True Grit (2010)

"The Dude", a man with true grit? Depends on who you ask.

Star Rating: ***½
It’s been eighteen years since "Unforgiven" (1992), which was considered by many to be the swansong of the classic western genre. Westerns seem to have rolled out of Hollywood with the tumbleweeds. Joel and Ethan Coen are masters of their craft, and have perfected thrillers, ("Blood Simple", "Fargo"), comedies, ("Raising Arizona", "The Big Lebowski"), and dramas, ("No Country for Old Men", "A Serious Man"). Being such masters, it was only a matter of time till they tried executing a western.

The Coens did right in making their western by adapting it from a novel, rather than using the elements of the common western to invent a potentially recycled plotline. "True Grit" has already been made for the screen in 1969 with John Wayne as the hero. However, the Coens’ take on the story isn’t necessarily a remake. It’s closer to the source material, Charles Portis’s novel, than to the 1969 version.

The main plot is rather easy to put on paper. 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) hires drunken, hardened Marshal Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn (Jeff Brides), a man with “true grit”, to help her find Tom Cheney (Josh Brolin), the man who killed her father. They are joined by Texas Ranger Le Bouf (Matt Damon). Together they go off on a set of adventures to find Cheney. This really feels like a Coen bros film. It runs on a rather simple story with quirky characters, punchy dialogue, sudden and overwhelming spouts of violence, and a great closing line to accompany a nonspecific almost non-ending.

A revenge odyssey mixed with suspense, character development and bittersweet scenarios really drives a good western. During one fight scene, I couldn’t help but cast my mind back to "Fargo" (1996), my personal favorite of the Coens films, in which one twitchy hood unsuccessfully attempts to talk his way out of a tight spot with a policeman, creating a suspenseful moment leading up to the violent murder of the policeman. That scene would look great in a western. The fight scene I referred to takes place after a long conversational interlude, when Cogburn whips out his gun and shoots someone in the head. It was sudden, brutal, messy, and made me exclaim to myself, “Wow, wow daddy,” just like the hood in "Fargo".

I really think that Jeff Bridges is the perfect man to play a guy like Rooster Cogburn. He has the gruff exterior and rough demeanor for the job. Its twelve years since Bridges starred in the Coens’ cult masterpiece "The Big Lebowski" (1998), in which he played a lazed slacker. Here, as you can imagine, he’s the complete opposite. He’s riding around on horses, guns in both fists, firing at charging opponents. Nobody can spin or fire a gun quite like Clint Eastwood or John Wayne, but I was in all of "True Grit"’s fight scenes, rooting for Cogburn to shoot his way on top. Back in ’69, John Wayne won an Oscar for his portrayal of Rooster Cogburn. If history repeats itself, Bridges will win an Oscar for his “gritty” performance, a mere year after he won Best Actor for "Crazy Heart" (2009).

Also worth noting is newcomer Hailee Steinfeld. She plays Mattie and she sure does a fine job. Even though she’s serious in the movie, I could feel that she was having a lot of fun with her character. Compared with Kim Darby, who played Mattie in 1969, Steinfeld’s Mattie is a lot stronger willed. Darby’s interpretation, though tough and gritty, felt more intimidated and vulnerable. Not to say that Steinfeld is a pillar of strength and Darby is a wimp; they both demonstrate moments of grit and fear. Who wouldn’t in a story like this? It’s just that one side is more visible in one actress than the other.

I was pleased to see that the Matt Damon character, who leads us to believe he’s a real jerk in the beginning, proves his mettle in helping the quest. Part of the simplicity of this story lies in that the good guys are actually good and the bad guys are actually bad, at least poetically speaking. There’s really no moral ambiguity here. "True Grit" is pretty easy to mark on a graph, with one axis being good, the other being bad, and no ugly to speak of.

I had such faith that the Coen brothers would do great work, and you know what? I was right. Nothing gets them down, nothing holds them back—they create because that is what they were put on this earth to do. I’m waiting for them attempt a fairy tale or a Sci-Fi epic, and westerns? They can do it, no problem. They create an old west where “the Rooster abides. I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in that.”

