Classic Tarantino; Typical, Too

Name a moment from Pulp Fiction that isn’t iconic. That, more or less, is the challenge that Entertainment Weekly recently laid down in naming Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 hitman flick the most “classic” movie of the past 25 years. It’s a bold statement, to be sure – the kind of from-the-hip hyperbole that you expect from a glossy magazine that uses just over 100 words to defend its top selection. So, last night, inspired by EW’s acclaim and thirsting for a good movie, I watched Pulp Fiction for the first time (I think) since around Kill Bill: Volume I. About five years.

What I discovered surprised me: EW’s proclamation is pretty much right on. With the exception of Butch’s cab ride conversation with Esmeralda Villalobos, there wasn’t a scene in the film that I couldn’t at least quote in part or that hadn’t been quoted to me at some point over the years. Pulp Fiction’s scenes aren’t merely memorable, they are indeed iconic: fast-food in Europe; Ezekiel 25:17; Jack Rabbit Slim’s; the adrenaline; the watch; the gimp; the Wolf; etc. Like Casablanca before it, Pulp Fiction plays like a tour of some of the most celebrated, quotable and unforgettable moments in cinema. And so if ‘classicness’ is measured by ‘iconicness,’ it’s hard to quibble with EW’s selection.

But along the way to that conclusion, I came up with another: Pulp Fiction may be classic, but it isn’t special anymore. Over the past 14 years it’s been pillaged and plundered to such a radical degree that not a single scene or even a line of dialogue still feels unique. It was one thing when Jules (Samuel L Jackson) and Vincent (John Travolta) curiously had the same self-aware speech patterns as Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), Lance the drug dealer (Eric Stoltz) and Jimmy the coffee brewer (Tarantino), not to mention one another, but by 2008 their cocky personas have now been copied so many times that it’s hard to recognize the original anymore. The culprit here isn’t movies in the ilk of Suicide Kings, which so blatantly attempted to conjure Pulp Fiction’s mojo. The perpetrator is Tarantino himself.

Tarantino’s detractors have long called him a rip-off artist – of Martin Scorsese and too many others to count. And Tarantino’s fans argue back that Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction have been plagiarized at least as much. But by now it seems obvious that both camps are correct, because the primary looter of Tarantino is Tarantino. And it’s a shame. Watching Pulp Fiction again, I wanted to revisit the memorable characters who in poster form dominated the decorative theme of so many dorm rooms during my freshman year of college. Instead I found the film dominated by only one character, the now unmistakable presence of Tarantino that supersedes the figures spewing his trademark patter.

This isn’t an entirely new revelation. Reviewing Grindhouse last year, I put it this way: “The Tarantino characters once lauded for their originality and uniqueness have fast become redundant … Swap the dialogue of Sydney Tamiia Poitier’s Jungle Julia with that of Rosario Dawson’s Abernathy and you’d detect nothing astray. Tarantino doesn’t actually create characters, it’s becoming clearer by the movie, he just changes settings, conversation topics and costumes.” That, I thought, was the explanation for why Tarantino’s recent films had lost that joy of discovery. I never suspected however that Tarantino was diluting his own filmography to the point that his initial charmers would go flat. Yet that’s precisely what’s happened.

Some scenes still seem to belong exclusively to Pulp Fiction. The foot massage conversation, for example, which in addition to being humorous develops the vicious reputation of Marsellus Wallace. Same, too, for the legend of the gold watch, the extreme details of which prompt Butch to risk his life to retrieve the heirloom. But when Jules pauses to explain to Vincent what a pilot is, or when Pumpkin rants about liquor store owners not speaking English, or when Jimmy says anything at all, the dialogue sounds interchangeable, which at the heart means it’s expendable. Tarantino seems less interested in creating cool characters than in using them arbitrarily in an attempt to document his own coolness. Yet by bludgeoning us with the same tactics over and over again, the magnetism of his brand has worn away, even retroactively.

None of this is to suggest that Pulp Fiction is a poor picture, of course. The praise for its nonlinear storytelling is overblown (EW called it “revolutionary,” which is going a bit far), yet otherwise Pulp Fiction frequently lives up to its hype. To watch it again was to marvel at how committed Tarantino is to each moment as it is happening. For example, in the grand scheme of things we needn’t watch Butch walk across an empty lot on the way to his apartment, just like we needn’t watch him creeping slowly down the stairs on his way to freeing Marsellus. But Tarantino understands that to underline the significance of these episodes he must treat each as if they are the defining moment in the film. And it works.

Underneath it all, Pulp Fiction remains a testament to the seductive aura that results from an artist with a well-defined vision. But by flattering himself with his self-imitation, Tarantino, with each passing picture, is turning his bona fide classic into something ordinary.

Who Sent Kevin Spacey Out to Lunch?

When I sat down last week to watch Glengarry Glen Ross for the first time, I already knew that it took brass balls to sell real estate. What I didn’t know was that David Mamet’s 1992 film adaptation of his own stage play required an iron will. Mamet is known for his proclivity for excessive dialogue, but Glengarry Glen Ross is so chatty it’s paralyzing. In one scene Character A will speak nonstop for five minutes, and in the next scene he’ll sit there silent as a rock as Character B takes his turn sucking the air out of the room. It’s a format that might work on stage, where our eyes tend to be drawn to the person speaking, but it doesn’t translate well to film, where it’s hard to ignore a stiff in the corner who is sitting there and doing nothing.

One of the few players in Glengarry Glen Ross who routinely has actual conversations with the characters around him – rather than trading soliloquies – is the boss of the office John Williamson, a major figure in the lives of the salesmen struggling to keep their jobs but a relatively minor personality in the story. He’s played by Kevin Spacey in what is a rather blank, gum-chewing performance. Spacey was a virtual unknown when Glengarry came out, and it would be three more years before he entered mainstream consciousness with his Oscar-winning turn in The Usual Suspects. I always feel for people who didn’t get around to seeing Suspects until years later, because Verbal Kint is an entirely different character when seen as a star’s role than when taken as a comparatively insignificant supporting part; Spacey’s relative anonymity was a key to the movie’s mystery.

Then came Seven, yet another film in which Spacey’s performance is responsible for the effectiveness of a carefully calculated conclusion. Most of us now probably remember John Doe kneeling in the grass, his fate in the hands of Brad Pitt’s anguished Detective Mills, but the gift of Spacey’s performance is his rage-filled rant from the back of the squad car that assures us that this otherwise cool customer is as vicious as his murder scenes imply. (“Innocent? Is that supposed to be funny?”) As with his turn in Suspects, Spacey’s John Doe was best experienced within the context of Seven’s release, because to see the film for the first time now is perhaps to wonder what Lester Burnham is getting so upset about.

Which brings us to this: Whatever happened to Kevin Spacey? Two years after Seven was L.A. Confidential, and two years after that came his second Oscar for his performance in American Beauty. And then the bottom fell out. Pay It Forward went down as easily as ipecac, and with the same result. K-PAX was trashed. The Shipping News wasn’t newsworthy. The Life Of David Gale was putrid in myriad ways. And Beyond The Sea showcased Spacey’s singing but at the cost of coming off like nothing more than a vehicle to showcase Spacey’s singing; it felt self-indulgent. I personally enjoyed his Lex Luthor in Superman Returns, but that part did nothing to silence Spacey’s critics who seem to find him over the top, generally odious and smug.

