The Happening November 24, 2009
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 4 commentsThe biggest mystery about this film is simply this- how does M. Night Shyamalan get away with making movies when John Carpenter can’t seem to get a film-making gig outside of cable television? I have two theories- one, that Hollywood simply hates us, and two, that Carpenter is laid-back, happily putting his feet up and earning so much money from all those shitty remakes of his movies he basically doesn’t need to get off his butt.
Well actually I believe Carpenter is -at last- actually making another film but he’s been in the wilderness for so long there’s something Very Wrong about the universe when Shyamalan makes so many Twilight Zone wananbies in Big Screen guise. He’s basically just a one-trick pony, much like that other modern Wunderkind Quentin Tarantino. Whereas Tarantino recreates Grindhouse video faves as foul-mouthed lessons in ‘cool’, Shyamalan just pads out stories that would fit 30-minute tv shows into bloated, increasingly wearisome full-length borefests with A-list talent. Sure, The Sixth Sense was pretty good but with Unbreakable the signs of trouble were already plain to see. His dismal slide continued with Signs and The Village and The Lady In The Water, but with The Happening he’s hitting such a low, it’s striking.
This film has no point. The script is awful, the dialogue inane, the acting embarrassing. How does Shyamalan attract the actors, the Hollywood talent, the studio money? There are amazing scripts out there that will never see celluloid, and instead we get films like this- unbelievable. There is no tension, no fear. Hard to believe anyone could sit through the entire debacle at the cinema without threatening a lynching unless they got their money back. Hard to believe it ever got a distribution deal, and that this film played at my local cinema and Moon didn’t. There is something very wrong there.
This is the worst horror/thriller film I have seen since the remake of The Wicker Man. And Mark Wahlberg actually gives Nic Cage a run for his money as most cringe-worthy performance, which is saying something.
Avoid at all costs people. Maybe the new Trek film really is the classic everyone is saying it is! Certainly compared to this movie Trek is a Citizen Kane- and that is what is wrong with modern Hollywood. The bad films are so bad mediocre films look like classics in comparison.
Star Trek Revisited November 20, 2009
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , add a commentWell, okay… I succumbed. I bought the blu-ray of the new Star Trek movie, which I saw in the cinema back in May. I’ve got no excuses. except that the wife, who has no interest in Star Trek’s other incarnations, really enjoyed it. That last point really says it all about the new Trek- it’s not aimed at the old fans at all (Paramount aren’t putting $150 million into a charity- they want a return on their investment so it’s aimed at a much wider audience-base than ‘Trekkers’).
Not that I’d consider myself a ‘Trekker’, I have little or no interest in later incarnations of the show; my love stems from the original era, having grown up adoring the show in my childhood. I read the comics, had an annual every Christmas, had jigsaws, built the model-kits, read all the James Blish adaptations in paperback.
I shouldn’t get too indignant I suppose, as the original show was hardly a classic every week, and some episodes have aged better than others. I’ve bought the new blu-ray sets of the show, remastered episodes with new/old effects, and have really enjoyed some episodes and cringed at others (I’ve bought seasons one and two, with no intention of getting the dire season three). Whatever the shows faults though, it can’t be denied how ahead of it’s time the show was, and how impressive it is that the creators even tried shooting a sci-fi show like that back in the ’sixties, complete with space battles, alien planets etc. It’s been tried again many times since with limited success (Space:1999, and the original BSG spring to mind).
So in some ways that’s the biggest offence that the new Trek commits- it brings little new to the mix, while in other ways it fails to recreate the magic of the original. Some things work, while others are hoplessly ill-judged. The pre-credit sequence is genius, with a mythic, emotional grandeur totally lacking in the remainder of the film, to the point that it seems in hindsight to come from a totally different movie. The car-stealing kiddie-Kirk. Simon Pegg’s awful Scotty, and the destruction of Vulcan are the most ill-judged elements for me and hard to forgive, as are all the plot-holes like transporting to a ship which is travelling at warpspeed, at an unknown location hundreds of light years away. Really, the stupidity of modern movies is insulting at times.
So anyway, watching the film again in the comfort of my armchair- it suffers all the old faults and frustrating possibilities of greatness that bugged me at the cinema. It just seems to go by more quickly now, which is a mercy of its own I suppose. It’s hardly a total disaster, and has me curious about what they will do with a sequel. I just hope they apply a bit of Spock’s logic to the script next time and reign in on some of the thoughtless excesses of the writers.
And no, I have tried but I really just don’t ‘get’ the new Enterprise re-design. I do love Ben Burtt’s sound effects though- this is one film that sounds absolutely lovely.
2012 in less than 60 seconds/words. November 18, 2009
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 1 comment so farAgh. Well, should have known what to expect. A cgi blitzkrieg with a by-the-numbers script (and oddy something of a remake of Spielberg’s War Of The Worlds). Daft over-blown nonsense. Vastly inferior to The Day After Tomorrow. Some websites reckon a tv-series spin-off may be on the cards, mind boggles.