It's not scary!!!!!!!!

I don't usually do movie reviews on here because there's enough people out there that have their own opinions in things, but when a movie with as many mixed reviews as Lady in the Water comes out, and you generally disagree with all of the reviews, i think it's my duty to tell it how i saw it. After i read the reviews on RottenTomatoes, which totaled a whopping 19% that liked the movie (right down there with Little Man) I was wondering if they were really on to something and it sucked, or if they're all a bunch of pretentious bastards who don't have a drop of that imagination juice left in their imagination juice sack. When they started describing how the plot made no sense to them, that's when i decided to go see it, and i already knew i'd like it. Generally, "no plot" means "too much plot for me to keep track of."

So Meg n' i sailed off to see it last night and during the movie, I could see why people might not like it. Characters who have no grounding in reality, a lot of (good) dialogue, and (oh my...) it's not scary. Have any of his movies been truly scary? Sure there's scary parts, but when i think about it, was the Sixth Sense "scary"? No. It was suspenseful, but it was also mostly dialogue that just kept you interested until the end. As I recall, i was almost bored before the end of that movie.

But what's amazing about this movie is that while it mixes reality and fantasy, the two parts often cross over, where the real characters start doing extraordinary things, and you hardly even notice. You think it's too far-fetched to believe it, so you start to believe that everyone and everything can be as real or as imaginary as it wants at any point. People start doing extraordinary things, and then the last thing that happened doesn't seem so crazy.

All of this factors into the fact that this was originally conceived as a bedtime story for M. Night's kids, and when it comes down to it, that's what it is. It's a bedtime story in real time, where if you took the plot down off the screen and told it to your own kids before they went to bed, then you wouldn't feel foolish at all, but you'd feel incredibly smart for making up such a dark, funny, imaginative, and engaging story, which would thus make you the best father/mother in the world.