Memento (2000)

Guy Pearce holding one of his "mementos"

Star Rating: ***½
"Memento"—a Latin word meaning “remember”. "Memento" follows the adventures of Leonard (Guy Pearce), a man with short term memory-loss trying to find his wife’s killer, but is hindered by his condition. He therefore had to take photographs and write himself notes and tattoo really important information on his body.

These are the obvious “mementos” in the film, but there are additional mementos too. "Memento" is that it is based on a story called "Memento Mori", written by Nolan’s brother Jonathan, a title which translates as “remember you will die.” From the start of the movie, we remember that somebody dies. In the beginning this isn’t such a bad thing, but in the end we wonder was it really poetic justice, and how many more people will die?

Leonard Shelby is an ex-insurance investigator who is trying to find the man who raped and murdered his wife. After he finished with his wife, he cracked Leonard’s head against a mirror, giving him Anterograde amnesia, or short term memory loss. This condition prevents Leonard from forming new memories—he can remember who he is and every that happened before “the incident”. “I have this condition,” he explains to the characters he meets, usually greeted by a “you told me already.”

Nevertheless, Leonard remains dedicated to finding and murdering the man who killed his wife and took his memory away. To remember things, Leonard takes photographs of people and places and he even tattoos information on his body. He is aided by a bartender named Natalie (Carrie Anne Moss) and a friendly guy named Teddy (Joe Pantoliano).

The plot is told in reverse chronological order. In between the chapters told backwards there is another story told in black and white, involving in a hotel room Leonard talking to some unknown person over the phone about Sammy Jankis, a man with short term memory loss who Leonard frequently compares himself to, that advances in chronological order. Sound confusing? It is, and it’s supposed to be.

Sammy is a very crucial subplot of Memento. During the days of Leonard’s career as an insurance investigator, he investigated the claim that Sammy had gotten Anetrograde amnesia due to an injury he received in a car accident and should be covered for physical disability. When Leonard is diagnosed with the same problem, he tattoos "Remember Sammy Jankis" on his hand. “Sammy Jankis had the same problem,” he reflects, “but he really had no system. He’d write himself a ridiculous amount of notes, but he’d get them all mixed up.”

By his use of a nonlinear plotline, Nolan effectively puts us inside Leonard’s mind and displays the intense confusion inside his head as he reads his memos and tattoos and tries to remember what he’s been doing and what he’s going to do. We encounter characters who we think are good, then a few chapters forward (or backwards) we discover that maybe they weren’t so good. Leonard doesn’t remember all this because of his condition, and we don’t remember because—well, we haven’t seen it yet.

Warning: Here be Spoilers:

Leonard is a classic Noir antagonist. He is, in a word, ambiguous. Nolan’s script makes the audience sympathize with him and want the best for him. Yet underneath that smiling exterior lurks some kind of homicidal monster. Personally the idea that he kills people to make himself happy, that he kills the man who gave him so much help just to give meaning to his life, makes me hate this man. Let’s see, smiling and likable, yet complicated and destructive. Could this be the new Norman Bates?

Spoilers Be Gone

Nolan’s second film after the dramatic Neo-Noir "Following" (1998), which was a bleak but nevertheless impressive directorial debut for Nolan, "Memento" reflects the ethic of a born filmmaker and storyteller. Much like Quentin Tarantino ("Reservoir Dogs", "Pulp Fiction"), Nolan has a gift for presenting an interesting plotline and giving it to life by cutting it up and serving it out of order.

The charisma and crisp quality that Nolan brings to the screen is most refreshing indeed. I wrote in my review for "Following" that the title as well as the quality of the film seems to suggest that more good films will follow from Christopher Nolan. That was just circumstantial evidence, but "Memento" proves that point. There is also one scene in the movie when Leonard passes a comic book store where the Batman logo in the window. Perhaps "Memento" can forget the past, but can Nolan’s movies tell the future?

Following (1998)

1998 never looked so much like 1949

Star Rating: **½
"Following" is not a big budget picture and must have been very cheaply shot, and has the feel of a homemade movie, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. That gives it a touch of character. It is still a decent movie. It is very intriguing on two levels. 1. Because of its insight into human nature, i.e. curiosity and lust; and 2. Because it wraps the humanity of the story into the bitter cocoon of a traditional Film Noir held together in the form of a nonlinear narrative. This is not a happy story and it does not end on a happy note. To sum up, this film is good, but only on a really morbid level. To me the bad points outweigh the good ones this time.

