Directed didn't care and ask for a take two.
M. Night Shyamalan has become the Shecky of suspense.
(Incidentally - NOT the worst movie of the year. One of the most entertaining. A great time at the theaters and I legitimately recommend it.)
The Happening
That's a great review Sabin; I couldn't figure out how to put my thoughts on that movie into words but I think you painted the right kind of picture. If in the very least, teachers should feel horribly offended by the random "teach-speak" dialogues sprinkled throughout. For example:
Marky Mark talking to himself, trying to figure out what to do - "Think. Think. You're a fucking science teacher. What do you do. You're a science teacher. Test the dependent variables against controlled variable. Analyze the results." Blah blah blah. At this point you figure his entire thought process works this way. "Pour sugary cereal into bowl. Pour prune juice onto cereal. Analyze results." Then you'd obviously throw up and that would represent the rest of the dialogue. Meanwhile, John Leguizamo is throwing out percentages like he was a damn Nutritional Facts table, an old lady creeps everyone 60's B-movie style, and there are more suicides than an emo kid can shake a stick at.
oh yea...
SPOILER... eh, kinda
Leguizamo cuts himself across the street and not down the road; this actor didn't do his homework.
Marky Mark talking to himself, trying to figure out what to do - "Think. Think. You're a fucking science teacher. What do you do. You're a science teacher. Test the dependent variables against controlled variable. Analyze the results." Blah blah blah. At this point you figure his entire thought process works this way. "Pour sugary cereal into bowl. Pour prune juice onto cereal. Analyze results." Then you'd obviously throw up and that would represent the rest of the dialogue. Meanwhile, John Leguizamo is throwing out percentages like he was a damn Nutritional Facts table, an old lady creeps everyone 60's B-movie style, and there are more suicides than an emo kid can shake a stick at.
oh yea...
SPOILER... eh, kinda
Leguizamo cuts himself across the street and not down the road; this actor didn't do his homework.
"It's the least most of us can do, but less of us will do more."
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barrybrooks8
- Temp
- Posts: 463
- Joined: Thu Jan 17, 2008 1:34 pm
- Location: Milwaukee
I can say without hesitation that 'The Happening' is one of the best times you will have at the movies theaters, but not for the reason that M. Night Shyamalan says. Before going any further: if A) a filmmaker, amateur or professional, does a dead-on parody of a filmmaker's work, amateur or professional, and B) it is as totally hilarious as anything that has been leaked onto the internet, does the fact that it is his own work make it any less of an achievement? I don't know.
As a sincere work of suspense, 'The Happening' is inept. It's not scary because the characters:
A) Behave inappropriately in every situation (as if:
- they are miscast,
- they are miserably directed towards human emotion,
- they are written by somebody who doesn't understand American culture and do not exist in any capacity, defined by either a single trait/misconception on his part of who we are and what we do by the seven films he's watched again and again while he could've been reading and/or talking to people)
B) As they run from a vague threat that is
- not threatening,
- incredibly vague, and
- impossible to run from
C) And the intended suspenseful set-pieces fail the test of suspense by being
- incredibly distant like Shyamalan saw Michael Caine's last scene in 'Children of Men' and thought "How haunting! I should shoot everything in my movie just like that and also try to recreate their journey in a lamely conceived screenplay,
- are telegraphed so far in advance that by the time they happen, we have already dealt with the loss of the dead and moved forward in our lives,
- hilariously acted,
- or so amazingly fucking random that you can only laugh at the absurd timing of this shit.
There are subclauses to the movie's misery. As a parody of Keystone Cops or Benny Hill, one could work wonders in Aftereffects. But as a parody of M. Night Shyamalan's own work, you can't do better. If this was shorter and I found it on youtube, I would recommend everybody that I know watch it immediately. I would call it brilliant without hesitation. So if it happens to be directed by M. Night Shyamalan on a budget of $60 million --
(ALSO - I have no idea where it went. Honestly. $20 mil max to the cast, $10 mil for M. Night to direct, $10 mil for M. Night to write, $5 mil for M. Night to produce, and the rest to catering and shooting Philly back yards - I guess they actually did have to do a needless company move to France and knowing his ineptitude, the four minutes probably took seven months).
-- does that make it any less of a brilliant achievement? Just because it's so inadvertently hilarious when so few movies can't even begin to advertently be so good?
It has the same hang-ups as all of M. Night's movies except there's an especially blithe misunderstanding of American society. Adultery consists of having desert with a co-worker (and misusing the word tiramisu so badly that I can't believe they couldn't ask for a Take 2) and/or going back for extra cold medication when the receptionist is incredibly attractive even if you don't have a cold. Doesn't anybody get laid in this universe? Who's the individual who gets the most ass in a Shyamalan film? Bruce Willis in 'The Sixth Sense' and he's stiff out of rigor mortis! Mark Wahlburg and Zooey Deschanel (both very particular talents who require absolute perfect casting not to be cloyingly one dimensional) can deliver his dialogue let alone several page-long diatribes no better than they can look married as opposed to strangers doesn't take away from his isolationist worldview. Has a foreigner ever brought less of his own country to our land before or best exhibited the bullshit anthem we trumpet to other countries of a world that doesn't exist? He's Brian DePalma regurgitating Alfred Hitchcock regurgitating Frank Capra...but in 'The Happening', he's never put himself on display so clearly. If there is a more transparent filmmaker alive than M. Night Shyamalan, I don't know.