Now Spacey finds himself doing TV movies, having recently starred in Recount. This while Nicolas Cage still gets starring vehicles. And Mel Gibson, too, despite being the subject of unpleasant headlines away from the set. Heck, Alec Baldwin – Mr. Brass Balls himself – has revitalized his career while managing to be more odious and smug than ever. Is Spacey merely experiencing a run of bad luck? A dry spell? Has his time in the spotlight simply come and gone, the way it did for Kevin Costner and to some degree even Tom Hanks (though Hanks is so beloved that I’m sure he can still draw a crowd given the right material). Or is there something else at work here? Do people have a grudge against Spacey? If so, why? And since when?

Of late it’s become cool to knock American Beauty as one of the “worst” Best Picture winners. If the film was so reviled at the time, I didn’t notice. American Beauty, you might remember, succeeded at the box office based on positive word of mouth: originally released in only a few cities, then a few more, then a few more, until finally the entire country could see it, satisfying a growing demand. I’ll leave arguments about whether American Beauty should have won the Oscar, and even whether Spacey should have, for another day. That doesn’t interest me right now. What does is trying to figure out how Spacey could so effectively slip into the shoes of Verbal Kint, John Doe, Jack Vincennes and Lester Burnham – four men who have nothing in common – and then seemingly find no shoe his size for almost the next 10 years.

And so I ask Cooler readers: Anybody have any theories on this? Are there similar examples? Does Spacey just need his Vincent Vega, or is it too late for that? How do you explain an actor who has two Academy Awards to his name but now seems to struggle to find work?

More Malick!

The e-mail from a friend brightened a busy week. All it contained was a single link, but that link served as a portal to fantastic news: Terrence Malick’s The New World is being released on DVD in an extended cut with “30 minutes of never-before-seen footage and extended scenes.” Yeah!

Truth be told, it’s probably more like 15 minutes of never-before-seen footage with 15 more minutes that have been mostly unseen. The 135-minute theatrical release of The New World was Malick’s sliced-and-diced version of his 150-minute original cut, which had a very limited run before Malick pulled it to make changes. If what I read on the Internet is true (and that’s a dangerous assumption), Malick’s preferred version is the 135-minute cut – which is to suggest that he voluntarily compressed the movie to improve it, not merely to appease cranky studio execs. Still, especially in the midst of one of the worst movie years in memory, it’s impossible to restrain my excitement for more Malick, superfluous though the ‘more’ might be.

The reality, of course, is that extended cuts of films – be they saucy “unrated” editions or geeky Lucasesque pixelpaloozas – rarely improve upon the original. And I’ll bet the norm will hold true for this repackaged version of The New World. But at the same time, Malick more than most filmmakers has a style that lends well to expansion. The New World has a plot, yes, but more than that it’s a meditation. Thirty more minutes of The New World means a half-hour more spent basking in the Zen of Malick’s cinematic poetry, as articulated by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. That’s the positive way of looking at it. The flipside is to say that if you find Malick wandering and boring at 135 minutes, you’d probably feel the same at 100 minutes or even 30. His style speaks to you, or it doesn’t.

It certainly speaks to me. I believe that The New World is among the top 10 films I’ve seen in the past decade and that The Thin Red Line is there, too. My initial reaction to The New World was to see all the ways it resembled The Thin Red Line, but with passing time and repeated viewings I’m able to enjoy it in isolation. Now, as then, I find the film’s greatest strength – beyond the luscious visuals – to be the performance of Q’orianka Kilcher, who hasn’t appeared in a film since (though according to IMDb, she’s attached to three other projects). If the 30 new minutes include 30 seconds of Kilcher, the extended cut will be worth watching.

Now comes the waiting: The extended cut is due in stores October 14.

My original pre-blog review of The New World appears below.


The New World
In a perfect world, when we went to see a Terrence Malick film, tickets would be embossed with gold foil. At the theater, formalwear would be required, with a coat-check service offered at the door, and a small orchestra seated near the screen to play us to our seats. Hors d’oeuvres would be served instead of popcorn, with snacking limited to the lobby. And when the lights went down in the theater, the patrons in the audience would shut up.

In short, it would be an event – by the most momentous definition of the word. Screenings would be held in lofty regard not just because – with only four films released since 1973 – seeing a Malick creation is in and of itself a rare experience worthy of ceremonial splendor, but also because time and again his films are so singularly magnificent. The pomp and circumstance would be the respect Malick’s filmmaking so richly deserves. And it does.

With his latest effort, a symphonic epic about love and discovery, Malick proves once again that he is a filmmaker without peers. The New World, a hauntingly beautiful Pocahontas-and-John Smith yarn, isn’t a perfect film. It isn’t even Malick’s best film, and there are many times when it simply reminds us of other Malick projects to come before it. But The New World is like nothing else we saw at the theater in 2005. Or in 2004, for that matter. To find something remotely like it you’d have to keep turning back the calendar to 1998, when Malick released his previous film, The Thin Red Line.

Of its three familial predecessors, it’s that film that The New World most closely resembles. In fact, the opening acts of Malick’s last two pictures are similar almost to the point of self parody: from the underwater shots of natives swimming, to the forest view of otherworldly ships approaching the shore, to the colliding of two distinctly different societies and the inner ruminating of an outcast searching for a utopian place of peace and harmony within an alien world of chaos and confusion. Both The New World and The Thin Red Line rely heavily on the requisite Malick internal monologues – in this movie, they replace dialogue almost entirely – and there are portions when the voice-over narration of Colin Farrell’s John Smith is so akin to that of Jim Caviezel’s Private Witt that they could be interchanged with little to no effect on our understanding of their characters or their stories.

But don’t get the impression that The New World is the tired exercise of a director who’s run out of ideas. It’s far from that. Here, Malick takes the Chickahaminia River to places of the heart that he’d never explored previously. But he does so with a storytelling style that’s uniquely his own. No other filmmaker today works in images and emotions as dramatically as Malick. His characters speak not thoughts but moods. And their words are pure poetry, just like Malick’s camerawork.

Acting as official cinematographer in this movie is Emmanuel Lubezki, but the visuals are unquestionably Malick’s. As always, the natural landscapes are presented so spectacularly that we can practically hear the trees growing and smell the forest floor. It’s for this reason that a Malick film isn’t to be seen, it’s to be experienced. So, if what you’re looking for is a simple assault on the eyes, go see King Kong. But if you want to be immersed in a world that computers have no hope of duplicating, Malick is your director, and this is your film.

The story goes the way you remember it: Smith, wandering through the Virginia wilderness in 1607, is attacked and captured by a Native American tribe that looks to execute their prisoner in a lavish ritual. At the last moment, Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher) throws her body over Smith’s and pleads for him to be spared. As the most favored of Chief Powhatan’s many daughters, Pocahontas’ request is granted under the condition she continues to spend time with Smith, so as to learn his motives and that of the 102 other white men who are busy establishing Jamestown nearby.

