The Happening

[cinemanarchist]

I noticed they're stressing that this is his first R rated film in the tv ads.

Never a good sign...It's like the dice...that's really all they've got.

[Stefen]

lol

[modage]

i saw this actually, in real life.  i can't remember if it was the Grand St stop on the D or someplace else though.  i remember thinking "that's awesome" and the internets thought that too.

[MacGuffin]

A sadder but wiser M. Night Shyamalan
After the very public drowning of 'Lady in the Water,' the chastened but still upbeat director returns with a tense thriller, 'The Happening.'
By Rachel Abramowitz, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

MALVERN, PA. -- HE DESCRIBES the experience of making "Lady in the Water," the biggest flop of his career, as something akin to stripping off all his clothes and running outside to have the world collectively laugh at him.

But in a good way.

M. Night Shyamalan, the 37-year-old film director who shot to fame with "The Sixth Sense" in 1999, is not talking about large-scale humiliation but rather personal empowerment -- the freedom that comes from giving up concern about other people's expectations.

"My hope for the movie was a personal one," he says. "I'm sick of feeling like I hope the cool people like me. I hope the teachers like me. You know that thing you do when you're in school? And you're in your mid-30s and you go, 'I'm sick of feeling this way.' And you kind of like have this urge to take all your clothes off and run outside and say, 'Make fun of me. Are we done? Is that it? Good, let's go on with our lives.'

"That really is what happened and I feel like I've been cleansed in some way."

Just weeks before the opening of Shyamalan's new movie, "The Happening," a phantasmagoriaof paranoia that arrives on Friday, the director is sitting in the private dining room of Creighton Farm, his little equivalent of Skywalker Ranch. His business offices and editing suite are set in a colonial stone home on this bucolic spread of Pennsylvania land. Across the walls, in chronological order, are the posters from his movies, from the little-seen early ones -- "Praying With Anger" and "Wide Awake" -- to the better-known -- "The Sixth Sense," "Signs" and "The Village."

Everything about Shyamalan the person appears pristine, precise, aesthetic. He's extremely thin, in a white shirt and jeans. A private chef -- who cooks for everyone who works at Creighton -- has served an immaculate lunch (Thai chicken, wasabi mashed potatoes) in tiny portions, each the size of a baby's fist. Yet the director also exudes a disconcerting mixture of warmth, guilelessness and confidence -- though not the walk-on-water sunny assurance he had in conversation four years ago. A vague soupçon of chagrin hangs over him. He's been through a complete cycle of media glorification and diminution, and emerged chastened but certainly not bowed. He's also, perhaps more important, not embittered.

Shyamalan occupies an unusual place in the pop-culture pantheon. He's a writer-director, an auteur of popcorn films, who has turned his own idiosyncratic brew of horror, psychology and spirituality into a global brand. Most of the directors who've come of age with him have divided themselves into two camps: the entertainers and the artistes. The entertainers -- Gore Verbinski, Sam Raimi, Doug Liman, Christopher Nolan, Bryan Singer -- have almost all gravitated to big franchise fare, the juggernauts that Hollywood prizes most, such properties as "Spider-Man," "Batman" and "X-Men." The artistes, most of whom write, include Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell and Quentin Tarantino. Most have made occasional missteps into insular self-importance and almost none has reached as broad an audience (nor made as much money) as Shyamalan.

The downside is steep

UNTIL NOW, Shyamalan has gotten a lot of approbation -- and flak -- for having a foot in both camps. He's received two Oscar nominations, but when he misfires, the fan base goes ballistic rather than simply wrinkle its nose in disappointment, as might happen for another director. And, oh yes, like Alfred Hitchcock, Shyamalan puts himself in small roles in most of his movies -- though his acting is less inspired than his filmmaking.

If Shyamalan had been just another writer-director trying to tell original stories, "Lady in the Water," released in 2006, would be considered just another arty misstep on the tortuous path of originality. But the film, a fractured fairy tale about a water nymph sent to awaken a mortal to make the world a better place, engendered outright vitriol. As Manohla Dargis wrote in the New York Times, it was unclear what the nymph was trying to get the humans to hear, "the crash of waves, the songs of the sirens, the voice of God -- until we realize that, of course, we're meant to cup our ear to an even higher power: Mr. Shyamalan."

