The Happening

[ElPandaRoyal]

Night's eye for composition are still some of his strongest points

As funny as this was to read, I'd say this line is just wrong, even in a text with this general tone. Okay, I'm a fan, and even though I think this is a lesser work, I still enjoyed it enough, and if there's something that he's great at is composition.  I can understand people trashing some of his characteristics (dialogue and some scenes require a lot of being into the tone of the movie, and if you're not, they'll just seem stupid) but the way he wrokd the camera, the set pieces, the close-ups... he's great at that - yes, I thought the "follow the gun" scene was one of this year's best. And fuck it, he not only doesn't give a shit about the current fashion of trashing his movies (in America anyway) but he has the balls to go further and farther ahead: he tries to make a movie where AIR is scary. The fucking air.

[Just Withnail]

he tries to make a movie where AIR is scary. The fucking air.

He obvisouly ripped that from the South Park episode Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow.

[diggler]

Spoilers:

it's a shame because wahlberg and deschanel are so horribly miscast that there really is never any hope for the film. Leguizamo does his best with what he's given, but it's not a very large part.  If the film had centered around his character there might've been hope that it could at least be watchable. He does his best with his last scene attempting to distract a female passenger from the horrors outside, but since we were never introduced to this character before you don't really care whether she's freaked or not. 

some parts are played for laughs (the idiotic military guy, wahlbergs apology to the plastic tree) which don't really fit the tone of the film at all. the only scene in the film that created any sort of tension wasn't due to the threat of wind but from the barrel of a shotgun poking through a window (which for some reason stops shooting when wahlberg steps out in the open).  i still really want to like shyamalan, and there are a lot of things in here that prove he's still an effective director. I particularly enjoyed the quick opening sequence (which was sadly overexposed in all of the trailers).  Lady in the Water at least felt like a failure on an EPIC scale. this was just bland and predictable, which is worse.

[SiliasRuby]

Spoilers:

it's a shame because wahlberg and deschanel are so horribly miscast that there really is never any hope for the film. Leguizamo does his best with what he's given, but it's not a very large part.  If the film had centered around his character there might've been hope that it could at least be watchable. He does his best with his last scene attempting to distract a female passenger from the horrors outside, but since we were never introduced to this character before you don't really care whether she's freaked or not. 

some parts are played for laughs (the idiotic military guy, wahlbergs apology to the plastic tree) which don't really fit the tone of the film at all. the only scene in the film that created any sort of tension wasn't due to the threat of wind but from the barrel of a shotgun poking through a window (which for some reason stops shooting when wahlberg steps out in the open).  i still really want to like shyamalan, and there are a lot of things in here that prove he's still an effective director. I particularly enjoyed the quick opening sequence (which was sadly overexposed in all of the trailers).  Lady in the Water at least felt like a failure on an EPIC scale. this was just bland and predictable, which is worse.

Couldn't agree more with this post....really an amazingly rediculous movie and not in a good way at all. Should have listened to you guys and my friends and stayed away.

[Alexandro]

I've never seen such bad acting in a fucking trailer.

I've never seen such bad acting in a fucking movie.
This was wrong in too many ways. I think Shyamalan can do much much better than this. I even Liked Lady in the Water. I don't wanna dwell on it but it was painful to watch.

[Thrindle]

This movie was fucking terrible.  I would have rather watched a 20 minute segment on recyclying than sit through 91 minutes of Shyamalan's attempt to "go green."  Ugh!

[Kal]

I just saw this. Acting was bad. The film itself is watchable and entertaining. I guess this fucker realized his twists were so bad that he decided not to even have one.

[picolas]

i'm sort of watching this right now just to see how terrible it is and i don't think i'm going to make it.. the acting is unforgivable. unbearably AWKWARD in every scene from every single person. the writing doesn't help at all (it's horrifically bad too), but M Night is clearly telling people to do stupid things all the time. really specific stupid things. like "after that line, open your eyes REALLY wide!" or "wave your hands and arms a lot as you explain things." it's ed woodian.

