“Along with many others, I was blown away by the twist at the end of The Sixth Sense. For two hours I’d snickered at the artiness of the compositions, at the way Bruce Willis‘s character was so ludicrously alienated from the world that he had no spatial relationship with anyone but the freaky kid. And then: Kaboom! Talk about using a critic’s jadedness to pull the rug out from under him! Shyamalan was still a showman back then, before he began to fancy himself a shaman — or is that shyaman? Now he just writes dead people.” — New York magazine critic David Edelstein.
Edelstein, by the way, really shows his cynical colors in the opening line of his review: “In the absence of a neurological disorder, a filmmaker who boasts about hearing voices is either scamming the congregation or has come to believe that the universe revolves around him.” Uhm…hello? There hasn’t been a visionary/creative person in the history of this planet who hasn’t heard ‘voices.’ This list includes the guy in the apartment next door, Thomas Becket, Leo Tolstoy, Edgar Allen Poe, Honore de Balzac, Yeshua of Nazareth and David Edelstein.
The reason Edelstein is a good writer is that he listens to his voices and goes with what they’re telling him. That’s how the process works, and yet Edelstein thinks anyone who openly talks about voices is boasting or “scamming” his audience. That’s not very perceptive. The voices I hear (and it’s probably the same for everyone) are always little whispers. They never poke you in the arm, but once you understand their pitch and tonality and precisely how they sound, there’s no missing them.

Mike Russell‘s comic-strip interview format is concise, involving, intriguing. Here’s one with Waking Life director Richard Linklater that went up yesterday. I tried to find other movie-type interviews from Russell but the navigation options on the right margin are too oblique. Why doesn’t Russell offer a link that just says “previous movie-type interviews with head-trip directors, writers, actors, etc.”? Maybe he hasn’t done any.
As I was reading the Linklater thing I was saying to myself, “Does Linklater drive a shitty car with empty coffee cups and cigarette packs lying on the dashboard”? Then I read that the interview was done over the phone, and soon after I began to conclude the drawings were probably inspired by the milieu in Linklater’ s Waking Life.
I also like what Russell wrote about the Frat Pack a while back. “A while back, I suggested that the half-funny, half-cliche Wedding Crashers was just lazy enough that it might signal the cusp of a decline” of Hollywood’s new comedy mafiosos — Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Jack Black, et. al., “Specifically, I asked: ‘How long until ‘Hollywood’s funniest clique’ [as described by New York Times writer Sharon Waxman] pulls an Ackroyd and starts to reek of smug, louche decay?” (Webster’s defines “louche” as ad adjective meaning “questionable taste or morality; decadent.”)

“The Village and Lady in the Water are the filmmaker’s protest songs,” says the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Carrie Rickey. “The 2004 film, about an isolated religious community, criticizes fundamentalists who shelter their flock from the modern world. The new movie damns cynics who cannot take social action and connect with others in a meaningful way.”
Rickey writes very concisely and quite well, and it’s clear from the piece she’s a Shyamalan fan. One presumes this has something to do with hometown loyalties and diplomacy, as she doesn’t include her reactions to Lady in the Water in the piece. The idea behind the piece is to observe the minutiae of Night’s life in a smart, gentle way.
She mentions that Night’s last four films “have collectively taken in more than $1.5 billion” which is closer to $10 bill” when you “consider that box office represents on average 16 percent of a film’s revenues,” and she quotes Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson as saying “only John Lasseter at Pixar can boast a record like Night’s,” says Thompson, adding that Lasseter “didn’t write and direct all his movies.” But the Lasseter comparison is wrong/incomplete, as David Poland has taken the time to point out.
Elsewhere in the piece she writes that “short-term profits are nice, but long-term resonance matters more to Shyamalan. He uses a different metric. The filmmaker read in Malcolm Gladwell‘s Blink about the cola wars, in which Pepsi won the supermarket aisle ‘sip test’ but Coke was the victor in the ‘take-home’ contest, being the beverage consumers drank at backyard barbecues. ‘I measure the success of a movie by the degree of difficulty plus the aspiration times the take-home effect,” he says. Staying power is what counts.”
This is all very nice, but let’s cut to the chase by repeating something I said earlier: the best thing Night can do for himself now is to direct one or two first-rate scripts that he hasn’t written, and make hits out of them. The second best thing he can do is to give up on the idea of reaching huge audiences. He needs to abandon the mid-budget realm and go into the indie world and make films that he just wants to make and forget about monster profits. It’s clear to me after reading a lot about him over the past couple of weeks that Night is a prisoner of his own legend, but also of a plush country-estate lifestyle.
A person as rich as Night, a man who lives through dreams but subjecting himself to such strictly regulated and heavily-insulated circumstances, can’t hope to connect with life’s unruly desperation.