DARK M. NIGHT, WHITE FLIGHT: “THE VILLAGE”

by Andy Nowicki

For all of the sound and fury attending Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” back in 2004, few of our trusted cultural nags bothered to complain about a film released later that year, one that, in the long run, has proven to be even more subversive of our age’s prescribed and rigidly enforced sensibilities.

DEVIL: DARK NIGHT

by Andy Nowicki

The credit sequence at the start of the 2010 film Devil is conceptually uncomplicated, yet breathtakingly powerful in impact. Its genius lies in the way it takes a standard, even clichéd, series of images, and quite literally ... inverts them.

As Fernando Velazquez's ominous, Bernard Herrmannesque score plays over the soundtrack, we are taken for a virtual ride across the heights of a skyscraper-filled cityscape — a point of view we've witnessed in perhaps hundreds of movies before, one that would be completely unremarkable except for the fact that in this case, everything we see is upside-down.

HOLLYWOOD'S LAST WHITE NATIONALIST

by Andy Nowicki

If you're the sort who lets the fickle proclivities of film critics affect your judgment of the actual quality of movies, you've surely concluded that M. Night Shyamalan's talents have been in a state of sad and hopeless decline for nearly a decade.

The same cultural commissars who unanimously praised The Sixth Sense (1999) and generally approved of Unbreakable (2000) and Signs (2002) began to turn on their once-favored cinematic prodigy when The Village was released in 2004; since that pivotal turning point in elite collective taste, they have never looked back. It is as though the India-born, Philadelphia-raised director has committed some unforgivable cinematic sin against the Holy Ghost, as far as critics are concerned – one suspects that even if he were to deliver the next Citizen Kane or Vertigo, it would still be greeted with a sour, bitter, contemptuous hate-loogie from the representative sampling of scribblers at Rotten Tomatoes, and the kind of accompanying astronomically low "rotten" score on the "tomato-meter" usually reserved for Pauly Shore or Larry the Cable Guy joints.