This looks good

Well this looks awful

I saw this trailer last night and can’t believe how bad this movie looks. Is there anything here to recommend it?



And why does every woman from Iowa have to be a blonde?

Oh wait.

Another rhetorical question

Also about a poster, this one for Touchstone Pictures’ upcoming Kevin Costner vehicle Swing Vote.

Does anyone else think this poster looks like an old cigarette ad? Is it the combination of red, scruff and that damn font?


Better image here (though less cigarette ad-ish due to the familiar movie poster details like credits and images of supporting cast).

The Happening ain’t

I really hadn’t planned on seeing M. Night Shyamalan’s the Happening. I’d always felt a bit burned by his films in the past, though I think I’ve somehow seen most of them. To me, his work suffers from over-promising and under-delivering. But it was Friday night and I was recovering from Thursday night’s extravagance. So there you go.

The basic plot of the Happening is this: Some unseen thing is causing people, upon exposure, to commit suicide—immediately and usually en masse. Science teacher Mark Wahlberg, his wife (the forever girlish Zooey Deschanel) and others flee the city in an attempt to avoid contact with whatever it is, with mixed success.

The film opens on two young women sitting on a bench in Central Park, one with an open book in her lap. Apropos of nothing, book girls announces, “I forgot where I was.” It sounds ominous to the audience, who know a bit about what they’re in for. Innocently, the other girl seems to realize the question pertains to the book and replies, “You’re at the part where…” and reminds her friend. Wait, so the girl who isn’t reading the book knows exactly where her friend is in the book? Yeah that happens. This forced interaction—created only to get that opening line—is a harbinger of the clunky dialogue to come.

The Happening is, quite simply, a disaster, and while watching it, it became clear to me that M. Night Shyamalan has no idea what he’s doing.

Much of the script is poorly written, and often awkward in its inclusion of details that Shyamalan surely intends to add authenticity to the language. Case in point, Deschanel on the phone to someone who might be her lover: “You’ve got to stop calling me. We had tiramisu, that’s it. It’s over.” Tiramisu? Did Wes Anderson walk on the set that day?

Shyamalan can’t even write believable newscaster dialogue.

There’s also the nonsensical “Do you like hot dogs?” scene, which feels like it’s aiming for a David Lynch-ian sense of unease via the bizarre. A more serious film buff could probably explain why Lynch and Anderson are able to employ odd dialogue successfully to create moods, and why it fails here. Perhaps it’s because there are plenty of odd visual details in their films (wardrobe, hairstyle) and the wacky dialogue simply fits better. Visually, the Happening looks about as odd as Footloose.

Wahlberg is completely unbelievable as a high school science teacher, and he struggles with a few of his lines as if he’s just learned some of the words during the run-through. Wahlberg can deliver funny, though, and this skill saves us from hating his character. Deschanel is simply flat and uninteresting.

But it’s Shyamalan’s decisions that make this thing a stinker from start to finish. Characters continually behave in ways that threaten the viewer’s suspension of disbelief. Shyamalan’s blocking renders numerous scenes unbelievable (perhaps most notably, a concerned group of that gathers around a panicked woman on her cell phone talking to her daughter). And he haphazardly tosses in what might be red herrings that simply interrupt the flow of the scene (ominous nuclear reactors quietly spouting smoke in the distance in one scene).

One of the more impactful images (included in the trailer) is of construction workers willfully jumping off the top of the building they’re working on. Shot from below, we see them step into the sky and plummet toward us. For my taste, this scene is too close to one of the most nightmarish events in recent history, that of the World Trade Center victims leaping to their deaths. Shyamalan includes the sounds of these bodies hitting the ground, a sound those of us who watched footage from the Trade Center lobbies that day will not likely forget. Shyamalan’s borrowing of this most harrowing moment—for “entertainment”—is galling and careless.

When all is said and done, the Happening seems to be a quasi-zombie film, with [SPOILER ALERT; SKIP THE NEXT FEW PARAGRAPHS] a message about being nice to Mother Earth and a possibly a commentary on consumer technology. If that sounds like an odd combination, well, it is.

As horrific as the idea of contagious mass suicide is, and as suspenseful as some of the images are, the affected individuals are a danger to no one but themselves (hence quasi-zombie). Additionally, the fleeing, the moments of comic relief (some of which are intentional), and what I’ve termed the Footloose quality to the look of the film (to reinforce the interruption of the naïveté of the everyday) further connect the Happening to zombie cinema.*

I won’t go into the Mother Earth part, other than to say it seems almost lazy to make “be nice to the planet” the primary message of a suspense film.

The consumer technology component is a strange and subtle theme. The print ad for the film shows Wahlberg and Deschanel standing amid dead bodies, one sporting an identifiable iPod, another with a cell phone in hand, equating gadgetry to death. In the film, it isn’t until our heroes’ phones have no signal that they seem to enter a safe area. And the final house they visit is noted for the absence of any electrical lines running to it. It’s completely off the grid. But whatever Shyamalan’s point about technology is, he never really makes it.

