The Village was such a disappointment that I didn't even want to waste cyberink on it. But today I was reading an old Outside magazine I had lying around, and found a quote which I think explains so perfectly, if indirectly, why The Village left me cold.

"Anything could be out there. Anything at all. The first Europeans on the land didn't have the science to conjure UFOs in the wilderness, but they certainly had the theology to imagine a wilderness of devils, a boundless waste occupied by Satan and his works."

-Ian Frazier, Outside Magazine, Oct 2003

The article was talking about mysteries and the ability the outdoors has to completely strip away our rational 21st century mindset and scare the shit out of us- to make us poo in the woods. Something M Night totally could have exploited but instead he chose to give us something so mundane that it was boring. The last thing I want in going to a movie is to be bored. Oh well.

"We go to the woods, or any place out and away, for the mystery there; sometimes, for a dose of fear right below the level of toxicity. Usually the object is to restrain it. But in benign cicumstances, a case of the yips can be fun. Let the panic stampede, let the unexplained mystery scatter your reason. You know that's what the Unknowable really wants of you. Constantly it undermines the rational stops constructed to keep it back. It wants so much for you to quit trying to figure it out, and just accept the incoherence, and come unglued. Mystery has its own ideas for you."
-ibid

Speaking of mysteries in the woods, I am still going to finish the rest of the bigfoot detective story- I have the ending all worked out it is just the middle expositional stuff that is bogging me down. Stay tuned.