Review of The Village (2004) by Chris Q — 07 Sep 2015

I was expecting this to be complete shit, but to my surprise it wasn't. Gorgeous camera work by the legendary Roger Deakins and a beautiful score by James Newton Howard (shockingly). Both of those combined add an elegance to the movie that it needed. Without those I'm not sure the movie would have the same effect. I am glad to say this was alright, and I am going to end this by quoting the end of Roger Ebert's review for this movie, although I do not agree with him on how bad he thought it was: "Eventually the secret of Those, etc., is revealed. To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore.

And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets".