![]() ![]() “The Lost Village” devotes a good half of its 89-minute running time to the real-estate depredations of New York University, and it’s here that the movie is onto something incendiary that nevertheless seems, at many points, to be driven by an overly personalized agenda. It’s too busy shoving Marxist dirt on the West Village’s grave. It is, or should have been, an elegy for something, but the film doesn’t do the loving and detailed historical work of showing us what it’s an elegy for. And on that score, the movie is oddly perfunctory. ![]() Yet “The Lost Village” is a documentary you seek out not just because you want to know what’s happening to the Village from the top down, but from the ground up. (They’re the people buying insanely upscale co-ops in the new Greenwich Village.) ![]() ![]() The film gets very macro, full of thoughts on the rise of the global moneyed elite, all of which is relevant. Market forces are on the march in our society, and Paradiso offers a top-down analysis of what’s happened to the Village that’s more convincing than not. Some of what the film has to say on these subjects is trenchant in a cranky, die-hard-Village-regular-ranting-on-a-barstool way. It’s about the gentrification - and generifying - of the Village, and about something larger: the takeover or urban spaces by corporate powers, the loss of the DIY flavor of mom-and-pop stores, and what all of this means for everyone. But for anyone who thinks it does, Roger Paradiso’s documentary “ The Lost Village” offers itself up as a furious piece of cultural history. Whether or not this matters is a question that relates to whether you think a place like the Village, which used to be an epicenter of the United States, still holds sway. ![]()
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