The Happening?- A Director’s Career Continues To Go In The Wrong Direction. Ironic.
Written: Oct 20 '08 (Updated Nov 07 '08)
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: Interesting Idea (Night has a lot of them). Cool suicides, Pretty to look at.
Cons: The Writing, The Acting. The Casting
The Bottom Line: I talk to the trees... but they don't listen to me.
Stupid trees.
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| shmoo1's Full Review: The Happening |
Howdy Folks. Did I mention that summer is over and that the cottage is all packed up? I tried to find this under videos but it's not up there yet, so you'll just have to suffer with it here.
I like The Night (he makes me boogie...BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!). I don’t refer to him as “A Night” or Shyamalan but as “The Night”. I’ve always been a fan of his, and yet I find myself defending him more and more as his career goes on. It doesn’t surprise me, he hit the ground with such a Herculean quake that he’s been trying to live up to his immediate success ever since. Probably the worst thing that could have happened to him in his early career was Sixth Sense.
It was a tough film to top and of course everything else he’s done is now measured by that same yard stick.The main problem is that everything else he’s done has been somewhat easy to defend for me… even Lady In The Water… until now.
If you hold Sixth Sense at a 5 star rating then the rest of his films go as follows: Unbreakable- 4.5 (always felt slightly unfinished to me), Signs- 4 (style starting to get predictable), The Village- 3.5 (too long and guessed the ending way too early), Lady In The Water- 2.5 (not Night’s fault… badly marketed and we were made to believe the movie would be something that it truly wasn’t), and now The Happening.
I can’t defend The Happening. You’re on your own here man.
What’s Happening?- No, not that TV Show starring Raj and Rerun… I mean here, in this film.
Central Park NY is where it hits first. Everyone thinks that it’s some high-falutin’ biological terrorist attack and it hits the human population in 3 different stages. Stage one- disorientation… people repeat themselves and seem to regress mentally. Stage two- immobility… people just freeze in place and Stage 3- An urge to kill yourself. All around, folks silently commit suicide using any means at their disposal and boy …are folks creative about it. The first suicide we see is a lady who jams a foot long hair pin into her own jugular. One guy lies down in front of an industrial sized lawn mulcher. The story follows high school science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) his wife Alma (Zooey Deshanel), his friend and fellow teacher Julian (John Leguizamo) and Julian’s daughter (some retched young actress who I have never seen before and hope to never seen again) as they try to get out of Pennsylvania and go somewhere (anywhere) where the attack isn’t happening.
They board a train that loses contact with “the outside world” and stops short in a little town called Filbert Pennsylvania, dumping everyone off. Just as well. If they had traveled to a major populace, they would have been dead in no time.
From there folks enter and leave the main circle of interest (Elliot, Alma and Julian’s daughter) as they struggle to find a place that hasn’t been hit. They are directly in the middle of all the infected areas and dead bodies and the attack hitting smaller and smaller groups of people are making it harder for them to escape.
The three of them finally end up having to take refuge at the house of some highly unstable, reclusive widow (Betty Buckley).
Who’s it Happening To?- All the people in the Northeastern US, pretty much from Maryland to northern NY. No one is immune. The attack targets the largest, densest populations first (originating in parks) and trickles down from cities to towns to roads to smaller clusters of people and finally to individual humans.
Why’s It Happening?- Because of the plants. The plants hate our guts. I don’t think I’m giving away a major plot point here since the connection is made about 30 minutes into the movie when the second main attack happens in a park in Philadelphia.
Did I mention that the trees and the grass hate our guts too and that all plants communicate?
Could explain why my weeds keep coming back.
What Happened? – Lets start with the acting. No one was any damned good. The performances ranged from forced and awkward (Leguizamo and Wahlberg) to wooden (Deschanel) to just downright horrible (Ashlyn Sanchez who played Leguizamo's daughter… yes I know her name, I’m just trying to forget it).
The emotion didn’t ring true at all. The panic was fake. The two best performances in the movie were by Cornell Womack (a construction worker watching all his friends toss themselves off the roof) and Jennifer Wiener (a woman talking to her daughter on the phone as the daughter loses it and offs herself).
I need to point out that both these parts are one step above extra roles.
Step two-The casting- M. Night Shyamalan apparently wrote this part specifically for Marky Mark ("Say Hi to your mother for me, okay?"). My question is why. What’s so special about Mark Wahlberg that he immediately makes you think of a high school science teacher with a somewhat troubled marriage? Anyone could have played this.
What’s with Zooey Deschanel as his wife? Anyone else SHOULD have played this. She wasn’t convincing at all. Frankly she’s not that great an actress and I can think of exactly one movie I’ve liked her in… Elf. She was good in Elf. John Lequizamo, who I usually love, was a throw away in this role and the daughter… well, I can only assume that Night was doing someone a favor for much needed funding. The thing that particularly annoys me about this casting is that we KNOW that Shyamalan has an incredibly adept eye when it comes to child actors. Haley Joel Osment turned in possibly one of the greatest child performances in Sixth Sense I have ever seen. Spencer Treat Clark in Unbreakable was no slouch either. How could Night have possibly thought that this girl turned in a decent performance?
Step three- The writing- The writing itself was clunky. None of the dialogue flowed, Night relied heavily on soliloquies that didn’t work and sounded rehearsed. If I didn’t know better I would swear that Night was single because the monkey wrench he throws into the marriage of Alma and Elliot to show that their marriage is “on the rocks” is so minor that it’s almost comical.
The DVD comes with several featurettes (scene dissection etc) deleted scenes and a gag reel, none of which I watched because I just wasn’t interested enough. The only reason that this movie got two stars was because some of the death scenes were gruesome and … inventive, however they don't make this movie worth renting, especially since you can go on You Tube and take a look at most of them for free.
Night needs a hit. A big monster, “nominate me for another Oscar” hit or I swear that in five years time, based on his current backward path, he will be directing made for TV movies and maybe really cool rock videos.
Recommended:
No
Movie Mood: Die-hard Fans Only
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Script
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shmoo1
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Location: Milton On. Canada
Reviews written: 103
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About Me:Vote Kingfish/ Shmoo in 2012 'Cuz A Shmoo In The Hand...
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