the groundhog day project

Going to keep it simple to end this week of The Sixth Sense . Going camping for the weekend so I don’t want to linger. (I will be blogging about another film tomorrow. A brief outing to Starbucks in the afternoon for some wifi away from the campsite.) Today: Christ. The Christ- Figure anyway. I will have to track two separate scores today, because I want to measure both Malcolm and Cole. Primarily Malcolm. On to Kozlovic (2009): The first of Kozlovic’s 25 “structural elements of the cinematic Christ-Figure” is that the figure must be tangible, visible and colorful. That’s an easy one for most any character. I’ll give both Malcolm and Cole the point. (M:1,C:1) Structural element #2: being the central protagonist. It might be hard normally to give this one to two characters in the same film, but both Malcolm and Cole do have complete story arcs. Malcolm’s starts one scene earlier and ends one scene later but I’m fairly sure Cole ends up with more screen time to make up for tha...

Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead. – Gene Fowler Fowler was a journalist, someone who wrote on a regular basis. I don’t know if he considered his output to be art or simply work. Personally, I feel that everything I write, even the most mundane academic piece, is still art. In Art & Fear , Bayles and Orland (1993) begin simply with the following: Making art is difficult. We leave drawings unfinished and stories unwritten. We do work that does not feel like our own. We repeat ourselves. We stop before we have mastered our materials, or continue on long after their potential is exhausted. (p. 1) On the first statement, I wholeheartedly agree. Though writing is easy, making art is difficult, though the two things are often (or, I suppose I implied above, always) one and the same. On the second statement, yes, I have left behind many unfinished drawings, many unfinished stories. I have detailed notes...

I was talking about mythology. As I mentioned near at the end of yeterday’s entry, Harty (2000) calls “the Arthurian myth… central to the plot of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense ” (p. 57). He compares Cole Sear to King Arthur, pointing out the obvious allusion in the second of the two school plays we see in The Sixth Sense , in which Cole now has the lead and the braggart child actor Tommy Tammisimo plays the village idiot… (It’s worth pointing out here that there is no internally logical reason for this reversal of roles. We in the audience don’t like Tommy, sure, but the movie has not told us he was cast in the prior play because of his one professional acting job or that Cole has any acting ability himself. Not that elementary school plays are built on great acting. We may assume that Cole got the lead because he has gained new confidence with Malcolm’s help, and that seems to be the intent of the scene; it just bugs me that Tommy’s character even exists here, since his onl...