kartooner

I’ve seen every M. Night Shay­malan movie released. When I first saw The Sixth Sense the end­ing didn’t sur­prise me due to an “unnamed source” who revealed the twist to me before I even stepped foot in the the­ater. For me, if the end­ing is revealed before­hand, espe­cially if it’s a twist end­ing, the movie loses its appeal.

Rather than let­ting the story develop and grad­u­ally let the end­ing reveal itself, I’m left with know­ing whats to come and that ruins the expe­ri­ence. My wife, on the other hand, isn’t effected if the movie’s end­ing is spoiled. I’m pretty sure that she laughs at me behind my back and won­ders why I care so much. “It’s just the end­ing, there is more to the movie than just the end­ing. There’s a begin­ning, you know?”, she might say.

Truth be told, the end­ing is every­thing to me. I’m not a film stu­dent so rarely will I pull apart the pro­duc­tion, piece by piece, nor do I ana­lyze, with scrutiny, the con­ti­nu­ity or glar­ing plot holes. If I want to be enter­tained I’ll watch a movie, if I need real­ism I’ll turn on the Dis­cov­ery Channel.

As for Shaymalan’s newest cre­ation, The Vil­lage, I’d rank it among my top all-time favorite films. To me it’s not only orig­i­nal but works on dif­fer­ent lev­els, many of which aren’t appar­ent dur­ing the first view­ing. The Vil­lage deserves repeat view­ings for it’s mov­ing per­for­mances, espe­cially by that of Adrien Brody, the vil­lage fool and Bryce Dal­las Howard who plays a blind woman named Ivy. Her per­for­mance is mag­nif­i­cent and yet haunt­ing at best and war­rants an Acad­emy Award. If you see the movie, look at her eyes, you’ll see what I mean.

The Vil­lage is labeled a ‘Horror/Thriller’ by the MPAA which doesn’t make any sense con­sid­er­ing it didn’t come across as a hor­ror movie at all. Maybe I’ve seen one too many Night­mare on Elm Street or Night of the Liv­ing Dead movies, but The Vil­lage, to me, would be more of a dra­matic suspense-filled movie. It has the trade­mark Shay­malan end­ing — mild com­pared to his pre­vi­ous movies — but over­all it’s a thought-provoking and well-made period film that I’d highly recommend.