4 Reasons Why 'The Village' Is My Favorite Shyamalan Movie

This week my home viewing has been concentrated on the work of M. Night Shyamalan, whose first four major movies (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village) were some of the first reasons why I began really loving movies in the first place. To be honest, I find it difficult to defend his latter work, and for many people this begins with The Village–for them a convoluted period monster flic that slowly bleeds out what little believability it begins with until it limps, dying and confused, into its closing credits. But I am here today to proclaim that not only is it my favorite of Shyamalan's films, but it might be his best work altogether. 

Reason #1: Dat Music, Tho

The films mentioned above all have superior music gifted to us by James Newton Howard. But the jewel in the collection is the beautifully melancholic suite he composed for violinist Hilary Hahn on The Village. Each note is full of sorrow and hope and loss, and the score is one of the greatest meditations on those themes in music. As a soundtrack it is risky, because it runs the possibility of overrunning the screen image it is meant to support, but it never overplays its hand or becomes pedantic. Indeed the music is the perfect accompaniment to the photography, and the mood which it carefully creates and maintains. Speaking of which... 

Reason #2: Roger

I know, praising the work of master cinematographer Roger Deakins is like saying bacon is tasty, but that doesn't mean it can't be done genuinely. Of Shyamalan's films this is by far the best looking (although Eduardo Serra does some cool stuff in Unbreakable.) I mean, tell me that just the still frame of that chair on the porch doesn't make you want to cry. Tell me (if you've seen the movie, of course) that it doesn't infinitesimally increase your understanding of and sympathy for the characters. Tell me his use of color (while often brought to our attention by the dialog) never feels immaturely attention seeking in itself. Indeed, it is the images Deakins captures, together with Howard's music, that floats the picture when the rest of it is shaky. This brings me to...

Reason #3: The Reason Most People Don't Like It

*This section gets spoilery.* While it is a solid aesthetic achievement, what really gets me (in a good way) about this film is how poorly its internal logic works out. And this is why most people don't like it. "Gee," they say, "it sure seems flimsy that they could live indefinitely in a wildlife refuge and no one would know." "Wouldn't Ivy immediately figure out that it was Noah and not a creature that she killed?" "Why do the elders speak in the weird 1890's speak even when they are alone?" "Couldn't they have brought modern medical supplies with them? No one born there would know the difference. Actually, why did they pretend to be homesteaders in the first place?" And so on.

The point is, I think that this flimsy logic is the point. Misreading it (and therefore being disappointed with the movie) comes out of misunderstanding what the movie is about. It is a love story above everything else. It is also an exploration of fear and guilt, and how those intersect with love. And to me, the fact that a story that they invented to preserve love from the corrosion of fear and guilt makes no sense at all, but that they desperately cling to it anyway, only adds to the poignancy of the whole thing. It is a kind of tragedy of whose sibling I cannot come up with another example. Brendan Gleeson's character says of Ivy, after she has gone, to let her run toward hope. The beauty of the place is that she is free to do it, and if it is worthy, she will be successful. The tragedy is that the place is not worthy, but she will come back anyway and think that it is.

So I take for subtlety what others take for poor plotting. The film manages to tell a very sobering and melancholy tale without ever being despairing. It preaches earnestly and sincerely about love, its powers and wonders. And it turns around and mourns over the false hopes that love can inspire. I cannot think of another movie that makes me feel the way that it does. In doing so it reaches a tonal ambiguity that isn't found in the rest of Shyamalan's work. In that regard it is his most artistically satisfying piece for me, and the one that I can come back to most often. Finally...

Reason #4: Just Because

I know that the film is not without its faults. The dialect is sometimes clunky and distracting and the editing near the end cannot decide whether it is brilliant or just confusing. And I have tried to elucidate real reasons why I love this movie. But I think it comes down to the fact that I love it, just because I love it. Maybe it's because it came at just the right moment in my life: earlier and I would have ignored it, later and I would have scorned it. Maybe it's because it was the first movie that I ever sat through the credits of, thinking that I didn't know what I was feeling. Maybe it's because everyone has to have a terrible movie that they love, and this is mine. I don't know. But I hope you have at least one that you love and you cannot explain why, even when IMDb tells you that it is worse than that last Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Seriously. Look it up.