Early conversation is limited. Smith and Pocahontas (who’s never called by that name in this film), begin by going over some basic words: sky, sun and wind. But notice how this arrangement differs from the translation scenes we usually get in the white man-and-Indians movies: here it’s the Native American who is driving the lessons. Pocahontas is the one eager to learn. Smith is equally enthusiastic – he’s respectful of the “naturals” and their customs – but mostly for different reasons. He’s wonderstruck by Pocahontas’ beauty and verve.

Can we blame him? Kilcher, who was all of 14 when this film was shot, is positively radiant. The camera loves her. She’s assigned the task of playing a young woman who stood head and shoulders above the others in her tribe, who was so celebrated that she was captured by soldiers at Jamestown to keep Powhatan from attacking, who eventually traveled to London and was received with royal honor by the king and queen of England. In short, Kilcher was assigned to play a woman who was dynamic, and she succeeds in every way, despite having little English dialogue. Her performance is a gift.

The rest of the movie is well-acted, too. Ferrell is perfectly cast as Smith, a rogue captain who so infuriated his fellow Virginia Company seamen en route to the New World that he arrived in shackles and was set to be executed, until it was realized that his charisma was too valuable to be wasted. The movie drags when Pocahontas isn’t on screen, but Ferrell expertly employs a look of enchantment in his scenes opposite Kilcher. Same goes for Christian Bale as John Rolfe, the tobacco farmer who weds Pocahontas and fathers a child with her after she’s converted to Christianity and takes the name Rebecca.

Even after they’re married, Pocahontas keeps parts of herself hidden, Rolfe notes in one of his voice-overs, yet incredibly we never doubt her emotions. There’s youthful whimsy when we first meet her, galloping through waist-high grass with her brother. There’s longing and heartbreak in her scenes with Smith. There’s loneliness when held in Jamestown. There’s joy when she becomes a mother. And, lastly, there’s marvel, when she ends up in London, a place that might as well be another planet. And what a fantastic segment that is! There have been countless alien-encounter movies, but few films better illustrate what it means to lay your eyes on the unimaginable.

In its heart, The New World is Pocahontas’ story. The “New World” is the one that arrives from the east and climbs up the banks and into her universe. As a complete film, it lacks the depth of The Thin Red Line, and it could use some editing. Malick loses sight of his story when he spends too much time following Smith’s exploits trying to keep Jamestown alive. But it’s foolish to get too frustrated with a roundabout path when the surroundings are so phenomenal. And Malick guarantees the latter. His movies are art, cinematic poetry. They show all that film can be, and what few other movies ever become.

"The Best Movie I Saw at 5:15 pm on June 13!"

How does a studio market a movie pulling a 19 percent favorability rating at RottenTomatoes and a score of 35 (out of 100) on Metacritic? Not very well, it turns out. Just a week after M Night Shyamalan’s The Happening bombed in its opening, the film is now being promoted in newspapers with this ad featuring a standard sampling of ‘rave’ pull-out quotes from critics. When flattering quotes are hard to come by, the promotional raves often wind up being from unfamiliar personalities at unfamiliar radio stations … and Larry King. This time though the quotes are from Roger Ebert, William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Glenn Whipp of the Los Angeles Daily News.

Ebert’s inclusion is hardly a surprise. He likes about everything these days, and he reviewed The Happening with a growing-familiar caveat that he’ll probably be “in the minority in praising it” (translation: it sucks, but I enjoyed it anyway). Arnold I have no read on. And then there’s Whipp. His grand quote calls The Happening “genuinely enjoyable.” That’s it. That’s the quote that Fox hopes will put asses in the seats. Ouch.

Apparently this means Fox’s marketing team couldn’t convince John McCain to watch The Happening so they could coerce him into calling it “Better than my experience with the North Vietnamese!” Shyamalan’s wife must have been unavailable, too. But I’m most amazed that they didn’t find someone to call this “Shyamalan’s best film since Lady In The Water.” Because it is. It so is!

(Click to enlarge rejected ad at the top of this post.)

Queue It Up: The Up Series

Tarsem’s The Fall, about a girl who gets lost in a world of imagination, will strike a lot of people who catch it on the art house circuit as a bright-and-blue version of the grim-and-gray Pan’s Labyrinth. Thus it might interest you to know that the latter didn’t influence the former. According to its website and a recent profile of Tarsem by Roger Ebert, The Fall was shot in 18 countries over a whopping four years. But this post isn’t about creative originality (heck, The Fall is said to be based on a 1981 Bulgarian film called Yo Ho Ho). Instead, it’s about that unusually lengthy shooting time, which allows for The Fall’s greatest magic trick: the performance of Catinca Untaru.

Playing Alexandria, Untaru delivers what must be the most amazing performance by a child actor that I have ever seen. A Romanian who memorized her English dialogue on the spot, Untaru essentially plays two parts: Alexandria the 4-year-old hospital patient with a broken arm and Alexandria the imaginary adventurer. In the first role, Alexandria is mind-bogglingly childlike yet refined. Her delivery of dialogue seems both spontaneously discovered and carefully plotted. It’s a wonder to behold. As for the second role: that Alexandria seems a little more assured, a little more direct, a little more mature. And that’s because she is. Tarsem shot all of the young Alexandria scenes when Untaru was 4-years-old. He shot the other Alexandria scenes about three years later.

Given the financial realities and pressures of making movies, few filmmakers would ever be so bold as to attempt this strategy. The effect, however, is stunning, because you just can’t fake the difference between 4 and 7 – a three-year gap that at that developmental stage might as well be three decades. As I was reflecting on The Fall, I tried to think of any films that offered a similar effect. And that’s when I started thinking about the Up documentary series.

To be clear: that gap between shoots is the only thing that the Up series has in common with The Fall. There are seven Up films, each shot seven years apart. Taken as a whole, it’s an extraordinary achievement in filmmaking, one that I suspect is the result of a combination of initial naiveté, subsequent earnest effort and, in between, lots of luck. If you’ve never ventured down the series’ rabbit hole, I suggest you do so at least once. What you’ll find is a diverse documentary portrait that’s made memorable as much by the time spent not shooting as by the footage compiled.

My original 2006 review of 49 Up, the most recent installment in the documentary series, follows. If you're new to the Up series, The Cooler recommends that you start with 42 Up or 35 Up, giving yourself the chance to move forward with the experience, which is half the fun.


49 Up
By the time I saw my first Up episode in 1999, Roger Ebert had already proclaimed that the documentary series was on his list of the “10 greatest films of all time.” Watching 42 Up, I didn’t feel like I was in the presence of something that historically stupendous, but I called the film “remarkable” and listed it among my eight favorite movies of that year. Now though, having just seen 49 Up, I’m inclined to side with Ebert. The reason for my change of opinion has nothing to do with the latest chapter being in any way superior to its immediate predecessor – in fact I’m partial to the twists and turns of 42 Up – but for me to truly appreciate the series’ genius it took seeing two episodes seven years apart. That’s the way the series is filmed and, it turns out, the way it is best viewed.

