Crime Is Still Happening - The Village: Media Club Plus S02E04

Greetings from Media Club Plus, a podcast about plunging into the media that thrills us and the stories that chill us.

As always, we have been dragged to you by friends at the table.

Before our next season, we'll be subjecting ourselves to the twisted mind of M.

Night Shyamalan.

My name is Keith J.

Carberry.

You can find me online at Keith J.

Carberry.

You can find the Let's Plays that I do at youtube.com slash run button.

You can listen to the five of us on Friends of the Table, where we play role-playing games and have a good time.

And

when this comes out, we will have recently

done a bunch of streams for our 11th anniversary.

Is that the year?

Yeah.

Wow.

That's wild.

And so you can go to youtube.com/slash run button to

eventually find the VODs of that going up.

No, he's lying to you.

You can go to youtube.com slash run button to find run button vodks.

Youtube.com slash friends at the table.

If you want to see friends at the table, you've got got to go to a different YouTuber.

That was sneaky.

It wasn't sneaky.

But Keith said he was going to start lying and he's lying.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

This is Archlist.

I've been doing run-button recordings for 10 days, so

I just got in the flow of saying YouTube.com for friends at the time.

Unlikely excuse.

Well, hold on.

To be fair,

just five days ago, I said youtube.com slash friends at the table on a run-button recording, so it evens out.

Okay.

Also, we're never saying youtube.com slash friends underscore table or whatever.

Friends at the table.

Yeah.

We're not.

It says it pretty often.

I say it.

I say it all the time.

Yeah.

That was part of our one who does the YouTube stuff.

Yeah, it's true.

But yeah, that's part of the general intro pattern, I think.

With me, as always, is

Sylvie Bullet.

Hi, I'm Sylvia.

You can find me most places at Sylvie Bullet.

You You can also check out my band at gutmachineband.bandcamp.com if you like loud noises.

Also check out sidestory.show.

Did Keith mention that one?

I don't think you did.

I did not.

Sidestory.show, if you want to hear us talk about video games, hosted by Austin and featuring literally everyone who's on Friends of the Table.

That's true.

Ali Agapora?

Um, hi.

Uh, my name is Allie.

You can find me over at Friends of the Table, which is a great actual play podcast.

You can listen to all of us.

Art Martinez Tebble.

Hi, I'm Art.

You can go to friends of the table.cash.

Has someone done that one yet?

No, I don't think I have.

For bonus content

from this and other shows that we do.

And returning to the show for the first time since season one is Jack DeKee.

Hi, I'm Jack.

You can get any of the music featured.

Well, I mean, you can get this theme for this show at notquitereal.bandcamp.com, but there's a lot of other music there from Friends at the Table.

I am so excited to be on Media Club Plus M-Night Shyamalan.

This is my favorite podcast.

Austin said it when we were making Hunter Hunter, and I thought, well, it's very kind that Austin's saying that, but he's saying that to us because we're his friends.

And now, not having been on Media Club Plus and listening to it as a civilian, I can say that this podcast rules, and it is my favorite podcast.

See that, Alan?

And And Jack's not friends with us anymore, so it's that really means a lot.

That's true.

We've all had a big falling out since Jack's since the 100-hunter season ended.

They're paying me to be here.

Allie would just join us.

But it's a very low amount.

It's very small.

We're paying Jack to be here, but like almost nothing.

It's an insult.

Why did you say see that, Allie?

After every episode, Allie screams at me and says, This show's terrible.

Oh, I do do that.

You scream?

Yeah.

We didn't even know Allie could scream until we started doing this.

I've gone through three sets of headphones.

Yeah.

I have a lot of notes.

Yeah.

My tinnitus is a lot worse.

And those notes are, I'm screamingly angry at you.

Yeah.

And F-sharp.

I wish you released this podcast weekly.

Don't say shit like that.

You know what it's like.

You, Daniel, and Austin can watch the movies and record a different one.

Yeah, you can do it.

Anti-Media Club Plus.

You can do it.

When the colors are inverted, I'll do it, but like, don't set us up for that.

Theme song in a minor key.

Run to the Mount Ready in France and do an anti-Media Club Plus.

Oh, Media Club Minors.

You guys have to cover Glee.

Go for it.

Okay, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I do that.

Oh no.

Before we get into the recap,

high-level thoughts on this movie.

I was really excited to come in and like one of these movies as much as Art thought that I might.

We might be here this time.

Well, no, because Art has come in with a lower than expected score for this one, I think.

Well, I think I watched Signs and it was better than I remembered, and I watched this and it was worse than I remembered.

I thought this was so much better than Signs as a movie product.

To me,

I was like kind of surprised by how

it didn't fall apart anywhere.

It was relatively even all the way through.

Sure, like all of these movies, it ended more abruptly four for four than any other movie I've ever seen in my life.

It ended like I imagine the final episode of Sopranos will end.

Jeez, spoilers.

I mean, we can either get into it right now or we can save it for much later, but the idea that you would say that this movie doesn't fall apart

is just bonking to me.

So here's the thing.

It didn't fall apart because the thing that maybe I think the movie might have fallen apart around,

I had

been feeling since maybe the second scene.

That's fair.

I think I also kind of expected a collapse at some point, but I ended up liking it overall.

I yeah.

No, go ahead.

Oh, no, no, no.

You go ahead.

Okay.

I came away as a reviewer of second viewing saw this when it was in theaters.

I like think that this movie held up a little bit.

Like the twist was twistier than I remember it being when I watched it.

I think it's like engaging the whole way through, just in terms of like camera work and like interest in the story, even if I like know where it was going.

So I really enjoyed this.

It's there's

I agree with a lot of that.

I think I think the like scene to scene, I think the movie is very good.

I was going to say, my relationship with this movie is that I think it is,

I think.

Objectively, I can't say it's like better than signs, but personally, I think it is.

Because

I think it's more like there's more interesting ideas going on here um and i think my big takeaway from it is i like the idea i like even if they're not executed great all the time i at least like the conversations that are trying to get started here more than any of the ones in signs i guess i'm i'm interested in hearing that idea articulated in a way that isn't some disabled people are magic oh that's some disabled people are the evil of the modern world personified.

Look,

welcome to my channel on still doing Stephen King.

Yeah.

He's still doing Stephen King.

This is very Stephen King.

It's very Stephen King.

I did not think this movie was very good, but I do think that it is very, very interesting.

And I think that there are bits of it that I like a great deal.

I wanted to come on this episode first

after hearing your talk about Sixth Sense and Unbreakable and signs, even though I haven't heard that yet.

Because I feel like at this point in M Night's filmography, he has gotten the stew bubbling on the stove, and we can look into the stew and recognize very clearly the kind of the ingredients that M.

Knight is interested in cooking with.

And, you know, I don't want to spoil Art's notes, but Art's first note here is like, oh my god, he's making another one of these movies.

And I think by this point in his filmography, he's really starting to settle into that.

I'm watching the ways that this is very much of a piece with his previous films and is also kind of trying something new and sort of falling over while it's doing it.

That stuff is really interesting to me.

I also think that it is really interesting in terms of

as a piece of genre work.

You know, we've seen M-Knight do The Sixth Sense, which is a ghost story that is actually sort of about

how you relate to other people.

We have Unbreakable, which is ostensibly a superhero story, but it's actually about how we relate to other people.

Science, Aliens, Ditto, and the Village.

You know, here we are making like a folk horror movie that's not actually a folk horror movie and is instead about the transformative power of love.

We are going to see M-Knight pull this trick again and again and again.

Yeah.

Yeah,

I think I'm interested in that

thematically this movie is

kind of

like 180 degrees in the opposite direction of signs which I found to be like irritatingly conservative in its

like

sort of like thematic direction.

This movie is kind of like like okay instead of a house it's a whole village and instead of like

being an expression of love to build these walls.

It's actually an expression of corruption to build the walls.

I like that it's like one of my favorite things about this movie is the ways that it's different thematically from signs.

And

I was also just relieved to have a movie that felt normally paced.

Unbreakable and signs were so strangely paced,

so bizarrely constructed.

For a guy who is like,

you know,

it's Spielerberg, right, who says like, you know i make one for the studio and i make one for me is that his that's his quote

oh i i just assumed that that quote has been around for a hundred years i i think someone said that for the first time i think that it's specifically a thing that people attribute to spielberg uh is like a one for them one for me thing and like for a guy who is like kind of not just trying to be the you know a spielberg guy and who was specifically inspired by spielberg and who newsweek said

like, this guy's the new Spielberg, which is something that I saw when I was looking up stuff about this movie.

It's weird.

Bizarre comparison.

I get it because his filmmaking style is very similar.

His directorial style is very similar.

Sure.

But like, M.

Night Shyamalan seems like incapable of structuring a movie.

in the normal way, even though everything about the way he packages his movie seems to be about like doing things by the book.

And the way that he strays from the book, I find make his movies harder to watch and, but also not more interesting.

And this is like the most normal watch of any of his movies, except maybe the Sixth Sense.

We can come back to this post

recap and as we get into the movie, but it's fascinating to me to hear you, Keith, say that this film has like normal or good pacing because I simply do not believe that is true.

Oh, the pacing is weird.

Yeah, I mean, I'm coming from signs and unbreakable.

Yeah, all right.

Okay.

I can kind of

see what you're coming from.

I mean, I'd have to sit down and watch both of them again, and I'm not super interested in it with like a pad and paper, but you can convince me this is paced exactly the same as signs.

They're both just like very,

and I

like how slow he's willing to go.

But I do think that this is a slow

movie.

It's slow, but that doesn't mean anything to me.

Like, I've always liked slow movies,

But

it's the unevenness of his movies that throws me off.

And this movie is very, I said it in my recap.

I call, I say, it is his first even movie since the Sixth Sense.

Wow.

When you say evenness

with regards to pacing,

can you expand upon that a little bit?

Yeah, so in Unbreakable, it feels like we have this huge

but extremely brief

first act.

And then we have a very long and slow and

mostly uninteresting second act about sort of exploring,

about Bruce Willis' character exploring everything that the audience already knows.

And then the climax is like his one superhero fight.

And then he like goes to confront the villain.

And then the movie ends with confronting the villain and it's just it's just the most insane thing I've ever seen in my life I mean I definitely like that movie more than signs um but like it is so weird the way that that unfolds and that that is like like it like the beat by beat what happens in that movie is so fucking weird to me and then signs you you have like a mostly normal first act again you have a second act that is like kind of long and kind of about exploring the stuff that the viewer already knows is happening and spending a really long time

poking at the edges of the character's understanding.

And then you have

Ray Ruddy, who says, By the way, they're afraid of water.

Ready?

Sorry, Ray Reddy.

He says, By the way, the aliens are afraid of water.

I figured it out in my library off-screen.

I got a feeling.

I got a feeling of feeling afraid of water.

Water weak to water.

Direct quote.

And then, and then you have like a don't like that movie.

You have a very, it's, yeah, you have have a very long, like, uh, boarding up the house and

like the, it's very confusing where the climax of that movie is and like what is the following action.

And again, it just sort of ends.

Like, they have, there's one scene where the aliens

pretend like they're going to attack.

And then they all wake up and they've all run away.

And then the movie ends.

Like, it's so weird to me.

This movie.

They did attack.

That happened.

That was in the movie.

Well, one of the things that happens in the movie is to go, like, how come they're not even trying to get into the door?

And it's because they were doing a weird trick with the coal chute.

I

defy you to come with a description of what happened there that isn't an attack.

They attacked that house.

They attacked many places.

They just could have done such a better job.

I just don't understand why they didn't do a better job.

The competence is not up for debate.

They were bad at that.

They were bad.

This is the worst alien invasion of all time.

If it was me, ever put that kid's dead.

If it were, yeah.

I think any of us could have killed that kid.

Yeah.

I agree, Keith.

Let's get into the recap.

I think that's a good idea.

2000 Forest Village, written and directed, of course, by M.

Night Chamalong.

M.

Night Chamalong, alongside director of photography, Richard Deakins.

Nope.

Rich.

No.

Roger.

Roger.

Roger.

Why do they write Roger?

Rich Brother Richard.

Roger Deacons and returning composer receiving his first Oscar nom for one of these M-Night movies is James Newton Howard.

It's perhaps the first even movie since the Sixth Sense, but also the most difficult and troubling film so far.

We enter on a small village's funeral.

August Nicholson has lost his child, seven-year-old Daniel, 1890 to 1897.

We see scenes of their pastoral existence, cleaning clothes, tending herds, gardening, burying anything red.

Did we make the right decision to settle here?

Asks Edward Walker, one of the elders, maybe the head elder.

Something is going on in this town.

Red is the bad color.

It attracts those we don't speak of.

The town should be safe from them.

They've never attacked without cause, say the elders, but it isn't.

Dead things are appearing in town, skinned but uneaten.

Lucius, the son of one of the elders, wants to make a trip through the forest to what they call the towns to get medicine and supplies.

The death of Daniel Nicholson and other things have been weighing on his mind.

He's brave, famously brave in a village for being selfless and fast acting.

He's also silently in love with the sightless Ivy Walker, the second daughter of Edward Walker.

She is not so silently in love with him.

And as tensions in the town grow,

With life and love trying to carry on as usual despite the encroachment of the ones we don't speak of, Ivy proposes to Lucius.

When news spreads throughout the town, Noah Percy, seemingly one of the closest friends to both Ivy and Lucius, and who has an unnamed developmental disability, stabs Lucius in the stomach twice, presumably over his feelings for Ivy, which begins a long unraveling of the plot that accumulates to the following reveals.

One, the monsters that stalk the town are not real, merely a figment of the elders used to keep the younger generation from venturing out.

Two, noah percy had discovered this and had taken a monster costume and had been the one causing the problems around town and finally it is not 1987 it is the modern day and they all live inside a billionaire edward walker's wildlife preserve sorry art did you have a note on the year Yeah, you said you said 1987 instead of 1887.

It is not 1887.

It is the modern day.

And they all live inside the billionaire Edward Walker's wildlife preserve.

Edward's guilt about Lucius and Daniel and his love for his daughter and his secret love for Lucius' mother, Alice, force his hand.

He lets Ivy venture alone through the woods to the town to find medicine.

I would like to begin with something that we can

kind of get out of the way first and

you know, touch on throughout the rest of the film.

This film is gorgeous.

Really pretty.

Roger Deakins.

Richard Deakins is a legendary

Richard Deakins.

Richard Deakins as he likes to be called

Richard to his friends.

It's so annoying.

I've called him Roger Deakins nine times in the last day, and then when it's on, when the mics are on, I said Richard.

You know, he's perhaps most famous for working with the Cohen brothers,

but he's also, you know, done a lot of additional stuff.

He is a very well-respected director of photography, in part because of his prolific and

really

people like the way he shoots things and they hire him specifically to shoot certain things.

