I don't even know where to start with Lady in the Water. Except that I'm not sure a muddled meta-fable about, uh, fables is such a good idea. Not to make a movie out of, anyway. I kind of like it up to a point: there's an oddly absorbing quality to its narrative offhandedness , at least for a while. And then it becomes unintentionally funny: why is this happening? what does this mean? In the same way a bedtime story is all exposition, this is all exposition. Shyamalan has said he wants to revere, restore, storytelling but whoever said it needed it? People go to movies all the time and settle in for Buffy marathons and read novels. What he really wants to restore and revere in this movie is himself. This is epic narcissism, especially since Shyamalan casts himself as a writer whose unpublished book will one day change the world.
Sure thing, man.
I could go on. I like three of his movies quite a lot. But Shyamalan's fallen down some rabbit hole he might find hard to climb out of.
About Me
- Paul
- Paul Guest is the author of four volumes of poetry and a memoir. His debut, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, was awarded the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His second collection, Notes for My Body Double, was awarded the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His third collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, was published by Ecco Press/HarperCollins in 2008. His fourth collection, Because Everything Is Terrible, was published by Diode Editions. His poems have appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, was published by Ecco in May 2010 and selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2007 Whiting Writers' Award, Guest lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
6 comments:
After a long absence
we return to ourselves
in little movements,
little smiles at children,
little longing gazes,
little forgivenesses
until our flight
doesn’t seem so unfeasible
and we remember
what it was
to gleam like a star
and take refreshment
in dust.
I'm just waiting for UNBREAKABLE VS THE MATRIX.
-cK
That might be next, I think.
Man, talk about guys squandering the immense goodwill of their audiences...
It was a bizarre movie. I kept waiting for something. Nothing came.
I think Shyamalan is so overated. "Unbreakable" had some interesting parts but also some weaknesses, and both "Signs" and "The Village" suffered from such pronounced problems of logic (in addition to being unbearably pretentious) that...well...they just sucked. (Hm, water kills us, so...let's invade a planet where 80% of the planet's surface is water, and most of the air is water... -- and it took the humans several days to figure out that water was lethal to them? What, they didn't invade Seattle or any other city where it might have been raining? They didn't go anywhere humid,and the air burned their lungs? That's like humans invading a planet that is predominantly sulfuric acid! Those aliens MAYBE could've invaded Arizona, or some Middle Eastern countries. Actually, I like the idea of them invading Arizona, because it would have all kinds of political overtones, like George Romero's "Land of the Dead." The Minutemen could go fight the "aliens." Film theorists everywhere would crap their pants in glee.)
Anyway, sorry for the long parenthetical. E-mail me your address so I can send you the Sopranos.
I can sort of overlook the water problem in Signs because I liked how the invasion played out on a small scale and Gibson's character's crisis of faith. And I really love Unbreakable, despite its pretension. But his has last two films are stinkers.
I think he has a great eye, though.
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