The Up series was born with the 1964 television broadcast of 7 Up, in which a dozen children from different backgrounds and social spheres in Britain were asked to talk about their present lives and visions of the future. That film, the first step of a revolutionary social experiment, was a response to two things: Britain’s vast class system and a Jesuit saying that goes, “Give me the child until he is 7, and I will show you the man.” The filmmakers, led by producer Tim Hewat, hoped to explore whether these children’s lives were predetermined by their backgrounds. To do that, they planned to check in on their subjects every seven years.

And so it has gone, from ages 7 to 14 to 21 to 28 to 35 to 42 and now 49, and, in the process, from 1964 to 2006. Michael Apted, who got his first film job working as a researcher on 7 Up, has been the director and principal interviewer of the series since the 21 episode. The project’s survival owes not just to his dedication but especially to that of the documentary’s cast, ordinary people who were selected to participate by their teachers a half-century ago and now return every seven years to continue a narrative that they never volunteered for but that can’t survive without them.

That the Up series is still upright is a triumph in itself. Over the years a few of the subjects have bowed out completely, and others have skipped an episode or two only to return later. But in large part the irreplaceable cast remains. Their commitment is both inspiring and touching. Throughout the course of their lives they’ve opened up with broken hearts and after broken marriages. They’ve persevered through career disasters and crushed dreams. Some have moved far away. Some have stayed close to home. Some have turned out almost exactly like they predicted at 7. Others, at 49, are enjoying lives that they couldn’t have imagined at 42. And all the while we’ve been allowed to watch, as life genuinely unfolds right in front of our eyes.

It struck me during 49 Up that these documentaries put the reality in reality entertainment, though the series was born long before the current fad. These days “reality” programming comes in the form of celebrity profiles, talent contests, dating shows and home/life improvement programs, yet even when 42 Up hit theaters in 1999 the reality movement as we know it today was merely poised for invasion. MTV’s Real World series had been on the air since 1992, but Survivor didn’t debut until 2000, and two more years went by after that before much-talked about programs like The Bachelor, The Osbournes and American Idol were beamed into our living rooms.

The subjects of the Up documentaries didn’t join to be stars. In fact, for many of them the moderate fame that has resulted from their participation has been an inconvenience or an outright embarrassment. Taking part in the interviews can be understandably painful: just imagine if you had to re-live your entire life every seven years – first through the question-and-answer segments, which have a way of digging up the past, and then through the resulting films, which show archival clips as part of the examination. It can’t be easy. But as children, teens and adults, the Up subjects have shown a forthrightness and bravery that deserves our respect.

Beyond that they also deserve our understanding. In 49 Up, one of the women complains that her life hasn’t been accurately represented by the films. We see Apted’s view of her, she claims. And it’s true that even with a running time of 135 minutes we can’t get to know everything there is to know about each one of them. But Apted’s approach is as fair as can be expected. He and editor Kim Horton allow for lengthy takes when appropriate and often let us be privy to the questions, so that even though we can never appreciate the complete context of a response, we can be assured that – unlike most reality TV shows – nothing is taken entirely out of context and mashed up in the editing room for dramatic effect.

If you’ve never seen one of the Up documentaries, you could start with 49 Up and not feel left behind. Apted and Horton are masterful at cutting through the crap and getting to the core of the cast. To see the latest Up is to watch lives develop in forward and reverse. We might see someone at 49, then at 7, then at 35, then at 14; it all depends on the person and the topic. Often what these men and women once were is as surprising as what they’ve become, and the series’ unique gift is that it gets richer with age. It’s so fitting that 7 Up was filmed in black and white and 49 Up was shot in digital. From the sweet and simple absolutes of childhood we now see adults in their full color, and in sometimes painful detail.

Amazingly, 49 Up has a way of looking back without feeling redundant. Some of the clips of the wide-eyed kids at 7 are in their seventh running now. But we see those clips differently as they apply to the 49-year-old than we do at, say, 35. My fear going into 49 Up was that too many of the subjects would have quit the project, having grown weary of its demands. But to my pleasant surprise attendance is almost complete. Nearly 50, they seem as comfortable in their own skin as at any time since they were 7. And maybe it’s because I’m staring at 30, but I was overwhelmed by their bountiful youth. Though heavier, slower and frailer, these don’t look like people at midlife. They like people transitioning into a new life. This time with decades of experience to help guide the way.

[“Queue It Up” is a series of sporadic recommendations of often overlooked movies for your Netflix queue.]

A Night to Forget: The Happening

The Happening begins with a parade of suicides. A woman stabs herself in the neck. Construction workers jump off a building. A policeman turns his firearm on himself. Etcetera. Why these deaths are occurring isn’t apparent at the start, yet what is clear is that these people are possessed. So, too, it seems is M Night Shyamalan. His sixth major motion picture is so disastrous that it feels suicidal. And whereas his previous outright flop, Lady In The Water, was an overly ambitious muddled mess, The Happening is just plain lousy. It’s poorly conceived, poorly written, poorly acted and poorly directed. By comparison, it makes the miserable Lady look magnificent.

That The Happening’s utter failure is a major disappointment for this moviegoer will shock no one who read my conversation earlier this week with Cooler friend Hokahey, about the films of Shyamalan. In town this weekend for a visit, Hokahey attended The Happening with me. We figured it was only right to give Shyamalan’s latest film a similar examination. Here’s a transcript:

(Warning: This discussion contains spoilers. Read ahead at your own risk. Or, considering the quality of the movie, don't read ahead at your own risk.)

Jason Bellamy: When we wrapped up our previous discussion on M Night Shyamalan, you said that The Happening would succeed because Shyamalan knows how to get touching performances out of his actors, how to set a memorable mood, how to frame stunning images and how to tell a meaningful story. You’ve now seen The Happening –

Hokahey: And as for my prediction, The Happening proves that Shyamalan has forgotten how to do any of that. Amazingly, he creates a toneless film.

JB: I agree. In fact your list of things that Shymalan has previously done well is like a checklist of the things he got wrong with his latest film. So let me ask you: what’s The Happening’s biggest failure? Is there one?

H: Well, before I get to that let me say that my favorite part of the whole movie was the opening credits, which built some atmosphere with the shots of the sky and fast-motion clouds turning from fluffy white to dark.

JB: In other words you liked the movie right up until it exhibited any writing, acting or plot?

H: Right. And I’d say the biggest failure of the film is the screenplay, because it builds no tension, drama or suspense. It sets up a disaster movie premise and never goes anywhere significant with it.

JB: I agree. The Happening is a movie that could be read a number of different ways. It’s a movie about the environment and our impact on the environment. It’s a movie about how man reacts in a crisis situation. It’s a movie about the unexplainable and random occurrences. And around all of this, theoretically, is the framework of a disaster movie. There are elements of a zombie movie too, and a love story. But it seems to me that The Happening needed to succeed as a disaster movie first and foremost.