Deacons is very famous for the way he shoots conversations, shoots people's faces, shoots light and dark.

He is very, very influential.

And I think, you know, firstly, it's really cool to see that M-Knight is continuing a working relationship with real

luminaries of photography, right?

He worked with Tech Fujimoto for a long time.

Most recently, he has been working with

his DOP on

Trap, also worked on Challengers and Call Me By Your Name with Luca Guadignino.

Let me just get his name.

Sayambu Muktiprom.

Yes.

And so it's clear that M-Knight has a real eye for who is photographing his films.

This film looks, for the most part, tremendous.

It has this sort of like pale, dreamy, odd look about it the whole time.

Deacons keeps framing these scenes that are, have this immense focal depth.

You know, you will be looking at two people talking and in the background, you'll be able to see, you know, 200 feet of the village down a hill with people in perfect focus all, you know, moving around.

There's a scene halfway through where people are like hiding in a bunker and we get these beautiful, like dreamy tableaus of their faces lit from the lights of the trapdoor above in the dark.

Um, I was so impressed by the way this thing looked.

Um, there's a not to jump all the way to the end, but there's a hell of a shot, like, in the last 20 minutes

where, where she's in the

where Ivy is in the woods, and it has just started to appear that perhaps the monsters are real.

Oh, yeah.

And she stumbles and

the camera pulls up to see that she is in a field of the red berries from earlier in the movie.

And that is a killer shot.

It's,

I mean, again, I'm going to, I guess I'm at the bottom of this one, but I...

I'm not here to say this is not a good-looking movie.

I'm not here to say this is a suspenseful movie.

I'm not here to say that there are not deeply affecting affecting dialogue couplets in this movie.

I am just here to say that it all falls apart.

Yeah.

That's fair.

This shot with the red, and then there's a shot of Jesse Eisenberg standing on a stump that I thought looked great, which sounds silly to say, but it looked like something that was filmed like...

At the dawn of the moving picture in a weird way.

There was something about the flickering light on it that made its frame rate look different than the rest of the movie.

I don't know how else to put it.

And also, he was dressed like Charlie Chaplin, which helped.

Sorry, Allie, I think I cut you off, too.

Yeah,

I've just, I think that my favorite thing about this movie is actually the watching of it.

Like, I

a lot of the way that the scenes are framed is really interesting.

The colors are all really engaging.

Like, you know, the, the, the dangerous color and the safe color of yellow and red popping up again, like never feels

like

a, you know, like a

like a guard ramp or like a like a safety wheel on a bicycle or whatever.

I think it's always used really well and evocatively.

One of my big notes for this was like that it felt almost like with somebody setting up some of these scenes, like

this is M-Night's first attempt at real like world building.

and like the ways that some of these wide shots, like Jack was saying, where you'll you'll there'd be a focused conversation happening, but these other people moving in the background, or these scenes of people just sort of living their life that like

are aspects of things that a film would just take advantage of.

When it's like, oh, it's just Philadelphia and there's traffic, you know what I mean?

I thought that was all really good.

I think that, like, especially the way that in the very beginning it starts out with, like,

um,

your access to the

like folklore about the monster coming from the explanation to these kids, but the like teacher has his back to the camera.

There's a ton of scenes where there are people speaking who are not looking at the camera, and there are other characters who are on the camera looking into the scene too.

That like happens three or four times in this movie, and every time it's just like, that's really cool.

Such

like attentive photography.

And I feel like

M Night has always had a really good eye for shooting people talking.

I think about

some of the scenes in, is it Unbreakable that has the that scene in the restaurant with the incredible like mural on the wall behind the camera?

Yeah, I think that's when we learned about their favorite colors being rust and brown.

Yes, yes.

Which is, it's so funny that you would have such a beautiful shot and then you would put that conversation in front of it.

And then, you know, something as simple as

staging your most emotive, most powerful scene in the sixth sense being in a car stuck in traffic and making that feel good.

So I think this is something he's always been really clued into.

But like paired with Deacon's ability with the camera, we get some really extraordinary setups.

Like my favorite...

shots in the movie are really simple shots that are like off kilter in one way or another.

When Lucius and Ivy sort of eventually confess their love to each other, he, rather than cutting from one face to another, he staged it where they're like sitting on the step of a house and looking at each other,

one looking right and one looking left, and he's pushed the camera in really close so that their faces are like perfectly framed on either side, and he just holds the shot for the whole scene.

Yeah, and he returns to that shot for like three different moments of that scene too.

It's a really simple shot.

And then later, there's a scene where the village elders, who we will kind of come to talk about later,

the adults, the people,

the council, who you will come to notice are all a very sort of specific age range.

It's almost as though they might have all set this thing up at some point before a second generation.

There's a rising number of widows, too, among them.

Yeah, it's very odd.

At one point, they have to have this sort of like hasty meeting about Ivy wants to go to the towns.

And rather than going into the meeting hall or whatever, M-Night and Deacons like stage it where they've like all gathered quickly behind a building

and the building is like at an angle and all the elders are standing facing

Walker who is facing away from us.

And it's just such a lovely way of framing, you know, one group of people listening to another person talk with this like wooden building in the background.

It's very, very odd.

And you could so easily have done it by saying like, well, we'll meet them in the meeting chamber and we'll stage the scene like we did earlier in the movie.

So much imagination in the way this film was shot.

Yeah, I think my favorite scene in the movie is off-kilter in a similar way where it's Ivy's older sister confessing to her father that she's in love with Lucius.

So good

early plot beat that she's like, apparently it's a thing in the town where the oldest sister needs to be married off first before the

youngest one can take a hand.

And it's just a weird thing.

And I love Ivy's sister.

She's such a funny character that we see very briefly.

Like Pam Greer, right?

Pam Greer.

Playing a second character named Judy Greer.

Judy Greer, Pam Greer, a very different person.

Judy Greer in 2004 on screen, on TV, and in the movie theaters, playing a character named Kitty.

But yeah, so the scene I was setting up is she's confessing to her father that she's in love with somebody to sort of ask his permission

to want to marry him um even though she's never spoken to him and we never see her father's face like to the point that the camera's far enough away that i was like i didn't know paul giamati was in this movie um because i thought he was just a completely different person um and it's so far away and she's speaking to him and keeps like walking forward but turning to be excited and um they're like walking between these buildings and the setup of like laundry and the like wind is picking up in a way that like am I supposed to be worried about this?

Like, is this just like a fun moment that they had during filming?

Like, I like that was, it was just really fun.

And I was like, I've never, not that I've never seen it, it just felt like really

to life.

It did not feel framed in a way that was, you know, cinematic.

What I really like about that scene is, in retrospect,

like the different ways that, because

Kitty Walker and Ivy Walker

both, at least Kitty for a minute, loved Lucius.

And the way that they loved them was so different.

Like you could tell that Kitty really didn't know him.

You know, her big, her thing was like, you know, he's not like other boys.

He doesn't bounce about.

And like, and Ivy had recognized that like Lucius is sort of like...

He's intentionally reserved in a way where it's like she's trying to draw him out rather than being happy with the reservedness.

I thought that was really well done.

Another thing is, you know,

I really think the script is a problem here.

There's some very clunky lines.

There's some really clunky lines.

And I actually kind of like that it gets

like this is not a natural language for any of these people.

I guess for the kids it is, but this is like, this has been constructed by the elders because Walker, I guess, was both a billionaire and also a history professor.

Um,

and so he's uh, unless I've conflated two characters, but I'm pretty sure Michelle.

You know, those are the same characters.

That is true, right?

Yeah, I'm he inherited,

sure, he inherited, but which name a billionaire's son who's a history professor.

I'll wait.

Um, I don't think that there's one on earth.

Well, you know that I am a hobbyist billionaire genealogist in my spare time.

Oh, no.

Um, but

so, like, you know, at the end, we learn, like, you know, they've kind of constructed the historical mythology of this place.

And so, like, none of them are speaking a natural language.

And then their children learn this sort of unnatural language.

And, you know, it kind of feels old-timey, but you're always like, maybe he should have had a fucking, you know, some sort of consultant work with this in the old-timey language department.

But then at the end, it kind of makes makes sense where you're like, Well, it's all fake.

So I guess it sounded clunky because it's not real.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which I think is kind of funny.

I love this loop about it because it is immediately like,

I mean, it's like fun, but it's a little silly.

And like, the more that it's happening, it's like, this is really silly.

But then you get to the end of the movie and you're like, all these motherfuckers just chose to do that.

Yeah.

These

were theater clubs?

Theater fucking LARPing?

Yeah.

Like,

it hits.

I'll be real.

That shit hits.

Especially.

Like, listen, we're living in the fucking Trad Wife TikTok era.

This shit,

the reveal that they're all LARPers, it does hit.

Their costuming is really gorgeous, but is also slightly off-kilter in ways that I feel is very, very deliberate.

They're playing in sort of a...

post-Puritan,

just post-Puritan America slash sort of religious, intentional, religious community uh era the tradwife era but all their costumes are kind of too clean or too sort of perfect there's a there's an amazing shot early on where um two women are uh um sweeping a porch and they're like spinning they're playing a game of spinning around to make their skirts billow out and it's such a i mean it's a fun like oh the we're establishing life in the village but also it's like there's something kind of odd and stagey and costume-like about these costumes that I really like.

And especially when this, you know, becomes a film about costumes kind of later on.

I like.

It does feel like they are dressed like they're in a stage production of, like, I don't know,

I don't know anything that takes place in this time period.

Would Little House on the Prairie be accurate?

Sure.

Yeah, but doing a stage production of Little House on the Prairie is like the most unfinished thing a person could possibly do.

Is that not a play?

No, it's a book.

What is that?

It's a book.

It's a book and then a TV show.

Yeah.

I couldn't make a play.

It would be very odd.

It would be odd, but hey.

Like a page just building a house.

If people didn't do things that were odd, the village wouldn't have gotten made.

Yeah, true.

So something I like about

the slightly off costuming and the slightly off language

is like one of the big criticisms of M.

Night Chamalan, like if you read critical, like film critic reviews of his movies, negative ones, one of the main things that you hit on is that critics who don't like his movies tend to consider one of their big downsides that they're like

logically sealed off.

He works backwards from the twist and constructs a movie around it.

And then it's very easy to poke logical holes in them.

You know, signs is a, is a, is a good one of these.

Like, you look at signs and, you know, as soon as you start questioning what, why are the aliens here?

Why are they so ineffective?

Like, why did they just run away?

Why didn't they know about the water?

Like, you can, you start to ask questions, and it becomes very difficult for the film to support the movie under even the tiniest of prods.

Something I like about the village is that that becomes sort of structurally important to the village itself.

The village is sealed off in this way, and it does succumb to the tiniest prods.

Like, they could not last even half of a generation

in this place without it falling apart because the kids were like, you know, we need to get out of here.

We need to get medicine from the towns.

Like,

we want to dare each other to, you know, quickly enter the woods and bounce out.

We, like,

Lucius is like, there are secrets in this town.

Like, how come nothing makes sense here?

Um,

and sort of I like literally have mystery boxes in all of our homes.

Yeah, they literally have mystery boxes full of like their old, you know, pictures and stuff

on display,

but like

as mystery boxes, yeah, not like yeah, not to be reminded of their past

before they came here and keep their sins locked away or some shit like that.

Yeah, if I were doing this, I would simply not keep evidence of my big lie in my house.

I would simply remember

my that is for my own well-being.

So the evil things from my past are kept close and not forgotten.

Forgetting would be to let them be born again in another form.

I like that line.

I think it's a good line.

It's nonsense, though.

Like, it is.

As a thing to think, it's ridiculous.

I don't know.

I, you know, I think that there's like a there's a kind of logic to, I think if you're trying to have a secret town having a locked box full of exposing all your secrets in all of the elders homes i think is silly um but as a thing of like i don't want to forget the things that made me come here and so if i ignore them if i put them out of mind then i could forget and repeat the mistakes it doesn't work It didn't work, but I see the logic to it at least.

I do think, like, also being dismissive about how they all keep it public, which is also really stupid, but like, it keeps everybody accountable on an equal level, right?

Like, especially as they're having children and sort of needing to keep the

secret tighter within them.

The sort of like,

well,

we all always have proof of this thing all of the time

means that like,

you know,

there isn't one weak chain among us.

Yeah, this is sort of like a mutually assured destruction thing.

We all need each other to keep up the illusion.

I would love to hear what their plan was for like the next generation.

Yes.

I will say that I think that this film is

politically and ideologically odd,

especially given this is kind of our first post-9-11

M-Night movie.

He was working.

Signs was released after 9-11.

Yeah, but I believe he was making it prior to

it started production in September 2001.

We spoke about this at Lambda.

We spoke about this at Lamb.

See, if you released weekly, I would shut up.

It's a very 9-11 feeling.

Yes, it's deeply 9-11 feeling.

What, you mean the movie about how they have to maintain their borders is very post-9-11?

Yeah,

they have to board up to defend against the aliens.

Yeah.

We must always have someone on watch protecting our borders.

Here's the thing.

And Keith and Sylvie know you're talking about different movies.

I'm talking about the village.

I know.

Keith is talking about the village.

I was talking about science.

The thing is,

also kind of true about both.

Well, but that's the thing.

In the village, that is the source of the corruption in the village.

That's what I like about the village.

In science, it's how you save the family.

In the village.

Okay, go ahead, Jack.

There are a couple of things happening here, right?

Like, first, the, the, the

impetus for creating the village among the elders, uh, which was initially a sort of like theory group at a university, um, is this spate of like very personal, very directed violence against these uh people.

Like, there were uh murders, robberies, sexual assaults, yeah, um, against the elders, and they sort of um

you get the impression that they see society society trending towards a dark place beyond their individual grief.

There's a sense that like the world is capital B bad, and we are going to like construct our own world.

And then, you know, it is, it is, the politics of the world that they choose to construct being a kind of traditional all-white American historical town is kind of immediately fascinating.

There are, I'm trying to remember if there are any people of color inside the village.

I don't know if there are.

Nope.

And so they seal the village off.

And then, in an attempt to keep people inside the village, they start working manufactured terror against their own citizens.

Right.

Yeah.

These sort of like weird false flag monster attacks, like quite literally keeping their people in a state of terror to prevent

going outside.

Including like regular fake attacks, right?

Yes.

yeah i you see maybe irregular fake attacks that's true there is a they stage it it seems like they stage attacks when people start getting too curious about what's going on the one or when the children start misbehaving it seems to me like there is one like legitimate elder attack like uh scare uh that was sort of to keep lucius in line and the rest of them were noah Yeah.

And this is fascinating because there's kind of...

I said earlier that the impetus to create the village

was being subjected to this kind of violence and a belief that society was trending bad, but to hear the elders talk about it, to hear the council talk about it,

the village is sort of like an act of love.