The director's distress was amplified by the fact that he'd cooperated with a tell-all book by Sports Illustrated writer Michael Bamberger, "The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale and Lost." The words "and Lost" were added to the paperback edition after the film failed commercially. Although the book is fairly sycophantic, Shyamalan is portrayed as veering between arrogance and self-doubt with a huge chunk of mono-obsession thrown in, not unlike so many other directors.

In truth, he comes off infinitely more humane than most of the directors that appear in, say, Peter Biskind's histories of Hollywood, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" and "Down and Dirty Pictures." But one incident recounted in "The Man Who Heard Voices" became notorious -- playing out in newspapers and magazines across the country. That's when Shyamalan broke off with his longtime corporate benefactor, the Walt Disney Co., after executives expressed concerns about "Lady in the Water."

Not only was it unusual to have an actual airing of creative differences, but the moral of the story ran counter to the myth of the filmmaker as the guy who teaches the bean-counters about risk and ingenuity. In this case, the suits turned out to be right. The film was flawed. Schadenfreude careened around the studios like the metal ball in a pinball machine.

Now, in retrospect, Shyamalan cops to a certain amount of innocence in letting his personality all hang out. "He didn't misquote me or anything like that. We both were naive in terms of thinking that being open is the best way. Don't play the game."

The media contretemps was stressful and upsetting, but he tries to be stoic about the vicissitudes of Hollywood fame. "The love-hate relationship that goes to love for a while and goes to hate for a while and then goes back to love. . . . You can let yourself get snapped and break in that process," he says. "I've watched so many friends going through it. People I admire have gone through it, you know, on much worse scales. The only answer I've thought of in terms of how to handle the [fallout] is be truthful of myself and consistent as long as they let me make movies."

And he has one more mantra: "Don't ever fall to the temptation of 'I'm going to chase you as my audience,' " he says, noting, "As soon as you do that, the system broke you."

Chalk it up to inspiration

ONE COULD think of "The Happening" as a calculated rebound from "Lady in the Water," a genre-movie chaser as a safe follow-up to a risky film that flopped. (Indeed, Shyamalan will soon have his own franchise -- he's about to embark on an ambitious three-picture cinematic rendition of the Nickelodeon cartoon "Avatar: The Last Airbender.")

Yet, Shyamalan insists he doesn't operate that way. In fact, he wrote "The Happening" before "Lady in the Water" was even finished.

He was driving to New York City, which is a couple of hours from where he lives in Pennsylvania. "You get into a kind of hazy half-sleep. And this idea kind of bloomed and it was big. The plot, like you could feel it. Sometimes the thing that makes me make a movie is a character. Sometimes it's a scene. And sometimes it's a structure. And this one had a structure to it which is really, again, another really wonderful moment if it happens."

The image in his head was a lot like the one that is on the poster, a forbidding road with abandoned cars and people mysteriously absent. "It's 90 minutes of just straight paranoia," Shyamalan says, like Hitchcock's "The Birds," in which birds inexplicably begin attacking human beings.

It's one of those movies where the less you know, the scarier it is, and "The Happening" begins with a bang: People stop frozen in New York City's Central Park and then begin inexplicably killing themselves with a kind of stunned matter-of-factness. Is it an airborne toxin? Global warming gone vicious? The mass psychosis spreads like a virus through the Northeast, sowing numbed panic as humans scamper to outrun the threat.

It's Shyamalan's first R-rated film and it was the studio, 20th Century Fox, that encouraged him not to stint on the violence and blood. "Night has an uncanny gift at exploring the recesses of the human psyche," says outgoing studio Vice Chairman Hutch Parker, and in this film, particularly, "the psychology of fear. We felt that the R rating would allow Night to go beyond the limits he explored so far, breaking new ground for himself and for the audience."