H: And it doesn’t succeed at that, because it doesn’t do the things a disaster movie does. Often even B-disaster movies can be very satisfying. They can have poor acting and bad dialogue, but once the disaster begins and there is frantic action the movie delivers. The Happening has poor acting and bad dialogue, but it never delivers on even that basic B-movie level.

JB: And when you’re thinking of B-level disaster movies you’re thinking of …

H: Well, a rather recent movie that you could probably call a top-level disaster movie would be The Day After Tomorrow. That’s a movie that knows what to do. It delivers natural disasters right away, the death toll is high and the stakes are high. It has some expensive special effects, but it’s the story construction, not the effects, that makes the movie an intense experience. As for B-movies, you’ve got a lot of stuff from the 60s, like Earthquake. That movie has a declining Charlton Heston and a bunch of other name performers giving wooden performances and it’s slow to get started, but once the earthquake comes it delivers.

JB: A recent disaster movie I was thinking of as I was watching this was Steven Speilberg’s War Of The Worlds. Once again we have, amidst a grand event, a small story about just a few characters. And there’s a father figure and a helpless young girl. And it begins in the New York area, with shades of 9/11. But whereas War Of The Worlds is dripping with fear and consequence and panic, this movie has none of that.

If the thing Shyamalan is best known for is the big Surprise Ending, which comes from careful plot construction, the second thing he’s known for is being the modern Hitchcock – a master of suspense. His first four movies have moments designed to terrify. So I think what befuddles me most about The Happening is how a filmmaker who has made his living scaring people apparently has no idea how to create characters who are afraid. Am I alone here? Did any of these characters display actual genuine fear?

H: No. There was no fear in the entire movie, from the very beginning. Sometimes it was bad acting, but even more it’s a writing or directing failure because while a lot of situations were weird, they weren’t scary. This is a movie with people on the run from either a massive terrorist attack or some inexplicable natural event and yet there’s no sense of desperation. In War Of The Worlds, which you mentioned earlier, Tom Cruise’s convincing portrayal of fear and his desperation to keep his daughter alive is memorably done. There are no memorable performances in this film.

JB: Right. At the beginning of the movie, for example, the looks on these characters’ faces suggest that they’ve been inconvenienced more than anything. First, there’s an inexplicably calm scene of people evacuating Philadelphia (one character compares getting a train ticket to the Christmas rush to buy a Cabbage Patch doll, but, nope, there’s not even that kind of pandemonium). Then the characters are on the train, and it stops and these people look like they’re trying to be concerned, but it never really works. I’ve seen more emotion on the subway when there’s a 2-minute track delay. And unlike War Of The Worlds or the flashback scenes in I Am Legend, Shyamalan’s scenes are constructed so that the main characters always seem to be the most concerned figures in any room they walk into. There’s no grand panorama of hysteria; it’s just a bunch of people with quizzical looks on their faces.

The irony, perhaps, is that the only character who seems truly worked up over any of the plot’s events is Mark Wahlberg’s Elliot. Both of us were worried about Wahlberg going into this movie: just hearing Wahlberg’s voice whenever the trailer came on I thought he sounded flat and fake. And in the movie, sure enough, he feels flat and fake. And yet he’s the only character who seems to realize the gravity of the situation.

H: If you’re going to pick an actor like Mark Wahlberg, you’ve got to give him some good direction. In this movie he comes off like a poor actor in a movie with a poor screenplay. But, as I said before, disaster movies traditionally have poor acting. That doesn’t mean they can’t work. So there has to be tension.

One thing that I find interesting here is Shyamalan’s use of the horrific image. In The Sixth Sense he went for those cheap, easy scares, with people hanging in the building and the kid with the back of his head shot off. He went away from that in Unbreakable, Signs and The Village, and the subtle stuff is more effective, as it almost always is. But in this movie he returns to the graphic, and the result is horrible. It falls flat. In one scene there’s a lion chewing off someone’s arms in a zoo. First of all, a lion doesn’t even eat that way, but the gross-out scene is empty. All the graphic parts have no tension or suspense or shock to them.

There was one sequence that had a glimmer of suspense, and that’s when the characters realize that smaller groups are less threatening to nature and they look down the ridge and see two groups coming together. They know that’s disaster, and it’s too far away to yell, “Don’t get together.” And the groups get together and it’s disaster –

JB: Yes, it is disaster, and not in the way Shyamalan intended it, because that’s the conflict that ends with the guy lying down in front of the lawnmower.

H: Oh! Gosh. You’re right.

JB: And that moment underlines just how unsuspenseful this movie is, because we watch this tractor drive over a guy and see his body explode, and it’s like, “Oh, OK.” The only interest in these death scenes is the number of ways that Shyamalan comes up with for people to kill themselves. It’s like the concept of Saw, in a way, but for a movie with all this death and supposed gore it’s not visceral, it’s not effectual, it didn’t make my skin crawl. As you said, it’s empty. It’s just there. Lots of movies these days make the mistake of having such a high body count that we don’t care about the action on screen, but if you’re making a disaster movie about human death on a massive scale, we need to feel for the victims, and we don’t here.

H: I was disappointed because I like the central, central, central idea of this movie. I like the concept of nature getting revenge. It’s like The Birds, a movie that is also unexplained but you get the feeling that nature is fighting back. In The Happening, the central kernel of the plot has hope, but it doesn’t move forward intensely enough.

JB: So do you think this movie fails because Shyamalan has too many ideas going or has no idea at all? I’m looking at the finished product and I’m wondering: what’s the germ of this story? Wahlberg’s character, who is a science teacher, tells a story at the beginning about these bees that inexplicably disappeared, which might be due to global warming but might also be some random occurrence. Is that the germ of this story? Is it an environmental hook? Is it a disaster movie hook? Is it a zombie movie hook? Theoretically in here there’s a love story, so is that the hook? Does Shyamalan have no clue where he wants to go here, or was he trying to go in too many directions at once?

H: It’s hard to say. I think he may have been going in too many directions. I think nature’s revenge is the message, but he didn’t go about it effectively. You’re right, he got distracted with other things. Probably Lady In The Water proves that he can get really distracted with unimportant details.

JB: Speaking of Lady In The Water: If you had told me a week ago that The Happening would be not just worse but considerably worse than Lady In The Water, I wouldn’t have believed you. If you had told me that it would be a bigger disappointment than Indiana Jones & The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, which is a masterpiece by comparison, I wouldn’t have believed you. But the even bigger surprise is this: The thing that Shyamalan has always delivered in his movies is a sense of atmosphere, mood and ambiance. Even his worst films in their worst moments have that. But The Happening has all the atmosphere of an airport bathroom stall.

H: Right, there’s no presence.

JB: Yeah. I mean, to what extent does this even feel like an M Night Shyamalan film?

H: It doesn’t at all, and that’s what I felt the absence of right away. From the very beginning, the camera set-ups have no Shyamalan signature. There’s no feel or magic to them. A lot of this stuff feels shoddy and rushed as if he had to have everything on the first take.