They talk about love as being a like a directing force over and over again with this movie, not just in the specific case of Lucius and Ivy, but also in the sense of the like the larger project and situating that love against the drills, the watchtowers, the good and the bad colors, the

very strange set of rules, the monsters themselves.

And all of this kind of comes to like a weird ideological head for me when Lucius gets stabbed.

And the films

and Ivy's intention kind of immediately moves to like going out of the village to get medicine and bring it back to the village rather than getting Lucius out of the village.

And I understand why that is like narratively because

the film would be a different thing if it was about breaking out of the village.

But instead it turns it into this weird sort of like short-term restoration fantasy where the

ideological project of the village is threatened by Noah stabbing Lucius, and we can talk about that a bit later.

Or even more sinisterly, by Lucius needing to be saved.

Yes, like

an evil,

a directed violence race.

Because inside the medicine.

If Noah had simply killed Lucius, then there would be no threat because no one would need medicine.

So they, so how goes...

Oh, sorry, sorry, going on.

Well, I think I would have just pushed back on that a little bit because I think, you know,

the incident is that they could not run from crime.

They built a wall and a lie as high as they could, but they could not save the situation from someone harming another person.

Right, because they filled the town with people, and people are the ones who do crime, not towns.

Not modernity.

Yeah, so yeah.

I just, I, I, I just wanted to med.

Sorry, what is that?

Well, just because, like, you know, the,

I think that's part of

the, the reversal of

of

going out versus coming in.

You know what I mean?

Like,

this is the

this could have only been the first crack.

This is why they're willing to do this for Lucius because

their point of doing this was to protect him from situations like this and to protect all of their children from experiencing a situation like this.

Yeah, I just think Edward Walker had to like really push the other elders to let Ivy go

in one of the better scenes in the movie, I think, which Jack, you already mentioned the scene behind the house where they're kind of all huddled up.

You know, and like, if Lucius had died, I think they would have been more than willing just to like sweep it all under the rug because there would you need to venture out to solve the situation, it could have been solved internally.

But it would have been

there's an implied

event because the movie opens with the debt with a funeral for a child.

Yes, so this is the first shot of the movie.

And not to, not to like, you know,

children die in the modern world all the time, but

most

childhood death has gone way down in the years since 1897.

Yeah, and Edward basically says that that death was probably preventable if they had had medicine.

And that's the reason that's like the main reason Lucius wants to leave.

That's like the inciting incident for a lot of

right.

So they've they've let people die.

Yeah.

Yeah.

To maintain the

project before.

So like under the which is a it's and sorry, go ahead.

The elders are

explicitly evil.

Yeah.

In as much as people who let children die are evil.

Yeah, but I think that they they have this sense in them that, you know, that wasn't murder, that was natural life, which is what they're living.

But as soon as

there's a weapon involved, then, you know, the same fear that brought them out of quote-unquote the towns is, is, has sort of breached the, the wall in a way that they can't.

We've like talked about like parenting and like the relationships to your children a lot in the past movies, and I find this movie really interesting because it is like

it is from from the perspective of people who had to grow up with the protective parents, with the people, like, like, the

relationship between

like

father and and daughter, between Ivy and Mr.

Walker, is

really reminiscent to some of the relationships we've seen with other, at least to me, with relationships we've seen to other, like, parent and child combos in the past M-Night movies, the sort of like over-protective, like, I'm trying to protect, I gotta, I mean, this whole movie is, is literally them trying to build, like, a walled fortress around their children to keep them safe.

Um, and as also about how that is completely ineffective.

Um, And I think this is something that M-Night is really interested in is the sort of like how being an over-protective parent can be really damaging.

And then also how like, no matter how much you try to keep your child like

safe from all the harm in the world, it's not possible to do that.

And in some cases, it is worse to do that.

I think

this is stuff to kind of, I like,

we can put a pin in this, especially because I think

these themes are stuff like I was watching this and was thinking a lot about how a lot of these ideas come back up in Knock at the Cabin, which we'll be getting to in like months' time or whatever.

Um,

but like this feels like a really like nascent stage of the thematic stuff going on in that movie.

Um

and I found it really interesting to think about that how Emma Knight's been basically working through these feelings for over 20 years of like

the world that you are creating for your children, and how

like the fear that it is, you are leaving it worse than

they came into it, or the fear that, like

the fear that they will be hurt by the world the same way you were.

I want to play a clip relating to that, Sylvie, you had

about the line that the elders have to walk to both keep everyone afraid enough of the creatures

but not so afraid because the threat really is literally not there

very early in the movie we talked about some kids find I think that it's a goat kid that has been

skinned but you have the line he says

I don't know which

line I have the line he says because it is so unnatural to me.

Let me play the clip and if it's not in there, and if it's not in there, anyway, this is when he takes them into the, and I think maybe Allie had already referenced this.

He takes the kids into the schoolhouse and is sort of talking to them about.

Yeah, this is this is after the thing I wanted to mention.

Okay, so what is the one that you wanted to say?

What manner of spectacle has attracted your attention so splendidly?

I ought to carry it in my pocket to help me teach.

Yes, he is acting.

He's acting.

Edward Walker

is crying.

No, no, not William Hurt.

Edward Walker is acting.

No, I know.

So, yeah, so William Hurt is acting an actor, which I think.

I love when actors act as actors.

It's one of my favorite things, especially if they're not good at it.

I love it more than anything.

It doesn't come up a lot, but

it's always amazing.

It's difficult because you have to let the ending of this movie recolor your experiences with the performances, which are

strange.

Because the children should all sound natural, but the parents should sound unnatural.

Well, the children only sound as natural as they've been like taught to speak by people who don't really know, like, yeah.

Well, I'll tell you this.

Um, uh, you know, we've got two main characters in the next generation, and one of them sounds very natural, and one of them doesn't.

We've got a little bit of a Nepo baby versus child actor dichotomy going on here in the movie.

Uh, of course, uh,

uh,

Joaquin Phoenix from a famous family of

young actors, and Bryce Dallas Howard, whose father is Ron Howard and whose uncle is Clint Howard, the extremely famous Clint Howard.

I'm not saying a negative word about her.

Sorry.

I didn't even hear a word.

I was like, wow.

I love her hair.

I think both these performances are great in

the world.

I think Bryce Dallas Howard is putting in work.

She is like a spinning dynamo that is kind of like making this movie go in a lot of ways.

And Joaquin Phoenix is playing the most awkward man alive.

Yeah.

And it is.

In a lot of ways, he's like Mel Gibson from Signs.

He sort of got,

he sort of took what Mel Gibson was doing in Signs and redid it in this.

I think he does it so well that part of the research that I did for watching the villages, because it was really bored, and I decided to watch The Joker too

oh my gosh

and i was just like stunned by the way that he's sort of grown as a performer obviously and like i just think in the signs and in this he is so

cute he is so good at what he's doing there's like an enjoyment of it i think like i think sometimes you can see like when an actor is really embodying their role and i think that like

signs being the funny goofy guy that you knew from college and then like

uh in this movie being somebody who like

lets himself appear really small but like has

so much like integrity yeah is everyone looks at lucius like he's larger than life and the movie doesn't quite

Show that that's true, but everyone kind of says it convincingly enough.

He only plays God aura.

He does have a little bit of aura.

But who is the culprit?

Who has done this heinous act?

Those we don't speak of killed it.

There it is.

Why would such a notion come into your mind?

They're meat-eaters,

they have large claws.

Children,

those we don't speak of have not breached our borders for many years.

We do not go into their woods.

They do not come into our valley.

It is a truce.

We do not threaten them.

Why would they do this?

First of all, those we don't speak of, that's fucking corny as shit.

That sucks.

The bad color, the good color, those we don't speak of,

sucks.

It sucks so bad.

But this like walk that they have to do to like,

hey, as long as you don't leave, you're perfectly safe.

We have a truce with them.

Don't test them, but don't be afraid of them.

It is a futile, self-soothing

tightrope walk to keep the elders from going insane with guilt, I think, is really what it is.

And this produces a weird effect where once the creatures actually arrive in the town, they sort of don't really do anything at all.

They mill about and they kind of

bobble around in the distance.

They put a red mark on a door.

Yeah.

I love it.

I kind of love it, though, because the viewer gets the same experience of

those we don't speak of, or as I call them, the red porcupines.

We get like the same experience that the second generation of villagers do because we see them just out of.

Like, there's a really great one, great shot when Lucius is in the forest, I'm thinking specifically, where we don't even see the full shot.

We just see it sort of like half in, like already half out of frame, and then it's gone.

We see it like out of focus in the background during when the what we find out is a drill, but like is is

um

at the time to everyone a very real attack where they're they're coming um and ivy's like holding out her hand for lucius and we see a blurry one in the back

and they like the cost the costuming on the um creature is i think it falls apart a little bit after the reveal because it's supposed to but until then they have a really good like a really striking silhouette on screen and like really work in terms of being an intimidating yeah like monster in a movie versus and it's like you doing a lot of the stuff that i thought he did well in signs up until he showed the alien and it's weird in this one where the showing of the creature does what the showing of the alien did to me in signs but it feels intentional in this case right and there's a they go like oh it just it looks like a guy in a suit and then they're like well it is just a guy is a guy in the suit yeah um but until that point you're they're kind of complicated to look at and they have a strange bulkiness to them and you're like i i he showed it but i didn't get quite a good enough look at it still which is the opposite of how i felt during the birthday party scene in signs don't get me started yeah

yeah i there's two quick things that i want to say here the first is that i think like some of the way that the monster is revealed here is successful enough that even watching it and only half remembering the plot i was like well people don't realize that this movie is still good because even if it takes place in modern times there's still actual monsters And then the movie kept happening.

I was like, wait a minute.

Yeah.

Well, this was so difficult.

The other twist.

This is what happened to me.

Is so at the very beginning, we have

the funeral.

Then we have the

big, you know, village dinner.

And then we have Lucius coming into the

elder chambers and reading his timid little speech about how he won't be afraid to leave the town.

It's so cute.

It's cute.

He's

more afraid to deliver the speech to the elders than to go into the woods.

But he's like, I can go.

They won't attack me.

They'll sense

my pure heart, which is a very weird thing.

Like it was, it's never established anywhere.

I guess it makes sense like

if that is part of their religion, like that they can sort of feel your fear and they can feel your

whatever.

I don't know.

Because I do think like we're about to get a third monster in Lady in the Water.

And I think that's what's interesting about the way that we're watching things kind of chronologically is that we see him continually trying to like keep attempting at these ideas.

And like, I think the quote-unquote, the way this has sort of like fixed some of those complaints about the alien reveals by being like smarter and more effective and, you know, holding your hand back better and like playing into some of the disappointment there with like the, the, it being fake, you know, things like that.

Um, also,

a second point that I was gonna have,

um, I think that like another way that this relates to signs in that way is like a thing that I was thinking about with how wide the camera gets to be in the town and how much of like just insular and like side characters and stuff that you see, you know.

The house in signs is so

like wilderness is a thing in signs in a way that we don't see in Unbreakable in the Sixth Sense because those are such city movies.

So it's not like it's his attempt,

first attempt at being in the wilderness, but like

being in a cornfield is so defined by how isolated it is and how

like you know, how close the the the the fields to that is and how little space they had to move around and how you had this like repeating shot of them on the lawn in the house because they only had this like eight by ten section or whatever to themselves before it's corn.

Whereas, like in this movie, you have literal walls around them and you have

these giant trees.

Yeah, yeah, but you have this, like

the way that

it's sort of like able to ruminate on what, quote-unquote, the wilderness is and the way that like science kind of wasn't interested in

is

really interesting compared to comparison to uh to both those movies, at least as I was watching it.

I remember the point that I was going to make, which is that

when he's talking about going to the towns to get medicine,

my mind immediately went to that they're secretly not in the past.

That was like my, that's where I just jumped there straight away when he talks about like going to get medicine.

I was like,

how is there medicine that can help people that they don't have, that the towns do have?

Oh, they must not be in the past.

So that's where I, that's where I went there.

And so the entire rest of the movie, I was trying to figure out how they could be secretly in the modern day.

And also, there's monsters attacking their little forest encampment.

I was like, maybe it's after, maybe it's post-apocalypse.

Maybe it's like

some vibe like that.

But I kept coming back to that there can't be monsters

because it doesn't make any sense.

You're Tim Robinson saying, for two minutes, I thought that there were monsters on the world.

Right.

And actually, there there were two minutes where I thought that there were monsters in the world because they try to make Ivy feel like there are actually monsters.

It's a really fun moment.

Yeah.

You know, we.

I think that this pacing is odd, and I stand by what I said about the odd pacing, but it does produce...

You know, sometimes you turn the...

shell over in your hands and you go, this is a weird-looking fucking shell.

Yeah.

I don't think it's particularly beautiful, but it is interesting to look at.

Ivy is getting to going to set out on her journey.

and then we get told that the monsters are fake before she sets off.

Right.

Which allows us a really fun scene with these two useless boys who are with her, and they are fucking terrified.

And she says, Don't worry, she has magic rocks.

We'll be fine.

I have magic rocks.

And her delivery of the magic rocks is a little bit more.

It's Michael Jordan's special stuff.

It's so funny.

The shot where as soon as that second guy is gone, and she just immediately drops the rocks.

Right.

And then it cuts through.

Beautiful, perfect.

Love it.

She missed her calling.

She would have been great in pro wrestling.

Keeps cafing like nobody's business.

But then he starts playing with us.

And I think this is a really nice moment of an audience is now cued in that M-Night films contain twists.

This sort of is the thing that America is talking about with M-Night for so long.

And it's as though he's the magician saying...

you know, demonstrating to us that he hasn't got anything up his sleeves or saying, you know, there are clearly no strings attached to this person that I'm about to do a levitation trick.

The fact that he says, you're going on the journey, the monsters are fake, and then he starts making you go, well, hang on, wait a second, are they fake?

Yes, we were just talking.

There's one line.

There's one line that makes you feel like, oh, maybe not, where he's like, I based it off something historical from historical thing from my history.

History.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which they annoyingly.

Historical thing from history.

They annoyingly flashback to right before Noah Percy.

We got to take his flashback privileges away.

He re-synthetic.

Yeah.

He did the the same thing in science but way worse in science it was way worse um yeah

i think it it's a flashback to a scene but you see the rest of that conversation so i thought i was like i remembered at this part i was like this isn't a full flashback i accept this yeah um

but i think

uh the other thing that's really fun and scary that the movie kind of squanders and we'll talk about noah in a second because i think we kind of have to we have to talk about noah yeah but prior to the i'm going out into the Woods sequence,

which is kind of the weakest part of the movie for me.

Walker also says,

one of the elders is kind of fucking weird.

Yes.

Do you remember this?

He says, one of the elders has kind of been disagreeing with us.