And here's a selection from the score, in case you didn't believe me earlier.

How the West Was Won, Once Upon a Time

Well, loyal readers, I'm back after something of a hiatus. However, I'm back in something of a different context, being in what might be something of a cinematic sequester for a few months, for timely theatrical viewing, at any rate. But for these next couple of months I am going to indulge in some more studied and intentional home viewing, and all seven of you get to be on the receiving end of that.

First up will be a discussion of the two great mythology-beatifying westerns: How the West Was Won, and Once Upon a Time in the West. Both films are stunningly beautiful examples of the totally disparate schools that produced them and obvious high-water marks in the genre. In comparing the two, I want to look at individual merit as well as overall impact on the genre, especially since we live in a largely post-"western" world. First up will be the first of the films to be released, 1963's How the West Was Won.

The film is almost equal parts hubristic passion project and insane National Parks PR campaign, and indeed, the film is almost as large as its subject matter: the West. ALL OF IT. From early expansion in Ohio through the gold rush, Civil War, Indian conflicts and railroad encroachment up to glorious Boomer-era capitalist triumph. It boasts an impressive cast featuring anyone who had ever been in a western, and was co-directed by 3 giants of the genre. It was shot and originally presented using the new panoramic "Cinerama" technology, which used three cameras and three projectors launching three synchronized images onto a huge concave screen for a more enveloping experience. It was a mammoth picture.

And, looking back at it with a few days' insulation, it is the picture's mammoth-ness that most sticks with this writer more than anything else. The photography is a little overwhelming. Of course it is beautiful (as evidenced above) but it is not a film that can really be transferred for home viewing. Because of the original panoramic nature of the projection, when this is seen on a flat screen it is a little dizzying. Sometimes there are two points of focus on the horizon, and almost always more than the human eye normally takes in. After a while one wishes (for the only time ever) for some kind of reduction in presentation ratio.

As a landmark in the western canon, the film functions as more of a toast and tribute than anything else. It celebrates the triumph of good old wholesome American-ness, in an era when such was being questioned and criticized more than ever. And, really, what else could it have been? The western up to that point was never anything less than that, from Stagecoach to High Noon to The Searchers. The film is the culminating statement in the decades-long treatise chronicling the subjugation of all nature and people by the righteous white man. And few films make that statement less ambiguously than How the West Was Won.

Contrast that with Sergio Leone's 1968 masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West. (Yes, it's even better, maybe, than The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Maybe.) It is an operatic fairy tale, incorporating Wagnerian leitmotifs perfectly with Leone's quintessential grit. It is a film of stark beauty and deep melancholy: a eulogy where How the West Was Won was a celebration.

The image that ties the two films together is the subduing of landscape by the railroad. This was the only "spaghetti" western to shoot outside of Europe, and there is some spectacular photography of Monument Valley. Here, the railroad brings corruption, greed, and an end to what innocence the West had notwithstanding its inherent violence. It brings new life as well, embodied by the film's heroine Jill, but she is hardly the kind of Eve found in How the West Was Won. In that film, the railroad was only ever a good thing, bringing together all good and hardy people for the last great colonization of the last frontier. That film ends with a showcase of the railroad's modern technological descendants; Once Upon a Time closes with the departure of the last man of his kind as the train pulls into the station, no longer welcome in his only environment.

But the film, notwithstanding its melancholy and occasional mourning, is not cynical. It canonizes rugged individualism of a different kind than its more patriotic cousin. That film is clean and bloodless in its conflict; this uses grit and dust and blood as its medium to paint a final portrait of the kind of American that no longer is.

So I say that Once Upon a Time in the West is probably the better film, although they are both worthy of viewing. But its artistry is more lasting and resonant, and its impact more appropriate given the landscape of our American west today.

----

Here's the main theme from Ennio Morricone's overwhelming score for Once Upon a Time in the West. I put it easily in the top 10 film scores of all time. In case you don't believe how seriously beautiful of a movie this is.

Fury

Hello movie lovers! Or likers, or it's-complicateders or just-frienders or whatever you do. I'm back to sort out my thoughts about Fury, the Brad Pitt-starring WWII drama that came out over the weekend. It has had me thinking since I saw it on Monday, and I think you should give it a look as well.