On the other hand, let’s examine for a moment Shyamalan’s much-profiled arrogance as both a filmmaker and the world’s foremost champion of M. Night Shyamalan: M. Night Shyamalan himself. He has said in writing that people who don't like 'The Happening' just aren't smart enough to get it. The joke is on him: we get his work better than he does at this point. Good work challenges you intellectually, and the failing of ‘The Happening’ is a rather minor one: it doesn’t succeed as a horror movie. But as an interactive cinematic coloring book, it’s fantastic! One gets the pleasure of imagining how ‘The Happening’ could be a better suspense thriller by look at the seven moments in the film designed to scare and asking “Why was I not scared of that?” Is it reasons of non-existent spatial relationship or because it’s paced like a Soviet epic? OR!!! You can paint in your own scary speed bumps along the way and feel legitimately superior to M. Night Shyamalan by providing the script doctoring that he would never allow within spitting distance of his precious Final Cut-approved bullshit in the first place.
M. Night Shyamalan starts out as either a one-man film school by way of inadvertent example, or the most notoriously belly-flopped Oscar-nominated filmmaker in a decade (what is a John Madden film anyway? And who goes to Stephen Daldry films in the first place?)…but actually, he’s a hilariously delusional douchebag who might never work in this town again. Enjoy him while you can!
Edited By Sabin on 1215318070
As a sincere work of suspense, 'The Happening' is inept. It's not scary because the characters:
A) Behave inappropriately in every situation (as if:
- they are miscast,
- they are miserably directed towards human emotion,
- they are written by somebody who doesn't understand American culture and do not exist in any capacity, defined by either a single trait/misconception on his part of who we are and what we do by the seven films he's watched again and again while he could've been reading and/or talking to people)
B) As they run from a vague threat that is
- not threatening,
- incredibly vague, and
- impossible to run from
C) And the intended suspenseful set-pieces fail the test of suspense by being
- incredibly distant like Shyamalan saw Michael Caine's last scene in 'Children of Men' and thought "How haunting! I should shoot everything in my movie just like that and also try to recreate their journey in a lamely conceived screenplay,
- are telegraphed so far in advance that by the time they happen, we have already dealt with the loss of the dead and moved forward in our lives,
- hilariously acted,
- or so amazingly fucking random that you can only laugh at the absurd timing of this shit.
There are subclauses to the movie's misery. As a parody of Keystone Cops or Benny Hill, one could work wonders in Aftereffects. But as a parody of M. Night Shyamalan's own work, you can't do better. If this was shorter and I found it on youtube, I would recommend everybody that I know watch it immediately. I would call it brilliant without hesitation. So if it happens to be directed by M. Night Shyamalan on a budget of $60 million --
(ALSO - I have no idea where it went. Honestly. $20 mil max to the cast, $10 mil for M. Night to direct, $10 mil for M. Night to write, $5 mil for M. Night to produce, and the rest to catering and shooting Philly back yards - I guess they actually did have to do a needless company move to France and knowing his ineptitude, the four minutes probably took seven months).
-- does that make it any less of a brilliant achievement? Just because it's so inadvertently hilarious when so few movies can't even begin to advertently be so good?
It has the same hang-ups as all of M. Night's movies except there's an especially blithe misunderstanding of American society. Adultery consists of having desert with a co-worker (and misusing the word tiramisu so badly that I can't believe they couldn't ask for a Take 2) and/or going back for extra cold medication when the receptionist is incredibly attractive even if you don't have a cold. Doesn't anybody get laid in this universe? Who's the individual who gets the most ass in a Shyamalan film? Bruce Willis in 'The Sixth Sense' and he's stiff out of rigor mortis! Mark Wahlburg and Zooey Deschanel (both very particular talents who require absolute perfect casting not to be cloyingly one dimensional) can deliver his dialogue let alone several page-long diatribes no better than they can look married as opposed to strangers doesn't take away from his isolationist worldview. Has a foreigner ever brought less of his own country to our land before or best exhibited the bullshit anthem we trumpet to other countries of a world that doesn't exist? He's Brian DePalma regurgitating Alfred Hitchcock regurgitating Frank Capra...but in 'The Happening', he's never put himself on display so clearly. If there is a more transparent filmmaker alive than M. Night Shyamalan, I don't know.
On the other hand, let’s examine for a moment Shyamalan’s much-profiled arrogance as both a filmmaker and the world’s foremost champion of M. Night Shyamalan: M. Night Shyamalan himself. He has said in writing that people who don't like 'The Happening' just aren't smart enough to get it. The joke is on him: we get his work better than he does at this point. Good work challenges you intellectually, and the failing of ‘The Happening’ is a rather minor one: it doesn’t succeed as a horror movie. But as an interactive cinematic coloring book, it’s fantastic! One gets the pleasure of imagining how ‘The Happening’ could be a better suspense thriller by look at the seven moments in the film designed to scare and asking “Why was I not scared of that?” Is it reasons of non-existent spatial relationship or because it’s paced like a Soviet epic? OR!!! You can paint in your own scary speed bumps along the way and feel legitimately superior to M. Night Shyamalan by providing the script doctoring that he would never allow within spitting distance of his precious Final Cut-approved bullshit in the first place.
M. Night Shyamalan starts out as either a one-man film school by way of inadvertent example, or the most notoriously belly-flopped Oscar-nominated filmmaker in a decade (what is a John Madden film anyway? And who goes to Stephen Daldry films in the first place?)…but actually, he’s a hilariously delusional douchebag who might never work in this town again. Enjoy him while you can!
Edited By Sabin on 1215318070
"How's the despair?"