Yeah, and I actually clearly a red herring.

Yeah.

It's great.

I actually really like this.

And I have in my notes, like, after the reveal,

I have it written like

that.

I really would have liked to see

in this is in conversation with me thinking that all of these movies needed to be just slightly longer,

except for Unbreakable, which needed to be twice as long in two movies.

But

why weren't the elders fighting amongst themselves?

Who is killing and skinning our animals and scaring everyone?

This isn't part of the deal.

This isn't what we're doing here.

Why are you doing this?

We need those animals.

We're not trying to freak everybody out.

Like, people are feeling the pressure of the creatures.

We're just supposed to be happy out here.

And that conversation doesn't happen.

I like it's, it's, I agree.

It's weird that they didn't do this when they also have the cover of one of the elders' children just died.

Like, uh, Brendan Gleason's character.

Um,

Brendan Gleason.

Never given a bad performance.

Never given a bad performance.

Um,

uh,

uh,

honestly, given not enough to do in this totally aside from a couple scenes um this movie has like a stacked cast by the way yeah um i don't know if we got into it but we have not talked about the cast wild how how many uh like good actors are in this yeah um

but like it's it's there's such an you should have asked

There's such like a natural end to being like, oh yeah, the elders are fighting.

And like you just see it like through like a window or some shit of like them having an an argument and like you have a really easy way to sort of obscure whether or not it's about

um

August Nicholson that's his name August Nicholson's son dying or about

or like as when we find out or if it it turns out it was actually about who's doing who's skinning these creatures which by the way you say it was probably a goat i love that you can't really tell what it is yeah because it's also different every time there's one that's probably a goat there's one that looks maybe like a fox kit.

This is also why I thought they were living in the zone from Stalker.

I also think like, you know, in the absence of the tension between the elders, what you instead get are these like

justifications throughout the movie of why they're here.

Like it feels like it comes up naturally in conversation throughout

the film of, you know, just an elder sort of casually mentioning someone that they knew that had been attacked, or like, you know, I don't want you to go to the town because they murdered your father.

And the wedding scene where,

you know,

I forget her name,

but one of the women elders is like talking about her sister because

Mrs.

Clack.

Yeah.

She's just sort of talking about her sister.

And then it's sort of like, oh, well, why isn't your sister here?

And then it has to be this reveal of like, there was this other violent crime.

Right.

She didn't live past the age of 23.

Yeah.

So I thought like, you know, in the absence of some of that stuff, instead you get this sort of like,

individually we have all of these reasons for doing it.

So it kind of doesn't matter that we disagree with each other is

kind of cool.

But it is kind of weird.

Like I, you know, Keith said at the

recap that the assumption is that like

Noah was doing the bitter attacks.

Like the one where everybody runs into the buildings was just some guy walking around.

But then during the wedding, it's Noah who's having this like big reaction.

And yeah, the building one where they mark the doors, that is like the real elders and then everything else is Noah.

Which is like right before the

wedding game and then the one that's Noah is actually quite because they don't mark the do they mark the doors in in the same way?

I remember the Noah attack mostly just being that he strung up some of the disfigured like animal corpses.

Yeah, he doesn't mark the door.

Only the elders mark the door during their attack.

Do we know this is true?

No, this is red.

This is

a

implication.

My read on the movie had been it's elders through and through until the creature in the woods at the end.

And that's it.

No.

So when I think

I think it's supposed to be Noah doing the stuff with the animals.

I don't think you're supposed to know.

You're not supposed to know, but there's like a line where they're like, the things that he's done will help us sell this more or something along those lines.

Like, they do mention his actions have helped them keep this illusion up.

And his death.

I also think it's Noah

when Lucius goes to see the berries.

I agree that that might be Noah.

I would also.

I think that one is an edge case for me.

But yeah, that could totally go either way.

That's also a great shot.

shot.

And then

this is also why, like, I had a big light bulb moment when

Noah stabs Lucius and he pulls the knife out and you see it's like this big hunting knife.

That's like a ding, ding, ding for me.

I'm out here chopping up animals.

He's out here.

Yeah, he's skinning animals.

This is the first animal skinning device you've seen on the movie is in the hands of Noah Percy.

And again, this is like, I like that this movie is kind of constructed to confuse people who know there will be a twist and who are trying to figure it out.

Because if Noah's killing the animals, that's not feeding into what I thought was happening.

The fact that there's a renegade monster out there, I hadn't,

I hadn't put that together at all.

Renegade monster really tickled me for some reason.

Okay.

Noah Percy is played by Adrian Brody.

Yeah.

Doing a

classic, classic, like soft-gloved

actor approach to playing a person with a developmental disability.

This was very popular in Hollywood.

Yeah.

And thankfully is now less popular, but it was sort of a rite of passage for usually male actors, usually in their early to mid-20s, to take a go at playing a character with a developmental disability.

Do we think this is past

that being at all in vogue this is feels late to me to be doing i mean it's within i think it's it's still a thing that was happening but probably to less success for the people performing it yes

yeah i don't think this is the last one by any means and we're only three years after I Am Sam, which I was going to literally bring,

but

was certainly the most like, I think I Am Sam was like the tipping point of that.

And the 2004 is simply too close for that to have successfully rolled down.

You know what?

You're totally right because I am Sam's 2001.

You know it's 2003, radio.

This is a particular kind of weepy-eyed liberal filmmaking that is almost always accompanied by a press tour where people talk fondly about the kind of mealy-mouth research they did to gain these characters.

You see this a lot with

DiCaprio in Gilbert Grape.

And this sort of got parlied in American film culture into cis actors playing trans characters.

Oh, wow.

That kind of movement,

complete with the same like rhetorical media maneuver of like, I've done a lot of research as Eddie Redmain or as Jared Leto, and you know, we're moving on to that.

This is this is grim.

It is

an unpleasant performance to watch.

Yeah.

It's nightmarish.

And it is also beginning to move in step with some kind of,

you know, Keith earlier, you described this film as very Kingian in a lot of ways.

These sort of Stephen King-ass ideas about disability that M-Night is working through.

Right.

You know, first with.

Both with Ivy and with Noah.

Ivy and Noah, and then also Mr.

Glass.

You know, we had that scene in Unbreakable where they were like, sometimes when people have been really hurt, their minds kind of go, you know, this sort of like liberal subject thinking about disability.

And in this movie, it goes into some kind of weird

off-kilter off-kilter places.

Because we have Ivy, who is blind and is, at the same time, kind of able to move through the film with a kind of wild and capable physicality.

The film is very much of the, like, she's blind, but she gets around just fine.

Don't you worry.

Like, one of the first times we see her, she's playing, like, a racing game.

It's important to this.

It's important to this that she's kind of magic.

They don't see that.

She can see Lucius's color.

Yeah,

she can see people's color sometimes.

Two people.

She mentions two people.

She says only there's a handful of people and one of them is Lucius and one of them is her father.

But

and they don't go into like what this means or why or

anything, but there's she sees, she can't just see his color.

She can see him through walls.

She sees Lucius through a wall.

So there's like we're really teed up for, like, you know, she keeps saying, I won't tell you what your color is.

We're really teed up for it's like, it's yellow or it's red.

This, this doesn't end up happening.

No, yeah, she never says it.

It's well, and she said she'll never say it.

Yeah, it's unladylike.

Well, but he was, he was dying.

Yeah.

And I, an audience member, want to know.

And then we have

Amber.

And then we have Noah, and there's an extraordinary moment where someone says, the creatures won't hurt Noah and and Ivy in the woods because of their pure hearts.

Yes.

And there is a, whether or not it is being spoken explicitly or not, there's a very clear implication that these people's disability renders them pure into the creatures.

Yeah.

It's very reminiscent of how

Stephen King characters like Tom Cullen are talked about.

Where it's like because of their disabilities, they are rendered pure.

They are like forever children.

It's really bad.

It's really infantilizing, obviously.

And lazy fucking writing, too.

It's lazy.

It's super lazy writing.

And it means that the movie gets to

an odd place with the act of violence, where both the ideology of the elders and the sort of unspoken ideology of the movie seems to treat Noah's violence as sort of

like depersoned or just sort of like a force of nature.

To me, it reads like it is an expression of the elders

seeding of corruption into the town, like a moral corruption.

And so Noah is, you know, having this developmental disability is sort of like a like

an empty cup that gets filled with their malice.

And he

expresses that violently in the town.

This is narrative sleight of hand because it lets M-Knight do both that particular kind of soupy sentimental storytelling about disability that we discussed earlier, but it also lets the

violence in the village plot play in a very different way than if it had been the kind of violence that was described by the elders.

You know, they describe someone shooting a man point blank in the head to steal his money.

You know, early in the movie.

This is what happened to Walker's grandfather?

Yeah.

Something like that.

Walker's father.

Walker's father.

Yeah.

Ivy's grandfather.

That ends up not being what happened.

Weirdly, like the rest of them are all true stories.

Oh, wait, I'm not sure.

Basically true stories.

He was shot in the head by his business partner who then hung himself in the closet.

Oh, that's right.

I thought everyone got hanged, but I don't know.

No, I think we're mixing it up.

The one who was shot in the head was the doctor, and the billionaire guy was killed by his business partner.

Maybe also shot, but

two separate shootings.

Yeah.

But this is like a very distinct narratological difference, right?

In that, like, the violence that causes the creation of the village is this like hyper-personal, capital C criminal activity from one cogent within the realm of the movie person to another.

And then the violence that threatens the village and causes this journey out to the towns and the kind of the falling apart of the secret is, like Keith said, this sort of like depersoned, um, sort of like uh, Noah is just like a, it's presented as like a like a puff of wind, you know, uh, that kind of like comes running through the village.

It's a it is a um a move that allows M-Night to make it through this movie without ever um blaming anyone or or saying that anyone ever did anything worse than make it a mistake.

Uh, like,

had Noah been

like just a piece of shit who lived in the town and who couldn't handle

the girl that he liked being pursued by Lucius and

had, it is a, yeah, and who, and, and who had resorted to the evil of the towns to solve this problem without ever having been there, then you have to take a harder look at the society that's being constructed in the village.

But because, but, but they, they, uh, M.

Night tries to turn this

from a, a social phenomenon to almost like a natural phenomenon.

Like there's no, uh, there's no escaping

human nature

despite your best intentions.

Oh, the elders, they tried so hard to, to, you know, they only wanted to scare them a little bit to keep them in the town.

And it was to keep everybody safe.

And so I think that he's trying to have his cake and eat it too by like because he wants the elders to be at their core, good people who made a mistake out of guilt.

And it becomes much harder to see them.

Yeah, it becomes much harder to see them as misguided if we can see like,

you know, if M.

Knight is like picking a rational actor to decide to turn into a criminal.

And instead, you know, he's instead, he's focused on this idea of like

innocence.

Like, we're trying, like, it's not just Noah and Ivy who are innocent, but they, they, it's, it is a village full of people who are trying to create an innocent place.

Um, and, uh,

and I, and I think that it's like by, by not taking the step to go like, Walker's a billionaire.

He's one of the only people in the world

who actually had the resources to create something real and instead he escapes to this place to to to play act as of like frontiersman

uh and create this sort of like constructed hell uh instead it just tries to go like oh he was sad they were sad and they made a mistake you know you can't escape

You can't escape society because society is just how you describe people when there's people.

Culture is just when there's people.

Um,

which I still, I still think that there's something of value in there.

And I think that despite maybe M.

Night's efforts, I think that the evil of the elders comes through in the movie and that and that the corruption that they sew into this the fabric of the society still comes through.

Uh, but I, but, but, like, the thing with Noah, it's such a misstep for me.

It's less interesting than the alternative, it's offensive, uh, uh, uh, yeah, uh,

But it does do something, of course, because it's in the movie.

So it has to do something.

And the thing that it does is, you know, on one hand, it sort of lets everyone off scot free without ascribing blame to anybody, really.

And it also, like, tries to do this innocence thing that they're doing.

I disagree that this lets the elders are being let off here.

I think, I don't think that they are let off.

I think that there's,

I think that the

I don't think that the script is condemnative of them in the way that it should be, in the way that it reads.

Like, I think it reads to a viewer harsher against them than maybe it was meant.

Because at the end of the day.

No,

I think it's intentional.

I think that the elders...

The elders are bad and you should think they're bad.

I think that's why there's the dead child at the beginning of the movie, to come back to that.

That I think we're, we're,

I believe we are supposed to feel that these elders did bad.

And I say that as someone who, um,

you know, finds a lot of sympathy

in,

you know, it's, it's a thing, it's a thing that's happened to me as I've had a kid.

It's like, I do need to protect this kid from the evils of the world.

And maybe we should move to the middle of the woods and pretend that cell phones don't exist because that's where the sex predators are.

But of course, the village also must have had sex predators.

We just didn't get into it in this film.

Right.

This isn't important.

My real point is

that I do believe that the movie is telling you that the elders are bad and what they did was bad.

Can you show me

something that happens, though?

Like, to me, it only

in the the eyes of the viewer.

Not in the movie.

The movie can convey ideas to the viewer without explicitly saying it in the script.

I think

that it image.

I think that it comes up in places like even,

you know, Joaquin Phoenix makes the suggestion of like,

if I went to the village, wouldn't there be medication that could help Noah, Which is

not great scripting.

And like, I don't want to defend

the way that M Night uses disability to get around this weirdness in his stories because it's going to be a thing that we keep talking about.

It's a thing that he's done badly and will continue doing badly.

Oh, is that going to keep happening?

Yeah.

But like, I, you know, there's something in speaking about this

as a 9-11 film and M-Night being like

an Indian-American writing about like white fear

and isolation is significant.

And, like, you know, I think that like,

you know, the reveal of, so M-Night's...

cameo in this movie is towards the very end when Ivy is actually able to leave the town and interacts with

society.

And we get this sort of like,

first she runs into the security guard and we learn that this is a wildlife preserve, which is so bizarre.

And then the security guard is going back to this office where there's a walker wildlife preserve, by the way.

This kind of potagon upon security manager who's speaking to the younger and like sort of uh

uh visibly kind of disturbed by this interaction with Ivy that he's seen.

And, you know, the manager is just like, you know, make sure you don't tell anybody about what's happening here.

If anything about this place gets into the

news, it's like going to be a big problem for me.

Yeah, yeah.

So this sort of idea of like, not only did these people isolate themselves in this

piece of property that he was able to purchase because he is a billionaire's son with this idea that he has just because he's fascinated by history and things that going into the woods and not having electricity and talking in a funny accident is going to save him from things but like he is relying on the the work of this guy outside to like protect all of it and like this this you know he the the the the winding of of how much that is and the requirement of there being somebody on the side outside who's he needs someone protecting it right yeah who's who's a person of color like i you know i think that there's there's something there where, you know, that, that is not unsignificant to the story.

