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jack, the commercial you have to watch for salon is brief and you can switch to another window during it.
a troublesome thing about this movie is that the twist gives it a thought-provoking theme. WHICH the reviewers can't discuss w/o revealing. so they are forced to simply write how let down they were by the obvious twist, the stilted dialog, how m. night should use other people's scripts, etc.
papi, yr wish is my command, and all, don't say i didn't warn you...SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS!
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soo, throughout the movie you hear various elders talk about people who they loved and lost due to violence, which is ostensibly why they moved to this little commune thing. so...shock! the Things We Do Not Speak Of (which is a lie, they’re brought up quite often), the creatures in the woods, are actually the elders in disguise! no! yes. it's all...a RUSE to keep everyone in the village from leaving, so they can stay safe. this you totally see coming. the reason this is revealed is that the blind girl, played by ron howard’s daughter bryce, (forgive me i can’t remember character names here) needs to go to the neighboring cities for medicine for her love, the tasty joaquin phoenix. joaquin needs meds cos he got stabbed by the village idiot, played by adrien brody. adrien stabbed him cos he was in love with bryce, but it was just announced that joaquin and bryce were going to get married. so it is stunning to see joaquin get the shiv from retarded adrien, that’s a twist you don’t see coming. at least i didn’t. anyway, blind girl’s dad tells her that the creatures aren’t real, so that she can through the woods and get some antibiotics.
however, the other twist you don't necc. see coming is when some of the elders go into a locked box they have in their house (almost all the elders have a locked box in their house that no one can go into, apparently) with a voiceover of all the elders talking about the people they loved who got killed, and bryce’s dad saying, “i have this idea...” and pull out a photograph of them in what looks like maybe the 1970’s, EVEN THOUGH the film opens w/a funeral and the gravestone says it’s 1897 or something. Hokay. i think outright lying to yr audience is cheating when it comes to a twist. but hey, at least i was surprised.
this is followed by bryce finally reaching the end of the woods, which she ends up traversing alone cos her companions chicken out. so, yes, that’s right, the blind girl goes into the woods alone. but when she leaves the woods, you see a car pull up, this is about the same time as the photograph is shown. the person is shocked to see her, turns out he’s just guarding the perimeter of some wildlife preserve. his jacket and truck say “walker”on them, and he asks her name, and her last name is walker. earlier in the movie her father does mention that her grandfather was one of the richest men around and was killed, so at that point you figure out that her dad took the money he inherited and set up this preserve thing so they wouldn’t be bothered. but she of course asks “what was that noise?” referring to the siren on the truck, and tells him they need medicine and he gets it for her and she goes back. so, even though the entire time she’s in the woods (and it is a little scary to see her in the woods alone, especially when she gets attacked by one of the creatures, cos yr like, wtf, but it turns out it’s just the village idiot who found a spare costume, but she kills him by tripping him so he falls into this giant hole that she almost bit it on earlier) yr going, “why the fuck did they send a blind girl on this mission?” you now can see that it makes some sort of sense, cos she couldn’t see the truck and say, perhaps, “hey that looks faster than walking, i think i’d like one.”
but it still doesn’t make sense that they didn’t send one of the elders, who already know about such things, but then again the trip through the woods wouldn’t have been as exciting if it was w/someone who could see. when bryce returns, she tells them that she killed one of the creatures in the woods, so it’s unclear if she believes it really was a Thing We Do Not Speak Of even though her father told her they were fake. he did say that even though they faked the creatures, there were rumors that there was something in the woods. then it’s decided that they will tell the villagers that adrien/village idiot was killed by the creatures, which is a good idea to scare people out of ever giving anyone the shiv, should such an idea ever cross their minds, i s’pose. ostensibly, joaquin lives on to have hot offspring w/bryce.
joaquin and bryce give good performances. despite the crappy dialog. seriously, does m. night have anyone else read his scrips after he’s done writing them? i’m not saying you need 13 writers all “the flintstones” style, but, you know, feedback is good. |
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