SixthSense Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Bruce Willis returns to cinemas this week with Surrogates, his first starring role since Live Free or Die Hard. It has been 21 years since the original Die Hard, and it seems as if studios and executives are still trying to make lightning strike twice with Willis as an action hero. Fortunately, Willis' finer instincts keep coming through with some of his quirkier choices between the big-budget blow-em-up movies. And though a casual fan wouldn't know it, he has demonstrated over the years a marked talent for acting. That's right. Bruce Willis is an actor, and a damn good one. It's a shame he has yet to earn a single Oscar nomination, and he could have -- should have -- earned some for the following great performances.

1. Butch in Pulp Fiction (1994)
He shows up 20 minutes in, in a single shot that lasts a full two minutes. It's just Bruce, framed in the center of the shot. The background is lit low and mostly out of focus. He doesn't speak for two minutes; we're listening to Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) speak, but we're looking at Bruce. We're looking at that mug. It's a tough, hard mug, but he knows that Marsellus has his number, so his guard is not entirely up. That look of hard disappointment anchors it. Most of Willis' acting is like that: an invisible stamp of quality that makes everything else around him look good. Then, check out the rest of the film, the way Tarantino's dialogue seems to perfectly fit his mouth, and the brilliant way he pulls off his many non-speaking scenes.

I consider myself a fan of M. Night Shyamalan's films, and it's not just because we're both Philly guys. Despite the popular backlash, I still think The Sixth Sense is a pretty darn good movie. I also feel that Unbreakable is borderline brilliant and that Signs works well enough, even if it doesn't exactly stand up to repeat viewings. I'm also of the opinion that The Village is an indulgent mess, and it's the first M. Night movie that I actively disliked. I've not yet seen Lady in the Water, so obviously I cannot even venture an opinion on the flick ... but I've spoken to a lot of film critics (Shyama-fans and non-fans alike) and they assure me it's pretty darn terrible. (It's currently wooing a 19% approval rate at Rotten Tomatoes, and neither Kim nor Ryan was all that thrilled with the flick.)

So I thought I'd transplant one of my recent geeky phone conversations into blog form and pose the following query: Is M. Night Shyamalan a fine filmmaker who's currently going through a rough spot in his career ... or is he a one-trick pony -- an emperor, as they say, with no clothes?

One of the most common opinions regarding the guy's last two films is a pretty logical one: That the filmmaker became so popular and so powerful so fast that now he's working in a virtual vacuum, a one-man filmmaking machine that's become insular, isolated, and beholden to no one -- and that includes the producers and studio execs who just might be able to contribute something important to the process. Or is M. Night a brilliant renegade of a big-budget filmmaker, a guy who tells the exact stories he wants to tell, and damn it all if the audiences and/or critics don't "get it"?

So what do you think? Are we dealing with a filmmaker who's "hit the wall," creatively-speaking? Did the guy only have two or three good movies in him? Or will he bounce back from the criticisms of The Village and Lady in the Water and deliver another movie that recaptures some of that Sixth Sense magic? And by "magic," I don't just mean the $293 million in domestic box office.