movie review (signs)

Bally/Lucas-inspired one sentence review: I liked it a LOT more than I expected to, but still managed to make fun of it.

I can't remember the last time I liked Mel Gibson in a movie. Of course, I also can't remember the last time I tried to watch a Mel Gibson movie that wasn't Braveheart, which bored me to death twice. Oopsie, not death - sleep.

The only M. Night Shyamalan movie I have ever seen is The Sixth Sense, and pretty much all I remember can be summed up thus: "That's Donnie Wahlberg?!" [an hour and a half later] "Oh my god I cannot believe I didn't see that coming." But I'm fairly certain I enjoyed it.

It has become understood in my house that We Make Fun of the M. Night. Not necessarily for any good reason, but Will did figure out the twist of The Village from watching the freakin' trailer, so we are not so impressed with him lately. But we had only seen one of his movies each - Will saw, and somewhat enjoyed, Unbreakable a few years ago.

So Ludek loaned us his DVD of Signs and we watched it last night. I think it was actually a lovely story, but the storytelling was somewhat flawed. I have noticed an irritating habit in certain directors of using flashbacks to make what could be a straight drama into a suspenseful thriller. That trick was entirely unnecessary here, and took away somewhat from my enjoyment of the final product. I am also not crazy about some of M.'s use of cinematography, though the painfully long shots of nothing happening (suspense again) are a far cry better than the thirteen-billion cuts in five seconds method employed by most action-y directors. I think M., like many directors out there, would be better off without final cut. (Isn't that awful of me?)

The performances were wonderful, particularly those from the children, one of whom is a Culkin which makes that statement pretty astonishing, coming from me.

Here, without explanation, are the notes I took during the movie:

"Do you think the music could be more heavy-handed?"
"No."

"Written, Produced, Directed and Masturbated Over by M. Night Shyamalan."

"They're growing a lot of weed."
[...]
"Ohhhh, no. It's corn."

"Egyptian hieroglyphs for 'Aquaman is a fag.'"

PREDATOR.

And this morning when I woke up, I told Will there was a monster outside my room and he brought me a glass of water. Hee!