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Sunday, February 02, 2003
Straying into Michael Medved territory...make sure you wipe your feet
Debra Saunders decided to play movie reviewer this week and proved to be as dense as King of Banality himself, Michael Medved.
If M. Night Shyamalan's crop-circle hit movie had been truly depressing -- say, if it was about women who hate their lives -- it might have won a Golden Globe. "Signs," however, wasn't even nominated in the drama category.
I hope this doesn't mean "Signs" won't make the best-films list for the Academy Awards, or that Shyamalan will have to settle for recognition in a category like best musical score.
Let's face it: "Signs" is too wholesome. Hollywood prefers more violence than can be found in this movie about an alien invasion. It doesn't treat viewers to a host of human corpses and high-tech firepower. The Academy gravitates toward movies that, like "American Beauty" with its five Oscars, that portrays America the ugly. [my emphasis]
Well. Which is it? Firepower and corpses or films that "challenge Hollywood's idea of American orthodoxy"? Let's look all the way back into the nineties:
2001 A BEAUTIFUL MIND
2000 GLADIATOR
1999 AMERICAN BEAUTY
1998 SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE
1997 TITANIC
1996 THE ENGLISH PATIENT
1995 BRAVEHEART
1994 FORREST GUMP
1993 SCHINDLER'S LIST
1992 UNFORGIVEN
1991 THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
If you can find a thread there, email it to Saunders. But here is her point, such as it is:
"Signs" is about real American beauty, the inner souls of regular folk. There's no preaching down to middle America. Instead, there is a real preacher. His name is Graham Hess (played by Mel Gibson), a Pennsylvania corn farmer/minister who loses his faith after his wife is killed in a freak accident -- and is sunk in despair be cause God is no longer in his life.
Based on Hollywood's play book, the plot is almost a formula for how not to win an Academy Award.
If Shyamalan really wanted to win an Oscar, he should have ended the movie with Hess discovering his true sexuality -- gay, other wise, or why bother -- or selling the farm in order to dedicate him self to a fight against bio-engineered corn. ( I see we are taking a detour into Coulter hyperbole land)
But noooooooooo, Hess has to find his way back to God. Bummer.
The conceit here is that Hollywood leans toward films that break the mold. Films featuring Protestant ministers who find God again need not apply
[snip...]
Unlike "Independence Day" or other movies in the standard alien-invasion genre, "Signs" presents the moviegoer with the prospect of an alien invasion, not from the point of view of the president, or top scientists or journalists, but from that of one simple farm family, with a swing set and two dogs in the yard.
I guess Close Encounters, ET, and Star Man are too art house-obscure for Saunders.
There's a slow buildup. There's a glimpse of an alien from afar, of an extraterrestrial hand reaching under the door, of a leg disappearing into the cornstalks. What does it all mean? By the time you actually learn something, you really care.
That's why the movie drew big box office, as they say in Tinseltown. Audiences liked the suspenseful unraveling, the sweet kids who miss their mother, the corny family drama of Hess turning again toward -- dare I say? -- God.
"Signs" was the fourth-largest selling movie in 2002.(sic) Some critics praised it, others couldn't handle the faith-affirming end -- "misbegotten," "an embarrassment" and "just ridiculous" read some reviews.
Those critics reflected the true spirit of Hollywood; they simply couldn't bear that there was no Hollywood-knows-best ending that tells middle America what middle America should believe.
To summarize: audiences went for the scary sci-fi but stayed for the "God-fi". Someone should tell the guys doing the Left Behind movies. They'd have a big hit on their hands if they would just quit going straight to video....
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