The Happening November 24, 2009
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , trackbackThe 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.
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Only worth watching to see Zooey Deschannel’s loopy performance (if it can be called a performance)
“Never has so little talent been inflicted on the great british public” Winston Churchill might have said.
d.f.
It’s been a gentle downslide for M Knight, hasn’t it, though perhaps this was arrested a bit with The Happening, which at least wasn’t as bloody boring as Lady in the Water. What a trawl that film was; at least here we had those wonderfully disturbing suicide scenes before it all went to bobbins in the film’s second half. The Crappening, indeed.
I have to agree wholeheartedly with your comment about Moon. I’d have had to travel to the Cornerhouse in Manchester to see it, whereas The Crap was playing just about everywhere. Nobody might have been entering the theatres, but it was available.
Yeah, you’re absolutely right on every count. If you want some insight into what seems to be going on in the M. Night camp, you really really should read this:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Man-Who-Heard-Voices-Shyamalan/dp/1592402135/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259229180&sr=1-1
Written as a puff piece by a fawning sycophant, there’s still so much amazing egotism and stupidity on display, it’s a must-read. It’s cheap and very entertaining.
What worries me most is that some people who should know better [DVDBeaver’s Gary Tooze, for example] still seem to think he’s some kind of misunderstood master-craftsman, rather than the pretentious journeyman [at best; hack at worst] that the evidence more strongly suggests.
On a positive note, I watched Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan last night for the first time since it came out, and LOVED it. Not really relevant, but I’m telling everyone anyway.
Both Tarantino and Shyamalan’s declines can be blamed on their egomaniacal attachment to self-penned, increasingly self-indulgent-and-parodic scripts.
Adapting existing material while unmistakably imbuing it with one’s own style and concerns was good enough for the likes of Hitchcock, Kubrick and Kurosawa, as well as (more recently) Scorsese and Wes Anderson, to name but five.