Yeah, I actually forgot that I was, should have been looking for an M-night cameo until all of a sudden there was an M-night cameo.

Until there he was.

Until there he was.

There he is.

I want to say that I'm not saying and also did not say that this movie is

like

not saying that the elders are bad and did a bad thing.

I just think it's really soft on them.

There's way too soft on them.

Sure.

I think it's one of those things though, because like the conceit of the movie has to spend so much time in their feelings about it.

That's part of why I mentioned how interesting it is that like a lot of the scripting in the movie is not disagreements between them, but their own personal justifications for this stuff.

Because I think in the

like way that M Night's career has been built around people talking about the twists

the way the scripting is set up here is that you interrogate those moments and they become worse on the reviewing or the reconsidering.

And, like, you know, in an era where people are still going to the movies and, like, you know, talking about them after the fact.

Not that people don't do that.

I don't know.

There's this

international design case about some of this stuff.

And like, this, this sort of like professional pressure of like having the

last scene of the movie be the the the thing that most informs your conversation about it or whatever else i feel like this sort of like

you are so invested in noah and ivy and joaquin's phoenix name who i forget that

you need to see the entire movie to understand how they are victims of a decision that happened 20 years before they were they existed.

You know what I mean?

Speaking of that decision, I'm going to play a clip of them talking about that decision here.

Oh, I hope this is the clip that I.

I hope this is the clip I want it to be.

Okay, let's see.

What have you done?

He is

the victim of a crime.

We have agreed never to go back.

Never.

What was the purpose of our leaving?

Let us not forget it was out of hope of something good and right.

You should not have made decisions without us.

You have gone to the house.

I'm guilty, Robert.

I made a decision of the heart.

I cannot look into another's eyes and see the same look I see in August's without justification.

It is too painful.

I cannot bear it.

You have jeopardized everything we've made.

Who do you think will continue this place, this life?

Do you plan to live forever?

It is in them them that our future lies.

It is in Ivy and Lucius that this way of life will continue.

Yes, I have risked.

I hope I am always able to risk everything for the just and right cause.

One of the things that I think is really interesting to me about Edward Walker as the sort of the guy at the end, the elder at the end who sort of breaks the oath and lets his daughter go to the towns in order to save Lucius is that, you know,

Ivy says, you know, we learn that she sees Lucius's color.

We learn that she sees her father's color.

To me, that is like,

you know, that is

genres speak to me that like she's like seeing good in them.

sort of magically you know this is like their good because she loves her dad she said she trusts his decision You know, if she was like receiving magical signals about their aura and his aura was like bad, I don't think that Ivy's decision-making makes a lot of sense.

Um, and we do see him let

Ivy go, but also right up until the very end, they're still wanting to like keep on living this way.

Like, um,

that the problem isn't the belt, but how tight the belt is.

And that, you know, maybe if you loosen the belt by one notch, that can fix things.

And then the movie just ends there.

So it's very strange to me.

It's a very odd moment where, where, and again, this is really nice staging from Deacons and M-Night, where at Lucius's bedside, as he's, as he's kind of failing,

Walker says something like, you know,

essentially, shall we reconsider?

And then one by one, the people in the room stand.

And it's not clear whether or not they are standing in affirmation of, you know, I'm with you, we should end the experiment, or I'm standing to oppose you.

And that question kind of hangs in the room, unanswered by the camera.

And then Ivy arrives.

saves Lucas and the movie ends.

And it's wonderful.

It's like

a moment where a car is briefly in the air after it goes over a hill and then suddenly comes back onto the road again.

You know, I hate to do this, but I have the clip of this one too.

Maybe we should just play it now so that we have it out there.

Yeah, I don't know that it's good, but it is compelling.

Yeah.

Ivy has returned with medicines from the towns.

She was attacked by a creature and killed it.

That's Noah's parents who know that it was him who's dead.

We will find him.

We will give him

a proper burial.

We will tell the others

he was killed by the creatures.

Your son has made our stories real.

Noah has given us a chance to continue this place.

If that is something

we still wish for.

And yet, Jack, like you said, it is unclear if that's something that they still wish for.

No, I think it's absolutely clear.

They all stand up.

It's not clear.

No, no, no, no, no.

They all like vote.

Noah's mother hesitates and she stands and joins the others.

I think

it's clear.

I also agree that this is clear.

It's clear voting to continue.

Yes.

Yeah.

Look, I think that that's totally...

That's totally fine.

I think that's a totally fine read of it.

I think that

they don't say what standing means.

They don't say, all right, well, the eyes have it.

You know, they just stand, and then Ivy comes in and she leans next to

Lucius, and she says something, and then the movie ends.

I don't even remember what she says.

I'm hoping.

It feels like a moment of suspension.

to me.

And I don't necessarily mean that in the sense of suspense, like a Hitchcock suspense.

I mean, like, we are suspended in a moment as they are, as they are standing.

I also think something that's like significant in terms of

the way the elders are considering their decisions and the way that they decide that Ivy goes out, what's never mentioned and what seems kind of explicit,

like,

Walker is willing to take advantage of his daughter here because he knows that she is not going to experience the outside world any the way anyone else will.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, they don't say, like, oh, she's blind, so it's, you know, it's less risk or whatever.

Um, and I don't know if that's like an omission of

like if it's genuine and it's just like love guiding his decision and his daughter's need,

or that, like, this is another example of him being sort of

manipulative.

And

um

yeah yeah sorry you feel very calculated could you say

could you explain the what like the part of it that's manipulative to you well because you know

in the way that he's unable to

first admit that to the elders when they question him why would you do this he says well i'm making a decision with love your son just died and now my daughter's sad and not like well

she has to be the one because when she goes out there, she's not going to experience the way, you know, the world.

Okay.

Everybody else will.

Yeah, he says she's led by love.

The world moves for love.

It kneels before it.

Right.

In awe.

And not like, oh, she's going to see what a car is and come back and tell everybody what a car looks like.

You know what I mean?

Not just because we, the audience.

Don't know that she's going to see what a car is, right?

Right.

Yeah.

It's more impactful for her to see the car than for the car.

Right.

No, no, no.

Yeah.

Well, she's going to be.

But at this point in the story, we know that like, there's modern medicine.

Like, well, I guess we don't, but we don't.

We know that there's more medicine.

I believe at that point, we had seen the newspaper clippings about the billionaire and the that it had been.

So, and then after that, we uh she climbs over the fence and then we see the car.

Um, and uh, but she had already been told the whole truth.

I guess maybe she hadn't been told, by the way, it's 200 years later than you think it is, but what does that even mean?

It is weird that

he feels like she can go, but that he can't.

And I can only, my only take on that is that at some level, he does believe in the myth of the monsters, like how they won't take advantage of Noah and Ivy because of their disabilities.

But, but to him, the monsters are like the people in the towns.

And I thought it was about like reinforcing the

story about the innovative.

Yeah.

If he goes, well, then anyone can go.

But if she goes,

well, she

Lucius's innocence then.

Yeah,

that makes sense to me, too.

Also, like, he,

well, if, if, if he pops out and sorry, we're talking about the dad going.

Edward Walker, yeah.

Like, why didn't Edward just go like, I'm brave.

I'm the leader of the town.

I'm gonna go.

Yeah, and then he runs into

Peggy's boyfriend from season three of Mad Men who's like, hey, aren't you that billionaire who disappeared?

Yeah.

Aren't you the guy who owns this place?

Why are you dressed like that?

I think for him, it's primarily social.

I like that it's not clear, and I like that it makes him kind of cowardly, and especially when you

know the financial setup of this.

Like, I love that scene with M-Night when he's in the security room that just has a bunch of medical supplies for some reason.

um that like

he doesn't have a mailbox set up at that thing like he's not tech i guess you couldn't text at that time but like the you know the the

when you come away from this and you realize how

badly thought out this is that they did not include packing things like antibiotics or other sorts of modern medical devices well they may have but it's been 30 years or something or you know 20 years right sure

It's been however old Lucia's is supposed to be years.

The idea that they have made the suit and they are willing to go out in the forest and make growling noises, but they're not willing to like

give M.

Night Shamalon's character

a payroll and,

you know, a...

a corporation that he works for and have all of these things spinning.

But he doesn't have somebody outside that's like, I'm going to put a thing in this mailbox that says, Please bring me some Cheetos and some antibiotics that I'm gonna come here once a week.

Yeah, that's one of the funniest

fall aparts for me.

Yeah, it's just I think it makes sense to me.

Like, the

you know, we live in an age, we've lived through like the prepper thing and we and like the age of the homesteader YouTuber.

Like, we know that there are people who like I believe that he's like, No, I want to do this 100%.

This is ideological for me.

I want to live like 1700s and I don't want a lifeline.

And,

yeah, there's a lot of weird stuff in here that you really can only write off as like, well, he's just a weird rich guy.

Like, the year is 1897 for the audience, right?

Like, no one born in that town knows what 1897 means.

Right.

Like,

your year could be five.

The year could be, you know.

Right.

There's a met, there's a meta layer of like,

you know, oh, they were doing it out of love.

No, they were doing it out of grief.

Oh, they were doing it out of fear.

And it's like, well, a lot of it they were doing out of being fucking nerds, actually.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

I just like that he becomes such a much more interesting character when you learn that like I teach history and I think that there was something pure about the world in the time that I teach it in.

Right.

Because there's no black people in it.

There's going to be this sort of doll box that I'm going to live in in this place that I aspire to.

It's just like, what a weird thing.

And we do get relatively early on that he does consider himself a coward because he tells when Lucius

tests the bounds of the forest and goes to get the berries and then

they have that, you know, quote-unquote attack where they mark everybody's door.

Lucius sends in a note to the elders admitting to what he did wrong and saying that he brought shame on his family and asking for forgiveness.

And uh, uh, you know, where it's unclear at this point the temperament of the elders, but Walker sort of slowly walks up to him.

Lucius has tears in his eyes.

He's like, I think the camera is

framing it like maybe he's about to be yelled at or scolded or even hit.

Uh, but instead, Walker says, Do not fret.

You, uh, uh, you are fearless in a way that I shall never know.

Um, and like, that's the end of it.

Um,

And it's interesting.

It's interesting that

it doesn't take any bravery to go into the woods if you know the monsters aren't real.

Right, but he's still more real.

Unless you're a blind woman that they've decided they're going to send

by herself.

That was very brave because she's still blind.

You can still just die in the woods.

Yeah.

I think that.

And she almost dies.

Sorry, Jack.

She almost just does die in the woods, by the way.

Yeah.

I think that when Ivy enters the woods, the film gets much worse.

Yeah, I agree.

And I did not.

I've been talking about the bits of this film that I like, and so I

don't want to get it twisted.

I do not think this is a very good movie, but I do also think that there are a lot of things in it that are worth talking about.

And there are things in it that are praiseworthy.

By the time she leaves, which, you know, we talked earlier about the kind of the odd pacing of this movie, unless you're Keith.

And

try watching Science Unbreakable.

I get it.

This trip through the woods feels like a gallop at the end of the movie.

We're like, well, she has to go out and then she has to get the thing and kind of come back.

Yeah.

And

well, as we discussed, all these movies have to be the exact same length.

Right.

So

he doesn't remember until the second half.

Yes.

Yes.

You run into this real problem, which is you have one of the best living cinematographers whose specialty is shooting people's faces and interesting arrangements of like people in sets.

And you say, we're going to put one character in the woods in daylight.

And it's also kind of narratively important that the woods don't really have landmarks.

You know,

there aren't broken down buildings.

There aren't, you know, one area of the woods is essentially the same as another area of the woods.

And there are ways that you can do this well in movies.

I think Blair Witch Project still really holds up in part because of the weird camera gimmick.

The woods as a hostile backdrop in that film work because the actress playing Heather is holding the camera and so it has this nauseating effect.

Instead, what you have here are just sort of four or five scenes back to back of Ivy moving at varying levels of speed through woods that look

functionally identical.

All the visual interest of the film just like drains out of it.

There's a couple reasons.

I liked it.

I liked exactly that about it because I thought it was a way for the movie to sort of take

my sight away.

Yeah.

I don't have

the character that I'm following has no like visual sense of reference, and so my visual sense is also

severely curtailed in this moment.

That's interesting.

And then that was like super tight on all these shots.

You never really get a sense of landmarks other than when she's in that big field of like red berries.

And that's not really like a landmark in the traditional

evocative.

Yeah, there's the big tree, but like there's it's a big tree.

There's tons of big trees.

Well, she usually

is a landmark.

No, she, I know she, like, I remember seeing her touch it.

I didn't really clock that that was the same tree until she was touching the tree.

And I was like, okay, that must be the tree.

Right.

She had a better sense of direction than you did.

Well, yeah.

She falls in a hole.

I'm not there.

And she uses this hole later to

kill Noah.

She both falls into and gets out of the hole very impressively.

If I had gone into that hole, even if I was clinging onto the edge, there's no way that I am getting out.

There's like this moment of tension where it's like, is she going to fall in?

And then she's just like, nope.

Why is that hole there?

What is this hole?

What is this 35-foot hole doing?

Who put that in?

Woods are weird.

Woods are not like woods.

I grew up in the woods.

They are not

like woods experts joining in.

That's the woods hole.

That's the

famous Woods Hole.

I don't know why the hole is like that.

I think that the arrival of the hole and also the one line, Noah must have found the costume we keep under the floorboards, are two of the most clanging, put the fucking line in the script, we have to move on

moments in the film for me.

I was like, I was made angry by the, he must have found the suit under the floor.

I want to say, I do like that they locked him in a box and he got out.

And so we, as the audience, I thought he was in the box.

And then when they opened the box and he was gone, I like that.

That is always fun in a mystery.

They put Noah in a place they call the quiet room, which is initially described as, or sort of seems to be like a timeout, but

it becomes very clear that that is the village's jail.

You know, that's where they...

Right.

If they ever needed jail, that is it.

It's sort of both.

It's sort of a little bit of a timeout room

and a little bit of jail.

Me, forgetting everything I know about contemporary customer politics.

What is jail if not a little timeout room?

Right.

And I, I mean, again, I think the entire movie falls apart once you like start to

like I agree that watching it a second time and knowing the twist, the twist becomes like a lot of scenes become cuter.

I especially like the scene where

Edward Walker is talking to the doctor and is like sort of asking,

but not like he's asking if we had modern medicine, could we fix this?

But he's not saying that because people are around.

And the doctor's like, so what are you asking me?

Like, that's a very, like, that was the clip I hoped you had.

Oh, right.

That's, that's like a very good scene the second time through.

But the movie itself does not survive an encounter with.

the idea that you would go back and think about what had already happened.

I don't know.

I, I've, because I, I really clocked in very early that that's what was going on.

And there is never a time in the movie where I didn't think that they were secretly in the early 2000s.

And I, um, I liked my way through it.

