"Lady in the Water" spoiler

[Orrex]

:rant:
Well, it's the spoiler about every M Night Shyamalan film, really.

With the possible exception of Stuart Little, his films completely fall apart once you figure out the gimmick. After you realize that Bruce Willis is dead (about fifteen minutes into the movie, unless you're sleeping), the whole thing is fluff and "oh, that's some nice composition." The "story" vanishes, and we're left with nothing more than a scavenger hunt for "subtle" clues about the film's big secret.

Annoyingly, Shyamalan is unable to resist the temptation of replaying the checklist of clues, so that he can show you how clever he is (and so slower viewers can figure it out). Only by wholesale suspension of disbelief do his films hold together at all. Yes, all fiction requires that we go along with the joke to some degree, but after two hours of overlooking obvious contrivances and conspicuous concessions ("Nobody talks to Bruce the whole time? Oh, that's no problem," etc.) even the most eagerly suspended disbelief starts to feel the strain.

Worse, he's defended by a legion of admirers who perceive depth in his recycled array of gloomy smoke and mirrors.

The dying wife delivers a death-bed prophecy, and that prophecy is "hit the monster with the baseball bat." Holy shit, I never would have thought of that!

Maybe I'll see his new film on DVD, but not if it all depends--like the rest of his films--on a single "clever" gimmick.

on edit: oops. I used "smoke and mirrors" twice. Maybe it's a clue to the subtle gimmick hidden in this post...

[Arkham House]

1. Well, yeah...(more spoilers)

...admittedly, I figured out that Bruce was alive in "Sixth Sense" the moment that kid said "I see dead people". But it *is* fun to see the pieces come together, and you *do* have to go along with the joke...every mystery book or movie would fall apart, if you looked at them too closely. (IE--nobody looked at the corpse, in "Vertigo"? Was the chaffeur murdered, in "The Big Sleep"? And "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd", with its famous solution, is so unlikely a critic recently wrote a whole book, suggesting that someone *other* than the narrator killed Ackroyd, after all...) In "The Village", I guessed what was happening immediately, when we saw the burial in the beginning, with a headstone showing a death date of "1897"...and aha, thought I, that's a red herring, it must really be now, the 21st century...and you know, it didn't affect my enjoyment of the film a whit...seeing it come together was fun, and knowing that the "elders" were modern people in Victorian fancy dress gave the film an interesting dimension as I watched it. BUT--I will give you "Signs". This simply did not work, and you're right about the ending--a disappointment. I'll certainly see "Lady in the Water", and hope for the best...