M. Night Shyamalan's The Village

Started by European Son, May 21, 2003, 10:07:35 PM

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ProgWRX

i feel exactly the same way although im not inclined to call this a failure yet
(at least a failure to me, because it clearly has been a failure to about half the people who have seen it or more)

<robot> need...another...viewing... </robot>
-Carlos

ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ

----Possible Spoilers, too lazy to pinpoint them.----

ADMIN EDIT:
LOTS OF BIG FAT SWEATY SLOPPY ODOROUS SPOILERS

Ok, so my friend said it was amazing.  It moved her, and she felt the message was lost on most of the audience.  I was already sort of excited about the movie, so this pumped me up.  If the movie wasn't directed or acted well, at least the "message" she touted would hit me.

Directing: Mediocre, not Night's best.

Acting: I rather enjoyed the acting in this movie.

Twist: Almost pissed me off.  I wanted the monsters to be real.  I didn't want them to be some sort of scheme to keep people trapped inside.  It's too obvious.  At first, it came to mind.  The monsters are forces to keep people innocent and obedient.  I tried to ignore that thought and hoped the monsters were real.  That's why I got so excited when Ivy ran into the monster in the forest.  I hoped that it was redeeming itself.  Night's ability always misses the bullseye for me.  Everytime I see his movies there's a quality that I want to like, but too much "predict the unpredicted" that isn't executed properly to me.  He just has thing essence about him and his films that I want to like, but I just can't.
"As a matter of fact I only work with the feeling of something magical, something seemingly significant. And to keep it magical I don't want to know the story involved, I just want the hypnotic effect of it somehow seeming significant without knowing why." - Len Lye

Jeremy Blackman

Quote from: filmboy70I wanted to jump up out of my seat and throw his pigmented ass againts the wall.
:?:

ProgWRX

i was waiting for someone to catch that...


and thats all i have to say about that... </forrest gump>
-Carlos

El Scorchoz

Boy did this movie suck overall. The story and the twist were so uninspired, predictable and dull. The twist  I didn't like the way the characters spoke, it got really annoying after a while (except for the Howard girl, her i liked).

I did like some of the music and some of the shots were cool, and the Howard girl.
Who snatched Lilo's coffee???

The Perineum Falcon

Quote from: Jeremy Blackman
Quote from: filmboy70I wanted to jump up out of my seat and throw his pigmented ass againts the wall.
:?:
Perhaps the boy had some sort of offensive skin disease?
We often went to the cinema, the screen would light up and we would tremble, but also, increasingly often, Madeleine and I were disappointed. The images had dated, they jittered, and Marilyn Monroe had gotten terribly old. We were sad, this wasn't the film we had dreamed of, this wasn't the total film that we all carried around inside us, this film that we would have wanted to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, that we would have wanted to live.

Henry Hill


analogzombie

Ugh, what a waste of time. I had the 'twist' guessed before seeing it, though I didn't forsee the monsters true 'role'. The directing was totally lacklustre and the acting was uninspired. these types of films walk a very fine line between being moody and atmospheric and being totally ridiculous. this one descended into silliness.

I just thought the dialog was awful, plain terrible. It sounded like some back historical reinactor talk. but then i got to thinking... wouldn't it make sense for these people to have bad reinactor dialog? I mean, in the frame of what they are trying to accomplish, the type of speech wouldn't be natural to them. They'd have to train themselves to speak in that way and to me it makes sense that they could be so self concious about their attempt to modify their speech that it could sound wooden. So i am not sure whether to bash Shamalanadingdong for his poor writing or to praise him for his depth of character study.

but at any rate i didn't like it. It was a cool premise, a good twist, but I would have enjoyed it more from the perspective of the elders trying to hold it together than from Toby N. Tucker's Lucious jibber jabber. Besides the best character in the film was Tommy Gnosis from Hedwig!
"I have love to give, I just don't know where to put it."

Henry Hill

I got this from the AICN web forum on Harry's The Village review (which he loved).

nazismasher
Subject: Ebert giving Shyamalan the George Lucas treatment?
Comment: Seems like Roger Ebert has once again switched brains lambasting a director's latest project with the very logic he had previously used to praise his other films. Hey, maybe SIGNS had two or three or certainly less than a half-dozen "issues" with its plot but that's just small potatoes so let's just give this young, "Next Big Man" director a break, right! Guess a media hyped reputation only gets you 1 free pass at the Chicago Sun-Times because the Star Wars prequels similarly slid from being visual feasts for the imagination to fx-bloated wormwood with seemingly little change from film to film. Hey! I can understand if Ebert feels the need to change his outlook, but consistancy is also a great virtue with readers. The man writes terrific essays on film, but his judgment on current releases has left me spinning every which way from Sunday the last couple of years. "So, which Ebert is going to write the review today?" I sometimes ask myself - the champion of independent films, classics, animation and science-fiction... or the guy that endorsed XXX, FAST AND THE FURIOUS and the TOMB RAIDER movies?


And lets not forget he gave Garfield: The Movie ***  :lol:

meatball

I liked the movie. I came in with lowered expectations from these sour posts as well as some relatives' comments, so what I saw was much better than I expected.

Luckily I didn't have "pigmented" boys and giggling girls to influence my impression of the movie, I just took it in for what it was. I did drop my cell phone halfway through the movie, but that didn't drastically taint my viewing experience.

Some stuff was a bit cheesy, but that's what M. Night serves best. I mean, Sam Jackson as a purple clad Mr. Glass?

Loved Adrien Brody! Reminded me of Leo's Gilbert Grape, in a good way.

Good movie. :yabbse-thumbup: :yabbse-thumbup:

Derek

I gotta say, I thought this was his worst film up until the ending, which made me re-think everything that came before in a good way. I think now this might be his best, certainly will hold up to repeat viewings unlike The Sixth Sense. Bryce Howard is a star in the making.
It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.

Finn

Well that's certainly the first time I've heard a comment like that on this movie. A girl I talked to said it was the worst movie she's ever seen. But most people I talked to about these things don't have a brain in their head anyway. They can go screw themselves.
Typical US Mother: "Remember what the MPAA says; Horrific, Deplorable violence is okay, as long as people don't say any naughty words."

Myxo

I still think this is the best thing I've heard about this film yet.

"This won't end his career. Far from it. I'm sure it's going to open huge. But this is definitely a defining moment for him. Whatever he does next, he's going to have to treat his audience with more respect. It's one thing to want to make a movie about lies. It's another thing to make a movie that is a lie. Understanding that difference and being able to illustrate it is something that seems to have simply escaped him this time out."

Ghostboy

I have to admit that, while I still think the film is a complete mess, it's definitely stuck with me the past two days -- the fact that there's those several moments of excellence mixed in to the overall mess makes it, in a way, more fascinating than his other films.

Sleuth

Aw, this was SO CLOSE to being good.  One word review:  awkward.
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