The Sixth Sense

Dorkman's front-page observation about Shyamalan's career making more sense backwards reminds me of my old English professor's story that Robert Frost wrote scads of poems and, when he was ready to start publishing them, organized them into different books so that they seemed to progress from less to more complex.

One of my favorite albums is Mindless Self Indulgence's "Frankenstein Girls Will Seem Strangely Sexy," which is thirty short tracks by an obsessive tweaker who ordered them alphabetically.

Still, you risk being written off as not that good early on and not having the later stuff published at all. Or actually writing new stuff and having the public think it's exactly like your inferior "old" work.

OK, I love this movie and I have some thoughts on it and Shyamalan and his career and his other movies...

First of all, I agree with the sentiment that this feels like a Nolan-style film. It's very well thought out. I generally like to look at his first three films - this, Unbreakable and Signs - as examples of his strengths as a film maker, and his next three films - The Village, Lady in the Water and The Happening - as examples of his weaknesses as a film maker (and specifically as a writer).

I think the most important thing about Shyamalan is the way he writes characters and relationships. His first three films are all equally great in that they have interesting characters and those characters have some fairly complex and well developed relationships with each other. Even if you don't like Signs, you have to admit that it's really pretty damn good until the last twenty minutes or so, and even then there are nuggets of awesome character stuff toward the end. His first three movies all deal with four main characters each. In this it's Bruce and his wife and Cole and his mom. In Unbreakable it's Bruce and his wife and kid and Sam Jackson. In Signs it's the four people who make up Mel's family.

When fleshing out this small number of characters and developing their relationships with each other, I think Shyamalan comes up with a lot of really interesting stuff and has a lot of good ideas about how to inject their relationships with more depth than is typical in most films. His first three flicks have some really great great character stuff going on, but aside from Unbreakable there's really not a sense of a single protagonist in any of his movies. There are usually two or three characters that sort of share the mantle of 'protagonist' in his flicks.

His next three films start introducing a lot more characters into the mix. The Village has got Pheonix and his girlfriend, A couple of the adults, a few of their siblings, Adrien Brody's oddity of a character and a bunch of little side characters. Shyamalan spends a whole lot of time fleshing out these characters and I think that cripples the films. It's like he's trying to give every character some sort of arc, but there's just so god damn many of them that none of them really stand out. There's way too much noise going on and he is not efficient with his character building and relationship stuff like he is in his earlier flicks. Lady in the Water has the same problem. There are tons of characters that all have their little back stories and little arcs and stuff and he spends too much time trying to make sure all of them are fleshed out. The Happening, again, same thing. Fewer characters in that one,but there are still too many, and he spends way WAY too much time fleshing out these little side characters that are only in the film for ten minutes and then get killed off, so the main characters don't really get that much attention. The relationships in his films become more shallow and simple in each following one, and yet he crams more and more characters into them and then gives them all these weird quirks and ... insanities?... instead of making them relatable human characters.

Also, I get the sense that he doesn't understand when and why to use the whole 'stillness' thing. It works in Sixth Sense in the same way a gunshot will feel much louder in a quiet dew-covered meadow than in an automobile manufacturing plant. The few scenes where emotions do run high end up feeling all the more emotional because the rest of the film is more or less drained of emotion. It's there throughout the film, but it's way more subdued. With his more recent films, it feels more like he's just decided that it's his 'style' or something, so he just makes everything awkwardly lethargic when people should be really emoting. Giamotti pulled it off pretty well, tho. It's just that by the time he started getting overwhelmed with emotion we still didn't know jack shit about his character. He was just a maintenance man. Look at all the clues in the movie!!! Here's another totally bizarre character! LOOK! ANOTHER METAPHOR!! I'm so god damned clever!

So yeah, that's my take on the guy and my theory on why his early stuff is good or great, and why his later stuff is totally unwatchable and baffling.

Also, I was really bummed out about Last Airbender. I watched the entire show a couple weeks before the flick came out, and after the first few episodes I was absolutely in love with it. It definitely feels like a kid's show, but if you look past some of the obvious pandering and stuff, there's a pretty awesome little set of characters (four or five of them...) who all have these kinda complex and subtle relationships and are very well characterized. I honestly thought that that movie was going to fucking rule because the show is almost entirely focused on the characters and their relationships and motivations. The fact that they can move water and shoot fire with their hands is just extra character stuff, really. They only use it as a crutch for an action sequence once in a blue moon. Halfway through the first season, the character who's supposed to be teaching this kid how to water bend ends up hating him because he's already surpassed her, yet the kid has this huge crush on her...

Long story short, I watched that show and thought to myself "holy crap, it's like a few characters on a road trip on a flying buffalo who have these interesting relationships and all of whom have these very well thought out character arcs... This is exactly the sort of shit that Shyamalan could be good at writing..."

And then, you know, he totally changed everything that was good in the show so he could have more pointless action sequences and cut out all that needless character development stuff. Who needs that stuff, anyway...

At 1:03:36, you guys start talking about the slit-wrists ghost, and how she knew she was dead.

I always figured that the ghosts in the movie lived in the moment just before they died. The hanging ghosts, the bicycle ghost, and even Bruce Willis to an extent, because of his obsession with helping Cole, are examples. Therefore, the slit-wrists ghost was saying "You can't hurt me anymore" because, in that moment, she knew that she was about to die.

I love Paranoia Agent, not to mention everything Satoshi Kon has ever done (that I've seen). It's a shame he passed away recently. I'm glad his friends and family are finishing his last film. Come to think of it, Down In Front should do a commentary for at least one of his films. I'd suggest either Perfect Blue or Tokyo Godfathers.

I couldn't agree more. Perfect Blue is one of my favorite movies of all time. Paprika has one of the best opening credit sequences of all time. I like Millennium Actress and Memories better than Tokyo Godfathers, but it's still very good.

I just listened to the Sixth Sense audio and while I agree with much of what you guys said about the film, I firmly disagree with M Night being nothing but a one trick pony. While I will agree to a certain extent his dialog could use some tweaking, I still feel his directing is top notch and his ideas are much better than most of the rubbish being peddled by Hollywood. He also doesn't use the twist angle as much as people think. I did an episode on him this past week where I go into a little bit of his history and also talk about the Happening, which is nowhere near as bad as people say it is.

I hope it's ok to post this here. If not I'll move it to the Creations folder. (and my apologies)