Yes, that wasn’t a very well-fleshed-out post was it?! I guess what I meant was, if the stories are really about people and characters, and he is a great director, and the “gimmick” of twists and spooky music has run dry, he could turn to true character studies and more realistic drama. The character stuff gets lost in the rest of the junk, and I tend to ignore it when faced with the feature-length-Twilight-Zone-ness of something like The Village. And I can’t stand to sit through it again to pick up on the character stuff!! Or come up with a more sophisticated way to show allegory and characters through fables.
You’re all off-track. The movie closest in spirit to Fight Club is Falling Down.
Falling Down is Fight Club without the benefit of a hip, funny or cryptic ending. I greatly preferred it.
I’m not saying that the plot twists were unimportant. They absolutely were important because of what they meant to the characters. That is how I interpreted the movie. I’m not saying that he “meant to fail” insofar as putting in very obvious twists. Rather, the obviousness of the twists did not detract from my enjoyment of the movie.
And my argument is that all you need to do to enjoy the movie is to believe that the characters don’t know the twists. That’s not hard at all. The suspense is then used because it’s the buildup to the characters’ realizations of the truth, not to make you jump out of your seat.
To a large extent, I agree with you. IMO, he’s a great director saddled with his own so-so material. But I still enjoyed the movie because I did focus on the characters (maybe because I already knew the twists?), so I focused on their reaction to the TZ stuff rather than my own.
Falling Down is directed by Joel Schumacher and therefore is a bad film by definition. 
That’s basically what I came in to write. MNS the director is very good and talented. MNS the screenwriter much less so. I think he did write a very good screnplay for Sixth Sense, but has failed to maintain that quality in his screenwriting since, IMO.
I know, I know. What’s the old saying? Even a broken clock is right twice a day? Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while? (and the rest of the time, it finds Batman and Robin)
Sorry, but I don’t buy it, partially because of the misdirection at the beginning of The Village, in which we see on a gravestone that the movie was set in the 19th century. There’s no reason for that at all, from a plot perspective - there’s no conceivable reason to fool the residents of the village into thinking it’s a different year than the movie was actually set in. Moreso, it was a bit of a cheap trick - done, I think, because the movie’s setting wasn’t convincing at all. But at any rate, his deliberate audience misdirection was obviously an effort to fool his viewers.
Just saw the tv trailer for Lady in the Water. It is indeed a laughably bad trailer. Yikes.
I still can’t wait to see it…on cable, the same way I see all movies.
Looks like the market audience doesn’t like the trailer as a whole. They’ve put a new one on here, which is completely different, and no stupid kid talking.