Yet, the terror is wrapped up in a reconciliation drama between a young couple played by Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel. "It's a normal day in their kind-of-troubled marriage," Shyamalan says. "And then this thing happens on this day. And if you got to the point where you knew in the next minute you were going to be dead. You both know it; you're not fighting it anymore, it's a fait accompli. You get one last conversation. What do you say to each other? That's what the movie ultimately is about."

Shyamalan famously identifies himself as a family man. He met his wife, Bhavna, while he was still at NYU, and during their first year of marriage they lived in his parents' house. Now they have two daughters. What would he say to his wife if they had only a few minutes to live? Shyamalan has to pause a moment.

"The good thing for me is that my wife, she genuinely makes me a better person," he says finally. "She's not just a light, surface person. You will never have a conversation about what someone looks like or anything. It's just not the conversations that we have. They're always the conversation that you have at the end. I think the strength of the relationship is that we always are aware. That's why it's not so unusual for me to think about if it all went away. Because you're always thinking about that, you know?"

However, at the last moment, he says he would not try to be too profound. That's the Shyamalan twist to this particular story.

"I probably would have a real casual conversation," he says. "One last laugh. One moment about the irony of life . . . that what we thought was so important was so, so not important."

[MacGuffin]

Happening Needed R Rating

M. Night Shyamalan, writer-director of the upcoming paranoid thriller The Happening, told reporters that there was no way around its R rating.

In the film, an unexplained event compels people to commit suicide in often grisly ways. Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo and Ashlyn Sanchez star as a quartet of Philadelphians trying to stay one step ahead of the deadly threat, which could be man-made, a force of nature or the result of an accident.

"I got an R on two other movies, on The Sixth Sense and The Village," Shyamalan said during a press conference in New York on June 9. "I got an R initially, for the intensity of certain scenes, and I needed to pull back a sound effect. We were right on the line, and I could always just pull back a sound effect and re-submit it, and they'd go, 'Oh, it's much better.' And all I did was take out some sound effects. It's always the impact; what you emotionally feel is different than what I actually showed."

But on The Happening, Shyamalan couldn't dodge the R. "The screenplay that I wrote, there was just no way to do it any other way," he said. "One of the movies I was thinking about was Pan's Labyrinth. I was thinking about that a lot when I made the decision, because I didn't want to make it as an agenda. You want to make an organic decision about: What does the material want to do? And when I thought about Pan's Labyrinth, which had visceral moments of violence juxtaposed against the softer kind of things that are going on against the canvas; it gave it authority and some teeth."

Shyamalan added that a PG-13 version of Guillermo del Toro's Pan would not have worked as well. "It wouldn't have stayed with me the way that movie has stayed with me," he said. "And so [on The Happening] it felt like the right balance of things. It was exciting, and it was disturbingly easy to shoot all those scenes. I had such a fun time." The Happening opens June 13.

[john]

This was actually quite crowded for 2:00 in the afternoon... I'd thought the popcorn bunch had given up on Shyamalan.

If they hadn't yet, they certainly will now. Audience reaction upon exiting the theater ranged from  apathetic to vocally displeased.

I kinda like it. For every reason that I defended Shyamalan before. He seems to be furthering his own interests and fascinations, in the guise of a popcorn film.

His commentary on man and nature is really too simplistic to recommend... but there's a continual stillness, and quiet, to many of the scenes that most mainstream directors would never attempt.

If you already don't like the guy, nothing in this film will changed your mind - in fact, it will only emphasize your complaints.

They are hyping the R-rating quite a bit, and there isn't much to this that pushes it past a rough PG-13.

Also: Zooey Deschanel fans be warned, I don't think I've ever seen her devoid of this much charisma or value.

[hedwig]

fuck.  I saw it.  it happened.

[Ghostboy]

This was astounding! Even better than the remake of The Wicker Man. I don't know what Shyamalan was trying to do with this (especially with his direction of the cast), but it sure is fascinating.

[picolas]

can't wait for the youtube highlights.