“The following is my explanation of what happened,” a young unnamed man (Jeremy Theobald) begins, and he proceeds to tell his story to a police officer (John Nolan), a story of how he started following random people just for the heck of it. “You followed women?” asks the policeman. “No, I followed anyone,” the man insists. “I want to be a writer and I wanted material for my characters.” He adds, “When you see somebody’s behavior and it raises 100,000 questions. I wanted to ask those questions and find out what the answers were. The most important rule was never follow the same person twice. That was the rule I broke first.” Just take into account that this is a condensation of a fairly long monologue.

This speech puts a rather Hitchcockian spin on a modern city street creeper. It’s human curiosity that drives our young man forward into his adventures, for better or for worse. The trick is to not let the person see that you’re following them. That is the second rule that our hero breaks and it ends him up in some trouble.

He makes the acquaintance of Cobb (Alex Haw), a thief whom he had been shadowing periodically. Cobb shows him how to properly rob houses and soon the young, fascinated by this thrilling lifestyle, is hooked on it too. He meets a blonde woman (Lucy Russell), who also remains unnamed throughout the picture, in a bar. He offers to buy her a drink. She tells him he can, but that he cannot sleep with her. Over the next few sequences (mixed out of chronological order) the two fall in love, or at least in lust.

They are in love and kissing within twenty-five minutes, but this is a fairly short picture so I’ll let that slide this time. There is a certain chemical crackle between the two I will admit. It starts out happy, but is then extinguished by the series of plot twists that exist in any Film Noir. The slick thing about Following is that the twists are showed to us ahead of time, but since we haven’t seen the ending, we don’t know what it means.

In between the man-blonde love scenes are the man-Cobb burglary scenes. Cobb is a fairly mysterious individual. We’re never quite sure whether he’s a “good guy” or “bad guy” till the end. He seems to alternate sides. I personally could smell trouble in his appearance, somehow something about him spells “bad guy.” Could it have been the fact that he robs houses for a living? I wonder.

"Following", being the first from acclaimed writer-director Christopher Nolan, foreshadows that Nolan’s “following” pictures will be clever, dark, profound and occasionally disturbing, but above all, good and hopefully better. Not that Following isn’t good, I just hope to see better from this director.

Can I define better? Well, for one thing a little longer. Nolan, whose script impressed me more than anything else, writes lines that give a great deal of insight into his characters. This movie is very short, and while it has plenty of personality, it could have gone on longer and said a little more.

For another thing, I want something more uplifting. The ending of this film left me with a fairly depressed feeling. Perhaps this was due to the movie’s lack of justice—which I think is one of its central statements. Occasionally in the movies, you take a movie that is like black coffee—utterly bitter and no redemptive qualities. Add a little sugar and it’s a little better, but not much. This is how "Following" affected me.

Nolan has talent, and can present and interesting story with interesting characters in a short time span. But I’m pretty sure that he can do better. I’m sure greater films will “follow”. (Second time I’ve used this pun, see above).

On "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" (1971)

If you want to view paradise, watch "Willy Wonka"

Star Rating: ***½
"Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" is a product of pure imagination. Enter a world made entirely of candy, where almost everything is eatable and delicious. A place where mushrooms are made of frosting—where chocolate plumbs grow on trees and a river is made of pure chocolate. It’s Wonderland—it’s Never-Neverland—it’s the Garden of Eden—it’s one of the most magnificent places on earth for both kids and adults. All this delight and splendor belongs to the mysterious candy man, Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder).

The candy man is one of the most admired people in the world. He’s the one who makes the world taste good. His unique candies and chocolates are adored by people the world over. His mysterious factory is his palace—like Buckingham Palace, or the Louvre museum. Everybody wants a look inside—especially rival chocolate makers.

