but then i am probably being naive.
josh [email] said at 6:12 PM 08-07-2006: i know iwas certainly waiting for the stakes to be upped in that one. such as his family being threatened or him becoming entangled with law enforcement.
neither of these are a twist thought - not in the same way that the sixth sense or the village have twists that make you reevaluate what you have seen before.
his family being in peril is just extra drama, not a twist.
if you were waiting for some big twist in unbreakable, that was you waiting. perhaps the movie didn't have enough drama for you, but the movie's structure doesn't require a twist... the reveal at the end, while it complete's mr glass's character arc, could be dropped from the movie... though it would probably feel a little hollow, since his battle with the rapist at the end IS a bit anticlimactic.
signs did build towards a "big thing", as i recall, because it had all these flashbacks and stuff that seemed to be going somewhere. but i still maintain it wasn't a twist, it was just crappy writing. he couldn't think of a good third act!
kiche [email] said at 6:35 PM 08-07-2006: yes we didn't get stakes being upped, we got a twist instead, and while it did make you reevaluate what you had seen before, it was anticlimactic.
i think the end of signs was supposed to be some sort of twist but was a victim of crappy writing. there was this whole attempt at a "EUREKA!" moment. after i saw that i wanted the aliens to come back and take the director away.
also, he couldn't think of a good second act. the aliens come down and try to take over earth in hand to hand combat because they are afraid we are going to nuke ourselves? did m night draw up the plans for the iraq war while he wasn't writing this movie? they're both huge disasters based on stupid logic.
josh [email] said at 6:41 PM 08-07-2006: the aliens come down and try to take over earth in hand to hand combat because they are afraid we are going to nuke ourselves?
what? i admit i haven't seen this movie since i was in theaters but i don't remember the aliens ever announcing why they were here... a character may have stated that as a reason they thought the aliens came, but that doesn't mean that's truly the reason.
of course, there really is no reason.
yes we didn't get stakes being upped, we got a twist instead, and while it did make you reevaluate what you had seen before, it was anticlimactic.
craig [email] said at 7:03 PM 08-07-2006: No one knows why the aliens were invading earth in the movie, and it is never revealed. The reasoning behind the alien's tactics, i.e. hand to hand combat or ground forces, was reasoned in the movie as being lo-tech and hands on so that they could take the earth intact without fear that the rulers of earth would use nuclear weapons. Like if aliens started using lasers and advanced technology then the humans would use nukes. Of course no one can prove that in the movie, either.
kiche [email] said at 7:31 PM 08-07-2006: the bottom quote is for unbreakable.
for signs, what craig said. we can go with the angle of "we really don't know the reason that the aliens decided to invade using hand to hand combat" but there was a whole scene in the movie in which a character surmises that the aliens are attacking using hand to hand combat to avoid earth's governments from using nukes to make the planet uninhabitable. the scene wreaked of a writer speaking in his own voice to explain something through a character. this happens common enough in narrative works, but i just thought it was a lousy explanation. not lousy, lazy. maybe not even lazy. i also thought the entire space aliens = demons undercurrent was dumb. also, at the end they imply that the aliens can be stopped by water, and that people figured this out in jerusalem. either that or the israelis have the ark of the covenant. i dunno. thinking about it that was a much worse movie than i remmeber it to be.
brianbibbly [email] said at 5:21 PM 08-07-2006: Now look at all the discussion that this movie has spawned. See, at least something good comes of M Night Shamamamamamamamamamalyn's new movie.