JB: I agree with you. And so with this amateurish staging, the only thing that feels like typical Shyamalan is the awkward writing. He’s had elements of that in the past, but previous to this I’ve been able to look past those faults and defend them. We had that conversation about The Village and I pointed out that, no, these characters don’t come across like people in a genuine late-1800s setting, but, guess what: they aren’t. It’s an act. And so the dialogue reflects a misguided modern idea of what the late 1800s looked and sounded like. It’s a play within a play, and it works. In Unbreakable a lot of the dialogue that seems stiff at first we later realize is that way by design to evoke the classic tenets of a comic book. Beyond that, Shyamalan would always write cringe-worthy lines here or there, but the larger film experience was so enriching that you looked past it. Or at least I did. Here there’s nothing larger to get lost in and so all the faults are glaring.

The low point probably – and it’s extremely difficult to identify the low point of this movie – comes in that scene at the diner when the woman taps Elliot on the shoulder to show him that video from the zoo of the lion attack. This guy is standing there next to these lions and he has to coax them into attacking him in the first place, and then he remains perfectly upright as these lions rip his arms off like something out of a Monty Python bit (“It’s only a flesh wound!”). Give me a break!

H: Exactly. So here’s Shyamalan, and he wants to make a shocking scene, and so he strays from reality, having the guy just stand there as his limbs are being torn off his body. If Shyamalan had showed the lions reacting as they really would – they would have jumped on top of the guy and dragged him off somewhere – done as a fleeting image, that would have been much more intense.

JB: It smacks of a desperate filmmaker. Because I guess he thinks this is a cool device, because we’re watching this video on someone’s iPhone. But in the audience we’re watching this smaller movie within our movie. We’re several levels removed: there’s the guy, the people watching the guy who shot the video, the people watching the video of the guy in the diner and then us. I felt totally disconnected.

And all of this leads to one of the worst lines in the film, from the woman watching what should be vomit-inducing video: “Mother of God, what kind of terrorists are these?” I wish I could say that she screams that line like Heston at the end of Soylent Green, but she doesn’t. She says it with the intensity of a woman who has found a hair on her sandwich. So what made me sickest wasn’t the lion attack but the dialogue. And there are several moments like that in this movie:

There’s a terrible scene – and I feel terrible for the actress – where we watch a woman as she listens to her daughter commit suicide on the other end of a cell phone. The staging of the shot is removed and unimaginative: a bunch of people standing around in a circle gawking at this woman while she has a meltdown. It looks like an acting class, like an improv device: “OK, you just listened to your daughter die, what do you do ...?” It’s painful. And then there are all these moments where characters say things that just make no sense. Like in one scene, when they’re at the model home that they don’t yet realize is a model home, Zooey Deschanel’s character is with the little girl and her line is: “This place must have a bathroom.” Well, fucking of course it has a fucking bathroom. It’s a fucking house!

H: Right. What she should be saying is: “I’m going to take her to the bathroom.” And a similar line is at the beginning of the movie, at the construction site. These construction workers hear a crash and they see that someone has fallen off the building. They walk up to him and see that he’s almost certainly dead, and the first part is okay: he radios for help –

JB: Although even that’s pretty nonchalant.

H: And then the guy kneeling there says, “Give him room.” What? Give him room? Why?

JB: I’d forgotten about that one, but, you’re right, that’s horrible. And I’m glad you mentioned that scene, because when all those bodies are raining down from the roof of the construction site it’s an obvious visual allusion to 9/11 and I was wondering, were you gripped by that?

H: With the first crash, I tried. But the sound effect was almost comical. And the people’s reactions were ill-timed. And it just didn’t work.

JB: What I thought of during that scene, and at other moments, was the frog scene from Magnolia. I got the sense watching this movie, “Damn, M Night just watched Magnolia for the first time two years ago and this is his big Stuff Happens movie.” But Magnolia tells an actual story with actual emotion while still playing with the inexplicable. Shyamalan, instead, dives just into that one area and still can’t make it work.

H: Yeah. And in Magnolia those inexplicable events bring people together, and here there’s none of that.

JB: Not successfully anyway. But that leads us to another surprise, which is that the same filmmaker who gave us this straightforward, sweet and yet devastatingly touching love story in The Village comes up empty with this ... this ... I don’t even want to call it a love story: this relationship between Wahlberg’s Elliot and Deschanel’s Alma.

H: It’s the most awkward relationship I’ve seen in a film, ever, that I can think of. They never act like a couple that’s living together.

JB: It really is. One of my pet peeves with movies is when they insert a relationship story into disaster. It happened in Indiana Jones, for example, where somehow amidst all this violence and near-death at the hands of the Russians, Indy immediately falls in love again with Marion Ravenwood, as if no time has passed. You would think they would preoccupied by other things and that love would come later. But lots of movies do this. Yet what The Happening does is one click on the wheel stranger because every time Shyamalan tries to squeeze in the Elliot-Alma subplot it brings what little momentum the movie ever generates to a halt.

H: It’s ridiculous: Alma feels guilty because she went behind her husband’s back and met some guy to have dessert. But it can’t just be dessert, it has to be tiramisu, as if that’s significant.

JB: Well, maybe Night just saw Sleepless In Seattle for the first time, too.

H: Right. And this brings us back to the fact that all this pained dialogue would be inconsequential if Shyamalan delivered on the action and suspense, but he doesn’t.

JB: I agree. My prediction right now is that a lot of the blame is going to be placed on Wahlberg’s shoulders, because he’s in the movie so much and he’s nasally and boring and just not very good. But the kicker is this: he’s all those things consistently.

H: And that’s a puzzler.

JB: That is a puzzler. And it leads me to believe that Wahlberg – and I could say the same thing about Deschanel, who is reduced to giving blue-eyed gazes – gives precisely the performance that Shyamalan was looking for. Because even after Night’s fall from grace with the critically panned Lady In The Water, and to a lesser degree The Village, Shyamalan is still a big name, or was before this monstrosity. The Happening was sold as an M Night Shyamalan movie. So this isn’t a case where some upstart director is working with Jack Nicholson and he hates what he sees in the dailies but his producers won’t axe Nicholson because he’s the box office draw. Wahlberg? Deschanel? Shyamalan could replace that talent if he wanted to if he didn’t like what he was seeing. But he didn’t.

Which is the long way around to saying that I could argue that Wahlberg gives the best performance in the movie. That’s by default a bit, I guess, because there aren’t that many characters in The Happening. But of any of the characters he’s the only one who seems to give a shit. When you think about it, Wahlberg’s performance actually works for the train-wreck dialogue that Shyamalan has written for him. It doesn’t benefit the film, but the performance matches the character as written. So I’ll ask you this: If we have a better actor in that role with those lines, would we have a better movie?

H: No. We’d have a bigger shame. Because Mark Wahlberg, let’s be honest, still gets something out of this: he got to star in a big summer movie. So he’s happy. But if you put a better actor in there it just would have underlined the disappointment.

And here’s a comparison: When Orson Welles got to the end of his career and was just this big fat guy in these throwaway roles, you couldn’t help but remark: “Oh, poor Orson Welles. Look where he’s gone.” And you knew he was eating too much and drinking too much and going down the tubes.