One almost gets the sense that Shyamalan’s creative process consist of him having striking visions of nightmarish scenes (often the ones that end up in the trailer) and that his task is to piece them together via a sensible story that incorporates these vignettes and delivers some point. The problem is that the stories are weaker than the vignettes and the points often feel like afterthoughts.

There’s no doubt Shyamalan is adept at creating mesmerizing visuals and compelling situations that persuade people to drop $12 at the theater. In the end, though, I think Shyamalan’s gift is not making interesting movies, but making interesting movie trailers.


* Another overlooked piece of the zombie cinema canon: Hotel Rwanda. No, I’m not kidding.

Return of the red band trailer

The trailer for the new Coen Brothers film Burn After Reading is for restricted audiences only. And why not have a trailer that accurately reflects the nature of the film? Have you heard the mouths on these kids today? Who are we protecting, and from what?

Also, this is my nominee for best use of an Elbow song in a trailer and/or movie.

Thumbs way up

One benefit of moving to a new place and not knowing a lot of people (and not having a job or a TV) is that you get to see plenty of movies. Since moving to New York three weeks ago I’ve seen five films. This is surely a record for me. The best part is that they’ve all been good. Recommendable, even. Here’s the recap, in order of my viewing (because I know how you like the details):

Hear And Now. I saw this documentary at its HBO screening, thanks to my roommate. Very touching story about the filmmaker’s deaf parents who decide to undergo cochlear implant surgery pretty late in life in hopes of being able to hear. Website here.

Glass: A Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts. I wrote about this a couple weeks ago.

Iron Man. What can I say that hasn’t been said? Great summertime fun and Downey Jr. is perfect.

Priceless. A great old-fashioned comedy, and funnier than I expected. Audrey Tautou shows she’s much more than Amelie. Here’s the French trailer (the American one is simply awful):



Reprise. The debut film from Norwegian director Joachim Trier, Reprise delivers exactly what you look for in a foreign film (those of you who go for foreign films): subtlety, innovative storytelling and characters we can believe since we haven’t seen the actors in a dozen prior films (not to mention US Weekly). Oh, and subtitles.



If these last two make it to a theater near you, I highly recommend you go.

More on what’s old is new again

I wrote a couple months ago about the growing joy that seems to come from handmade or low-budget-y things when they’re coupled with the web. Here are a couple more things that kinda fall into this camp. Or do they? Either way, they’re cool.

The first is a video that’s made the rounds already, but it’s timely (for this blog) given yesterday’s post. (Couple it with the presentation from Paul Isakson I posted a while back and you’ve got a good primer on social media and today’s marketing landscape.)



It’s also an interesting corollary to Malcolm Gladwell’s article, In The Air, in the latest New Yorker. Gladwell’s article is partly about the myth of innovations as rare gems delivered the minds of individual geniuses—like Athena, springing fully formed from Zeus’s forehead—and partly about the power of having a bunch of really smart and engaged people gather to brainstorm on a topic. (“Really smart” and “engaged” being the factors that lead to successful brainstorm sessions, unlike those that the guys at Brooklyn Brothers wrote about.)

But back to the interestingness that comes from the juxtaposition of the DIY-infused and modern technology. (Jeez, this is kind of two posts in one, isn’t it? Follow along, please.)

The second example is the very cool short film I Met The Walrus by Josh Raskin. It’s a little more than a year old and was nominated for an Oscar (which, unlike being nominated for a Grammy, means it’s probably good). Very cool animation to go with the audio of a renegade interview with John Lennon by a 14-year-old fan back in 1969.



Thanks to DY for the heads up on the Walrus film. Apologies for the scattered post today. Welcome to the jungle, baby.

Half full

One night last week I went to the final screening of the documentary Glass: A Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts. Fans of documentaries and/or music (or both) should certainly try to check it out. Glass comes off as a remarkably humble but passionate artist.

You don't need to be interested in Philip Glass or even a fan of his music to find this documentary compelling. Here’s the trailer (with painter Chuck Close’s retelling of a Glass-inspired joke at the end).

Shout Out: Jonny Greenwood

I saw There Will Be Blood last night and was blown away by the score. Intense, eerie, dramatic. It adds monumentally to the experience and hold its own with the performance of Daniel Day-Lewis (which is really saying something).

Jonny Greenwood (yes, of Radiohead) is a genius. As I exited the theatre, I thought, “Well there’s the Academy Award winner for best score.” Sadly, because the soundtrack contains excerpts from a piece Greenwood did for the BBC in 2006, There Will Be Blood is ineligible for a Best Score Oscar.

I’m not saying the Academy’s rule is bad, but it’s a shame the best score of the year won’t get the trophy.