It’s the plants!
This movie is awesome, for reasons I’ll get to in a second, but it does have a major problem in its lack of a villain—or rather, in its ham-handed attempt to evoke one in shots of ominous-looking gales blowing over trees and brush, and people looking ominously at these ominous-looking gales. Wind, you see, doesn’t look ominous, especially not in quaint, rural Pennsylvanian landscapes. Our response is to mirror these peoples’, but it doesn’t really. And gauging from the audience I saw this with, there’s a lot more humor in the film than intended.
What should be scary here is the sudden compulsion towards suicide that grips so many people so suddenly. But the suicides are – by and far – the best parts of this movie. The more people killing themselves, and the more creative their deaths, the better it gets. It’s jack-in-the-box filmmaking, and the only suspense this film contrives from its fatally ephemeral concept is in how this unavoidable plague inspires people to dignify their deaths with elaboration—and they keep getting better and better and better. My favorite is the guy who offhandedly attempts to pet the lions at the zoo, followed closely by the group of people who systematically erect ladders and hang themselves from oak trees overhanging a rural road. Oh, and there’s a guy with a lawnmower…
This is deathsploitation with pretensions toward environmental parable, but deathsploitation it remains. I’m actually disappointed that there’s not more death in the movie; had Shyamalan the lack of tact to include more killing, this would have been a solid contemporary exploitation film.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: 20th Century Fox 35mm print
14 Jun 2008 11:08 AM | Comments (4)
So its essentially an American version of Sion Sono’s Suicide Circle with tacked on evironmental armaggedon? I’m tempted to see this just for that alone.
Suicide Circle/Suicide Club, I’ve actually seen that (I remember it being a sort of cash-in on Battle Royale’s popularity). But this film isn’t precisely like it, because Sion’s film is more outright exploitation, whereas this film has pretensions toward something else. If you can ignore those pretensions, then yes, this is a very enjoyable film.
The Happening was the biggest waste of an afternoon that has happened to me in a long time. What was so enjoyable about this movie? I’m joining my NY Cinema Society brethren and exercising a three picture ban on M. Night Shyamalan films. Feel free to join me.
I have to qualify my statement with the fact that I saw a slightly “compromised” version of The Happening. With that caveat out of the way, I must say that I was shocked at how bad Shymalan’s latest is. It wasn’t even bad in the spectacular fashion of Lady In The Water, that mouth-agape, train-wreck, watching-the-intricately-planned-self-sabotage-of-an-auteur type thing. It just fell flat, and was incredibly underdeveloped. But still, seeing Shymalan do horrible work is more interesting than a lot of other stuff out there. The reason Hollywood hates him is basically for his earnestness – he is willing to try chancy ideas, do elaborate, risky things, and back them with genuine convinction. When they go well – The Sixth Sense – the results are spectacular. When they collapse – the results are also spectacular, just in an unfortunate way. I actually liked The Village a lot – thought it was innovative, and had more going on than most films. But The Happening is a disaster (no pun intended). The first ten minutes is promising – and then, nothing. Even the deaths are disappointing. I heard Shymalan saying in an interview that he wanted to match the visceral impact of something like The Exorcist with the room his R-rating gives him – which in retrospect seems like a joke. I still look forward to his next film. That said, I have been finding some evidence online that Shymalan may have plagiarized a lot of his best material – including The Sixth Sense and The Village. Check out what people are saying – it’s more disturbing than The Happening itself.
David Carter
14 June 2008
11:43 AM