Because many of his competitors were sending in spies posing as workers to steal his secret recipes, Mr. Wonka decided to close his factory, but as it turns out he only closes it to the public. The factory starts working again, churning out more delicious sweets then ever, while the front gates remain locked.
One day, Mr. Wonka decides to give an exclusive tour of his factory to five lucky people. He puts out a “golden ticket” in five of his chocolate bars, and the people who find them have won a spot on the tour. When the people of the world hear of this, they go crazy trying to find the tickets that could be anywhere in any place in the world.

Enter the main hero of the story, young Charlie Bucket, played by Peter Ostrum. Charlie’s family is very poor. His father is dead, his grandparents are bedridden and his mother tries very hard to keep the family afloat. When Charlie hears that Willy Wonka is opening his factory to give an exclusive tour to five lucky people, Charlie finds something to think about. He wants to find a golden ticket more than anything else—and just as it looks impossible for him to find one, he finds one. Charlie and his grandpa Joe, played by Jack Albertson, go on a fantastic adventure through the most amazing place on earth. In one day, Charlie (and the audience) learns more lessons than many people learn in an entire lifetime.

This screen gem was based on Roald Dahl’s novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. As is common with most of Dahl’s work, the main characters are children. The hero, Charlie Bucket, is a child. The other four golden ticket winners are children. Each child is supposed to represent a fault or a flaw, i.e. vanity, selfishness, bad habits, etc. When a child breaks a factory rule due to their flaw, the moral “that this is not the way you should act” is outlined by a musical number from the small factory employees, the Oompa Loompas. Their songs always open with “If you are wise you’ll listen to me.” As usual, Dahl is using children as tools to create another morbidly fascinating fairy tale.

Dahl himself was involved in the making of "Willy Wonka". He began writing a screenplay for the film, but when he failed to meet the necessary deadlines, the project was taken over by screenwriter David Seltzer. Dahl was so displeased with the final product, due to the massive changes in the script and the story made by Seltzer, that he refused to sell the rights to the second book, despite the very warm critical reception the film received.

Despite what Mr. Dahl said, this movie is a masterpiece. It has a young tonality, having been made for a younger audience, but it carries lessons that are beneficial to everybody, young and old. "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" is a beautiful, enchanting romp that is refreshing and will go down like a dash of hot chocolate with a little peppermint added.

Trivia Information: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067992/

On "The Shining" (1980)

Jack Nicholson in one of his "break through" roles

Star Rating: ***
The moment that "The Shining" begins, you know that you are watching a horror movie. Not only is there extremely creepy music playing in the background, but there is one long continuous shot of a car driving by lakes, through mountains and general rural scenery—in short, in the middle of no where. It is also based on a novel by Stephen King, the master of contemporary horror literature. Put two and two together and you realize that you are smack in the beginning of a horror movie. That is what "The Shining" is. There is nothing else that it *possibly* could be.

The main characters in this overpowered drama are the Torrances. The father, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is offered the job of caretaker in the enormous Overlook Hotel—a place that has gone down in horror movie lore; along with the Bates Motel and the Universal monster castles. The rooms are enormous, beautiful, empty and silent. There are endless mazes of passageways and it would be no trick to get yourself lost in place like the Overlook Hotel.

The new Bates Motel?

Jack and his family will have to live in this vast spectacle for five months over the winter, being virtually cut off from civilization. Before Jack moves in, the owners tell him about “the tragedy” of the hotel. The previous caretaker had gone crazy from cabin fever and murdered his wife and children with an axe and then committed suicide. “That’s not going to be the case with me,” says Jack smiling. Now why do I not believe that at all?

Sure enough, within one week of their arrival, Jack, struggling with a writing project, starts losing his marbles. When disturbed at his work, he unexpectedly flies off the handle. He visits the ballroom and encounters ghostly bartenders and guests. Finally, he follows in the footsteps of the previous caretaker and tries to murder his family. I know that Jack is supposed to be an unspeakably horrible character and boy does he deliver. Nicholson is good—perhaps too good. I found myself so unearthly disgusted by Jack. He becomes a psychotic slasher monster following in the footsteps of Alex, the maniacal killer from Kubrick’s "A Clockwork Orange" (1971).