In Greek mythology, furies, or erinyes, were the female deities of vengeance. They would often violently punish oath-breakers and the insolent. They are also sometimes an "embodiment of the act of self-cursing." Thank you, Wikipedia.

I went on this pseudo-research bend after I saw Fury, because as it finished it seemed to me that it isn't really a war movie, at least as far as making a politicalish statement is concerned. Plot-wise,  of course, it totally is: Pitt leads an American tank crew through Germany as the war ends. But resonance-wise, it feels different. This is vague, so allow me to explain.

On paper, Fury is often as conventional a WWII movie as there is. Pitt is the grizzled leader of a tight tank crew, which includes the religious guy, the Mexican guy, the Alabamian guy, and the scared new guy. This hardy troupe encounter the kinds of experiences with anonymous and faceless German soldiers you might think they would, and there is a healthy but not overbearing dose of postmodern skepticism thrown in to taste. But, all that aside, it is not really a war movie.

The movie is about the primeval in us, more than anything else. Nobility and honor in a war movie are things we stopped doing with Vietnam (with the exception of Saving Private Ryan,) but Fury tries to take it a step further: there isn't even right and wrong. Here, what is awakened in the man who finds himself in battle far predates any conception of what is good or not. Stephen Crane talked about it in The Red Badge of Courage, the animalization of a man driven to survive the insane situation of 10,000 of his fellows trying to kill him. No other species attempts its own genocide. Perhaps that is the fury referred to in the title: the fury of the complacent, easy, "natural" man against the bloody and counterintuitive taxes of life required of his "civilized" generation. 

One of the more moving scenes takes place in a German home which two of our tank crew have adopted after a battle. The women make them food; together they eat and sing and make love and try to enjoy something "normal." But these men are as out of place there as they would be flyfishing on the moon. The scene ends with a call to battle, and a return the belly of the tank, the only home they understand anymore. They claim, ruefully, ironically, but undeniably, that the war is "the best job they ever had." I would say then that, more accurately, the fury the film is concerned with is more of the self-cursing variety.

Fury is haunting and grim and at times contradictory, or at least tonally complicated. It is an interesting counterbalance to the idealistic tone struck in Monuments Men, from earlier this year. Though probably stick with that one for your feel-better-about-life movie night.

Fury features Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña, and Jon Bernthal, and is rated R for tank-related killing and many swears.

Written & directed by David Ayer

A Cry For Independence

A while ago (okay, like a month ago) I was reading a little post over at Collider about why this summer's box office has been so much slower than last year's. It's an interesting little nugget, but to me it boils down to this: people haven't gone to movies this year because movies this year haven't been that good. But that can't really true, can it?

Heaven knows I don't want it to be. But I had a depressing realization this week: it has been two solid months since I have gone to a movie. (For the record it was Edge of Tomorrow, which was pretty nice until the last three minutes.) This drought often happens in January or February, which are usually reserved for studios' unplanned and regretted mistakes, but not in high summer. Of course you are thinking, must be real a tough life if not going to movies is the biggest problem you have. And, of course, moviegoing is a silly little passtime. But ask yourself: what was the last movie you really enjoyed this year? What is the movie you would go see again?

Part of the issue is that I live in Cedar City which, for being such a self-proclaimed artsy town, has a pretty large cinematic blind spot. There are exactly 16 movie screens in this town, 14 of which are owned by the late Mr Larry H Miller's car selling multi-media conglomerate. The other two belong to a pretty nice (and locally owned) second-showing theatre. There simply isn't room for a diverse slate of options down at the multiplex. Or so it would seem to one disgruntled lover of decent film.

Now, before I decry the Megaplex any further, I will say this. I like the Stadium 8 in Cedar City more than almost any other theatre I've been in. The stadium seating in some rooms is so deep, the head of the person in front of me only reaches my shins. It feels like a small-town theatre, often with small crowds and quick lines. The screens and projection are very often without fault. Part of the issue, no doubt, rests in complicated and expensive distribution deals about which I am totally ignorant. But I don't think that a little variety or quality control would kill anybody, either.