I mean, I didn't love this movie.

I thought it was easy to watch.

And I thought, and that's not true of Unbreakable or Science.

Um, I don't know that I like this better than Unbreakable.

The last scene in Unbreakable is better than anything in this movie by far.

That is the movie that

I, yeah, I, I mean, that's a movie with the last scene that is so weird and good to me that it's crazy.

It fixes a movie that I otherwise pretty much hated.

I think the last scene of Unbreakable is the worst part of it.

Yeah, the best scene in Unbreakable is him flirting on the train.

This is when his son pulls a gun on him at dinner.

Okay, that is also, that's the other good scene in Unbreakable.

Unbreakable is weird because at the same time, I really don't like that that's how it ended because I did want more.

I wanted Mr.

Glass to be able to express himself as a villain instead of say, by the way, I'm the villain, movie over.

But I, but it's just such a bizarre way to end a movie.

And

Samuel L.

Jackson, who I thought had struggled to act for the entirety of the rest of the movie, he really pulled it out for that final monologue.

Something about it really stuck in my mind.

I don't know why.

And,

you know, nothing really in the village is is that good,

but some of it's pretty good, and it goes down smooth.

And it's, you know, it's extremely unsavory in a lot of places.

But it was a way easier watch than Science, which bugged the fucking shit out of me in the second half.

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know.

Can we talk about the music briefly?

Sure, yeah.

Oh, it's such a good score.

I'm glad we have you on call for this.

I also didn't like the score.

Really?

I like that James Newton Howard is kind of a chameleon, and he's just like, well, I do 30% me and 70% the setting,

no matter what.

And so you can always kind of feel the James Newton Howard underneath.

But I did find the

pastoral violin thing kind of cloying.

And

I found a lot of you very samey.

This is kind of exactly where I'm at.

I am not the world's biggest James Newton Howard fan, although I think his work on the Sixth Sense is is really, really good.

And I think that when he is composing at his best, his work has a real

um

like lucidity to it.

There's like a kind of clarity and

straightforwardness in the way that he is writing.

I mean, you think about the um

the the great sixth sense cue

of the Celeste,

it like floats along with the movie.

And I don't mean that pejoratively whatsoever.

I mean, it's like it's like

bobbing along with the movie.

And the ideas are kind of coming through really beautifully and clearly.

But I feel like what he tried to do in this movie, like Keith said, is kind of aim right for a particular kind of pastoral composing.

Your, you know, like ascending, Vaughan Williams, your Delius kind of

vibe, in a way that I think was sort of the beginning and end of his

thought process there, and

kind of moved on from that point to just sort of fairly straightforward violin melodrama.

The texture of the movie doesn't really change in its in its soundscape.

We have these like split arpeggios over and over,

these violin arpeggios.

There's no particular differentiation between the elders and the young people.

And once we get out into the woods, we move into like pretty standard violin horror.

You know?

Violin the scariest instrument.

It is pretty scary.

I think the violin is played really well.

I think something that's really cool is Hilary Hahn gets a credit.

I don't know if you noticed that.

Like Tott Billing at the end.

And she's a fantastic player.

And I think she's making the best out of good material.

But I really feel like he wrote down american pastoral and circled it and then wrote an hour of music it's one of the things i was thinking while i was listening to this movie is that um james duden howard takes i think a lot of cues from

the same

era of classical that films of the 30s and 40s and 50s take.

Oh, that's a good point.

And the pastoral thing kind of runs away from that thing that he had been.

Like if you listen to Signs of Unbreakable, there's a lot of

there's a lot of that like

that big orchestral, fast

kind of some chase scene classical music from like stage and early screen.

And it's very hard to marry that with,

you know, a melodramatic violin.

Yeah, I think that the kind of worst and most honest thing I can say about the score of this movie is that I didn't think about the music at all while I was watching it.

Which is something I definitely did for Signs of Unbreakable.

But in here, it just sort of feels like it's happening.

It's there because it has to be.

I don't really feel like there are really any memorable moments where the soundtrack comes up or makes itself known or like enhances stuff very much.

Um,

it kind of sounds like it's supposed to, so it doesn't like stand out

in any way.

I like some of the chasy stuff.

Oh, sorry, go ahead, Art.

I disagree.

I liked it a lot.

I liked the way that it went from the two things, from being the like pastoral to the tense stuff, especially not so much in the woods, but in the

town spooky stuff.

Yeah, it works for me.

And

just for an appeal to authority, it was nominated for an Oscar.

It was nominated for an Oscar.

It was the first one of M-Night's movies with a score nominated for an Oscar.

Like, in my memory of the sort of town

intrusion scene where you get all of the families running into their homes and

Lucia's kind of going from house to house to help people.

I feel like that was a very successful scene, but I could not describe the way that it sounds to you at all.

Which was maybe just on me.

I don't think the music there was what

it's tough because it looks so good.

It looks so good.

The wedding looks incredible.

The wedding looks amazing.

Yeah.

I think it's a highly functional score that is not that impressive.

That's fair.

Yeah, that's fair.

I think it does mostly its job as a score.

I think it's surprising that it's the one

of the four movies that we've seen now,

Sixth Sense is the one with the best score by far, I think.

What does the score of the Sixth Sense sound like?

Ghost

Tines.

Ghost Tynes.

Oh, Ghost Tines.

Ghost Tynes.

Creepier violins, bigger drums.

Yeah, I feel like it's the one that's the most comparable to

the song that you composed, Jack.

So

did you listen to any of the music from...

Are we talking scientists?

Well, Jack's Jack's

theme that they did for this is

basically a cover of the

one of the main songs from the Six Sense soundtrack, but that I can't remember.

Oh, okay, fair, fair, fair.

Okay, that's why it sounds very familiar.

I was biting James.

But I mean, even as I was biting

his stuff, I could feel, despite myself, that I was, I was, that sixth sense, oh my god, I can't say it.

That sixth sense theme has such a lightness to it, such like an effervescence and an ethereal kind of like spookiness.

And even as I was covering it, I could feel without trying that I was like bogging it down.

You know, he's definitely definitely got something.

Yeah.

James Newton Howard.

Yeah.

Old Jim.

I believe the track is called

is it Malcolm is Dead?

Or is it oh, it's the main no, it's just the main title theme.

It's just the main title theme.

Yeah.

Which gets sort of roped into several of the other tracks.

And has become the sound of Sixth Sense, despite the fact that there's a bunch of other music in there.

I'm interested.

Do you recall Lady in the Water having kind of an interesting compositional move, Ali?

I think a little bit.

I will certainly listen out for it, but I watched it actually maybe almost exactly a year ago if it was the

Palisade finale.

I'm gonna wait for this plane to go.

The Palisade finale was a year ago.

Probably later, because we did

the postmortem on our anniversary, right?

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

I feel like I am only just now recovering from Palisade.

So

what the hell about it?

Anyway,

Prison Tablet Cash.

Anyway,

I

is receiving more updates because that is why I said that.

Anyway,

I think, so there's two things with

Lady in the Water is another

film about

like fairy tale and fantasy in a way that is not

I mean I don't want to spoil it for anybody but it it's it's it's going for that in an earnest way so much more earnestly than this movie is um

and I think that that comes across in the soundtrack as well I think that there is

there is a feeling in that that movie that that soundtrack supports and not in this way that this one does it but I just think that the camera work and the acting and the

costuming was something that you think about as successful in bringing those moods out

in a way that the soundtracks

does not feel memorable in that way.

Yeah.

Does Lady in the Water take place modern day?

Sure does.

Okay.

I remember from the trailer.

You're breaking the rules.

Sorry.

So

we'll go over.

We'll go over Lady of the Water at the end, and my guess is for what it is.

I believe I've only ever seen a trailer for it, and I remember

a suburban pool.

That is my memory.

But we'll get there.

Is there anything else on the movie that we would like to talk about?

I would like to talk a little bit about the reception,

but I feel like there's a pretty natural break between talking about the movie and that.

So I don't want to jump on that.

There are two scenes I would still like to discuss

in chronological order.

It's

the three of them meeting in the woods,

the three of them being Lucius, Noah, Ivy.

The run-like a boy scene.

The what?

You run like a boy scene.

Yeah, the you run like a boy scene.

And the if you want to, if you want to, sometimes we do not do things we want to do, so people do not know we want to do them.

Is that in the clip?

Oh, let's find out.

I think it is.

All right, play the clip.

My sister cried a lot.

You wonder how I recognized you?

Some people,

just a handful, mind you, give off the tiniest color.

It's faint, like a haze.

It's the only thing I ever see in the darkness.

Papa has it too.

Do you wonder what your color is?

Well, that I won't tell you.

It's not ladylike to speak of such things.

Shouldn't even have asked.

You run like a boy.

Thank you.

I know why you denied my sister.

When I was younger,

you used to hold my arm when I walked.

And suddenly you stopped.

One day I even tripped in your presence and nearly fell.

I was faking, of course.

But still, you did not hold me.

Sometimes we don't do things we want to do so that others won't know we want to do them.

Yeah.

I'm glad, Arthur, you wanted to point this out because this was like the one thing I wanted to circle back to, is that we had kind of not talked about the Ivy and Lucius romance.

But I'm glad that I had that line that you wanted.

And then

the other scene I would say in the Ivy-Lucius romance is the two of them on like the porch later.

I sure have that too.

Hey, just let's just run it all.

Me and me and Keith are really synced on these clips.

Why can you not say what is in your head?

Why can you not stop saying what is in yours?

Why must you lead when I want to lead?

If I want to dance, I will ask you to dance.

If I want to speak, I will open my mouth and speak.

Everyone is forever plaguing me to speak further.

Why?

What good is it to tell you you are in my every thought from the time I wake?

What good can come from my saying I sometimes cannot think clearly or do my work properly?

What gain can arise from my telling you?

The only time I feel fear as others do

is when I think of you in harm.

That is why I am on this porch, Ivy Walker.

I fear for your safety before all others.

And yes,

I will dance with you on our wedding night.

They really had to sell the Ivy and Lucius romance because it happens in about 15 minutes of the movie.

It's so odd.

I think they basically do a good job with it.

I think that they

really did not make Lucius look good in that clip.

I think that he comes off like an asshole.

Oh, absolutely.

He comes off as an asshole, but I do think it's a good,

I think they're both good and effective scenes.

I agree.

Yeah.

But it's strange because it's the only scene where he comes across like an asshole.

He seemed like kind of shy.

He seemed kind of nice.

He seemed like he had

a good head on his shoulders.

He seemed brave.

Everybody in the town respects him.

And then he's basically like,

you're showing me up.

You're emasculating me by being so

forthright.

But also, I love you.

They're kind of doing a Darcy thing here as well.

Less in the overall character

arc and more in the individual pacing of this scene.

The

wildly vocally repressed, you know, how come you're being like this?

You know, this is Darcy flexing his

I have no Jane Austen experience, so

Pride and Prejudice is really good.

Lots of them are good.

And she wrote 100 books.

Wow.

That's too many.

That's not true.

I think she wrote like seven.

Okay.

I

there's something in

it, it is a really weird relationship.

I do like that there's

something in the way that

it is both

really

the subtleness of it.

It's tough to say that it's subtle when so much of the movie resolves around it.

But like that our first introduction to Lucius as a

eligible bachelor, I guess you say, is from her.

The village's most eligible bachelor.

You know what I'm saying?

He is.

Like her older sister, who is of varying age and, you know, is so impatient about this.

Well, timing in this movie is also really weird.

like

it feels like it takes place over three days but it could be an entire year like it feels like there's missing time here in a big way that I think is really fascinating too but so her older sister is

so wanting a husband that she is asking for her father's hand of marriage uh for a boy she's never spoken to which is lucious at this point and then like within a couple scenes later is like oh she chose somebody else so now we can be together

Christoph.

Oh, it's so funny.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You said earlier, too, that they've never spoken.

I read that as that she hadn't spoken to him about

loving him.

Not that they'd like literally never spoken.

But I do agree that like that her infatuation came out of nowhere and kind of she sprung it on him.

Whereas like Ivy and him seem to have a pre-existing

building

relationship.

Right.

And I do think that the part of the reason is that it's successful is because the, you know, the first mention that we have from Ivy that she also has feelings for Lucius is both post-rejection of her older sister and speaking of this history between them.

It's not her saying like,

oh, I can, you know,

that first conversation happens before she's even like, oh, my sister's engaged.

No, I can have a boyfriend too.

Just, I just wanted you to know that.

So, you know, the first inciting thing that we get is this sort of history between this and her questioning, like, I don't understand why you don't want to be with me anymore.

But I am going to say to you very plainly that I think that you want to be with me.

And I like, I like that, like, in

the start of

putting the relationship in focus is to illustrate the the weirdness of this town.

Ivy's sister Kitty is obviously kind of going about this the way that like an American viewer would not

view courtship, you know, like her enthusiasm for it, this like sort of like, like, you know, the way that Ivy ends up saying, like, oh, because my sister's married, now we can be together.

Like, that ends up being, like I said, like world building instead of just pure character development.

And then, as the sort of like permission and the sort of like

removal of the

I am not allowed to yearn for you because you are not eligible for marriage to this sort of like

I

there's a big attack on the town and for some reason I'm gonna risk my own life and the life of my entire family so I can stand on the doorstep and wait for this person to take my hand sort of like immediate like

intensity of feeling between this, sort of, like, well, I think that you have a crush on me, and I just think that you should ask me out, is is kind of fun.

I mean, like, you have to get to the end of the movie to believe and want for her to

go to the woods to save him.

And I also think it's kind of a fun reversal that, like,

his entire desire throughout this movie of like, I'm going to be the brave one.

I have pure of heart.

You have to let me do this.

Yada, yada, yada and then she's the one who gets to be the adventure is also kind of fun um

but yeah i don't know i thought they were i i think it's sort of like

you know ivy as a character especially to lucius is so overbearing

in those scenes that i think that it actually becomes kind of endearing that he is like his impatience with him or his impatience with her comes from this moment of like you keep asking me all of these questions so much, so that I do not have the room to speak.

Yeah.

Um, and like, this is my moment to say it now that I am in love with you, but like,

I, I,

I didn't have access before, like,

right.

Um, so I, I don't know, I know

when he tells her that she runs like a boy, and she's like, Thanks.

That's the funniest thing to me.

That is like such a

like it almost feels like they're 12, not in their 20s.

They constantly feel younger than they are.

Yes.

Which, again, I think is tying back into how they're trying to preserve this notion of innocence among the second generation of village dwellers or whatever.

Yeah, I mean, what you mostly see anyone who's not an uh, you know,

in their middle ages doing is like playing.

They do chores and they play, and that's like all that anyone's doing.

Yeah, what do they eat?

So I guess they have livestock.

They have livestock and gardens, which we see basically only in the first scene.

