Friday, June 13, 2008

'Nite, Night.

It's been a really long time since I wrote anything movie related. A really, really long time. Damn. Movies are one of the great joys of my life, but home-buying and child-bearing (especially when done simultaneously) erase a lot of time that could be spent with movies. So here's some thoughts on something that also hasn't been around in a long time: a good movie by M. Night Shyamalan.

I have not seen The Happening and I'm not sure I will. The initial savage reviews are akin to the early bloodletting that The Lady in The Water received (I didn't see that movie either). With both movies, I was intrigued by some well-done previews and I don't think Shyamalan has ever lost his knack for creating some interesting premises. Sadly, based on reviews, it'll be three bads in a row for M. Night.

I can't speak for the success or failure of The Happening, but it is puzzling that such an incredibly successful and imaginative filmmaker could go from spectrum to opposite spectrum with his work. Maybe he doesn't give a damn what people think, maybe he's still convinced his movies are brilliant, maybe he just works for a paycheck like the rest of us; who knows?

The Sixth Sense is still a fantastic movie. The splashy twist at the end (does anyone not know by this point that Bruce Willis is a ghost?) created most of the buzz and played a large part in establishing Shyamalan's moviemaker identity, but the twist is not what makes The Sixth Sense so good. Toni Collette is a major reason why the movie succeeds so well. She terrifically plays her role of tortured mother struggling to care for her inexplicably and literally haunted son. Collette injects so much honest, raw emotion that she grounds the conflicts of the spiritual world into her own hard reality, making the movie's ghost story a real-life struggle. Shyamalan also did his best writing with The Sixth Sense. He's very good at creating an emotional investment in his characters and his movies. He's always been able to grab interest, and with The Sixth Sense, he made a valuable story of grieving people and family struggle to go along with a winning premise and the jaw dropper at the end.

Here's where it went wrong. Shyamalan wagered his success on making everyone's jaws drop lower. He figured that the basis for his success was fabricating the most amazing twist and basing his movies around the bait-and-switch. With the notable exception of Signs, Shyamalan's movies live and die by their twists. Signs didn't really have a "holy shit!" moment at the end, which is probably why Signs is Shyamalan's only other really good movie: Night got away from trying to bend his movies around their twists and simply wrote a good story about ordinary people struggling under extraordinary circumstances. The "holy shit!" moments kept coming in his other movies, but they weren't always a pleasant surprise.

The Village pissed me off. The first half of that movie is really good. Shyamalan created a fantastic medieval world with scary monsters running around an engaging love story between Joaquin Phoenix and Bryce Howard (I refuse to validate that stupid three name thing popular among some actors unless you've earned those props through such kickass work as being Buffy The Vampire Slayer: S.M. Gellar [heh heh], you're worthy.) The twist of The Village is so ludicrous that it's insulting. Shyamalan devalued his entire movie with that stupid twist. It's a pity that the movie was based around trying to pull off the most amazing switcheroo. Problem is, people's jaws only drop so far, and if your only goal is to dislocate mandibles through surprise, you're going to miss more often than not.

The Happening may suffer because of that same instinct. If so, it's really a shame. M. N. Shyamalan is really a good writer and talented filmmaker. Maybe it would have been better had he not had such dizzying success with The Sixth Sense as his first movie. He might have had too many people telling him he's brilliant and how oh-so-amazed they were at the end of that movie. That might have made him forget why he was able to make a good movie through his characters' struggles. The twists aren't what made him a successful filmmaker. They certainly helped and my jaw was on the floor with everybody else's at the reveal of Bruce Willis' actual condition, but the movie was already good. I hope that Night puts his twisties to bed and wakes his basic storymaking skills back up; it's a question of whether that twisting instinct wants to go down or not.

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