Observe the list of showtimes for this week, typical of every week so far this summer. Between the two theatres, 11 movies are playing. Now to be continually fair, this is actually a pretty nice movie-to-screen ratio compared with how it has sometimes been. But let's look at the movies themselves rather than just the numbers. There are no less than 5 showings of Disney's sequel-of-a-sidequel-for-your-five-year-old, Planes: Fire & Rescue, more than for the James Brown biopic Get On Up, which is out this week. Other movies you all are beating the doors down to see are more recent releases like Sex Tape, The Purge: Anarchy, and May holdover Maleficent, which together are tying up 8 showtimes. I guess my question with this is: Would it be a bad thing to do away with duds no one will miss for something a little more artistically and culturally satisfying?

Don't get me wrong, the multiplex is probably the crowning achievement of the mechanized entertainment industry profit machine, and I realize its primary purpose is to make money. It is a carnival for movie exhibition, and the bigger the show the bigger the draw. Movies have been this way since the Lumiere brothers. But I also believe that a theatre should do something to show off the best of the medium it showcases, and that it can do so without being confused for a non-profit arthouse in Greenwich Village run by hemp-smoking Tarkofsky junkies. Surely as much money could be made on two or three showings of Richard Linklater's critical triumph Boyhood as is being gleaned from token exhibitions of Sex Tape. I am willing to bet that you don't even know anybody who knows anybody who went to see The Purge's sequel, but anybody who saw Snowpiercer doesn't stop talking about it. Maybe afternoon showings of Maleficent to two or three people could be better used for accessible indies like Begin Again or Wish I Was Here. But of course, I don't know.

So I guess my plea here is, if you live near an independent theatre, please support it. Movies like Guardians of the Galaxy will always be around (always, since there is already a sequel in the pipes, aren't you excited) but independent gems like Grand Budapest Hotel or even disappointing non-sequelated flicks like Edge of Tomorrow are far less common. Maybe you'll be disappointed or challenged or (heaven forbid) actually emotionally involved, but your experience will surely be more rewarding than sitting through incoherent pixelated robot porn. 

On Why I Don't Go to Comic Book Movies Anymore

I go to movies (and consequently write about them) because I like movies. I try to like the movies I go to see: to take them on their own terms, meet them in the world they create. People that go to movies presumably to identify everything wrong with them (ie, CinemaSins, Screen Junkies, etc) really bug me. A lot. They are fun-sucking parasites who mistake fault-finding or cheap parody for critical analysis. I like that we have temples of entertainment to which we can journey and forget our troubles temporarily in the smell of popcorn and the hum of projector wheels. And I like that, sometimes, special things can happen there.

But, unlike most or possibly all of you, I don't like comic book movies.

Normally a thing like this wouldn't bother me: difference is the spice that makes film great. When people like a movie that I don't, I'm glad that they enjoyed it, because for all the work that went into it, somebody ought to. But I feel that, in the spirit of letting you enjoy the movies you will, I should say something. Obviously this is opening a can of potentially angry fanboy worms, but know that I'll love you no matter your life choices.

First, I concede that such a categorical ban of such a broad genre is pretty narrow-minded and possibly unfounded of me. I feel (and based on the many comic book movies I have seen have concluded) that basically, a comic series does not, and cannot, a good movie make. Fanboys will claim that comics give us unique opportunities to explore important contemporary themes along with timeless motifs, that they are a window into us. They do, and are, but their prolonged (and often interminable) episodic structure cannot be made into effective, original cinema, the very form of which is bound by tight time constraints and often years of work per single offering. Comics work on their own because they are more like television shows, offering small chunks of story minced out on a weekly basis. Movies in a series come at most once a year, and therefore cannot have the same kind of structure. The resulting attempts have yielded a lucrative but lame formula which has become something of an addiction to both studios and audiences, one that values the next movie more than the one currently being shown. What fanboys forget is that movies of any genre offer us a glimpse into ourselves. That's why we make them in the first place.