[tpfkabi]

does Night have a significant acting role in this one?

the other day Signs was on at a friend's house and he goes, "check out this intense acting." it was the part where Night gives 'the look' getting into his suv when Mel is in the drugstore.

[hedwig]

does Night have a significant acting role in this one?

it's a voice cameo. he says "hello?"

[I Love a Magician]

MOVIE

IS



AMAZING

[cinemanarchist]

MOVIE

IS



AMAZING

I stared at that for entirely too long.

[Sleepless]

SPOILERS:

Not a fan. Although it was the first Shyamalan I've been able to sit through since Unbreakable (still his best in my opinion). Thought the concept was very good, although they gave a lame "explanation" way too early on, and the fact they very early on we learned it was just confined to the North-East sort of lowered the stakes to the point where you didn't really care - the trailer and the hype set it up as a film about the whole of humanity - and the PLANET - so in that respect the film was a let down. Also, I thought the acting was terrible (Leguizamo aside - he was VERY good). I imagine a lot of it is the naff dialogue "with whom?", but I can see Shyamalan telling Wahlberg and Deschanel to be less intense, more subtle, but it just came off as bland. By the time we got to that running through the fields sequence with the gunshots I could barely stomach any more of Marky's bland reaction shots. The acting was just awful, and both leads we know are capable of so much more. Shyamalan is capable of being a good director, but he just doesn't seem to embrace balance at all. The whole film - character wise felt very flat. Leaving the packed theatre, everyone else was quite vocal about their dislike of the movie, but there were no empty seats. I felt this movie has some similarities to The Mist, which even though I wasn't *that* keen on, I still thought was far, far superior to this. Even with CGI bugs. It just handled the situation better - that you didn't know what was happening outside where we are. Maybe Shyamalan just wanted to give us as much information up front so that it didn't come across as a bad twist ending, but I think it really lessened the impact of the movie, and of the conflict and the stakes involved. To be honest, after Signs and The Village, I didn't think I would bother with another one of his films. The premise, and what he had said about The Happening got me interested, but sadly I don't think he'll ever get me interested in anything he does again.

[SeanMalloy]

Scary Movie 5: The Happening
SPOILERS
M. Night Shymalan has made the funniest entry in the Scary Movie series by keeping the visual gags to a minimum and ramping up the situational and verbal comedy aspects that the past four have left out. Scary Movie 5: The Happening has everything a great parody movie needs a wonderful opening scene that sets us up for what will surely be the funniest 90 minutes of Summer '08. The reaction shots from the cast rival Jason Bateman and Micahel Cera's best work on "Arrested Development." The whole production looks stunning and Night's eye for composition are still some of his strongest points, but it's the way he handles his actors that really caught me. In a bit of inspired comedic casting Mark Wahlberg is our hero through this canon of classic Hitchcock motifs and like Charlie Sheen before him, Wahlberg turns in some of his best work since Boogie Nights. You can see and hear the joy in the actor's voice as he spits out comedy gold at every turn. The "You should care more about science" exchange may go down as one of the great moments in comedy history right next to 'Who's on first?' and the drop off scene in "The Big Lebowski." The death scenes are some of the best in the series even topping the stabbing of Carmen Electra's implants. The 'follow the gun scene' has some great moments from the extra blood spurting that is obviously a nod to "Ichii the Killer" and "Kill Bill" even the sound effect is different for each successive shot from the same gun, possibly an 'in' joke referencing the grindhouse horror of old. Making the villain 'wind' is Mr. Night Shymalan's finest bit of writing since Sam Jackson's reveal as the mastermind in 'Unbreakable.' I had thought Night had run out of ideas after his last two efforts but in the comedy/ satire genre Shymalan has found his true calling and one can only hope he chooses to continue on this path. I loved Scary Movie 5: The Happening and would reccomend it to anyone looking to laugh and cry tears of joy as you watch a cinematic masterpiece that I will be proud to place on my DVD shelf. Thank you Mr. Night Shymalan you have returned with great success, let's hope you come back for 6.

Scary Movie 5: The Happening receives:
94% out of 100