JB: Marlon Brando had that fall.

H: And Errol Flynn, too. Watching this movie I kept thinking about that, like, “Oh God, M Night Shyamalan has lost his mind.” With Lady In The Water you could see some of the same quality of his previous films and you thought, “Oh, it’s just misguided. He’s trying to do too much.” With this film I thought, and not as joke, “He’s gone insane.”

JB: I know what you mean. It’s hard to believe that this is a Shyamalan movie. And going back to Lady, at least that’s pretty to look at. The Happening has no redeeming qualities. Not one. There aren’t 10 consecutive minutes of solid moviemaking in that entire debacle. And so that leads us here:

It’s 2010. Shyamalan releases another movie. Do you see it?

H: I probably do, because I’m curious, and because I’m ever hopeful. And because I’ve gone to movies that I’ve known were going to be bad because I was drawn by one element or another. So, yes, I’ll probably go and see it. But right now, I’m just baffled. I’m baffled.

JB: Me too. I think I’ll see his next movie. But unless the trailer blows my mind and gives me hope, I already know that I’m going to be going into that movie with the lowest of expectations. I’m going to be drawn to that film like I’d be drawn to see Mel Gibson in a room with an open bar, topless women and Jews. Something disastrous is going to happen, and it’s going to be ugly, and I must see. That will be what draws me to the theater next time, and that’s depressing. Because right now I have zero confidence that he’ll ever make a good film again. Even just a good film, not a great one.

When we go back to his previous films, like them or not you have to agree that they were made with passion. You could feel how much Night cared about those stories. Sometimes, perhaps, he willed them to success by his love of the material alone. But I feel no passion in this movie.

H: No, there’s none. And my theory is that as his movies have drawn fewer and fewer people and increasingly negative reviews that people in the industry must be giving him advice to collaborate with another writer or go a different direction and it feels as if he’s pushing forward his way toward destruction.

JB: So let me offer you this: You are the Michael Clayton of moviemaking. You are the fixer. But, as if in an M Night movie, you’ve got some sort of supernatural power. So with a wave of your hand you can change one element of this movie. What do you change?

H: I’d change the direction of the disaster. I’d make it a disaster caused by nature, but it causes humans to kill each other instead of themselves, and once it starts it’s non-stop action and no one is safe. It wouldn’t matter if you had bad acting or bad dialogue, because once the audience was swept up in the intensity of it, the rest is just details.

JB: That would be a good change. If I’m trying to fix this movie, I think I go with a more dynamic presence in the lead role if I can only change one thing. But that’s a contradiction because I think Wahlberg was directed into the performance he delivers here, so maybe that wouldn’t have made a difference. I have to say, if I was drawn to anything in this movie, I was drawn to Wahlberg. So this film seems unsalvageable to me.

You’re probably right that the crux of the problem is in how it approaches its disaster. I mean, can we agree that wind isn’t all that sinister and that it isn’t particularly easy to film? Plants may be the thing fighting the humans, but it’s the wind that these characters are running from. At one point one of the characters even says: “We’ve got to stay ahead of the wind.” I don’t know how that’s done, exactly, but that line pretty much encapsulates the ridiculousness of this whole project.

H: I would have made the vegetation the clear ‘bad guys,’ because that’s worked in the past in The Day Of The Triffids, in an Outer Limits episode with the tumbleweeds and in this year’s The Ruins, with the vines. It can be done and it can be done effectively and he didn’t do it.

JB: So we agree hands down that this is the worst Shyamalan movie ever. So let’s up the ante. Is it the worst movie you’ve seen so far this year?

H: Well, formerly I was calling Indiana Jones the worst movie of the year – but now, definitely, The Happening takes its place – though Indiana Jones is a close second. It’s sad when filmmakers like Spielberg and Shyamalan can’t deliver a decent movie.

JB: What a disaster.

Night Writers: E-mails on M Night Shyamalan

Friday, the sixth major film from writer/director M Night Shyamalan will debut nationwide. The Happening stars Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel in a story about ... well, I’m not quite sure what it’s about. I’ve tried to avoid the trailer and advanced publicity, but I’ll be there Friday night, for whatever is in store, hoping to be taken away like I was by Unbreakable and like I wasn’t by Lady In The Water.

Friend of the blog and frequent Cooler commenter Hokahey will be there, too – in town this weekend for a visit. In anticipation of the opening-night event, I traded e-mails with Hokahey, discussing the highs and lows of the Shyamalan oeuvre. A transcript follows.

If you’re expecting to find two guys who love The Sixth Sense and detest The Village, think again. This is what it looks like when two Shyamalan fans try to assure one another and themselves that The Happening won’t be another Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull.

(This probably goes without saying, but beware: super-duper spoilers ahead for The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village and Lady In The Water! There are NO SPOILERS for The Happening.)


Jason Bellamy: There are only a few days left until M Night Shyamalan’s The Happening debuts and I’m starting to find the title ironic. There was a time not too long ago when Shyamalan was the hot thing – Newsweek called him “the next Spielberg” – and his movies were highly anticipated. They were happenings. But this summer I feel like we’re the only two people on the planet counting down the days until the movie comes out. Maybe I’m doing too good a job of avoiding the advanced publicity and rumor (because if there’s a surprise twist at the end, or if there isn’t, I don’t want to know). Certainly, though, it seems like there’s considerably less hype for this film than there is for The Dark Knight or than there was for the release of Indiana Jones or Sex And The City. Heck, the new Hulk movie is getting more play.

Am I alone here? Are we alone in our excitement? And, you’ve seen the trailer, is “excited” the right word? We’re just days away. What are your emotions about The Happening right now?

Hokahey: When I walked into the local multiplex this winter and saw the huge cardboard stand-up display of the poster – the highway diminishing into the distant dark city, cars overturned or simply stopped, doors open – and I looked up at the top of the poster and saw the name of M Night Shyamalan, I uttered an audible, “All right!” Seeing Shyamalan’s name gave me that warm burst of excitement you feel in anticipation of a cinematic experience that seems made just for you. Really, despite Lady In The Water, I felt as much excitement as if the name at the top of the poster had been Terrence Malick, which would make me jump for joy.

As for the title, it’s nicely terse and in keeping with M Night’s previous titles, but it may be a little tongue-in-cheek – as much as to say, yeah, Lady In The Water bombed, but watch me now. And watch I will (on June 13) because, for me, Shyamalan is a talented filmmaker. I saw the initial preview long enough ago that my memory of it is fuzzy (and I haven’t let myself watch the recent extended preview), but I am very excited – as excited as I was when I saw the name Spielberg on the poster for War Of The Worlds. And whereas the preview for Lady In The Water made me think, “Uh, oh. I’m nervous about this one,” the preview for The Happening seems to display the same mood, tightness of story and focus on strange, unrelated elements (that will all be drawn together in the end) that made M Night’s first four films so satisfying.