Luckily, there is the unsung titular hero of "The Shining", Jack’s son Danny (Danny Lloyd). Danny is a strange child who likes to talk with his imaginary friend, Tony. Tony shows Danny unpleasant visions of the Overlook Hotel—blood pouring from an elevator and filling up the hotel lobby and two identical girl twins, the ghosts of the children of the last caretaker. In a conversation with a kindly hotel attendant, Mr. Halloran (Scatman Crothers), Danny learns (as well as the audience) that the reason he sees these visions is because he has a special ability to hear people’s thoughts and see things that other people can’t. Mr. Halloran, who has these same abilities, calls this gift “shining.”

When the Torrances are all alone in the hotel, Danny finds traces of the “tragedy” when he encounters the ghosts of two twin girls and a ghostly woman in a locked off room. Finally, he sees that his father is going to try and murder him and his mother Wendy (Shelley Duvall). It the dead of night, during a snowstorm that has barricaded the unhappy Torrances inside the hotel, Danny walks into Wendy’s room, warning Wendy of the coming catastrophe by muttering “redrum, redrum” (murder spelled backwards). At that exact moment, there is a big bang at the bedroom door. Someone is trying to break in with an axe. “Wendy, I’m home!” cries Jack Torrance from outside.

"The Shining" was filmed over eleven months from May 1978 to April 1979. Production took so long because Kubrick wanted to get various details of the film exactly correct. He had multiple takes for very short sequences, such as the infamous “Here’s Johnny” scene where Jack breaks into the bedroom with an axe, which took three days to film and required the use of approximately sixty doors for Jack to break through. For another example, the scene where the blood pours from the elevator into the hotel lobby took almost a year to get right. For one thing it took nine days to set up and could only be filmed in one take. Kubrick filmed the scene three times, arguing that “it doesn’t look like blood.”

Kubrick was very serious about his job, which unsurprisingly made him difficult to work with. He was hard on his crew, particularly Shelley Duvall. He would lose patience with her on the set and tell her that she was wasting everybody’s time. Duvall later said that he was probably just trying to get the best performance out of her that was possible, but that she never wanted to go through such an experience ever again.

"The Shining" received mixed reviews upon its initial release in 1980. Stephen King, the author of the original novel The Shining claimed that he was very disappointed with film, saying: "It's like a great big beautiful Cadillac with no motor inside, you can sit in it and you can enjoy the smell of the leather upholstery - the only thing you can't do is drive it anywhere. So I would do everything different." He adds, "The real problem is that Kubrick set out to make a horror picture with no apparent understanding of the genre. Everything about it screams that from beginning to end, from plot decisions to the final scene."

King had originally written a script of "The Shining" that was a more accurate adaptation of his novel, which had been rejected by Kubrick, who went on to write his own script with novelist Diane Johnson. King also felt that Kubrick had misrepresented his novel by casting the wrong actors—namely Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. King felt that Nicholson didn’t capture the good side of Jack Torrance, but skipped the conflicted feelings and skipped to the slashing violent aspect of the character. King disliked the choice of casting Shelley Duvall, whom he thought was too emotionally vulnerable to play Wendy, who was supposed to be a bright and sunny type of person. It is a pity that King feels this way because these portrayals have become so iconic. I can imagine that King would feel angry that his novel is considered in a way he so strongly disapproved of. If things had been done King’s way, the film would probably not be such a classic and certainly not the icon that it is.

Like many critics had been in 1980, the first time I saw "The Shining" I was repulsed, but not from fright. I had heard nothing about the film besides praise and assurances that it was absolutely horrifying. For my first viewing, I waited till midnight, shut off all the lights in the house and started the film. Even with the darkness I felt that it was an inspired story, but I was disappointed because I didn’t find it very frightening—just mildly creepy. The second time I viewed it, it certainly intimidated me. I grew up around the result of this trailblazing film. Since "The Shining" movies have gotten a lot scarier, at least visually scarier. Sometimes wish I had been alive in 1980 and had gone to see it in the theater to experience the fright it had provoked.

