Mr. Glass

It's a mediocre time Mrs.
Dunne. People are starting
to lose hope. It's hard for
many to believe that
extraordinary things live
inside themselves as well as
others... I hope you can
keep an open mind?

Issues of temperament. Too highly strung, some of us are, like a violin wire.
Sometimes the tension is in the wire, but not always.

Samuel L Jackson plays Elijah Price in 'Unbreakable' to Bruce Willis' David Dunne.
Superb performances both. The story is woven with care, each thread lovingly laid and twined with the rest.

David wakes up every morning with a great sadness in his heart. His wife is unable to figure out what's wrong and is going to pieces with worry.

Elijah tells him : "You could have done one of a ten thousand things. In the end, you chose to protect people. And I find that very interesting"

Elijah is convinced that David is a real-life instance of the exaggeration that comic books draw for us. He sees comic books as an unrecognized form of cultural transmission - not unlike the songs of the loremasters of yore. And remember, visual communication works best for men.

David is a security guard at a University. Elijah runs a comic book museum.

Elijah has an affliction. He suffers from weak bones which crack and shatter every time he falls. He drives a car with padded interiors and carries a glass cane for irony.
A lifetime of suffering has made his faith in super-heroes an absolute.
For him, it's only a matter of when he finds one. He thinks David is one such who is unaware of his super-hero powers.

It's easy to be smooth if you're a villain. The moral programming that stops a normal individual from seeing humor in pain/suffering is conveniently absent.

Curious, David experiments. He can lift all the weights in the gym. He was not injured in a car accident, and is the only survivor in a train accident. A bit of confusion arises when he remembers that he almost drowned as a kid. But Elijah clears this up and David realizes that he is unbreakable.

He now heads out at night, seeks crime, and does his bit. And when he hangs up his rain-cape, with SECURITY stencilled on it, he knows there'll be no more sadness in his heart when he wakes up.

Shot in Philadelphia , a city I have only seen from afar, it sets the bleak grey tone of the movie very well. And the ocassional gloomy rain frames the state of the characters' minds very well.
The background score depends heavily on silence.

Real crime, however, is very hard to take, and we silently hope it remains within the movie forever, and is forever unable to escape without.

However, 'Signs' by M.Night Shyamalan is just plain spooky and freaks me out and makes me jump at shadows and the refrigerator noises in the night.