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I just got around to seeing Lady in the Water the other night. I am a big M. Night fan. I've liked all of his work except for the Village and now this.
I've been thinking about why certain movies that claim to be "fantasy" work, and why others don't. Fantasy stories that just make things up as they go along with no rhyme or reason can suck you in when they are truly fantastical. If you put the fantastical in the realm of ordinary, fantasy can look just plain ordinary and thus ceases to be interesting. Case in point, putting a mythical world in a swimming pool without showing us any wonders of that world is just boring. What makes Story (the female lead) fantastical? The fact that she walks around with no clothes, talks like she is permanently scared, and she is really really pale? Think about this: how interesting would the Little Mermaid be if you never saw Aeriel as a mermaid or never saw her in her father's underwater world? Even the Scrunt just looks like a green wolf and when it disappears into the grass, guess what it looks like? Grass. M. Night REALLY missed the boat on this one. I will say this... His movies are cross-genre. The Holywood hype machine needs to stop evoking Sixth Sense and making it seem like they are all horror movies... Sixth Sense = scary movie, Unbreakable = supero hero / comic book movie, Signs = alien invasion movie, Village = er... bad excuse to put a ridiculous twist into a movie. M. Night's gift is to rework genres, put a new spin on them, but also try to make them seem realistic with a more "human" element to them. But when you try to "reinvent" a genre, you have to keep in mind what makes them so enjoyable in the first place. And when you try to make it realistic, you may lose the elements that draw us to movies of that genre in the first place. I credit M. Night with making it okay to have superheroes without capes or costumes (a la Heroes) in Unbreakable. However, he tries a little too hard to make the powers more "normal", and that's something Heroes doesn't compromise. I think Tim Kring understood that you have to make the superpowers exactly that - SUPER, otherwise it ceases to be interesting. Bruce Willis' character's power is that he cannot be hurt and that he is kinda strong. Not super strong like Superman, just strong like an NFL linebacker. And when he doesn't get hurt, we don't really get to see swords break on him or bullets get flattened or anything cool like that. We just see him talk about not getting hurt in a trainwreck that we never see... I guess we'll just have to take your word for it. And what is with the villain whose sole ability is that his bones are really brittle? Shyalaman's take on the super hero genre is so subtle that a lot of people even missed that it was supposed to be one!!! Another thing is that M. Night is a victim of his own success. He likes to use the spooky vibe in all his movies and all of them have an element of suspense to them, but that does not make them horror movies. If you come in expecting the two things that stood out about the Sixth Sense--a twist and scariness-- in all his movies, you are going to be genuinely disappointed. In fact, the movie that tries the hardest to return to that same formula, The Village, is probably the least interesting and weakest of all his movies, because it feels overly contrived and because we feel like we've seen this trick before. Sixth Sense was successful precisely because it was so fresh and novel. One more thing about M. Night... I am getting sick of his "interesting" camera angles. They feel a little indulgent and they're getting really annoying. There are times in Lady where you cannot see characters because of the positioning of the camera. It's not artistic to me. An artist shows you what he wants you to see but does it subtly and non-intrusively. M. Night does it in a way at times that feels like a director on a power trip. And if you keep putting yourself in your own movies, you are gonna look pretty self-indulgent as a director. Having said all that, M. Night is one of the more original film makers to come along in while. I like that he tries to reinvent some old and tired genres and he has taken some risks in doing so. I look forward to seeing what else he can cook up. How many other directors can be so interesting, even when they fail? |
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