Grounded :(

  Before I allowed myself to find my seat for TRAP, M. Night Shyamalan appeared and told me something. He said it would "make the experience better" if I just "went with it." As I watched him walk out (with a weird limp[??]) I pondered what he said over and over.

   So many people balk at how "ridiculous" Trap is but that absurdity is presented very plainly in the trailer and the synopsis on paper sounds so silly that you have to have some kind of "WTF" rattle around. So, since it's honest about what it is, I feel like one should be honest about their experience with it; you either went in with the express purpose of shitting on it afterward or you knew absolutely nothing about it. You don't go see a movie with a premise that absurd expecting it to hold up to objective real-life scrutiny in some attempt to ground it in a concept as flimsy as reALitY.

  I knew what I was in for and thus I laughed quite a bit. It's imperative to note that that laughter wasn't ironic or anything: I had genuine fun. At times Trap feels like if DePalma made a Naked Gun movie, which I'm still not entirely sure works 100% of the time but, as far as the 'realism' goes, I have no complaints - nor would I. The massive leaps in logic are definitely a feature, not a bug. My speculation is M. Night is just saying "fuck it" and letting himself get away with murder, with a murderer. Hell, even after so many narrow escapes it doesn't end with Cooper being caught and facing justice. Instead, it ends with Cooper getting out of handcuffs and laughing while briefly breaking the fourth wall; Shyamalan couldn't be more blatant here.

  For so long he's been a joke to be picked apart and mocked and, this time, he's deliberately breaking the rules with a smile on his face; one might say the whole movie...is a Trap. It's incredibly refreshing to see a movie this radically stupid because we've been 'grounded' for far too long with 'smart' movies. From Richard Brody's review of OLD, "just as it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken, it takes a smart filmmaker to make a stupid movie, which I mean in the best possible way. " Shyamalan truly is The Butcher, the freakin' nutjob who goes around just choppin' people up.

  George Miller seems to be sick of this cultural obsession with nitpicking, too. One of the most lasting things about 3000 Years Of Longing for me is how Idris Elba's Djinn can't survive in our world. The more his magic is explained away using science, the weaker and sicker he gets, until he gradually withers away because 'realism' seems to kind of...unmake him. The thesis basically being "let [movie] magic be magical." You don't enhance stories when you make them more believable, you destroy them.

  So many other filmmakers have had their own responses: 

• Joe Dante showed what he thought in Gremlins 2 when the control room dude could barely finish his little monologue about time-zone minutiae before a Gremlin popped out and bit into his neck

• When the cinematographer for Lord Of The Rings was asked by Elijah Wood where the light was coming from, during the The Battle Of Helm's Deep, he gave the most logical response, "The same place the music is coming from."

• On the set of Jaws Spielberg was told that shooting the tank of compressed air wouldn't actually blow up the shark, because that's unrealistic. He responded "But it will be cinematic."

  Those quotes have always meant a lot to me but even moreso after I saw this growing sentiment: "The John Wick movies must take place in an alternate universe because they're so unrealistic." That idea is disheartening for so many reasons but chiefly because yes, movies and TV shows and books take place outside of our universe: that's the point. In a sense, every piece of fiction is in its own pocket universe because "a writer crafts their ideal world." Writers are, in the abstract, Gods, so to criticize a movie for being Unrealistic doesn't make sense because what Realism are you applying to it besides its own?

   Another favorite is the notion that "People don't talk like that, the dialog is unrealistic," well, that's how the writer wants them to talk, it's a deliberate choice. Beholding a movie to your idea of Realism is so needlessly limiting. It's a rejection of curiosity that's so disapproving of Imagination it makes my head spin. It's a form of engaging with art that's so purely a dilution of magic that it brings to mind a mass amputation of unicorn horns. Like, how long have you hated fun? You're the villain in every '80s comedy.

   Unless a piece of media is actually going for real-world realism, like a work of Non-fiction, no one should expect it to adhere to real-world rules; journalistic integrity doesn't apply to make-believe. Hell, sometimes 'realistic dialog' is a fallacy unto itself because I've had/heard conversations where I've wondered "WHY does this person talk like that??" There is no uniformity because people enunciate differently and have weird cadences and inflections and pronunciations and even say unexpected things because people are unpredictable fucking oddities with interiority formed by experiences outside our own.

   The Lion King (2019) went for 'realism' and ended up being one of the most bland, unimaginative, ugly movies ever made; a cold and synthetic simulacrum of the colorful, expressive original and of any nature documentary you can find on streaming right now. There are so many moments in Planet Earth where David Attenborough will be narrating the craziest shit I've ever seen and it's better than any frame in Lion King (2019). And that's the thing: 'Realism' Folks need to give Real Life a little more credit. I mean, fuck, we have the idiom "truth is stranger than fiction" for a reason. When Jon Favreau was making his Lion King remake he actually admitted, proudly, that they used bland lighting because "when you really want to get a shot of a sunset you have to be lucky, they don't just happen like that." But as Youtuber YMS points out: a quick Google search of African Sunsets will yield plenty of gorgeous shots of colors and clouds taken for decades. Jon Favreau has millions of dollars, creative freedom and even real-life inspiration at his disposal but he actively chose to reject beauty. It must be so miserable for him and people like him to think life is so bland and uninteresting. The CGI in The Lion King is incredible, photo-realistic even, but without art direction and inspiration it means fucking nothing. 

  And while, thankfully, Cinematography has been incredible this year, for a good part of the last—almost—20 years there was this mounting push for more 'realistic' night photography. Thus began an onslaught of some of the most dim, hideous visuals committed to the screen. In so many movies and shows there'd be an ugly, muddy blue hue and nothing else because there's no 'realistic' light sources allowed, besides their version of moonlight. It was perpetually frustrating because there wasn't even any effort to find interesting ways to utilize practical light sources, ala how Spielberg shot the flashlights in E.T.'s night scenes. So many movies and shows were met with deserved scorn because audiences couldn't see anything. While I like to see what's going on, Lol, that's not what upset me most: I was annoyed that there was no push for artful imagery at all. So this isn't a screed where I bitch about media illiteracy online, it's about a philosophy that's been seeping into the actual production of movies, which is worrying.

  Audiences and filmmakers need to disabuse themselves of the CinemaSins-y mythbusting of movies and just embrace Artistic Expression, otherwise you're atomizing art itself until it doesn't exist.