The Sixth Sense

It's been a pretty productive couple of days otherwise. I wish I could figure out what the deal is with these phantom bugs, though.

On the plus side, Apple turned a big profit last quarter, selling 1.3 million machines, and making enough money that profit sharing will kick in for this quarter. (Basically, that means an extra paycheck at the end of this month.) Woo-hoo! Plus, our revenues were good enough that our stock started climbing again, and several investment houses upgraded us, setting some nice target prices for us (which usually makes the stock go up as well). So things look good!

Tonight was our scheduled Ultimate night, but due to all the rain this week, the games were called off, so on the spur of the moment (more or less) Subrata and I decided to go see The Sixth Sense at the local second-run theatre. And this mission quickly ballooned into a seven-person gathering. Not bad for short notice!

Bruce Willis plays Malcolm Crowe, a child psychologist. At the beginning of the film, a former patient of his (now an adult) breaks into his home, screams that Crowe failed him, shoots Crowe, and commits suicide.

The next fall, Crowe takes on a new patient, a young boy named Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment, in a performance which should win an Oscar) who has the same affliction the other patient had: Depressed, withdrawn, and has hallucinations. Crowe feels that if he can help Cole - who is deeply disturbed, but who has a mother (divorced) who loves him and wants the best for him - then he can atone for failing his earlier patient. However, he's so driven by this mission that he feels his wife is becoming estranged from him.

The film is beautifully filmed throughout Philadelphia, with an outstanding mix of light and dark shots, and carefully arranged camera angles. It's visually arresting. As we follow the process of Crowe and Cole, there's the ever-present question, "What's going on here?" Well, something is going on, and the movie ends with a twist that smacked me from out of left field. (I knew a twist was coming, but it was completely different from the one I was looking for.)

It's an effective little psychological suspense story. If you're one of the six or seven people who haven't seen it, check it out.

Let's see, rather than reviewing a whole bunch of comic books all at once, I think I'll try reviewing one every few days or so.

First up is the two-issue mini-series JSA: The Liberty File. An "Elseworlds" series set during World War II, the story involves the secret agents The Bat, The Clock, The Owl, and Mr. Terrific as they track down Jack the Grin to learn the secret of the "Liberty File": That the Nazis have the "superman". Then they have to figure out what to do about this.

Written by Dan Jolley, I suspect that penciller Tony Harris is the driving force behind this story, which does a pretty good job of mixing alternate versions of Justice Society characters with having a readable self-contained plot. Harris' art is fine, as usual (Starman really misses his contribution), and the story moves right along, although the characters are not much more than caricatures. The action sequences are the most exciting. The ending is a bit of a let-down, especially since it brings in some non-JSA elements to resolve the plot, which makes it feel a little unfair, to me. But overall, it's a pretty good investment for only two issues.