  I won't be seeing urlLink The Village until next weekend. I don't faun over M. Night Shyamalan's movies, but I do enjoy them. They're excellent works of fiction (at least the previous three - The Sixth Sense , Unbreakable and Signs ), and I can lose myself in them for the nearly two hours they run. They're not too long -- I'll never forgive Braveheart for the numb rear end I had going into the last 45 minutes -- and I don't feel like I've been tricked into seeing a half-hour cartoon for $10.
But that's what they are. They're entertaining fiction. They come out in summer, as part of the slasher/action/dumb comedy summer movie set. They're not Ghandi . They're not Fahrenheit 9/11 . They're not movies that bring up issues and make people think. And they weren't meant to be. Slate's David Edelstein urlLink hated The Village because he wasn't having deep philosphical conversations about it. Michael Agger, who writes for the same online magazine, urlLink hates Shyamalan , because he's a young powerful filmmaker who doesn't use his power to make anything but fluffy, entertaining films.
Frankly, I'm OK going to see an entertaining film. There's a reason film reviews tend to be printed in newspapers' entertainment sections. Some films are meant to distract people and take them out of the real world for a couple of hours at a time. Cripes, people, go relax and enjoy a movie, will you? 