Today, there are very few horror films that I enjoy because it’s all about violence and what is onscreen. Considering "The Shining" is a film about many gruesome murders there is only one onscreen murder in the whole film. The rest is all in the mind. "The Shining" is an interpretive film, made up of several ambiguities that are up to the viewer to make out. I’ve also said this for Alfred Hitchcock’s "The Birds"–that level of ambiguity is what makes a horror movie effective. It begs the questions, why is this frightening or how is this frightening to you?

With this in mind, I certainly enjoyed "The Shining" after a second viewing. That pretty much sums up the film's past—overall mixed criticism to “shining” cultural reference. My main advice to approaching this film is to watch it a few times, rewind a scene or two if necessary and possible, and above all, just go with it.

Trivia Information/Writing Source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081505/

On "Lady in the Water" (2006)

A touching moment towards the beginning of "Lady in the Water"

Star Rating: **½
Like "The Village", M. Night Shyamalan’s previous movie, "Lady in the Water" borders on being too somber. The main difference is that "The Village" was unforgivably somber, to the point of reminding me uncannily of a slab of very dry wood. "Lady in the Water" is not wooden, dull at times maybe, but nothing compared to "The Village". "Lady in Water" was interesting and charming, whereas "The Village" didn’t even have that in its favor.

Shyamalan first conceived the plot for the movie in the form of a bedtime story he would tell to his daughters. This is confirmed by the presence of a title card during the end credits stating, “To my daughters, I’ll tell you this story one more time. But then go to bed.” This movie feels like a short fairytale ala Hansel and Gretel stretched to two hours.

The film opens with a narration about humankind’s linkage with the “water-people”. As time advanced, humans had broken the connections with the water-people because “man’s need to own drove them deeper into land” and communication between humans and these water people had shut off. But the water people keep trying to find and help humans, but many are attacked by their fearsome enemies and don’t return. But they still try. (Inspired and biblical, no?)

This brings us to a modern day Philadelphia apartment building. A stuttering, down-on-his-luck hotel superintendent named Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) discovers one of the water people in the hotel’s pool. This is a Narf, a nymph-like creature named Story, played by Bryce Dallas Howard. Heep saves her from a vicious “Scrunt”, a wolf-like creature who tries to kill Story throughout the movie in order to prevent her from returning to her home. Story says that she has come to the human’s world to look for a writer who is writing something of such value, that it will change and inspire generations to come. When her mission is accomplished, Story will fly away back to her people on the wings of a great eagle-like creature called, “The Great Eatlon”. I guess the water-people still haven’t given up on humanity.

After interrogating all of his tenants, Heep meets Vick, a young writer played by the movie’s writer and director M. Night Shyamalan, who is writing a “cookbook” containing his ideas on politics and other world issues. Like Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense masterpiece "Rear Window", Shyamalan introduces a puzzling story and a set of quirky residents of an apartment (a man with a knack for crossword puzzles, a group of cigarette addicted slackers, a young college student who is always arguing with her mother, etc.) who all play some part in the story. What with the appearances he makes in his films, and the suspense mechanisms he uses (or tries to use) to advance his plots, I wonder more and more if Shyamalan is not in fact a Hitchcock buff. In this film however, Shyamalan doesn’t just make a cameo appearance—he stars in the film as one of the supporting characters. He is the one the lady in the water is searching for. It is Shyamalan’s revolutionary ideas that will change the (cinematic) world.

I applaud "Lady in the Water" because it is an endlessly energetic and inventive exercise. It takes a pure fairy tale that sounds pretty silly when you think about it, and it handles it contents moderately well. Note the world moderately—this film is not without its faults I’m afraid. Much of the dialogue feels improvised, while the other part of it feels premeditated. I was so happy to find comic relief here after sitting through "The Village". There are a few humorous things about Lady in the Water—such as a tenant whose husband is always in the bathroom, and his wife who tells the other characters something unflattering about him, like “he has a little gas problem,” and always ends with, “please don’t tell him I said that.”