[MacGuffin]

*SPOILERS*



M. Night has always been better at concept than character, so this film was par for the course for him. It's just that the underlying 'message' in that concept clutters what would have made for a better film. It would be okay not to give any explaination and let the happening happen. But M. Night is on point when he has scenes where no dialogue is said and events play out for you to see or even hear. It's what I think he's best at and what I can admire him for. From the opening rooftop rain of people, to the pass the gun scene, to the tree hangings, the car crash, and the mower; they are all great deaths and the film's strength. He even makes wind a character and, yes, scary. If he could have scaled himself back, or even rewritten himself, he would made for a film with more suspense.

[picolas]

wicker man-esque highlight reels

[MacGuffin]

Shyamalan Unpacks The Happening

Director M. Night Shyamalan offered insights into his SF thriller film The Happening, which arrives on DVD this week, in a conference call with reporters. The film stars Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo and Spencer Breslin in a story about people trying to figure out what is causing an epidemic of sudden suicide. The film made $161 million worldwide. Following are Shyamalan's thoughts about key elements in the movie.

"You deserve this." When Mark Wahlberg passes into the Clear Hill community, there's a sign that announces, "You deserve this." Shyamalan said that the ironic motto embodies his own disdain for encroaching suburbia. "I've always been a little bit averse to the whole sprawling development stuff, where they take farmland and they take all these forests and drop 90 identical homes on a hillside," he said. "For many reasons, then, some of them would seem odd, but even in terms of individuality and personal expression, I love driving by someone's home and being able to know something about them, that there's no other home like that particular home. However little or large, it's something of an extension of the human being. And then to spread in that fashion the way we do now, so hundreds and hundreds of acres are taken up, and then we put identical homes and everyone just goes into their cubicle without personal expression and without regard to what we're doing to nature, it just seems we're going into a soulless place. ...

"I'd seen the sign once for one of these developments: ... [the] "Make your dreams come true," "You've worked hard," ... "You've earned this" kind of feeling. And so it stuck in my head when I was making that one ... [to] see if we could play on the words a little bit."

An Inconvenient coincidence? Shyamalan wrote the environmentally themed Happening before Al Gore's global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth came out. But he said that he was amazed at how the documentary coincided with some of his movie. "I saw it after I wrote it, and I did feel a little bit like this was the fictional science fiction version of that," he said. "That documentary [about] 'How can we continue to think that we're not a threat to the planet?' If we don't change our ways within 100 years, any rational person can see that there'll be nothing left if we continue to do what we're doing."

Surprise, surprise! How does Shyamalan keep his films fresh? "I think that is the bane of being an original filmmaker," he said. "You always get the 'I thought I was getting ... .' And then you get judged by that, as opposed to, well, there should be an assumption that you don't know what you're getting. And then please don't use another movie of someone else or even my movies to have an expectation about what you're going to see. ... Let's say I Am Legend and The Happening are similar movies in terms of their subject [matter]--end-of-the-world movies, that kind of thing--where one ends with man saving the day. Mine ends with man being the villain. That in and of itself is a specific choice that is important to me as the author, but contrary to the expectations of the human being who came and sat in the multiplex."

Scare tactics. "I have a creative autism or something that just makes me focus in on the thing that is getting me really excited," Shyamalan said. "I can understand intellectually how it would be that wind might not be naturally scary to somebody, but if I told you that there's a gas in the wind, and it's coming and that you have to shut the doors and close the windows and make sure no air gets in, I can see a million variations of how that would be scary to me. I love taking something innocuous and then, by the end of the movie, making you nervous about it and imbuing it with ominous or portentous qualities."

Film mentors. "I feel a little bit like a dinosaur in this day and age of filmmaking, maybe momentarily not knowing whether my accent means anything to anybody," Shyamalan said. "But where it came from, this idea of Kurosawa or even Kubrick or Hitchcock, those three guys [have] their quiet tension that they do with the frame, as opposed to stimuli scares or suspense. I'm not naturally the stimuli suspense guy. ... I don't think in terms of when I think of an alien invasion I think of hearing about it, and then seeing a couple of lights on a TV, as opposed to all these amazing filmmakers, I'm sure like Spielberg and Jackson and obviously Lucas and all these guys, James Cameron, they would all do the spectacular version of it. But my mind never goes there."

