something astonishing happened to me earlier today: I watched the profoundly problematical M. Night Shyamalan film Glass, one of two films featuring a questionable and gimmicky depiction of DID plurality by James McAvoy—I'd seen the film once before and it was just painful, but this time...I found that I liked the movie. yes, it's still problematical; yes, Shyamalan makes some very poor creative decisions. but the film got my sympathy.
Shyamalan's post-stardom films have a cheap and nasty look about them, but now that seems to me more like the cost of working a "B-movie" sort of career. we don't really have "B-movies" any more because the "double feature" no longer really exists, but Shyamalan now seems to occupy similar territory to a filmmaker like Sam Fuller or Budd Boetticher: he's making movies with low budgets and lesser-known actors, putting as much style and messaging as he can into them, and he's at least trying to tell stories with far more emotional rawness then you'll get from a polished top-tier Hollywood film. Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor is an "exploitation" movie about mental illness, much like Shyamalan's Split or Glass, but it's still worth watching.
(Split is maybe more upsetting, though.)
~Chara
