I liked the movie.
The story was muddled but the telling(acting & cinemascope) of it was marvellous.
Too bad Paul Giamatti has’nt a snowball’s chance of winning an Oscar for it! :smack:
Well, I kinda liked it. My friend and I laughed quite a bit, along with the other people in the theater.
I kind of liked it. It was oddball but not incomprehensible and the Shyamalan 's writer character didn’t bother me at all. The allegories referring to at and the criticism of same were pretty thick (naming the mermaid “Story,” for instance) but easy to ignore. It’s not great but it’s not boring.
Flaccid Pretension. Great band name.
He is unnervingly overfunded and underskilled.
I truly bought into The Sixth Sense. The rest of it? Meh.
Can anyone spoil if there was a big twist in this one? I read the spoiler site above but I got the feeling the guy who wrote it was atoned out of his gord when he watched it, and might have missed a plot point or three.
There’s a minor twist but nothing big and nothing really affecting the audience’s expectation of the ending.
Not true; Ebert really liked The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs. So did I.
The Village was a big disappointment: there’s nothing wrong with having a “paradigm shift”, as Shyamalan likes to call it, but in The Village it was the wrong one. The real paradigm shift should have been a gradual change of perspective about the moral righteousness of the Elders’ attempt to protect their children by raising them in a closed world of ignorance and fear. In fact, it could have worked just as well if it were actually set in the 19th century; there were actual isolated communities like that, and you could imagine one that goes to extremes and wants to raise children with no knowledge of the corrupt outside world (only to find that you can’t escape human nature, good and bad). Just forget about the big freakin’ Twilight Zone “twist”.
The reviews I’ve read of Lady in the Water sound like it’s a work of metafiction – a story about storytelling (with a character named Story, for Pete’s sake). That would be fine if you have the right touch, but it sounds like it came out heavy-handed and kinda stupid.
All I know of this film I’ve learned from the previews and here, and I don’t intend to go see it, so could someone please spoil why her hair changes from blonde to red?
I don’t remember that. I’m pretty sure her hair was red from the beginning. Are you sure you didn’t see a lighting effect or something.
In the previews I’ve been watching all week, she’s blonde in one scene and a redhead in the next. Maybe it is just the lighting, but it’s an extreme difference. And since every litlle detail is supposed to have vast significance in one of his films, I just want to be sure.
Her hair is dark red for most of the movie, until she is “killed”. When she is brought back to life her hair has changed to strawberry blond.
I thought Signs was excellent. Is there a thread here with intelligent criticism? Sorry for the minor hijack.
Blonde - Dry
Red - Wet? 
Nope. When her hair changed, so did her eyebrows and eyelashes.
Well, I caught it last Friday, but I’ve been away from the dope for the last few days, so I actually had to search for this thread, to see if I’d missed something about LitW.
Apparently, I hadn’t. General consensus seems to be that it was a boring, poorly constructed movie.
To get the caveats out of the way, I have enjoyed MNS’s previous films. All of them, admittedly some more than others. Unbreakable was my favourite, and Sixth Sense the only one that actually portrayed any sense of fear. IMHO, of course.
Lady In The Water seems haphazard in its execution. The essential backgound of the film - the underlying fairytale of the Narf - is entirely imparted through straight exposition. This is the most flagrant film-violation of “show-don’t-tell” writing in recent memory. I would have accepted a flashback sequence, a personally related experience of some strange traveller, a mystical vision or, for that matter, an animated educational film the other characters rented on video, rather than the overwrought opening narration and dribs and drabs of detail from the nice Korean lady.
So, all the interesting stuff is simply stated, which makes it far less interesting. Then, when characters are confronted with this information, there is almost no (none at all?) moment of ‘gosh, what a strange story!’ surprise. Everyone just accepts the situation, and offers to help. MNS and his on-screen sister are more surprised to think that their landlord might have scored with the cute redhead than that she might be an otherworldy creature sent to save mankind.
The only saving graces the film offers are in it’s cast. Shyamalan’s self-aggrandizing mega-cameo aside, there are some solid performances here. Giamatti makes the most of barren material. Supporters Balaban and Choudhury are deeper and more real than the story itself, and Bill Irwin is wasted in his small role.
But the work of these excellent actors cannot save a film from sinking, when it is built on a foundation of sand. There may have been enough story here. I think Shyamalan has a clear idea of the back-stories of each of the tenants. I think he has a rich and colourful image of the life of a Narf in his head. He shared none of it with us.
thwartme
I revived this thread to say how much I enjoyed LitW. It had its flaws, but they were negligible compared to its strengths. To me, the story was about the way members of this oddball community in an apartment complex take on mythic roles when they encounter the supernatural. It was interesting to see ordinary human beings become elements in a mythology that most of them had never heard of. I particularly liked the way they frequently missed out on who was supposed to take on what role in the mythology because of their mundane preconceptions about who they were.
It had a great Tim Powers magic realism feel. My major problem was that I thought it should have tkaen a lot more hitting over the head with the supernatural for these regular folks to buy into it, or that they would tend to interpret in terms of their own supernatural (i.e., religious) beliefs.
Still, it was a pretty good movie, I’m looking forward to watching it on cable and seeing what more I can dig out of it.
It was one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a long time. I wanted to make stickers for the renters at my video store: “Just when you thought *The Village * was the stupidest movie ever made.”
With much trepidation, I finally watched this the other day. I’ve heard only terrible things about it, but I have a crush on Bryce Dallas Howard so I was going to cave sooner or later. Bryce was great in The Village–too bad the rest of the movie sucked. She is wasted in Lady In The Water. The rest of the cast are engaging enough, and Paul Giamatti is excellent as usual, but that wasn’t enough to save LITW for me.
Shyamalan has a knack for taking the basic themes, the atmosphere and mood, and the storytelling styles that I love (fairy tales, fantasy, mythology, magical realism) and he blends them all together hamhandedly into really terrible movies. It’s been said many times before, but if he could put his ego aside and apply his directing talent toward a movie with a screenplay by someone who can actually write a good story, then he might be able to come up with a great movie. I won’t hold my breath.