Entries in the Category "the sixth sense"
Osssssssscars!
I am reading all these bloggers who’ve pledged to see all the Best Picture nominees, or all the films with a non-technical nomination (that’s Sarah Bunting, and she almost did it). Some of them spent two Saturdays in a row parked in a movie theater seat watching five wannabe Best Pictures back-to-back. My major regret going into Oscar night is that I haven’t seen enough of the nominated movies. Living virtually across the street from a limited-release haven like the Cedar Lee, just about every one of these movies has crossed my path (not something I could say back when I was living in Lansing, Michigan--sorry Lansing). I went to an Oscar party in which the crowd was generally well-versed in movies—not just the big ones, but independents, foreigns, documentaries—and I wished I could have given more opinions instead of continually saying, “That looked really good. I heard that was good. I was going to see that. Everything I’ve read online says that was overrated, actually.”
The real problem is this whole being-in-grad-school thing, which will be over soon enough. I’ll be a cultural civilian again by May, and then it’s seeing movies all the time, reading books all the time, just because I damn well want to. And maybe next February I’ll plan my own Oscar film binge.
This year, I had to content myself watching the Oscars having seen only Inglourious Basterds, Up in the Air, Julie and Julia, and one-third of The Hurt Locker. I'm catching up on the other movies at my usual snail’s-pace rate. (Oscar-nominated or Oscar-winning movies I have seen in the past few months: Valmont, Mrs. Brown, Frozen River, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Gangs of New York.)
Anyway, here are my totally uneducated thoughts on the proceedings.
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How Signs is Both Awesome and Misunderstood
I turned on the TV on Saturday night to see that Signs was about ten minutes from being over on TNT. I was so disappointed at having missed the thing that I threw the DVD on, utterly spur-of-the-moment. I LOVE Signs.
And yet, many people are frustrated with or critical of this movie. I remember when it came out, people in my college dorms were complaining about it and people in the breakroom at the department store where I worked were complaining about it. It suffered from comparisons to The Sixth Sense, the movie its writer/director, M. Night Shyamalan, made first, although I think it’s at least as accomplished as that one. Here, then, is my answer to the common criticisms of Signs.
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