{"id":2065,"date":"2005-03-18T14:09:00","date_gmt":"2005-03-18T14:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=2065"},"modified":"2018-07-06T07:32:48","modified_gmt":"2018-07-06T12:32:48","slug":"2065","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2005\/03\/18\/2065\/","title":{"rendered":"Gratuitous"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In an article entitled &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/slate.msn.com\/id\/2114918\/\" target=\"_new\">Twist and Shout: Readers nominate the most-idiotic-twist endings.<\/a>&#8220;, Slate&#8217;s movie guy offers an editorial comment:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>One thing you can say for The Village that you can&#8217;t for many of the movies with cheap reversals: !!! Whatever the film&#8217;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&#8217;s family from a diseased society, be it crime-ridden, chaotic, and amoral or governed by rapacious, right-wing corporatists. <b>(Well, the ultraconservative Shyamster didn&#8217;t exactly focus on the latter, but it strikes me as the bigger threat right now.)<\/b> The problem with The Village is that the Shyamster bungled the suspense and couldn&#8217;t manage to come up with a cathartic payoff. Audiences felt rooked.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Dear movie guy: I don&#8217;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&#8217;re writing.  It is gratuitous and doesn&#8217;t make me think well of you at all.<\/p>\n<p>But it does put you on Eric Mink&#8217;s career path&#8211;from television critic to editor of the op-ed pages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In an article entitled &#8220;Twist and Shout: Readers nominate the most-idiotic-twist endings.&#8220;, Slate&#8217;s movie guy offers an editorial comment: One thing you can say for The Village that you can&#8217;t for many of the movies with cheap reversals: !!! Whatever the film&#8217;s absurdities (the redirection of flight paths is an especial giggle), the Shyamster was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2065"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2065\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20421,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2065\/revisions\/20421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}