Archives, eh
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# Shit, that's what is Happening
I have never quite managed to work out why D & I didn’t walk out of Lady in the Water after the first ten minutes. It might have been air-conditioning related; we may well have gone to see the movie on the day it was 48 degrees celsius in Campbelltown and had paid our money to enjoy 90 minutes of air conditioning, not a movie. I can’t actually recall if that was the case or not.
Even so, I remember sitting there somewhat stunned as the flickering lights played out across the screen thinking, “Nothing can be this bad for this long. It has to get better. We have to have reached the nadir and begun the long arduous climb back up to the dizzying peaks of mediocre.” And in general, I was kind of right. At any point during the movie – pick one, any one – nothing can be as equally bad as it was at that point for an entire movie; if only I had been completely right, rather than so recklessly optimistic. The movie never began an upward tick in watchability. It did not attempt to climb out of the hole of (the audience’s) misery and despair it had created; it sought to dig its way out. Inexorably it became worse and worse until, by the end, I had stopped watching the film itself and merely looked on, fascinated at this train wreck. In a way, I even celebrated M. Night Shyamalan’s achievement and his élan in so wonderful a quest, seeking the absolute zero of Meritorious Effort.
I was already aware when we went to see the film that he and Disney had split up acrimoniously over it; Disney thought the script wasn’t much good and Shyamalan thought it was gold. I was also aware before we went to see it of the general direction Shyamalan’s films had been taking. The Sixth Sense was a great movie, Unbreakable is a completely closed book to me, Signs did well but the premise was mind bogglingly dumb1, and The Village...well, I’ll let Roger Ebert say it for me.
The Village is a colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn … To call the ending an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It’s a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It was all a dream. It’s so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don’t know the secret anymore.
He kept going with the Twist Ending conceit long beyond the point where the endings even qualified as a twist; how can it be a twist when the audience has spent the entire movie expecting a twist of some kind if not the twist that was actually applied? Branch out, M., do something else. Pursue your themes using supernatural elements if you like, but go for a conventional ending, a plot that builds up into a soaring climax or even – instead of the violent switchback – just gently curves. But rather than abandon the concept, he made The Lady In The Water, not so much a Twist Ending movie as a Twist Ending Of Every Scene movie. It was just twist after twist really. Or maybe it was an Unreliable Narrator movie without an actual Narrator, so if effect it was just Unreliable. Whichever, it amounted to the audience having to suspend disbelief – without any effort being made to give them a reason to – and then, in ever decreasing intervals, having to change what they were suspending disbelief about.
Which of course leads me to…why do people keep giving this man money to make movies? I will not be going to see The Happening because I have graduated from Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe’s School of Bullshit Identification and allow me to tell you, The Happening is indeed one giant steaming pile of homogenous bullshit. I don’t even need The New Republic movie ‘review’ that is doing the rounds. On the one hand, he appears to have given up the Twist Ending conceit since I have gathered that the culprits are identified pretty early in the movie. Instead it has been replaced with the Supernatural Element Unable To Stand Up To The Slightest Scrutiny, a shift in his story telling style that we really should have seen coming since it began in Signs. And maybe that shows M.’s true dedication to the Twist Ending; if we’d just been paying attention all along we would have seen nothing was as it seemed. M. Night Shyamalan is actually really really bad at his job.
1 In case you are unfamiliar or have never before been exposed to sarcastic internet geeks talking about it, aliens who are vulnerable to water invade a planet whose surface area is 70% water and regularly has water falling from the sky.
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# I see shit movies
When I was sixteen or seventeen, some friends and I watched a movie that was memorably bad.
It was a titty movie, although I am pretty sure there was no actual sex act going on. It was all simulated so it was not technically a porn flick. Hey, sixteen. I was just happy to see boob.
This movie was bad. It was awful. It was unremittingly stupefying. I walked away from this movie discernably less capable of speech capable of expressing the depths of atrociousness that this movie plumbed – a condition you may well note I still suffer.
It was bizarre. Fantasy trappings, which basically meant the “talent” was all wearing brown leather instead of black, and animal skins. There was some horse riding and some desultory melee. There was a man wearing a cow’s head, skin and all, as a helmet.
There was some kind of jewel or gemstone, maaaagic and all. There was something that I sincerely hope earned a chuckle when it was a referred to as a aplot by the director and producer.
See, it was the worst of both worlds. It had the complete lack of a (comprehensible) storyline that is so quintessentially porn, and yet it had no actual porn, just girls getting their tits out while men in laughable “fantasy” costumes made surreally unrealistic thrusting motions.
All I can remember of the “plot resolution” was the magic jewel transporting the girls into modern-day LA where someone was unrealistically thrusting their pelvis against a girl laid out on the bonnet of a sportscar.
Lest I was too subtle, this movie was bloody terrible.
I saw Hawk the Slayer when I was thirteen. Enough said.
Lady in the Water makes both of these movies look like Citizen Kane.
I cannot give it a rating in stars. I do not have the doctorate in pure mathematics required to invent a new way of describing numbers that are more zero than zero.
I am going now, to hit my head a lot until I fall into a coma and forget I ever saw this movie. Waking up with psychic premonitions leading me to attempt to assassinate a candidate for parliament will be considered a bonus.
