To start: I apologize for lying to all of you so brazenly last night.
Well, I stuck to it for a little while anyway. The agreement we made after leaving The Grande last night was that we would tell you all how awesome The Happening was so that as many people as possible could go see it.
Then you could share our pain. Oh yes, dear reader, I was lying my ass off last night. In order to understand exactly how I feel about M. Night's latest, reread what I wrote yesterday and know I mean the opposite about almost everything. I was telling the truth about one thing, though: I was riveted by the film and could not stop watching because it amazed me that a film this astoundingly awful ever made it to theatres.
It boggles my mind that 20th Century Fox actually released this. Surely someone must've watched the film after Night finished this, if they weren't sending producers to check up on him during filming. Did no one notice the lousy camera work? Maybe the insipid dialogue that repeats the same questions over and over and over but never considers addressing them? I know I said the acting was uniformly awful, and it is, but it's not purposeful. Anyone who would intentionally subject this on an audience is a true sadist.
Leckie did try to sell us the "Communist Scare" film angle, but I don't buy it. The Happening is too heavy handed and so stunningly bad that had Shyamalan been doing this on purpose, his career would be over. There would be no "next" film for him. I told you to think of movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers last night, and that was also a complete and total lie.
You should probably think of Plan 9 from Outer Space. Except that Plan 9 is more entertaining.
This isn't hyperbole, folks. Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel, two people who I consder to be pretty good in other movies, are SO BAD in The Happening that within fifteen minutes, I asked aloud "is this a joke?". I felt like the three of us were part of some kind of massive prank, because The Happening should be rotting on a shelf somewhere.
I urge you to go see it, and maybe I'll go with you. When I told Leckie and Daniel that I was considering taking everyone coming to Horror Fest to see it, they told me they'd catch up with the fest later. The Happening must be seen to be believed, because the reviews from yesterday and today are so diametrically opposed that a lot of you aren't going to be sure which one is the real one.
This is the real one, because I can talk about something there's no way to spin positive: the chase scene. In the middle of this already retarded movie, where Mark Wahlberg (playing a SCIENCE TEACHER!!!) keeps flip flopping about whether plants are killing people or not, is in the middle of the field with other similarly worthless characters. Half of their group splits off and starts dying, and Wahlberg says "we must be ahead of the wind. Oh no! Here comes the wind! Run!!! We have to stay ahead of the wind!"
That's not an exaggeration. Then we see them running, and Night cuts away to well, wind. Wind that's blowing the grass in a not-really-menacing way. You see, there's nothing really frightening about the endless cutaways to trees and grass blowing that makes up most of the movie. I guess Shyamalan thought it did, but it's just silly. The scene where a girl is swinging and the camera tilts up to show the branch two or three times gets really funny.
A lot of The Happening is very, VERY funny, and not intentionally. Often the camera plops down right in front of an actor and they stare blankly at us, then deliver the dumbest thing you've ever heard. Like, "I'm talking to a plastic tree. I'm still doing it."
I mentioned the "You Deserve It" sign last night, but not the clumsily placed Nuclear Power Plant behind a plant nursery, because I couldn't figure out a way to make that not sound as subtle as a brick wall. I left out the myriad of pointless subplots that don't enrich the characters or have anything to do with the film, including Night's cameo. Or the way that every ten minutes or so someone uses the word "happening", all the way through the film. Or the news broadcast where the anchor cites an "anonymous source" to suggest a government conspiracy. Because that would ever occur on the news.
We had a long conversation after the movie trying to digest what exactly we'd seen after the movie. I made the comment that if you'd told me Michael Jackson directed this, I might believe you. It's like The Happening came from a person who had no idea what human beings acted like or spoke like. Fifteen hours later, I still can't believe I actually saw something so terrible. Not because I don't see terrible movies but because this was a major studio film from a director people already have serious doubts about. Surely everyone at Fox involved noticed that this was a disaster long before I paid 6.75 for a ticket.
The only real way I can explain this to you that I mean what I say today is to tell you it's worse than The Time Machine. The Happening may be the worst film I've ever seen. It's astoundingly bad, and I urge you to find out for yourself, because I went in with someone who was a die hard fan and he couldn't understand how this movie came to be. In that regard, it's most entertaining, from the bloodless deaths to the retarded ending and everything in between.
Sneak a few beers in your tummy; it'll help with the experience. Don't wait and rent this, because it may inexplicably vanish in the interim. Go see it in theatres. Feel better about your own shitty student films. I promise you will. And call me, because I need to make sure I didn't imagine the whole thing...
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