M.Movie Mumbojumbo
Aug. 10th, 2004 08:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chaosvizierBefore all else, I'll take a second to once again shamelessly plug ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ljdq, and how much incredible fun it is. Oh yes. Definitely fun, yeah. Visit the info page for, obviously, info. Then join and play. Or don't join, but play anyway. If you've already joined, then you are a beautiful person. More beautiful if you play, of course. Except fizrep, of course; he hasn't been beautiful since age 5 when his mother decked him out in a pink bonnet, just to see.
Anyway, that's all beside the point. I'm in the business of reviewing movies, and business is good. Even if the movies aren't.
The Village
M. Night Shyamalan is on his way to becoming the next George Lucas, and I don't mean that in a good way. His first movie, The Sixth Sense, is an outstanding film, very highly acclaimed, and rightly so. Poignant, moving, frightening, thought-provoking... it does all these things well. And then there's the tricksy surprise ending, which, if you've been living under a rock for the past 5 years and don't know yet, I'll be kind and not spoil here. Shyamalan loves the tricksy surprise ending. He likes it a lot. Now, his problem takes form. Each of his subsequent films tries to repeat the magic of The Sixth Sense's surprise ending... with less than stellar results. It is not the concepts that are poor, merely the executions. He writes, produces, and directs these films. Producing and directing he does exceptionally well. Writing is where he needs to touch up a bit- his plots are getting shakier, with more continuity errors cropping up every moment. He needs a backup writer/editor, to keep him on track.
So where does that put The Village in his collection? Better than Signs, which I felt was an abomination. If you didn't like Unbreakable, you might like this better, and vice versa. They're rather different.
The plot: Young love, Quaker-style... with monsters and Adrien Brody, who will not receive an Academy Award for this. Duke Leto and Menelaus look on with demeanors stern and foreboding.
The pros: Surprises and secrets and scares, oh my! The film has a few good scary moments, and a number of surprises that may or may not be predicted by the viewing audience. I could have used more scary... but that's just me. The atmosphere is tense, gripping, without being ridiculous. The setting is nicely done as well- you really get a feel for the customs and culture that the villagers have. The big surprise, while far-fetched, is not wholly outside of the imagination. I think the cast is the strong part of the film- while the dialogue is somewhat wooden and stilted, the performances of William Hurt, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, and Bryce Dallas Howard make the rest of the atmostphere more real. (Although, holy crap, Sigourney Weaver sure got old...)
The cons: Details, details, details. Using the logic of a timeline, one has to wonder "when", "how long", "what about their resources?" and "where did the other people come from?" If you don't think about it, the movie works fine. The blind girl has to be the most visibly unchallenged blind person ever; I guess she's really just Daredevil in disguise. Or something. The camerawork and film editing is occasionally jerky and unsteady- could have gone better there. The dialogue, as I mentioned earlier, is very wooden and stilted, and makes the film a bit lackluster at times. I think it can be explained via rationalization, but it still ruins the pacing. Lo Pan's maniacal cackling would have gone over better than this.
The verdict: Imperfect, but not totally unwatchable. Save the cash and rent the DVD in a few months.
Disclaimer: I'd go see it again, but only for the chance to scare people sitting next to me during the appropriately scary moments. I'm a real bastard when it comes to watching movies... but goddammit, it's so much fun.
ljdq, and how much incredible fun it is. Oh yes. Definitely fun, yeah. Visit the info page for, obviously, info. Then join and play. Or don't join, but play anyway. If you've already joined, then you are a beautiful person. More beautiful if you play, of course. Except fizrep, of course; he hasn't been beautiful since age 5 when his mother decked him out in a pink bonnet, just to see.Anyway, that's all beside the point. I'm in the business of reviewing movies, and business is good. Even if the movies aren't.
The Village
M. Night Shyamalan is on his way to becoming the next George Lucas, and I don't mean that in a good way. His first movie, The Sixth Sense, is an outstanding film, very highly acclaimed, and rightly so. Poignant, moving, frightening, thought-provoking... it does all these things well. And then there's the tricksy surprise ending, which, if you've been living under a rock for the past 5 years and don't know yet, I'll be kind and not spoil here. Shyamalan loves the tricksy surprise ending. He likes it a lot. Now, his problem takes form. Each of his subsequent films tries to repeat the magic of The Sixth Sense's surprise ending... with less than stellar results. It is not the concepts that are poor, merely the executions. He writes, produces, and directs these films. Producing and directing he does exceptionally well. Writing is where he needs to touch up a bit- his plots are getting shakier, with more continuity errors cropping up every moment. He needs a backup writer/editor, to keep him on track.
So where does that put The Village in his collection? Better than Signs, which I felt was an abomination. If you didn't like Unbreakable, you might like this better, and vice versa. They're rather different.
The plot: Young love, Quaker-style... with monsters and Adrien Brody, who will not receive an Academy Award for this. Duke Leto and Menelaus look on with demeanors stern and foreboding.
The pros: Surprises and secrets and scares, oh my! The film has a few good scary moments, and a number of surprises that may or may not be predicted by the viewing audience. I could have used more scary... but that's just me. The atmosphere is tense, gripping, without being ridiculous. The setting is nicely done as well- you really get a feel for the customs and culture that the villagers have. The big surprise, while far-fetched, is not wholly outside of the imagination. I think the cast is the strong part of the film- while the dialogue is somewhat wooden and stilted, the performances of William Hurt, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, and Bryce Dallas Howard make the rest of the atmostphere more real. (Although, holy crap, Sigourney Weaver sure got old...)
The cons: Details, details, details. Using the logic of a timeline, one has to wonder "when", "how long", "what about their resources?" and "where did the other people come from?" If you don't think about it, the movie works fine. The blind girl has to be the most visibly unchallenged blind person ever; I guess she's really just Daredevil in disguise. Or something. The camerawork and film editing is occasionally jerky and unsteady- could have gone better there. The dialogue, as I mentioned earlier, is very wooden and stilted, and makes the film a bit lackluster at times. I think it can be explained via rationalization, but it still ruins the pacing. Lo Pan's maniacal cackling would have gone over better than this.
The verdict: Imperfect, but not totally unwatchable. Save the cash and rent the DVD in a few months.
Disclaimer: I'd go see it again, but only for the chance to scare people sitting next to me during the appropriately scary moments. I'm a real bastard when it comes to watching movies... but goddammit, it's so much fun.
