The village idiot

Look who's blogging now.

In other news, the wife and I saw "The Village" this week, and I liked it, though not as much as M. Night Shymalan's previous effort, "Signs." (Note: Spoilers to follow.) Some critics are beginning to dismiss Shymalan as a one-trick pony because all his movies have some kind of surprise twist or ending. I think that's a bit simplistic; each of his films has its own unique, intricate plotline and characters. One characteristic common to all his films, besides the twist, which is more mult-layered in "The Village," is that all his films involve people who are nursing wounded psyches or struggling with their place in life, from Bruce Willis' loss of faith in himself in "The Sixth Sense" to Mel Gibson's loss of faith in God in "Signs." Similarly, the elders in "The Village" have all retreated from the modern world because of their inability to deal with the pain of having lost loved ones to violence. In that sense, Shymalan's films follow in the tradition of great horror films and literature (though none of his films qualify as horror) in revealing that nothing in the outside world is as dark and terrifying as what we find inside each other.