the groundhog day project

I've complained before about M. Night Shyamalan. Hell, I've complained in this blog about M. Night Shyamalan--primarily Day 375 - used to tell you bedtime stories when I added a viewing of Lady in the Water to my week with The Sixth Sense . I am one of those folks who loved Shyamalan about when he first made it big, then was increasingly disappointed thereafter as the films mostly followed a linear trajectory downward in quality. The Visit is not a great film but it is well above that downward trajectory and it's actually pretty good. Shyamalan dips his feet into the "found footage"* waters with a couple of kids sent to spend a week with grandparents they've never met. * MINOR SPOILERS: "found footage" implies dead protagonists in the end. From the start, given that this involves kids, you can safely assume they will survive. But, The Visit is built on footage filmed by those kids as the older sister, Becca (Olivia DeJonge) wants to make a doc...

Behind the more mundane details, like Malcolm serving as a surrogate for Cole’s absent father, M. Night Shyamalan likes to put big ideas into his movies. Sometimes he’s a little obvious about it. Hell, Lady in the Water basically invents an entirely new mythology just to play at something big. I’ve got Lady in the Water playing beside me right now as I write this, and I’d say this is the point at which Shyamalan really became… well, a joke. Despite many seemingly incorrect notions about comic books, Unbreakable remains a fairly good film, even if it tends to be lesser Shyamalan. Signs , despite an overtly (ridiculously) religious ending, still plays quite well. The Village , with a few minor changes, would be great, but instead is just mostly (that is, through most of the film) good and partly just awful. Lady in the Water --well, it is something else entirely, Shyamalan getting bigger than himself. News reports on war in just the first few minutes of the film remind me of the news...