So the latest M Night Shyamalan movie is actually reviewing well.

[Zhukov]

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/split?ref=hp

I did not see that coming.

Now it remains to be seen if the decade-old odour surrounding the name of Shyamalan will prevent it from turning a decent profit.

It also seems to be attracting a scattering of controversy for using a real world mental disorder as the driving force for a fanciful villain.

Has anyone here seen it yet?

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

Shynamamooloo can be a great director when he's leashed. Unbreakable is one of my favourite films of all time.

He's been steadily improving since his nadir about 2010. The Visit was creepy, weird, funny and scary all at the same time. I got hooked on Wayward Pines as well, right up until the second season soured it for me. So I can believe that Split is good; I might even get my hopes up for future films from the guy.

I probably won't see it in the theatre, though. I rarely go to theatres, except to see Star Wars films and superhero films. I'll pick it up on DVD sometime.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

Your using Metacritic for movie reviews? And NOT Rotten Tomatoes?

 

[thebobmaster_v1legacy]

Your using Metacritic for movie reviews? And NOT Rotten Tomatoes?

Here's the Rotten Tomatoes scores. 77% from critics, 81% from audiences.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/split_2017

 

[Bob_McMillan]

The story that split is based on is pretty insane (heh heh, geddit?)

 

[happyninja42]

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/split?ref=hp

I did not see that coming.

Now it remains to be seen if the decade-old odour surrounding the name of Shyamalan will prevent it from turning a decent profit.

It also seems to be attracting a scattering of controversy for using a real world mental disorder as the driving force for a fanciful villain.

Has anyone here seen it yet?

Haven't seen it yet, but after pretty much all of my online movie critic review sources have all said basically "Holy shit! A good Shyamalan movie! Split's actually GOOD!" I'm probably going to see it tonight. And this is from like...7+ different critic sources, who frequently do not all agree on anything other than the biggest turds that get squeezed out. But even the ones who have made a business of going into detailed breakdown of some of MKS's shittier works, were like "no I'm not even kidding, I'm totally serious this movie's good!" I'm highly optimistic for it.

 

[Casual Shinji]

It isn't entirely impossible to yank one's head out of one's asshole.

Seriously though, The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable showed that the dude had talent. He just... suddenly stopped using it. Maybe with this movie something clicked inside his brain again.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Shyamalan does actually have an interesting creative vision. Sure, he often does really stupid crap and he's trying way too hard to be Steven King but the exaggerated shitting on him is kind of disproportionate. I'd rather watch most of his work than some designed by committee "okay" movie.

But yeah.. I'm going to boycott this movie. Not in an angry or contemptuous way, just nah.. I don't think I can support it.

My partner actually has dissociative identity disorder and.. no.. just no. As far as I'm concerned, you can't wash away this kind of exploitation by throwing in a cursory scene about how living with DID is really hard, because that merely hammers home the insult of presenting what you've depicted as a real mental illness rather than what it actually is, a fictional excuse as to why people are violent and as a dramatic excuse to explore thoroughly played out themes.

Stereotyping or demonising the mentally ill is still not unacceptable in the way demonising or stereotyping some other groups would be, so I'm not angry about it in any personal sense and I'm glad it's a good movie. I just can't justify giving it my money.

 

[Sonmi]

Seems like he's been on an upwards slope recently, The Visit was also quite good despite some problems.

*snip*

I don't think you would have liked The Visit either, it quite blatantly demonizes the elderly, and more specifically older individuals suffering from mental illness.

 

[Fox12]

The guy was decent back in the day. Sixth sense and unbreakable were solid movies. Other then the dumb ending, signs was really good. The village was criminally underrated. It wasn't until after that he lost his damn mind.

 

[happyninja42]

Seems like he's been on an upwards slope recently, The Visit was also quite good despite some problems.

*snip*

I don't think you would have liked The Visit either, it quite blatantly demonizes the elderly, and more specifically older individuals suffering from mental illness.

Well, as someone who has a brother who is schizophrenic, who has tried to kill my mother, and threatened to kill me as well, I can attest that the mentally ill can be, when unstable and in the throes of their instability, fucking terrifying. To have someone just stand up, for no apparent reason that you can figure out, and lunge across the room and try and choke you out, yeah it's unnerving. The fact that it's due to a chemical imbalance in the brain, or other biological factors, doesn't lessen the fact that a certain portion of that community is dangerous. And, seeing as this guy, in the movie, is free to walk around the community, and is apparently abducting people at the behest of the voices in his head, yeah he's a threat. My brother was exactly the same way, and I can in fact, be certain that some people, have encountered my brother in a very similar situation to those girls in the car. They are minding their own business, and a crazy person walks up and assaults/threatens them.

So yeah, while you can say it's not nice to portray a person with mental illness as a villain, it's not fiction. This does happen. Not ALL of the people suffering from mental illness, no, but some of them ARE criminals. Trust me, I spent enough time visiting my brother in the mental institution for the criminally insane to know that.

 

[Sonmi]

Seems like he's been on an upwards slope recently, The Visit was also quite good despite some problems.

