AccentedCinema

[Weekly Update] July 26, 2021

Added 2021-07-26 15:59:18 +0000 UTC

Are you watching the Olympics? I don't follow it per-se, but I do play it on TV as background noise.

They got skateboarding, which is kinda neat.

CHANNEL UPDATE

Hope you enjoyed our video on the cinema of India. Even though the video is just me sharing some films and thoughts, it take way longer than most other videos I make, purely because the amount of films I have to watch, and the length of an average Indian movie.
There are many other industries in India, and we will return to it one day. But for our next "First Impression" video, I'm thinking of Filipino cinema. Our Filipino viewers seem very passionate about their film industry. Although most of those passion came from anger... I can relate.
Anyway, our next video is already completed and it's waiting to be publish in a few days. It'll be a spoiler-filled analysis about Eat Drink Man Woman.
While I keep the most important spoilers out of the video, I still think you'll get a better experience going in without prior knowledge tot he film. It is one of Ang Lee's best movie, and I highly recommend giving it a watch.
That said, it does contain footage of fishes being prepared. So if you are sensitive about that... maybe skip the film. I edited those out of the video.
Infra-man is next!

MEDIA TALK

Well, a new Shyamalan movie came out, and people are certainly having a reaction. I haven't watch it yet, but I do want to talk about Shyamalan, the writer director.
It's safe to say that Hollywood broke Shyamalan. In all of his movies, there is a consistent pattern: The higher the budget, the crappier the movie.
If the behind the scene from The Last Airbender is any indication, Shyamalan just can't (and also doesn't want to) handle the logistics behind a major Hollywood production. He only enjoys the creative process, which is understandable.
But also because of this, the good Shyamalan movies are consistently the ones with the most constrain: dialogue heavy dramas, high concept low spectacle films, single location bottle movies. Any time he attempts something bigger than a single family, the concept begins to fall apart.
This becomes Shyamalan's greatest flaw and asset.
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Most people with similar talent focuses on art films. Wong Kar-wai is one of those constraint filmmakers. His movies, at least the old ones, often uses only a few locations and a couple of actors. It's intimate, and small scale.
On the other side, there is nutcases like Robert Rodriguez, who's filmmaking talent isn't half bad, but definitely outshined by his ability to managed production logistics. He can make a movie in a garage. El Mariachi costs only 7000 bucks. That's lower than some YouTube video budgets.
Then comes Shyamalan, who writes and directs movie like Wong Kar-wai, wild and carefree. But a lot of his movies are mainstream entertainment films, which requires much more planning to achieve the level of cohesion we expect. His production method and his goal just doesn't go well together.
As a result, Shyamalan's filmography is... interesting.
Take Sign, for example, a movie with a very split reception. And I think your perception of the film depends entirely on wether or not you think you are watching an art film or an entertainment film.
Critics who approach this film as a family drama, set against an Alien invasion, often love it. Because Shyamalan's writing lends itself well to these small scale, intimate settings. It feels artistic.
But if you are approaching it as an alien invasion film, ala War of the Worlds, then it's an absolutely non-sense movie.
A bigger budget like After Earth no only forces Shyamalan to work against his weakness, it also creates a mainstream entertainment expectation. Making his movies double bad.
It's only when those expectations are cleared, that we finally got another well-received Shyamalan movie: Split.
But, again, if you approach it as a mainstream horror movie, then you start seeing plotholes. you'll start realizing the movie's lack of narrative cohesion. And the movie is bad again.
I guess, fundamentally, we just don't watch art films and entertainment films through the same lens.
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But, this is also Shyamalan's greatest asset.
It's precisely because his work is sandwiched between the mainstream and arthouse, that his name is still attached to all of his work as a selling point.
Go watch his recent trailers. All of them still says "From director M. Night Shyamalan", like it is a big selling point. Because it is, he offers a kind of films no one else is offering: A mid-budget, artsy entertainment horror thriller. It is very much a market of its own.
For that, I think he is a fortunate filmmaker, to be able to find his own niche.
Maybe Shyamalan isn't as bad as we think. Maybe we had the wrong expectations.
But also, he shouldn't have made The Last Airbender. Just saying