"There is no originality left in the world, Mr. Heep. That is a sad fact I've come to live with."
Altered is the movie Feast wanted to be. Hell, it's the movie we wanted Bubba Ho-Tep to be. A bunch of hillbilly alien abductees have been waiting in the woods for years, hoping to catch an alien of their own for revenge. "But mostly it was about the drinking." When the aliens finally return, they capture one and take it to a remote wilderness compound. The actions of assholes and innocents cause characters to die in an unpredictable order.
The budget is low, the acting isn't that great, and the dialogue could use some punching up. But the movie gets the beats right, an impressive feat for a horror/comedy. The plotting is dead on and the jokes work. There are a few nifty revelations along the way, and some of the plot twists turn out to be punchlines. And in a nice throwback, the aliens are little green men with sharp teeth.
You have to hand it to Eduardo Sanchez, co-writer/co-director of The Blair Witch Project. He sure knows how to make a scary movie about a bunch of jerks screaming at each other and screwing each other over. And now he can do it without giving you a headache.
"What type of person would be so arrogant to assume the intention of another human being?"
Me, for one. Or anyone who reads a book, watches a movie, or views a painting, for that matter. Thanks for asking, Joe Rogan.
Okay, Joe Rogan doesn't actually play the evil movie critic in M. Night Shymalan's Lady in the Water. But he might as well be in there shouting, "If you think this sucks so much, why don't you make a movie?" Ignoring the actual answer (I promised I would never do that again, the evidence might still be out there somewhere and now we have YouTube), I'd ask a question in response. "If you're going to attempt to create art, why shouldn't we be allowed to judge it?"
A quick recap for anyone who regularly avoids reviews of movies they know they will hate: Lady in the Water is the story of an friendly Los Angeles apartment superintendent (it's nice to know screenwriters on both coasts don't know what the hell they're talking about) who befriends a sea creature from the Blue World. She appears in the swimming pool of his apartment complex because she needs to be seen by someone who will change the world. That someone happens to be a writer played by M. Night Shymalan, who is writing a book that will change history after he's killed for publishing his crazy ideas about peace in the first place.
(Oh, and the creature's name is Story and for some reason the superintendent never offers her pants. Dude, if you want to make movies about your fetish for Ron Howard's daughter, do it on your own time, like your fictional counterpart in The Skin Gods.)
You have to give props to M. Night for putting himself in the role of the messiah. Unless he cast Mel Gibson again, we would have assumed the character was supposed to be him anyway. The real problem surfaces after that, when the superintendent tries to get the sea creature back to her homeworld. As it turns out, she requires the services of several archetypes to aid her in her return: a witness, a healer, an interpreter, a guild... (This is all delivered through racist portrayals of Korean-Americans. Old Asian ladies are the new Magical African-American Friends.) Not knowing who to turn to, the superintendent asks the advice of the resident film critic.
This is the point at which it becomes understandable why no one knows the definition of "irony" anymore. Everything the film critic says in the movie is true until M. Night says it's not. The critic's analysis of romantic comedy, his previously italicized opinion of originality, and his original interpretation of which apartment residents fulfill what archetypes are all on the money. Why shouldn't the pot smokers be the guild? Why isn't the crossword puzzle guy the interpreter? Because a movie critic said so and every justifiable opinion he reached is wrong.
Several critics alluded to the twist of Lady in the Water when it came out and how it was cheating, but they wouldn't reveal what it was. Allow me to put in in clear terms. The twist in Lady in the Water is that a writer/director who is known for spelling out what is exactly going on, be it via flashbacks or television and radio announcements, the guy who provided an animated prologue for his latest film because he thinks we're too stupid to get it, is now an unreliable narrator. Who saw that coming?
That's the last time I defend Unbreakable.
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1 comment:
I finally saw Altered, and Narraptor is pretty much dead on with his review. I would say that he's not giving enough credit to the actors, though. The actors do a pretty damn good job of playing their archetypes to the hilt, while leaving most of the scenery unchewed. And to be honest, I had just assumed that Eduardo Sanchez would be a mediocre director at best.
Also, props are given to the movie for knowing how much budget they had, and not trying to go too far beyond it. Monsters offscreen are more effective than CGI-cloned monsters onscreen. Ditto for the ending, which did not take the one step too far that I was expecting.
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