In an article entitled “Twist and Shout: Readers nominate the most-idiotic-twist endings.“, Slate’s movie guy offers an editorial comment:
One thing you can say for The Village that you can’t for many of the movies with cheap reversals: !!! Whatever the film’s absurdities (the redirection of flight paths is an especial giggle), the Shyamster was trying to explore, with sympathy, the age-old difficulty of separating oneself and one’s family from a diseased society, be it crime-ridden, chaotic, and amoral or governed by rapacious, right-wing corporatists. (Well, the ultraconservative Shyamster didn’t exactly focus on the latter, but it strikes me as the bigger threat right now.) The problem with The Village is that the Shyamster bungled the suspense and couldn’t manage to come up with a cathartic payoff. Audiences felt rooked.
Dear movie guy: I don’t give a pawn what you think about politics. I clicked the article because it looked like an interesting pop culture read. Your beliefs in politics, particularly your insertion without comment or development, matter not a whit to the story you’re writing. It is gratuitous and doesn’t make me think well of you at all.
But it does put you on Eric Mink’s career path–from television critic to editor of the op-ed pages.