And when the livestock starts showing up dead.

Sort of.

I mean, how many people live in this village is also, you know, an interesting question.

There's like

two long tables worth of people.

It seems like several dozen people.

It's, I mean, I don't want to get too into the weeds on this, but it's definitely not enough to sustain for multiple generations.

It's certainly not.

They're going to have a massive.

I mean, this whole experiment can't last, right?

There's no way, even without this incident, which Edward says lasts more than like

a generation and a half.

I don't even think this thing survives Google Maps, which is bearing down on them in like four years anyway.

Well, to go back to the last scene where

they, you know, they stand up,

you know, when asked, you know, are we still interested in continuing this?

And assuming, you know, I think not

at all outrageously, assuming that they are voting to continue

doing the village,

like, I just think it is careening towards an inevitable collapse that, like, they are just kicking the can further down the road.

You know, they can't stop people from going.

Like,

as soon as Ivy can go to the village or to the towns and come back to the village of medicine, the requests for more things will pile up.

That's the human nature that they're trying to escape.

Which I mean, they're just gonna have to kill Ivy, right?

That's yeah, they're just gonna have to kill

she's just gonna have to be the bearer of the

consequence, right?

Like the, you know, sort of the question is like,

this is part of the patch,

the passing of the

torch for

Father Walter.

Oh, yeah.

I just think it'll never work.

It's impossible.

Yeah.

Oh, I agree.

Yeah.

But, you know.

They should have my mailbox idea.

It would all go fine with that.

But would Ivy...

Do we think that Ivy will lie to the town to keep to keep the lie that was born out of fear and guilt and grief that she

doesn't know, right?

She doesn't have any of those things, but she doesn't know that the that she doesn't know the secret either.

She doesn't know the time, she knows the monsters of things, she doesn't know it's the

present, well, but but she knows that the towns have things that they don't, things that save lives.

Yeah,

I'm gonna put one copy of Tekken 2 in and the console to play it inside Ali's The Village mailbox and just let it sort itself out.

Oh my god,

they're gonna play as Gone, the little dinosaur guy.

And

everyone's gonna lose their mind.

We do the Armor King we do not speak of.

I think briefly.

As we were talking about,

the older sister has to get married before the younger sister can get married, and we're sort of reproducing late 19th century sort of marriage politics as we go here.

I do want to ask briefly, what does the village believe?

We know they believe in love

and how that's good and we know that they believe in a lot of like negative things.

You know, red is the bad color and there are monsters.

Well, they believe yellow is the good color.

They do believe yellow is the good color, and they believe that love moves the world and they believe that you should sort of be

kind.

But in the latter moments of the film, we have this sort of like this revelation that they are

historians and that they are like a study group that became the village.

I think they were a counseling group.

They were like, yeah, they were a support group.

Yeah,

that's a group that became.

Yeah.

I mean, it's like, what, what do they believe in the village?

Yeah, it is unclear that they're like preaching Christianity in here.

Yeah, it is kind of

absent the actual

like belief structure that they have that is not the monsters at the gates.

There is a priest though, right?

At the beginning, August Walker crying over the coffin of his son.

Sorry, August Nicholson.

Walkers are the other guys.

August Nicholson crying over the coffin of his son before he goes into the ground.

He seems to be wearing

a priest's collar,

but I then couldn't find that in my screenshots, so I don't know.

So I thought that he was the priest and that it was the priest's son who had died.

But then they never really actually have church or any building that's clearly identified.

identifiable as a church

if i was yeah they they

just if i was a historian go ahead go ahead allie well no i just say it i i think that it's like interesting that they conceal this as much as they do because like it's not even that like the wedding even has uh like a ceremony that we see with some um yeah like an official expression of faith yeah yeah yeah uh if i was a if i was uh you know in the

seven late 70s or whatever or early 80s whenever it was if i was um a history professor and i had the chance to build a society from the ground up in the woods, I personally wouldn't include Christianity,

but I also wouldn't have included only white people.

So,

would you have included the monsters?

No, I think I would have skipped the monsters.

So, there's a lot of places where me and the elders disagree, but

how would you have kept people out of the world?

Oh, sorry.

How would you have kept people out of the forest?

There's bugs in there.

Bugs.

Yeah, bugs.

There's bugs in there.

There's bugs in there.

Somewhere in the forest, I've dug a 30-foot-deep hole, and I won't tell you where it is.

You better be careful.

Yeah, it is right.

He did have the funds

to

create any kind of barrier that he wanted, and he chose a mythological barrier instead of a physical one.

I guess because a physical one would have been, you know, I guess this is the difference between,

you know,

a jail and a border.

A border is just kind of a social jail.

There is a, I mean, there's a literal wall around them, a protected wall with security guards circling it um there is a physical barrier yeah but it's the key it's a it's more of like a watchtower than a than a because like pet because you know it's not like lucius is a hard tower or noah have a hard time getting into the forest

no i mean there's a wall that she has to get over at the end oh that's right the forest is contained within a wall oh yeah but that was like a day's walk away Right, but sure.

I mean, like,

half a day's walk for a blind person.

He created a jail and hired the security.

Yeah, it was like they paid off planes fucking Disneyland style.

Yeah.

The only other time I've heard of somebody being able to be like, planes are not allowed to fly above here is Disneyland.

Yeah, and governments.

Oh, sure.

It basically is a government.

He basically created a micro-nation inside of

another thing that would have been exciting to preppers and homesteaders.

Yeah.

I would watch the film about the first

year.

Yeah.

I don't think it would be very good, but I'm just saying that I would watch it.

Well, the first year is interesting, right?

Because in the first year, everyone there still knows it's a lie.

Yeah.

Right.

Yes.

But it can't all be easy.

One year.

One year without modern medicine and conveniences.

Something's going to go wrong at some point.

I want to see the last year.

Yeah.

I want to see the last year where they're like, it's like the fucking end of midsummer.

They're burning the houses down.

I want to see when this goes all Jonestown, you know?

Yeah.

Well, that's what we need.

The village trilogy.

Yeah, the villagey.

It's time.

It's time to do...

The next sequel is going to be called

Red and the last one's going to be called Yellow.

Wow.

Oh.

yeah.

Do we have to do that?

Oh, no, it'd be the towns, and then it'd be the cities.

Sorry.

I fixed it.

Do you have anything else to say about the contents of the movie before we move on?

Oh, just one more little thing, just an addendum to what we were just saying.

They made this little society, but they did make it like

better than 1897

World, right?

There are women on the Elders' Council.

Bold Walker.

They're not like

they're lying to their people and they're doing all of that, but

there's an equality to

the world.

Right, they have a liberal sensibility that comes from having been in

the late 19th century or 20th century America.

Equality as long as what you're not looking for is to leave their village or not be scared by monsters, periodically.

Or have anyone not white there.

Well, I think that's a coincidence.

Sure, but fucking

coincidence.

It might be a coincidence for the characters, but is it a coincidence for M.

Night Shyamalan?

Yeah.

No, and I think that like that's something I'm not really prepared to go into, the idea that a non-white person made a movie about these crazy white people.

Oh, I heard something about this movie that that was the original last line of the script was that actually M.

Night Shyamalan was going to play that security guard, not Kevin.

And that when they came out of the forest to be like, we need medicine and we're living in there and blah, blah, blah.

And that he was going to say, crazy fucking white people.

True.

I don't know if it's true.

I just saw it.

I didn't have time to look and do if it was true.

I saw it.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

I mean, unsubstantiated reports.

Again, I, you know, I think it is significant if you think about the timeline and the way that

white people were feeling towards brown people in the states and how they wanted to get away from them.

Like, I, you know, I think the movie is, we've said

too subtle about this.

Um, but I, I think that, you know, the, you know, this movie walked so fucking

uh

fucking

movie that isn't us.

Get out.

Get out.

Could run.

Like, you know,

I think that there's

plenty of stuff there at the very least.

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't really disagree at all.

I wish I wanted to see the monster.

Oh, sorry.

Go ahead, Jack.

Oh, I just wanted to see a monster pull someone's head off or something.

I know it wouldn't have really worked.

Well, again, we've run into the situation where this is a movie that was marketed as a horror movie.

I think people might say that it's a horror movie, but I watched it and I'm like, well, this wasn't really a horror movie again.

I remember being feeling quite a lot of suspense.

Sure.

We've got a name for that kind of genre, and it's suspense.

Well, thriller.

Sure, thriller.

I think that people would call it either.

I feel like science is his only horror movie at this point.

And even that, you could just say it's a thriller.

Yeah, I mean...

Sixth Suns has moments that

are playing with horror movies stuff in the way that I would consider that one also a horror movie, but it's doing that in the way to subvert a lot of expectations.

Yeah, it's the closest so far to me, Sixth Sense, is the closest to a horror movie that we've seen.

And upon watching it, I think I immediately was like, that's not a horror movie.

And it's in the episode.

I do think

I do think Signs is the most straightforward horror movie of them all.

Yeah.

I'm with Ali on that one.

Shyamalan, who knew exactly what film he had written and directed, makes a signature Hitchcockian cameo as the only only brown person in the film, the camera briefly focusing on his reflection in a plate of glass.

The film's gaze can't even look at him directly.

An early, that's a good note, an early draft of the script leaked in 2003, and its final line of dialogue is spoken by the truck driver who helps Bryce Dallas Howard's character obtain the medicines she has spent her life being denied.

Crazy fucking white people, he says, and drives away.

I don't think we were ready for that in 2004.

I don't know, but I would have popped hard.

That would have been going crazy.

I would have been whooping and hollering.

I think that there's something really funny about

making this movie and ending it on

the only comedy beat in the movie.

And actually, he still does have the only comedy beat in the movie because when we get to

the outpost where, you know, Kevin's boss, M.

Night Chamalan, is at, where he says, you know, we have, we keep medicines for animal bites and whatever.

And we pan to, we see him, like, reading the newspaper and we pan around.

We don't get a look at him, but we get a look at the newspaper.

And the newspaper is just full of crime.

It's just like crime and death.

It's just like, you know, nine headlines being like, horrible crime happened today.

And the radio is on, and the radio is like, and by the way, you're putting on new crime.

There's crime still happening.

He's old-timey doom scrolling.

It's so funny.

Well,

it's like, you know, it's weird to then to show you what those guys in there are so fucking afraid of, and it's all the crime on the news.

Yeah, I thought that was thematically appropriate.

Yeah, I thought it was really funny.

I thought it was really funny.

I'm sorry, I just scrolled down the Wikipedia page and saw the excerpt they have from Roger Ebert's review, and it's

so brutal.

Share with the clubs.

Okay, Roger Ebert gave the film one star and wrote, quote, the village is a colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the film not so deadly solemn.

To call the ending an anti-climax would be an insult not only to climaxes, but to prefixes.

It's a clumsy secret about one step up the ladder of narrative

originality from it was all a dream.

It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore.

I have to say to Roger Ebert, who I, you know, you can't agree with a critic every time and you can't disagree with him every time.

And Roger Ebert's just one of those guys who, when he, I like how he explains when he doesn't like something, but I often find him wrong.

This movie is not better if they're not in the modern day.

Nothing about that.

Yeah.

Nothing about that makes the movie better to have like, oh, they were actually in 1897 the whole time.

Like that doesn't fix anything.

That's such a weird thought, I think.

And in fact, like the

way that the movie spins around this intentional action is something that makes it so compelling.

Like walking, like if I was walking away from this movie, like, oh, Joaquin Phoenix is going to be alive.

Yay!

Like, okay, that's just a film.

But like walking away and being like...

You're talking, you're saying that fucking rich guy was

obsessed with history and he fucking like

ordered fake fucking tombstones and fucking like that part of it that's like the the worm in your brain that's like, I want to know,

I want to see the movie of the first year is like

what's interesting about it and not like,

well, Bryce Howard had a really good performance.

Here's even though she did, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I mean, you have to believe that they either brought a bunch of stone with them or someone is risking the monsters to go to the towns to get tombstone rock because there certainly isn't a quarry in this village.

That's actually, that's one of the sequels that we've gotten development now.

The quarry.

Yeah, the quarry.

The village quarry related to the video games.

Knowing M.

Night Shamalan now, as I do, I sadly have to reveal that I know exactly what the quote-unquote first year at the village would be.

And it would be all the crime that happened to all the people to lead them to this sort of grief that they're feeling.

And then the second that they actually get to where the village would take place they'd lay down one you know piece of lumber be like all right time to get started and then credits that's how it would go

we actually wouldn't get even a second of the village in the movie

yeah

um art once said uh

rewriting i never want to see anybody walking anywhere um you know just like get them there kind of immediately and i feel like m-night sort of has like a weird relationship to that.

Where, like, once he hits the idea, close the curtains as quickly as possible.

It's, I feel like they all end so abruptly, so abruptly.

But, but the problem is that he doesn't ever follow that advice in the film itself because, like, you know, except the sixth sense, which is why I think that it's the best of these by far.

You know,

this is an oversimplification, but like, to me,

you know, the character interactions is

all the meat of the movie.

And the

like the plot is just the Japanese sushi restaurant conveyor belt that brings you more character interaction.

And there's a point in all these movies where there's so much plot that's built up

that despite the fact that the movies are so about the characters,

it goes like, okay, we have to take 30 minutes to like do the action part of the plot and then slam the door shut and end it.

And it's very strange to me.

Signs is like that.

Unbreakable is like that, and then this is like that.

I'm beginning to love it.

I agree that it wasn't the best choice for Unbreakable, but

I

don't care what happens

after the events of this film.

Like, we saw everything I cared about happen.

We dealt with exactly the repercussions that I think are relevant to the movie we saw.

Yeah.

And everything else is the same brain worms that means I have to see a Star Wars episode about every character in the background of

Attack of the Clones.

I am with you.

I am with you.

It does just sometimes feel like he reaches up and tells the projector.

This is the problem.

No offense intended to people who have dedicated themselves studying the Clone Wars.

I mean, okay, fuck the Clone Wars.

And, you know, there's obviously a negative end of the spectrum

of

doing too much with characters that don't matter and don't mean anything and like not being able to produce anything other than delivering an audience more

helpings.

But the problem with just shutting the projector off is that in all of the movies, he spends the last 20 to 35 minutes showing you stuff that I don't, I'm not interested in.

So it's like he gets, you know, the first 60 minutes.

Great.

I'm sorry, they wasted all that time and sh signs showing you that the child was going to live.

They

it's not that ending abruptly is fine, but he ends abruptly after all the worst stuff in the movie is in the last third.

Um,

and so it's sort of like,

oh, go ahead, Jack.

I am fascinated to see how you feel about this maneuver as the project continues.

M-Knight is going to kind of continue to have thoughts about how to end movies and about how to pace his movies.

it's going to be interesting.

Yeah,

I don't know.

By the way, this movie has a plagiarism allegation.

