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Movie Review: 'The Village'
by Rich Brooks
31 July 2004
I had planned to see the new niggerized version of "The Manchurian Candidate" at its opening yesterday, but I noticed that another new film, "The Village," was also playing and promised to be more enjoyable. What a mistake! "The Village" is written and directed by Indian-born M. Night Shyamalan (real name: Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan), who is most famed for "The Sixth Sense," and "Signs." If I had thought a little more beforehand, I would have remembered I didn't like either of these films in spite of some considerable critical acclaim each received, and I would not have been enticed, as I was, by a favorable review of this latest film.
Shyamalan likes to delve into the supernatural and the abnormal and stuff that is just plain weird. He also likes to take his time filming it, because his movies move at the speed of a nigger at work: very, very slowly. There is much eerie anticipation, underscored more by the music than any action on screen, but nothing much ever seems to happen in his films. I found myself starting to doze off in the theater more than once, and probably would have done so even if I hadn't just eaten a big lunch. I may well have missed some of the film's nuances, but there isn't really much of a plot line and I wasn't planning to give a blow-by-blow description anyway.
"The Village" has an intriguing premise of a quasi-religious cult-like community living entirely self-sufficiently and totally cut off from the surrounding civilization. It is located in a valley surrounded by a forest and inhabited by some 60 people, mostly living in family groups. The setting is reminiscent of a reconstructed pioneer village and the residents are all White, making everything seem on the surface quite idyllic. Everyone in the village takes meals together, dining on long tables "family style." Everything else about their lives is likewise communal, but we really don't know until very late in the film exactly why these people are living together here and what exactly is the tie that binds them.
But underneath this pastoral utopia are dark and foreboding happenings. Village people have taken an oath never to leave, and are warned of strange and dangerous creatures in the surrounding Covington Woods if they should ever venture to leave to go into "the towns." One of them, a blind girl no less, does so out of necessity at one point, and we have on the screen some scenes that looked like they were cut and pasted from "The Blair Witch Project," another vastly-overrated horror flick.
I will admit that I could not follow some of the plot and no doubt missed much of the symbolism the dooga director apparently had in mind. I didn't even "get" the surprise ending because I missed hearing one of the key words just before the screen credits unexpectedly started rolling. I do like surprise endings, but I hate the abrupt ones so often favored by modernist filmmakers. The point is, I couldn't give away the ending, even if I wanted to, because I'm not really sure exactly what happened. I'm not going to rack my brain about it either, because there's nothing about this weird fantasy worth any further thought.
I said the characters were all White, but not the cast. One of the major roles is played by jew Adrien Brody, the super-hooknosed star of "The Pianist." He plays the villain in this movie, but unfortunately is not identified as a jew. He is without doubt one of the ugliest kikes around, which is why I can't for the life of me understand why Coca-Cola (or is it Pepsi?) has recently done a TV commercial featuring him as some kind of movie star "hunk." Talk about Chutzpah!
The bottom line is, don't waste your time or money on "The Village." It is sleep-inducingly boring and not even very scary, and even William Hurt's presence can't save it.That's not surprising, however, since Shyamalan has already demonstrated in "Signs" that he can waste even the considerable talents of Mel Gibson. I think the teenaged amateur critic on Yahoo said it better than I can: "Hey, dude, that was one weird movie."
RICH BROOKS
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