*snip*

I don't think you would have liked The Visit either, it quite blatantly demonizes the elderly, and more specifically older individuals suffering from mental illness.

Well, as someone who has a brother who is schizophrenic, who has tried to kill my mother, and threatened to kill me as well, I can attest that the mentally ill can be, when unstable and in the throes of their instability, fucking terrifying. To have someone just stand up, for no apparent reason that you can figure out, and lunge across the room and try and choke you out, yeah it's unnerving. The fact that it's due to a chemical imbalance in the brain, or other biological factors, doesn't lessen the fact that a certain portion of that community is dangerous. And, seeing as this guy, in the movie, is free to walk around the community, and is apparently abducting people at the behest of the voices in his head, yeah he's a threat. My brother was exactly the same way, and I can in fact, be certain that some people, have encountered my brother in a very similar situation to those girls in the car. They are minding their own business, and a crazy person walks up and assaults/threatens them.

So yeah, while you can say it's not nice to portray a person with mental illness as a villain, it's not fiction. This does happen. Not ALL of the people suffering from mental illness, no, but some of them ARE criminals. Trust me, I spent enough time visiting my brother in the mental institution for the criminally insane to know that.

Oh I don't disagree that people with mental illness can be dangerous, and that things like schizophrenia can make an otherwise harmless person put others at risk.

I just don't think it's in very good taste to use those illnesses for cheap thrills, those people are victims too.

 

[happyninja42]

Seems like he's been on an upwards slope recently, The Visit was also quite good despite some problems.

*snip*

I don't think you would have liked The Visit either, it quite blatantly demonizes the elderly, and more specifically older individuals suffering from mental illness.

Well, as someone who has a brother who is schizophrenic, who has tried to kill my mother, and threatened to kill me as well, I can attest that the mentally ill can be, when unstable and in the throes of their instability, fucking terrifying. To have someone just stand up, for no apparent reason that you can figure out, and lunge across the room and try and choke you out, yeah it's unnerving. The fact that it's due to a chemical imbalance in the brain, or other biological factors, doesn't lessen the fact that a certain portion of that community is dangerous. And, seeing as this guy, in the movie, is free to walk around the community, and is apparently abducting people at the behest of the voices in his head, yeah he's a threat. My brother was exactly the same way, and I can in fact, be certain that some people, have encountered my brother in a very similar situation to those girls in the car. They are minding their own business, and a crazy person walks up and assaults/threatens them.

So yeah, while you can say it's not nice to portray a person with mental illness as a villain, it's not fiction. This does happen. Not ALL of the people suffering from mental illness, no, but some of them ARE criminals. Trust me, I spent enough time visiting my brother in the mental institution for the criminally insane to know that.

Oh I don't disagree that people with mental illness can be dangerous, and that things like schizophrenia can make an otherwise harmless person put others at risk.

I just don't think it's in very good taste to use those illnesses for cheap thrills, those people are victims too.

Well where do you draw the line though? I mean what things are ok for "cheap thrills" without harming people IRL that were effected by it? Do we refuse to let them show car accidents, because of people who were injured, or had loved ones injured in car accidents? Those people were victims, but we're using car wrecks for cheap thrills. What about any kind of crime?

Movies love to show step parents as dangerous people, given how often slasher flicks depict the new family member as the "secret villain", but nobody believes that every step parent is secretly a serial killer sociopath.

It's a no win situation for the directors. And personally, anyone that honestly thinks that just because a movie depicts someone in a certain way, that all people are that way, those people are idiots. Just like how every person with autism isn't Rainman, or The Accountant, neither is everyone with MPD a girl-napping monster. It's fiction, but we only seem to complain when it's depicting them incorrectly in a negative way. Nobody ever seems to complain "Not every autistic person is a math/counting genius like Rainman!" Or at least I've never heard them.

It's fiction, people need to learn to simply take it at the story it is. Personally though, I see nothing wrong with depicting someone with a mental illness as a villain. Their illness doesn't protect them from being a danger to those around them, so it's hardly painting them in a false light. A negative light sure, but that could be said about everything in our culture from one movie to another. If we boycott every movie for a single instance of "you showed that negatively!", then we just wouldn't have movies anymore. Because there is someone out there, that will get upset about everything.

 

[Terminal Blue]

I don't think you would have liked The Visit either, it quite blatantly demonizes the elderly, and more specifically older individuals suffering from mental illness.

To me, it's a huge step up in that it doesn't specify a mental illness. General mental illness stigma is real, but it only tends to come out when people actually get murdered.

For context, DID is so poorly understood that a significant proportion of people, even people working in medicine, refuse to believe it exists because they think it's something made up by movies and fictional media. Furthermore, the image which tends to be depicted in media is so unrecognisable that a lot of people (like my partner) manage to go for years not knowing that they have it. Obviously, that's specifically bad because it delays people from accessing specialist help which they might desperately need, or simply being able to care for themselves.

Well, as someone who has a brother who is schizophrenic, who has tried to kill my mother, and threatened to kill me as well, I can attest that the mentally ill can be, when unstable and in the throes of their instability, fucking terrifying.