In rebuttal of my own case, I’ve mentioned that this film has an endlessly inventive plot. It does—but it is a flawed plot and feels a bit hokey after a while. The reason this isn’t an epic fantasy tale would have to because of the lack of depth in the creatures, namely these Scrunt creatures. Its appearance, besides its monstrous desire to kill Story and anyone else it caught, isn’t really clear. I found myself thinking, “It’s true, in a fairytale like this there has to be a magical antagonist of some kind. Like the wolves in 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' or the Nazgul in 'The Lord of the Rings', but their point in the story is always explained.” The Scrunt’s role isn’t really explained, or maybe the bare knowledge that it’s out for Story’s blood is all we need to know and anymore explanation would become too much exposition.

The creature’s names definitely need some alteration. Take the name, “Narf”. I can’t honestly find myself taking a magical creature too seriously with a name like that. The same goes for Scrunt. I appreciate with so much fantasy literature in the world today, finding original monster names must be a challenging task. Or maybe Shyamalan thought it sounded good. Point being, it doesn’t work here.

For all the negative things I’ve just recounted, "Lady in the Water" isn’t a bad film, but I can imagine it being some much more effective as a bedtime story. I don't give it thumbs up or thumbs down, but an encouraging rating of two and a half. I applaud M. Night Shyamalan for trying it out on screen however. I have respect for Shyamalan—he’s a good storyteller and he deserves a hand for his creativity. With a few more adjustments, organization and a little more scriptwriting instruction, "Lady in the Water" just might float.

Trivial Information: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0452637/trivia 

On "The Village" (2004)

Joaquin Phoenix painting the trees with "the safe color" as a guard against "Those We Do Not Speak Of"

Star Rating: **½
M. Night Shyamalan’s "The Village" takes on the classic scenario of a small superstitious 19th century village, stricken by fear of the supernatural. That’s the premise. Not exactly original, but still interesting. The small village is surrounded by a thick forest inhabited by “Those We Do Not Speak Of”, which are supposedly fearsome creatures who object to humans living around their land. Here it starts getting a little too serious and overdone. To start with, the label “Those We Do Not Speak Of” sounds like something taken directly out of a Harry Potter story.

The conflict begins when the villagers start finding skinned animals, signs of the creature’s displeasure. Then a young man named Lucius, Joaquin, seeks permission from the village elders to go into the woods were these creatures live to fetch better medicines from the towns on the other side. The elders are much troubled by this request and they try to drill it into Lucius’s head how really terrible these woods are. The script doesn’t set these monsters up to be very interesting or intimidating. It just puts endless emphasis on how bad they are. This isn’t narration, more of a lecture.

Then the story shifts into a romance that Lucius has with a blind girl, Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard), the daughter of one of the village elders, Edward Walker (William Hurt). Then Lucius is wounded by Noah (Adrien Brody), a developmentally impaired man, who is also in love with Ivy. Ivy seeks permission to go through the forest to seek medicine needed to heal Lucius. (Great idea, right? Send a blind girl through a forest full of monsters). On her journey, Ivy trips over sticks on the forest floor and uncovers Shyamalan’s trademarked twist ending.

"The Village" is not a total failure, but it is far from a masterpiece. It has some interesting prospects, but they are not well meshed together. This movie is suspenseful and there are frightening moments, but the movie takes itself much too seriously. The dialogue tries to sound early like some kind of nineteenth century jargon, but tries too hard and just ends up sounding unnecessary and corny. It uses too many big words and turns a simple sentence like “We were told of their engagement this morning” into “We were informed of their intentions this morning.”

There is little to no comic relief, just stuffiness. The village elders are stuffy and annoying. The characters I liked the most were Lucius and Ivy, who were the most developed characters. Lucius is a very shy and quiet individual. Ivy, a more gutsy and talkative person asks him, “Why can you not say what is in your head?” Lucius replies sharply and satisfactorily, “Why must you say everything in yours?” I was pleased for something that made me smile after an hour of just shaking my head. The end of "The Village" brings a lot of character development to everyone and we understand the whole stuffy picture, but it doesn’t do much in the movie’s favor I’m afraid.

To sum up, "The Village" is fairly forgettable entertainment. As far as Shyamalan’s movies go, this film is certainly not memorable as "The Sixth Sense" or even "Signs", but much better than his latest picture "The Last Airbender". M. Night Shyamalan has interesting if not hokey ideas, but a lesson in scriptwriting is probably in order.