Effect of Green Effect. The original script was called The Green Effect and centered more on an environmental crisis. "In that draft, it was much larger scale, so it's happening all over the world instantaneously, so it was very apocalyptic," Shyamalan said. "And that one, as most of my instincts do start out, was pretty dark. I remember I had calculated--I have it all scribbled down in some notebook somewhere--but I calculated the population of how much I wanted left on the planet when this was all done, to kind of start over in an innocuous number of the species so we could have another chance at repopulating the correct way again, and it was something like .0006 percent or something. So I had calculated down how many people that would leave in each country before the environment stopped and said, 'OK, now we're back at equilibrium.'"

The R Factor. This is one of the few movies of Shyamalan's where a lot of the violence is shown and marks the director's first R rating. "The screenplay I wrote was just an impossibility to shot as a PG-13 movie, as my other movies have been," Shyamalan said. "And, to some extent, the movies that I've been inspired by in my life--like The Exorcist, The Godfather and others--there is a visceralness to them that I hadn't really let myself go there, except on occasion, like in the stabbing scene in The Village or a few moments in Sixth Sense or the fingers getting cut off in Signs. ... You know, the two sides of me, for whatever reason, are this kind of really naive 'Santa Claus is real' side and then the 'Oh, my God!' I know how to throw that lady off the roof of the building and make it really disgusting. I don't know why they both live in the same head, but they're there."

Knocking hot dogs. There's a rant about hot dogs in the film. "I'm an All-American boy, I'm a big cheeseburger and hot dog guy and all of that stuff," Shyamalan said. "You know, I'm not allowed to take my kids [for junk food], because my wife is vegetarian and all healthy and all that stuff. But occasionally [I do]. I actually went to visit an orphanage in India recently, and she's like, 'Where are you going with them?' I said, 'I'm taking them out.' 'Where are you going?' 'Well, we're going to McDonalds.' And she said, 'What, what did you say?' And I said, 'I'm taking them to McDonalds.' I took the whole orphanage to McDonalds. So I have a great affinity for all that stuff. I do think they get a bad rap, man."

Personal reflections? What movie is most like the writer/director? "I've been really different from The Sixth Sense to Unbreakable, and if this was a therapy session--which these often are--I would say that Unbreakable and Lady in the Water are the truest versions of me, and the other movies are parts of me."

More blood on DVD. The DVD extras contains some of the more violent scenes that needed to be cut from the film. "You see some of that on the DVD," Shyamalan said. "I'm anal about the experience being the one that I frame-for-frame decided was the best experience, with the balance of everything I just did, but I really wanted you to see those sequences that were more visceral, that ended up for me feeling like trauma to the audience, that they couldn't recover from them, but powerful. So those are on the DVD."

[RegularKarate]

wicker man-esque highlight reels

With the exception of the last clip (which is included in the second one as well), these clips don't work the same way the Wicker-man clips do.  There's a lot of the intentional humor included, which takes away from the non-intentional.

[squints]

this is true. but i found Zoey Deschanel's awkward maneuver putting her cell phone in her purse and then the little hand-under-the-chin gesture unintentionally hilarious. what terrible terrible directing/acting.

[Alexandro]

this is true. but i found Zoey Deschanel's awkward maneuver putting her cell phone in her purse and then the little hand-under-the-chin gesture unintentionally hilarious. what terrible terrible directing/acting.

right. the intentional humor in the happening is terrible. and that cell stuff is bad in every possible way. when i saw this in the theatre i couldn't believe it. it was like seeing acting in the worst mexican soap opera imaginable.

oh yeah, and he makes the wind scary? really, was it scary for anyone? was people on the edge of their seats in that scene? because I was mad at this film for being so stupid. this guy seemed to think that because he says so, now the wind is scary, because "it has gas in it"...jesus, just thinking about it I get angry again.

[MacGuffin]

*SPOILERS*

oh yeah, and he makes the wind scary? really, was it scary for anyone? was people on the edge of their seats in that scene? because I was mad at this film for being so stupid. this guy seemed to think that because he says so, now the wind is scary, because "it has gas in it"...jesus, just thinking about it I get angry again.

There's the scene where they decide to break off into smaller groups and the wind is shown gradually blowing the grass as it's approaching behind them. I found it to be the same as a killer coming up behind the unsuspecting heroes, because once they realize it, there's that panic for them to run.