{"id":266,"date":"2007-06-01T20:10:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-02T00:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=266"},"modified":"2007-06-01T20:10:00","modified_gmt":"2007-06-02T00:10:00","slug":"lady-in-the-water-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=266","title":{"rendered":"Lady in the Water review"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, <em>Lady in the Water<\/em> wasn&#8217;t completely stupid&#8230; I&#8217;d give it a 5 out of 10 stars.  I think the reason a lot of people don&#8217;t like it is that it&#8217;s not like the director&#8217;s other films, such as <em>Signs<\/em> or <em>The Sixth Sense<\/em>, in which there is some twisted ending.  I guess you could still say there are &#8220;twists&#8221; in <em>Lady in the Water<\/em>, but it&#8217;s certainly not the same as his prior films.  I think the story itself had a good message, but the film has some problems&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>First of all, film critics might see the film as a reflection of their own arrogance, which I don&#8217;t think they like.  One of the characters in the movie just happens to be an arrogant film critic, and real film critics probably aren&#8217;t fond of the way he is portrayed.  Meanwhile, the director&#8217;s character (he plays in his own movie) is a struggling writer who is told that his book will end up changing the world after he dies.  Uh&#8230; corny.  Film critics probably have a tough time buying that, especially when they see their own arrogance being portrayed.  In other words, they probably get the feeling that the movie is against them.<\/p>\n<p>The audience might get that feeling too from the opening, when a narrator tells us something like &#8220;perhaps man has forgotten how to listen.&#8221;  What?  You can&#8217;t seemingly insult the audience about how wrong mankind is nowadays and then think they&#8217;ll still follow you.  Mankind in and of itself is perfect.  It is a character&#8217;s decisions and desires that can be flawed.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, the film was just corny.  It&#8217;s too hard to suspend disbelief when you have a bunch of adults from our world doing all these fantastical childish things.  But who&#8217;s fault is this, that it becomes too hard to suspend disbelief?  Film critics might blame the director, while the director might blame the audience.  Well, technically it&#8217;s both our faults, ours as the audience <em>and<\/em> the director&#8217;s, but the need to even blame an entity is silly, because we don&#8217;t have to presume that not being able to suspend disbelief is somehow <em>wrong<\/em>.  It just didn&#8217;t work, and no one should try to make an audience afraid to admit that.  Do you get what I&#8217;m saying or am I being too wordy?  It&#8217;s an issue that comes up time and time again in art, and my point is that a person should not be afraid to dislike something for fear he might be seen as stupid.  And trying to blame someone for a difference in artistic taste can seem like a justification for something that is neither right or wrong anyway.  Does that make any sense?<\/p>\n<p>I think the story&#8217;s message would have been much better portrayed in a film targeted towards and starring children in some sort of fantasy world.  It would then be much easier to suspend disbelief and much harder for film critics and\/or audiences in general to get the sense that the film is against them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, Lady in the Water wasn&#8217;t completely stupid&#8230; I&#8217;d give it a 5 out of 10 stars. I think the reason a lot of people don&#8217;t like it is that it&#8217;s not like the director&#8217;s other films, such as Signs or The Sixth Sense, in which there is some twisted [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7gI4B-4i","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}