johnberg-39983

Movie fans has spent too many years now with Shyamalan bashing, why they are tired of it (and themselves). They found a glimpse of light in "The Visit", which indeed was a big step up compared to his recent movies, but it was still a mediocre and not very memorable thriller comedy. The reviews, however, often made it sound like a minor masterpiece.

This movie is also a step up, but not at all the fantastic comeback everybody hail it to be. "Split" would fare better without the twist, which appeal to fans of one of his first movies, but really is awkwardly inserted. Or, it would fare much better if the twist WAS inserted in a skilled and seamless way. Now it is a surprising bullshit ending -- everything leading up to it is muddled, too convoluted and hidden among details which have nothing to do with the twist. The plot you get in this movie is far away from the clear and distinct structure and storytelling in Shyamalan's first movies like "Seventh Sense" and "Unbreakable". You could see these movies a second time and be amazed by how every small detail fitted in the machinery which revealed itself in the end.

Not here.

I really like Paul Feigs previous movies, and I could never believe that this movie was as bad as the Youtube- and blog-commentators thought it should be. Okey, the trailer was probably the worst trailer in Hollywood history, or at least in the last 10 years. But goddamn it, trailers are made by other people than the director! It turned out that Ghostbusters 2016 was a sloppy soup of nonchalant mediocrity, that became insipid after the beginning of the movie and in the end was going straight down the drain. Paul Feig doesn't seem to care a blip about the movie -- the money he got for directing it was probably enough -- and I am sure he and his PR-team at least had a great time with provoking the critics and trolling media with the notion that all is about "anti-feminism" and "racism". One of the biggest points that the critics did beforehand was the ugly racial stereotype written for the role Leslie Jones need to play. This is true -- and it was written by Paul Feig.

This was one of the first movies I saw in a theater, 1985, the year after its release. And I tell you, this movie wasn't a big deal then; it was considered a well made but derivative B movie, and the CGI effects were almost never mentioned in reviews or articles. I have checked it now in newspaper archives online, so I know I remember it right.

The ironic thing is that "Young Sherlock Holmes" (1985) was released this same year; I saw it soon after "The Last Starfighter". The Sherlock Holmes movie was hailed for its alleged groundbreaking CGI effect: a very short sequence where a knight of stained glass attack a priest. This effect lasted perhaps 20 seconds...

"The Last Starfighter" is full of CGI sequences, and either me or my friends in the theater recognized them as computer images, and absolutely not as "cheap video game graphics" as some reviewers here describe it. And no journalist or reviewer saw it that way either, back then. But when I watch this movie on DVD today, many sequences really look distinctly artificial with unnatural sharp edges and light, much like computer graphics, which give them a style that cut them out from the rest of the movie. My theory is that the celluloid copies that we were watching in the theaters smothered this down and gave these sequences a much more natural look; and that the movie makers originally counted on this when they incorporated the CGI scenes with the rest of the movie.

The movie is well made, with a rather original story and good performances by the actors. Not a very great movie, though, but it is entertaining and without doubt movie history.