But my complaint is not that movies like these exist, or even necessarily that they are popularly enjoyed. What I see is an artificial behemoth that is damaging the art that gave it life (such a great comicky theme!) and whose disease is spreading. The great comic houses of DC and Marvel are running an arms-escalation race similar to the one they both lost in the 90s when people people realized it wasn't the 50s anymore and stopped buying comics, causing their bankruptcy. The film medium has now provided them a renaissance with exponentially higher cost but much less product to produce. The result is a reliable but generally unchanging palette of movies on accelerated production timetables. Each is enormously expensive, and while each has also so far paid its own bills, one wonders for how long a brand of movies with near-identical dramatic arcs can be profitable.

The answer, you say, is forever, because we only tell a handful of stories to ourselves in the first place. Is there anything in Captain America different from Errol Flynn or Star Wars? Essentially, no. A hero's journey is a hero's journey, a romance is a romance, and a tragedy is a tragedy. Part of my grief comes not from content for its own sake, but from the amount of fanboy control exercised thereon, at the expense of quality. This begins as early as the writing room with screenwriters who were weaned on Superman and The Hulk creating indulgent fan fiction at the behest of controlling studio heads. They are not free, even if they would, to stray even experimentally with the adopted canon, else vengeful fanboy crucifixion and shameless studio eviction are inevitable. (Remember the fallout from Superman killing in Man of Steel? Or, just this week, Marvel's and Edgar Wright's divorce after he worked on Ant-Man for 8 years?) Thus the rest of us are presented with formulaic summaries of hallowed storylines in which no meaningful surprise is hidden and no real depth is or can be plumbed. The nuance that might be present in a comic series lasting years is sanded off in order to present a sleek, boring replica.

But what, you say, of Ironman 3? Wasn't the Mandarin's character twist a brilliant attempt at freshening up the property, of breaking with the establishment? I say, no, not really. It was more an example of world-building in place of story telling, of again waiting to show off the "real story" yet to come just before Robert Downey Jr's contract is up. Like much of what these movies do, it only works at a self-conscious level at best, something only hardcore fanboys will appreciate because they know how it used to be different. The rest of us are left with unsatisfying narrative arcs glossed over too quickly to be meaningful. They are films made to go through the motions, like playing Super Mario World even though you have it memorized, and we are left to be the younger sibling watching over the shoulders of the player.

I concede perhaps over-generalization, but ask yourself: what are the real stakes in a comic movie? Is the outcome ever uncertain even a little bit? You didn't really think Spider-Man would die, did you? That maybe he wouldn't come out on top, or that a baddie might get away? If Christopher Freaking Nolan's Dark Knight can't actually die, who would entertain even momentarily that Thor or Wolverine or Ironman would? Take the example of Captain America, whose entire purpose was to prepare the way for The Avengers. Of course poor Steve-o's sacrifice can't be consummated, because he has to appear in the Real Movie for which he has been giving us a 2-hour preview. I guess what bothers me about these movies, about paying money to experience the same archetypical story I would get in pretty much any other movie, is that given the "mythology" each brings with it, there can be no real originality or dramatic vitality.

Again, if the problem were self-contained I wouldn't bother, but it is spreading. Outside of comic book land we have something like Star Trek Into Darkness. (Perhaps not the best example since I have already maligned it elsewhere.) When Kirk is "dying" you know he won't: not because his hero's journey and therefore the story is incomplete, not because he must yet pass through fire and ice and come out better and blah blah blah, but because Paramount has a franchise to maintain. At least the first time around they had the nerve to actually kill Spock (albeit temporarily). It is one of any number of growing examples of starry-eyed fanboy writers breaking the rules of their story for the sake of a) doctrinal soundness and b) the profit-hungry studio machine. For this reason I am exceedingly apprehensive of the forthcoming Star Wars movies, or that there will be a 2 and 3 of Godzilla, and indeed why I have almost given up on the non-comic breed of franchise altogether.

So, while you are all enjoying X-Men in the Past Right Now, I'll be sitting at home writing angry blog rants because there are exactly three (!) comic movies playing right now, all with the same comic house father but with three separate and vengeful studio mothers, tying up screen space that might have gone to somebody's unique, risky, but probably rewarding original idea. Or at least to a broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera.

Am I being too obnoxious about a problem over which I have no control? Or do you find yourself wanting to join the boycott? Let me know how you feel, and when it comes out I'll look at Edge of Tomorrow, which at least looks like it shouldn't have a sequel.