My brother has suspected Borderline Personality Disorder (sadly, impossible to diagnose because he's also an alcoholic) and I feel your pain in a big way. I've been threatened with knives too many times.

I can see how DID could be frightening in its own way. It is a completely different thing however which has nothing to do with schizophrenia, and is actually much more similar to PTSD in the way it works. However, it is much less well understood in the general population than schizophrenia, and while people can generally muster a degree of sympathy or maintain a nuanced view of schizophrenia despite the fact that schizophrenics can occasionally be violent, the same is not true for DID.

Again, the problem is that misrepresentation actually harms or erodes the ability of people to make very important and life changing judgements. The fact that you're treating two completely different mental illnesses as interchangable is actually a fairly good example (although I'm not blaming you, it's understandable given the way mental illness is treated in fiction).

 

[happyninja42]

My brother has suspected Borderline Personality Disorder (sadly, impossible to diagnose because he's also an alcoholic) and I feel your pain in a big way. I've been threatened with knives too many times.

I can see how DID could be frightening in its own way. It is a completely different thing however which has nothing to do with schizophrenia, and is actually much more similar to PTSD in the way it works. However, it is much less well understood in the general population than schizophrenia, and while people can generally muster a degree of sympathy or maintain a nuanced view of schizophrenia despite the fact that schizophrenics can occasionally be violent, the same is not true for DID.

I never implied that DID and schizophrenia were the same, I was using it as an example of people suffering from mental disorders being dangerous, that the way they are depicted in the movie, at it's core, isn't inaccurate for some of them.

And while DID might not have many documented cases of violence, I would be surprised if there was never a case of someone with that condition, also being a physically violent person on top of it. Just like no condition is composed of 100% dangerous people, no condition is composed of 100% harmless people either. Nuance, it's the word of the day here. xD There are gradients to this stuff that have to be acknowledged.

Now if you want to argue that movies NEVER, or rarely ever show people with those conditions in a positive light, THAT topic and issue I will agree with, as I can't think of many examples off the top of my head. But that is a different issue than the "mental people aren't dangerous!" angle, which, quite simply, isn't true. They can be dangerous, so using them as a threat in your movie, is, in my opinion, perfectly valid.

 

[Sonmi]

Well where do you draw the line though? I mean what things are ok for "cheap thrills" without harming people IRL that were effected by it? Do we refuse to let them show car accidents, because of people who were injured, or had loved ones injured in car accidents? Those people were victims, but we're using car wrecks for cheap thrills. What about any kind of crime?

I think portraying harmless behaviours, such as incontinence in the case of The Visit, in as something sinister and contributing to the scariness of the elderly characters is where the line is crossed.

Going "Look, that schizophrenic and demented old man, who was also a career criminal, is scary, with dementia and schizophrenia contributing to him being terrifying" is fine, because, well, dementia and schizophrenia are kind of terrifying. Using the main antagonist's incontinence as something gross and, more than anything, sinister kind of falls in the domain of shaming the elderly for something out of their control that doesn't really affect anyone else. It's cheap and exploitative, there is no proper drama in an old man shitting himself the same way there is in car wrecks or mental illness.

 

[Terminal Blue]

And while DID might not have many documented cases of violence, I would be surprised if there was never a case of someone with that condition, also being a physically violent person on top of it.

Sure, but in that case DID contributes nothing to the movie. The trope of "abused person grows up to be a murderer" has been used a lot and doesn't require DID. If that's the case, it's a cheap trick to allow a character to do horrible things and still be sympathetic.. well.. except for the other reason which is apparently to give them superhuman strength (ah yes, that well known symptom of DID).

I mean, you could just have them be possessed by ghosts. It would be just as ridiculous, but wouldn't be pretending that having a serious mental illness is equivalent to being possessed by ghosts.

It's kind of like having a villain character whose entire premise is that they're clinically depressed and having them express this by constantly walking around in The Crow makeup quoting Nietzche and murdering people for no other reason than because "life is pointless, man", then justifying it by throwing in some quasi-PSA stuff about how people with depression are the real heroes. Oh, and give them telekinesis to boot because some character in the movie has an in-universe theory that depression gives you telekinesis..

You can see how that would suck, right? It would be laughable. This is just as laughable, it's just less familiar to most people so it passes better.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

Your using Metacritic for movie reviews? And NOT Rotten Tomatoes?

RottenTomatoes says Rogue One is a good movie. You can barely trust critics.

I've only seen The Sixth Sense (Pretty good.) and most of Signs, so I have nothing to add.

Well I think the Prequels are better than these new Star Wars movies coming out.

And least the Prequels try to give themselvs an identity I mean I recognize Qui-Gon, Young Obi-Wan, Anakin, and Padme, I barely remember anyone's names in these new movies. I remember what happened in the Prequel movies more than the these new ones.

And the Prequels have better music:




I mean fuck me what happened to the music? I barely remember a single decent track in the Force Awakens that wasn't a recycled track from the older movies and John Williams appearently was the Composer?