SPLIT

(M. Night Shyamalan, 2017, USA)

“I’ve been around religion a lot; I went to Catholic school for 10 years and my parents are fairly religious Hindus. I also live in a diverse area with people from all kinds of religions. Still, I’ve never been a big fan of organized religion, but I do like to talk about it because it’s important to me. So I use different subjects — ghosts, aliens, comic books — to have those conversations about faith. What do we believe about the unknown? I definitely believe in something, but it’s very tied to our own power. I don’t like what most religions, if not all of them, say, which is the thing that’s amazing and powerful is over here and you’re completely powerless. I actually feel the reverse: that each of us is super-powerful and we control a lot. My base feeling is the universe is benevolent. Even with this election!”

• Shyamalan, interview with Yahoo!

Any discussion of M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film SPLIT must inevitably begin with a discussion of the director’s oeuvre, both due to the unique nature of the film (more, spoiler-y thoughts on this later) and the unique nature of the director himself. Shyamalan is still somewhat of a rarity in this cinematic day-and-age: a mainstream genre filmmaker who both writes and directs, rarely adapts others’ material, and is both consistently commercially successful (SPLIT will be his ninth in ten wide-releases to open over $25 million, and the lone holdout – LADY IN THE WATER – would cross that mark when adjusting for inflation) and intermittently critically acclaimed. His latest continues the (don’t call it a) comeback begun in 2015’s lo-fi found-footage horror THE VISIT, making two positively-reviewed films in a row after a string of five negatively-received ones. From his breakout with THE SIXTH SENSE through his nadir of THE LAST AIRBENDER to his re-emergence as a B-movie master and box office king, his career has never been less than fascinating, and now that he is peaking again, it’s just as compelling to look forward.

(spoilers herein)

Top Ten Tuesday: Alien Visitations

This weekend finally sees the Canadian theatrical release of Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer’s much-discussed sci-fi film starring babe-of-the-moment Scarlett Johansson as an alien seducing and killing men in Scotland. While the premise makes it sound like just another Species sequel – albeit with an A-list actress as the lead – Glazer’s music-video background and the film’s seeming impenetrability (or at least thematic complexity) gives the film an arthouse reputation that was sorely missing from the Natasha Henstridge-headlined franchise – or most other alien movies, for that matter. Indeed, works detailing extra-terrestrials invading, investigating, or otherwise visiting our precious planet usually fall into one of two categories – big-budget blockbuster or B-movie obscurity – making Glazer’s more enigmatic approach all the stranger. With that in mind, and for this week’s Top Ten Tuesday, I count down my favourite cinematic alien visitations.

Top Ten Tuesday: Disaster Flicks

With the upcoming release of Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii (in 3D!) this weekend, I decided to take this opportunity to discuss some of my favourite disaster flicks. This genre has proved very popular over cinema’s history, peaking in the 1970s with the commercial success of films such as Airport, Earthquake, and The Towering Inferno; this latter movie was especially well-received, as it was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture. After a brief lull throughout the 1980s, brought on by the success of genre spoof Airplane!, the disaster film returned with a vengeance in the ’90s, climaxing with the incredible box office returns and eleven Oscar wins of James Cameron’s Titanic. The genre has since remained fairly popular, with costly flops balanced out by enormous hits, but seems to be entering another waning period, with only a handful of high-grossing success stories; in fact, most disaster flicks these days are relegated to specialty TV channels, with increasingly ridiculous titles like Birdemic, Sharknado and the upcoming Airplane vs. Volcano. Whatever the pedigree, though, the template has always stayed relatively the same: large ensemble casts, high-concept catastrophes, and life-or-death stakes.

One final note before I reveal my top ten: I decided to focus only on natural disasters and not those of the man-made or extra-terrestrial variety. While some of the disasters in these movies are eventually revealed to be caused by human actions or interference, they all manifest in nature to begin with.