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So I just watched The Incredibles 2 and when I walked out of theathers, this person look to her boyfriend and said with a condescending tone "Were they watching cartoons?" then laughed as if we, mostly adults emptying the theater room, were supposed to be ashamed.

Really? I mean, I get why someome who never seen a movie before might still hold the belief that animation is a lesser form of film, but someone in the theater, who probably knows about Lion King and other great movies that happen to be animated, to say that, it seems quite... Dumb. She was somewhat young as well, so I'm guessing she grew up with modern CGI animation. Odd isn't it?

It just struck me as weird, particularly because she was going in to watch Jurassic World 2, which I thought was particularly dumb and child-like in the worst possible way, as if the script was written by children themselves, despite being live action and PG-13... The animation I saw was very good and smart, with loads to say about philosophy and society and what not, even though it was just a disney cartoon.

Hopefully, that dumbass will see a good animation by accident some day.

Submitted June 30, 2018 at 09:59AM by GeraltForOverwatch https://ift.tt/2KwqzZD

And now having a sequel in Split, and an upcoming closing chapter with Glass, it can become a part of the best superhero trilogy of all times too, me thinks, and is ripe for another re-evaluation by the audience that largely forgot about it.
A last night re-watch reinvigorated my interest in Glass even more than Bruce Willis' Dunn cameo in Split did a couple of years ago. Unbreakable remains a wholly unique take on a comic book film for several reasons.

Unlike the majority of recent superhero films that attempted to transplant their comic book roots onto ostensibly more mature and/or grounded territory Unbreakable seems to be the only one devoted to not deconstruction of the superhero trope but instead its careful, humanist even, reconstruction.
Where films like Watchmen, BvS, Nolan's The Dark Knight trilogy and even some of the MCU efforts, attempt to work with the established mythos and then break it down so that it works in a more realistic, historical or even political manner, Shyamalan's film understands the iconography of the genre and builds towards it steadily, but at the same time doesn’t try to explain why the world needs its heroes or how it deals with their existence. Rather than attempt to fit their reluctant larger than life, impossible characters into a world that the audience feels familiar with- be that through Civil War's assemblage of international heads of state or Batman v Superman's headline obsessed TV talking heads, Unbreakable recognizes that they were always out there in plain sight, conflicted yes but human and it puts this humanism at the centre of its story. Where the core of the comic book based movies lends itself to a post-modernist debate and even analysis based on their politics, social context and gender stance, Shyamalan's film is open to philosophical interpretation but is happily devoid of a political subtext- in that sense it is realistic but timeless, not specifically tied to a particular decade and cheerfully beyond it. Not unlike a fable and brilliantly laid out by Samuel Jackson's Elijah, Unbreakable traces the notion of comic books as modern myths and superheroes as a mythological occurrence and it resonates powerfully because it retains the humanity of its hero- Dunn. It tries to bring the myth and the mundane together. The film's respect and affinity towards that form is evident. It is telling that the entry point into this mindset visually and in terms of the story comes from a perspective of a child. Dunn's son becomes the biggest champion of his father's transformation into a literal hero and the validation of his belief is ultimately a culmination of Dunn's arc- as a father/husband and a superhero, both the mundane and the mythological.

In fact the entire film is strongly preoccupied with its characters' point of view and cinematography reflects that on many occasions but the dominant mode of this narrative still resides in the perspective of children. From several skewed angles, flipped images to the entire opening conversation emphasising that particular relation of the film's story to its seemingly infantile source of inspiration. Naturally we have seen comic books seep into mainstream more and more prominently in the last decade or so with the onslaught of MCU films but just before Bryan Singer's X-Men and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man ushered a new benchmark for comic book movies' critical and financial recognition Unbreakable was effectively dealing with a largely dismissed and even niche source material. The film as a whole seems to validate admiration for comic books and their logic and is in that sense an example of pure fan service. Devoid of cynicism and never knowingly winking at its audience perhaps it does so better than any of the recent Box Office hits. In one of its early scenes it even betrays its twist ending to the viewers, yet again aligning itself with the comic book narratives it is based on, as explained by Elijah's mother.

Not unlike Nolan's accomplished take on Batman, Unbreakable is also able to operate around bigger (or smaller) themes, injecting its superhero flavour into a fairly well rounded set of circumstances. Whereas in The Dark Knight trilogy, the three films (to various extent) were able to work as urban crime thrillers, Shyamalan's work puts at its core a set of human relations. Marriage, fatherhood and themes of fate, belonging, manichean duality of opposing good and evil, these all exist within the film's world and remain relevant throughout. More typical elements of a superhero film are layered on top of that and never seem to be ostensibly forced.
The iconography of Dunn's character is one of the examples of that mechanic. While there is a more typical costume reveal that occurs later in the film and is emphasised spectacularly by the non-diegetic score and framing, that actual reveal happens much earlier. When Dunn puts on his work uniform, the security embroidery prominently stretched across his back lingers in the frame dramatically. It's at once a typical element of the superhero lore and a utilitarian, mundane symbol.

The film is not without its flaws. The ending and the twist feel almost perfunctory. It revels in manichean determinism and at the same time in all those little moments of domestic bliss and tragedy that render it cynicism free but also abundantly melodramatic. It is at once the most grounded and most romantically grand superhero film but in spite of that (or maybe because of it) also the purest. Split did not feel like a sequel and feels even less like one in the context of the soon to be completed trilogy (when did we ever get a whole film devoted to an origins story of a villain?). It played like a supernatural thriller the way Unbreakable plays like a supernatural drama. The danger now is, with all the components in place, that Glass will indeed feel like a modern superhero film, knowing and disillusioned, ready to play its hand too early and very much like the final act of Signs or The Village- unrestrained and dumb. If Shyamalan pulls it off and the trajectory of the films' three main players remains unpredictable and grounded, Unbreakable will hopefully be remembered as a brilliant beginning to a truly unique superhero trilogy.

Also it's 6 am for me right now and I might be rambling...Apologies.

Submitted June 30, 2018 at 10:19AM by zuluszpolski https://ift.tt/2tE87YU

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