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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Movie Review -- The Village: Not Scary, Lemon Twist
Contributed by Anonymous on: Wednesday 18 August @ 09:03:29 |
 Twist my arm and I'd give The Village a C minus. Good pacing, decent cast, couple-a thrills, couple-a chills... But what a gloppy stew of mismatched parts. What a cobbled confection of phony good-versus-evil comic book shtick. What a paper-thin tale of duplicity masquerading as a suspense thriller. All with a twist and a happy ending. If this movie were a martini it would be a virgin.
Think The Truman Show meets the Hardy Boys on Halloween at Ye Olde Salem Village in a made-for-TV-movie with a PG-13 rating. The best I can say is that The Village could have been an okay episode of The Twilight Zone.
The village, by all appearances (wink, wink), is an American Puritan farming community circa whatever. The people are all happy, well-behaved and modestly dressed. But behind the cheerful exteriors, they're really stressed out. They're stressed about the monsters lurking in the woods, they're stressed about sex, and they're stressed about keeping the big Secret that we find out later is really, oh -- sorry, can't tell you. The whole movie is clich¨¦d, squeaky clean and screams phony. Everything looks new. The early American farm buildings look freshly built. The antique furniture looks like it was moved onto the set 5 minutes before the shot. The costumes look like newly-made early American village movie outfits. The farm yards look like suburban lawns.
No mud, no animals, no dogs, no dirty clothing. It irritated me during the movie, but afterwards I wondered whether it wasn't intended as a clue to the ultimate secret of the village! I love deep meaning in movies, it's so literary, so Rod Serling.
In The Village nothing is as it appears to be, especially the monsters in the woods. They groan at night and rustle about in the shrubbery. The village is ringed with torches and watch towers to keep out "those we don't speak of." But in this repressed non-violent utopian village there's no weapons, they don't keep the monsters out by force. The villagers have an understanding with "those-we-don't-speak-of." The villagers stay out of the woods, the monsters stay out of the village. How liberal and co-dependant. The obvious illogic and awkward inconvenience of this with regards to an even minimal reality check of the village's need to maintain itself by farming, hunting, cutting firewood, etc. is only one small example of ¨D but wait, I suddenly realized, maybe this was another clue! That would fit since at the end we find out that the monsters are really -- oops, sorry, it's my sworn duty as a reviewer not to reveal the Secret.
The people in the village act in a phony formal and stiff imitation of how we imagine repressed New England farmers acted back then. You wonder if the director told the actors to move slowly and act stupid. Why? Well, maybe the phony Puritan farmer act is also supposed to be a clue! Whoa... was Memento this clever!? The heroine of the movie is the red-haired blind girl who's the life of the party, the village and the movie. We know she's not really blind because she keeps looking at things, and also because she's Bryce Dallas Howard, Ron Howard and Cheryl Howard's daughter, who's not blind and is actually quite beautiful and engaging on-screen. Thank god she doesn't look like her Dad. Hopefully she'll be in a real movie some day. Joaquin Phoenix does his job and that's about it. I don't want to say mean things about River's brother...
Moody shots to little effect, clunky dialog, intrusive music, faddish camera shots, an adolescent plot, The Village has it all. And don't forget the happy ending. Well, happy in the sense that poetic justice is served and the real monster, the half-wit with the English rock star hair cut and the really irritating phony nut-case laugh played by Adrian Brody gets to die in a red monster outfit covered with horns and claws in a kind of satanic mock-pieta scene at the bottom of a muddy pit. Never mind that the lead-up to this not-so-high-point of the movie is an absolutely ridiculous blind-girl-in-the-woods chase scene in which Adrian the phony monster flits and leaps around the woods in his red outfit with vampy moves and arty camera angles worthy of the Beatles' movie Help! It has about that much intensity, without the good music. Sometimes happy endings are welcome. In this case it was irritating. The only unknown of this movie is how fast it'll sink at the box office. A suspense thriller with a family-friendly happy ending. That's scary.
Written by: Henry Hubben -- 612-529-2479 -- hopke@citilink.com
Words: 767
Date: 08-13-04
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