Of course, no charges were ever filed, but charges.

I don't think that's when it's...

You sue.

You sue.

There was no lawsuit ever filed, but Simon Schuster alleged that this movie had taken ideas from the book, Running Out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddocks.

I forgot to read that earlier in the note.

They both involve, this is from Wikipedia.

They both involve a 19th century village, which is actually a park in the present day, have young heroines on a search for medical supplies, and both have adult leaders bent on keeping the children in their village from discovering the truth.

No lawsuit was ever filed.

I have not read that book, but I did write that it reminded me of The Giver.

which is a book that I read in fourth grade and liked until I thought about it when I was in high school and then said, oh, I bet that book actually fucking sucked.

I don't know.

Who knows?

It's very hard to say that you own an idea like this, it's even harder to prove that someone stole it.

Um, I just think it's not his first one of those.

I think that he has a couple of these.

Hey, did you lift our idea for this?

And I don't know, maybe, whatever.

I think, kind of whatever about that.

I think that's kind of whatever.

Um,

signs had uh alleged similarities between that and Lord of the Barons, the Jersey Devil.

Um,

and uh,

people got very weird about M-Night Shyamalan, yeah, oh, very much so, yeah.

And I think with this being his kind of like

I think with the release of the village and it not doing well, America was really starting to move into a phase of M-Night Shyamalan is a bad filmmaker, yeah, and also he's an Indian guy, and so we are going to turn a lot of pop culture racism directly onto this guy.

And

that in combination with M-Night puts twists in his films was the kind of like prevailing M-Night story in American media for a very long time, right?

You never want to be the like the famous golden boy.

And you also never want to be the famous golden boy who isn't white.

Because as soon as you can, you can change almost nothing about what you're doing, and people will fucking tear you limb from limb.

Yes.

He's changed almost nothing about what you do.

He made one really good movie and three basically okay movies and people acted like he was the worst filmmaker of all time.

Yeah.

I want to say this movie was still wildly profitable.

Oh, yeah.

Made $60 or $260 million on a budget of $60 million.

Something like that.

Yeah.

Holy hell.

Yeah.

That where the next one is, but this is where where the audience starts to turn on him.

I want to especially call out the robot chicken M.

Night Shyamalan sketch, which comes out a year, which comes out in between this movie and Lady in the Water, is jaw-droppingly racist.

And

is sort of the whole thing in a

it's it's the whole thing in one place for me, in one capsule, in a nutshell.

There we go.

Yeah, we got you, bud.

Yeah, no,

this is kind of that it's that.

And then, like, we sort of mentioned how the

scary movie factory was starting to really start shitting on his movies.

I don't know if it ever got quite as racist as that robot kitchen, robot chicken stuff did.

Robot Kitchen sounds delicious.

No, dude, you don't want that.

I don't need Wi-Fi in my stove.

But yeah, no, like we are.

Sorry, that's YouTube.

Whatever the reason

it's scary.

Why the

real?

Yes.

It's the monster, the real.

So scary.

I'm never leaving the village again.

But yeah, like Art says, the machine of

anti-American M-night...

Oh, sorry.

American, anti-M-night.

racism is now starting to turn.

This is when people start like, because it's it's the Robot Chicken sketch that gives him the racist nickname that I will not be saying, correct?

Yeah.

Because I feel like that is how he just sort of started getting referred to.

Oh, and I'm guessing that we actually

have talked about that in the first episode.

We probably have.

I didn't know it was from Robot Chicken, a show that I've seen basically zero seconds of.

I would watch too much of this.

Yeah, I'm not willing to watch this sketch to check.

That's fair.

The

I

it's very funny that this movie has the reputation that it does because

I think that it is sort of like

plainly better than signs as a movie.

And,

you know, probably

like, I think I have like a weirdly,

a weird appreciation for Unbreakable.

Like I think that it's terrible in a lot of ways, but there's just enough weird stuff in there that I'm like, oh, that's kind of of fun and

interesting.

You know, the gun scene and Samuel L.

Jackson's closing monologue.

I just, I think the village, like, as far for a general audience movie, the village just feels like so much more appealing.

And the fact that it has the reputation that it does seems very unearned.

Yeah, I, you know, I do wonder if it's also

a

consequence consequence of the like racial politics at play here that people did not walk away from the village thinking that this is an interesting concept and instead were like

it the twist was that it was present day it was so obvious you know and I like

sorry I do think we're in an interesting place

I think we're at an interesting place in his career because as we go to lady lady in the Water, first of all, it's like, all right, we're going to do a silly one.

And then I do think

a lot of that movie is about

story and

filmmaking and

things of that nature.

So I'm looking forward to it.

He then follows it up with three movies that are like pretty bad.

And people hated Lady in the Water.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think we're going to like Lady in the Water a little more than

certainly its 25% Rotten Tomatoes score says.

Sure.

Yeah.

But then I do think, I mean, I don't think, and then we have three movies of which I think only one of them is on our schedule.

And I don't think we would like the other two either.

It's Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender, and then After Earth, The Wills and John Smith.

Oh, we're watching.

That's on our list?

Yeah, that is on our list.

Yeah.

Well,

that's a bad movie.

That's an Austin one, I think.

Austin wants to watch After Earth with us.

I can't.

I've seen that movie once, and I think that it is

strange.

This might be a good time to mention the

two M.

Night Shyamalan movies my boyfriend has seen in theaters: The Last Airbender and After Earth.

Wow.

It's really funny.

And then we get to the

Shyamalan Renaissance with the visit.

Yeah.

I'm really excited for everything from...

Well, I'm really excited for the visit, Knock at the Cabin, Old Ant Trap.

I'm less excited for the split and glass of it all.

The split and glass of it all.

And we're skipping those, right?

I can't remember if they are not anymore.

Art and Unbreakable convinced me that I really want to see what happens with that.

We could do Split and Glass as a one-episode speed round.

Maybe.

Maybe.

We can talk about this off air.

I like this.

Can I read this?

This is from a French newspaper, Libay, about

a review of the first one.

Yes, but you have to do the accent.

It doesn't say that here.

It doesn't say that.

No, I just checked.

They said I didn't have to do the accent actually later.

I'm done on the show.

I'm leaving.

Liberation called it a Jansenist turnip, which pretends to worry about the isolationism of its ass benitant heroes, but shows above all that it understands their fears and feels sympathy for them.

And I really like that because it kind of hits on both things.

Like, I do

like that it makes gestures towards worrying about and condemning the isolationism.

But I also do

am really annoyed by how

there's this sort of like, you know, the world anneals before love and, you know, you know, Walker's love for his daughter and his respect for Lucius like sort of allows him to rise above his own sort of moral sins,

mortal sins.

It's an interesting movie.

I think as a post-9-11 movie, it works much better for me than Science, which to me is almost like a pro-isolationist movie.

Maybe Adnight Shaimalan felt like, oh no, I accidentally released this movie with this message at the worst possible time and kind of tax

doing something new, but can't quite make it all the way there.

It's hard to make a left-wing movie even a little bit,

especially if you're a mainstream American director.

So

I'm not surprised that it fell short for me in that regard.

But I don't think in 2004 this movie felt left-wing, but I.

no i agree i i mean it didn't feel left-wing in 2025 but it felt like he was running to the left from science which did feel like a right-wing movie

well all all american pop culture became just fiercely right-wing after 9-11.

yeah i agree yeah until you know until until oh yeah no that's definitely a sentence with an until until dot dot dot until the point in the future where we fix it yeah this This is a headstone with 2001 dash and then no.

That's a.

I think even the date might be a little too late there for that first one.

Well, there's a series of headstones and we're at the latest one.

Okay.

I'll accept it now.

Yeah.

Keith, would you do the honors of taking us out with your productions of Lady in the Walk?

Oh, yeah.

Yes.

Okay.

So

I know what the lady looks like because she's the face of the box

on the box card.

Okay.

Yeah.

So the lady,

I'm presuming that that blue lady is the lady in the water.

And I think that she lives in a man's pool in the suburbs.

And I think that he loves her.

And I think that something bad happens to her and she ends up in his shower to get water on her.

Sure.

Yeah.

I think I remember that from a trailer that

she's in the shower.

But like not like taking a shower, like in the tub with the shower on her.

Like she's being

like kept alive by the water.

Right, yes.

Like a floundering fish.

Now

the lady in the water, I think is going to be magic, but I don't know in what way.

Allie gave me a hint that it was a fairy tale, but I probably would have said that anyway.

And I think that that's all that I know.

I don't know anything other than this is like a, like,

you know, pardon my French, but maybe a monster fucker romance.

Okay.

And sorry, can you say that with the accent?

It says here, I don't have to.

It says here, I don't have to.

A monster fucker romance.

How you say monster fucker romance.

And

I don't want to put this on Allie.

I don't want to put this on Allie.

And Ali, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I think that this is the movie that inspired Allie and her love of this movie, or at least appreciation for it, to want to do this and my charmalon project.

To me, speaks to that it probably is a monster fucker romance.

Whoa,

interesting.

I love that.

I can't wait for the next episode of the monster fucker romantic.

Do you think it's a, you know, you've said woman in the pool and in the shower.

Is this a mermaid?

No, I think she's a water ghost.

Ah, okay.

I think that there's something like psychic or

ghostly going on.

I don't think that she's a mermaid.

Like,

maybe this is a, maybe this is like a mental, you know, now knowing and my shamelon, you know, maybe his wife died in the ocean and she's a mental or spiritual projection of his desire for

a water-based

emotional safe haven rather than a fear and grief.

Sylvia, you've been trying to get a word in here.

I'd love to hear what you're talking about.

I was just going to ask who you think the guy who has the the lady in the pool is.

Like, who, who, who, do you have any casting predictions?

I just weirdly,

every time there's an M-Night movie, my mind immediately jumps to Kevin Costner, and he's not been in one,

but, and I think he's too old.

And I remember hearing that Mark Ruffalo was meant to be in signs.

So maybe they got Mark Ruffalo, who's definitely younger than Kevin Costner, but not by a whole bunch.

It would be very funny if it was Joaquin Phoenix again, and Joaquin Phoenix is sort of like his guy.

It might be, and I know that he's in the happening, so it might be the Wahlberger himself, Mark Wahlberg.

But I think all of those are wrong.

Is it a famous guy?

Is it a male lead?

Like a famous guy.

Oh, it is a famous guy.

Okay.

And you are correct in that.

MmI.

Chamalan does seem to like swing from one person to another.

Like, I guess it didn't happen between Unbreakable and signs, but he likes holding on to people if he can.

Okay.

Let's see.

Is it a leading man kind of guy?

I would consider him that, but like,

interesting question.

Not a trading man.

Not a traditional leading man, I suppose, in the way that you might think of a Hollywood leading man.

Oh, fuck.

Okay.

All right.

I have a guess.

I have a good guess.

Leading man, but not a traditional one.

I'm blanking on his name.

It's

fuck.

Steve Buscemi.

No, but that's actually a pretty good point.

You're very close.

You're definitely in the ballpark.

Yeah, I'm close with Steve Buscemi.

Okay, that's a short list.

There's a short list of clothes with Steve Buscemi.

I mean, I have a.

There's a clue I can't give you because of

circumstance.

Okay.

We'll have to live the next seven days of our life.

Yeah.

We'll see.

See you in nine days.

I'll see you in nine days.

You, the listener, will wait two weeks or whatever.

Yeah.

I'm looking at the cast for the last airbender, and it's one, super weird.

Two does not have carryover from Lady of the Water.

Carry over.

Oh, carryover from, not a person named Carry over from.

Carry over

from

Lady of the Water.

They didn't cast Carry Over from in.

Is there anything else before we get out of here?

Ah, shit.

I got to read a review.

Yeah, you do.

Yeah.

If you want to read a review and have Sylvie maybe read your review, you can go to Apple Podcast and leave us a five-star review and talk about how much you like that show.

We've got 655 reviews.

I would love to get to 700.

And

that means that if you're listening to this and you've been listening and you haven't left a review, that's you.

You're the person who hasn't left a review.

You're the person.

You know,

we've exhausted all the people who are excited and happy.

It has to be five stars.

Yeah, it has to be five stars.

Excited and happy about leaving reviews.

Those people left reviews ages ago.

So if you're dragging your feet on leaving a review, pick up those feet.

But I want you to know that we do have way more than 700 people listening to this show.

Right.

It's just that it's been years.

Um, this review is from user not at the table, uh, titled She Hunter My Hunter till I shamelan.

Uh, five stars.

I can't believe friends at the table got me to watch M-Night movies after I swore I'd never watch another after seeing the last Airbender movie in theaters.

From by all accounts, that is a reasonable

swear.

We don't have to laugh at that movie.

That's a mistake.

Um,

that movie was never going to be good.

Yeah,

you could tell from the trailer,

you did that to you.

But people are, and sorry to

not at the table,

people are weird about The Last Airbender.

So there's a huge number of people who probably knew it was going to be bad, but had to see it.

Yeah.

People love pretending fast food is fine dining, and that's all I'll say about The Last Airbender.

Wow.

Wow.

And we'll never get to it.

You'll never get to see the show, Not the movie.

But also, we'll have to

either.

You'll never have to defend it.

Yeah.

That's a media club minus.

I think so, yeah.

I think that shows fine.

But

a fine to like fine plus show from 20 years ago.

What are we doing here?

I've had fast food meals that I didn't hate.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Fast food.

Sometimes you're driving and that's what you can get and it tastes fine and you've had a good time.

I totally agree, but you're not almost forgotten about your fast food from 20 years ago.

And you know what?

We're not talking about anymore.

Well, the village or this episode of the podcast.

Thank you, everyone, for listening.

Bye.

Thank you.

Bye.

Thank you, Jack, for being here.

We're gonna have more of me.

And it's gonna be a lot of fun.

Um,

uh, Jack, is there another one that you were thinking about being on to give people a preview?

Yes, yeah, which is what I think you will see me.

I think you will see me next when Mark Woolberg and Zoe Deshanelle start experiencing

strange

things start happening.

Things start happening.

I shall be here again.

What a good cast that movie has.

And it's so bad.

I loved that movie.

I've never seen that anyway.

I'm really excited.

I've never heard anyone else ever say that.

Ever.

I've never heard that ever.

I'm excited because no one

no one likes the movie everyone hates more often than me

I just skipped to the critical response page on the happening Wikipedia and there's a there's a positive review from wait for it Stephen King

Wow not

good for him good for him

He's on to something.

Famously, a guy who can't tell the difference between good things and bad things.

And it's what makes him a genius.

It's what makes him a genius that he can't tell.

I believe that.

A guy who hated the Kubrick shining and loved the ABC miniseries shining.

Look, I get it.

I get it.

What did I just say about fast food and fine dining?

Stoon King loves to do that.

Good night, everybody.

Good night.

Good night.