Recently Seen Movies

Contemporary American movies:

One great one, the other drek-

Richard Linklater's A Scanner, Darkly (8/10)

Linklater uses rotoscoping animation for the second time (after Waking Life) to adapt Philip Dick's scifi novel Through a Scanner, Darkly. Linklater creates an appropriately paranoid, existential (overused, yet actually appropriate here) crisis of a movie. More about A Scanner, Darkly soon.

M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water (2/10)

Truly horrific nonsense. In yesterday's matinee performance, there were precisely two people - one of them left about halfway through. I wish I hadn't been the one who stayed. My brain wouldn't have been assaulted by one of the laziest story-lines I've seen in my life, along with a collection of cardboard characters, infantile philosophizing, token stereotyped Asians and the director as the saviour of mankind. Except for the fact that the female lead wears no pants in the movie, pretty near unbelievably bad.