He stuck with Bruce Willis this time as a drab superhero in
He stuck with Bruce Willis, this time as a drab superhero, in Unbreakable (2000); planted Mel Gibson amid the alien corn in Signs (2002); then really pushed his luck with the fairy-tale duplicity of The Village (2004), which mixed Little Red Riding Hood with The Twilight Zone to no great advantage. The cast maintain an impeccable concentration, given the circumstances, and no sudden belly-laugh disturbs their air of earnest, philosophical puzzlement. All the same, the movie is a train-wreck, a calamitous mishmash of fantasy and horror that only a film-maker utterly besotted with his own reputation could have inflicted on the public It's breathtaking - in all the wrong ways You'd have to say this wreck was foretold. If it didn't star Black and his one-man band of funny tics, it might struggle - but it does, and it delights..
Sometimes a movie gets it so wrong you wonder if it might just be a gigantic send-up of itself, and you can imagine the actors on the verge of corpsing, the cameraman's shoulders starting to shake, and the famous, "quiet on the set, please" about to break into howling gales of laughter. In truth, there are no such moments in M Night Shyamalan's latest, Lady in the Water. The pace and look of the movie will be familiar to fans of Napoleon Dynamite, each shot carefully framed and held just long enough to underscore the oddball mood. Reprising the overgrown adolescent he played in School of Rock, Black leaps around like a pig on Benzedrine, yet his facial mobility and faux-Latino accent are as nimble as his physical comedy - it's a treat just to hear his pronunciation of the word "nutrients". The script, by Hess, his wife Jerusha and Mike White, keeps delivering zingers, only going slack when the wrestling takes over: even fake wrestling is a bore. Wishing to enhance their diet, and to impress a beautiful nun (Ana de la Reguera) at the monastery, Nacho moonlights as a masked participant in lucha libre, a nutty Mexican version of wrestling. It's as daft as it sounds, but the picture is lifted single-handedly by Jack Black in the title role, sporting a curly wig, Zorro moustache and a pair of Lycra shorts that show off his ski-slope belly.
A blissful fiesta of absurdity. Following up his terrific Napoleon Dynamite (2004), the writer-director Jared Hess focuses upon another heroic misfit, this time a tubby friar named Nacho who cooks terrible food for the children in a Mexican orphanage. The latter has to carry the minor but maddening symbolism of the screenplay (the collapse of a treehouse is less than convincingly staged) but shares an intriguing by-play with a sinister aunt (Trudi Styler, also the film's producer), about whose treachery she has kept quiet for years. The robo-Sloane 21st-birthday party of the last act will test the sympathy threshold of certain viewers, but Wilde is bold enough to remind us that even spoilt brats can legitimately yearn for a mother's love.. Jennifer Ehle plays the widow who finds solace with a new partner (Patrick Baladi), thus alienating her brattish son (Mark Wells) and disturbing the fragile sanity of her daughter (Amelia Warner). A decent, thoughtfully written chamber piece on bereavement among the English well-to-do.