JB: It’s interesting that you mention the trailer for Lady In The Water. In anticipation for The Happening, I’ve finally gotten around to reading Michael Bamberger’s The Man Who Heard Voices, about Shyamalan’s trials and tribulations making Lady. In the sixth chapter, there’s a scene where Shyamalan shows a rough cut of Lady’s teaser (to be released during the film’s shooting, months prior to the first real trailer). As the book puts it there’s a “moody piercing violin solo” and “a tenor singing a snippet of a modern opera in Italian.” There are shots of Paul Giamatti’s Cleveland Heep writing in his journal at The Cove, and then the words: “Cleveland Heep’s life is about to change. Forever.” We’ll get to the specifics of Lady later, but reading that passage reminded me of how enticing that teaser was. It had me pumped. And then the trailer came out, which showed more of what was in the end a discombobulated film. And, like you, it made me nervous. Rightfully, it turned out.

Which brings us to The Happening: I had the same reaction you did over the poster, but the trailer has me feeling uneasy. I’ve only seen parts of it, and just once. Since then, I’ve closed my eyes whenever it has come on, and that might be part of the problem. Mark Wahlberg, who I’ve liked in Boogie Nights and Traveller, sounds flat. And there’s some shot of people listening to a radio in a field that looks right out of Signs, and a shot of people on a train that reminded me of Unbreakable. And this is coming off of Lady, which was a disaster. So I guess I can sum it up by saying that I’m nervous. Very nervous. But like a character in a Shyamalan movie, I want to believe.


H: I’m nervous too. But I trust Shyamalan. He knows how to tell a story. He proved that in his first four films. I forgive him for Lady. He incorporated intriguing elements – he just incorporated way too many silly ones. As for the elements in the trailer for The Happening that echo other films: that's M Night's style and that's part of what I like about his films. He likes to tie his films together thematically. For example, his first three films include the father figure who has lost faith in himself who must renew that faith by saving others. If anything makes me nervous about The Happening, it's Mark Wahlberg, so I agree with you there. He's just not an actor with much presence; he's not even a Dennis Quaid – who isn’t a great actor but at least succeeds in exuding some passionate presence.

But back to the trailer: it seemed to throw out a bunch of random weird things going on that intrigued me and that gave me the hope of their coming together in a meaningful and suspenseful or surprising ending, which I don't even want to speculate on right now.

JB: Ah, yes, the patented Shyamalan Surprise Ending. That’s the perfect segue to begin discussing his films, starting with the ultimate surprise-ender The Sixth Sense. First of all, how did you come to that movie? Did you see some movie called The Sixth Sense about a kid who sees dead people, or did you see The Must-See Movie With A Surprise Ending That Everyone Is Talking About?


H: My experience with The Sixth Sense was this: I had seen the preview and it looked intriguing. I went opening night – before the buzz and later the hype. The surprise ending was one of those pure, emotional, thrilling cinematic experiences that only happen when they happen by surprise, like the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet Of The Apes. Again, I was totally taken by surprise, but it wasn't just the surprise ending that thrilled me, it was the great filmmaking, the tight storytelling, Bruce Willis' performance, and that new name I didn't know how to pronounce (Shyamalan), and the promise of more films by this new and thrilling writer/director.

JB: That had to be a cool experience, to be so completely stunned by the movie. My experience was that I almost passed on The Sixth Sense. I’ve always liked Bruce Willis, but the whole “I see dead people” thing wasn’t a turn-on. Eventually though, more and more people were talking about it, and some friends wanted to see it. One of my friends told me there was “some surprise ending.” So we go and I’m watching the movie, and I’m digging it, and it occurs to me as we’re nearing the end that there was some sort of surprise in store.

When the scene happens late between Cole (Haley Joel Osment) and his mom (Toni Collette), when he tells her that he can see his dead grandmother, I think I convinced myself that was it, that was the big surprise. I remember thinking, “Well, I don’t know that I’d call that a ‘surprise ending,’ but it’s a nice touch. Good movie.” And then The Surprise happened. And I was blown away. Here I’d gone into the movie expecting a surprise and it still surprised me. That’s impressive.

Like you, I admire the tight storytelling and Willis’ performance, and the surprise offered that extra wrinkle that made the movie extra-special. Still, I thought the Oscar nomination for Best Picture was nonsense. It’s a fun movie, a heartfelt movie and the surprise makes it narrowly unforgettable, but without the surprise it’s simply a very good movie, not great.


H: Yes, in this case the integrity of the surprise isn’t ruined by knowing to expect a surprise. When Malcolm's wedding ring rolls onto floor that's a chilling, memorable moment. Yet, I like the fact that Shyamalan gives us satisfying climaxes in addition to The Surprise. We have Cole helping the little murdered girl show her father how she was killed – also a very enthralling moment – and, as you said, we have Cole's revelations to his mother during the traffic jam – also very chilling. The Surprise, then, is the frosting on the cake and the mark of a clever storyteller.

The Oscar nomination for Best Picture came from the hype, and I agree it was silly. It's a well-made film, but it resorts to trite, graphic shockers (the bloody bicyclist; the boy with the back of his head shot off; the hanging corpses) that were unnecessary in the midst of such a gripping, well-developed tone.

JB: I agree, and maybe that’s why I never feel the urge to go back to The Sixth Sense. As I think about it, Willis’ surprising performance (not cocky or tough like his famous Die Hard persona) was the biggest thrill for me as the movie was unfolding. It’s a performance that would have brought me back to The Sixth Sense. But then Shyamalan made Unbreakable, featuring what I think is an even stronger Willis performance in an even stronger film.

H: Right. I enjoyed The Sixth Sense. Then along came Unbreakable, starring Willis once again, and I felt I had viewed a much more significant contribution from M Night. In Sense, Willis goes for the deliberately subtle, quiet delivery so that he comes off as the antithesis of his action movie persona, but in Unbreakable a touching sensitivity and sincerity come through. We feel him struggle inside with his turmoil. "You're not doing what you're supposed to be doing," says Elijah (Samuel L Jackson), a statement that might haunt many audience members unsatisfied with their lot.


One of Willis' best moments comes during the breakfast sequence after his first experience as the Guardian: Joseph sits down with his orange juice. Ever notice the exaggerated sounds of unscrewing the cap, pouring the juice, screwing the cap back on – as though drawing our attention to what comes next? Without a word, David slides the newspaper over to his son so that Joseph can read the article. We see a minimalist still life of the juice glass, the edge of a plate, just the corner of the newspaper. When Joseph looks up from the paper, David says softly, “You were right.” It is a very quiet sequence, but powerfully touching.

What's your favorite Bruce Willis moment in this film?

JB: It has to be the weight-lifting scene. It’s a marvelous bit of simple, visual storytelling (something Shyamalan would get away from in Lady In The Water), and it’s magical. In an otherwise subdued yet nuanced performance (even when he becomes the Guardian he’s restrained), it’s the only time that a flash of Willis’ spunk shines through. In the scene, David first scolds his son for putting on too much weight, but then they start adding weight until David has successfully pressed it all. “What else can we use?” David says, just a hint of a glimmer in his eye.


Otherwise, Willis is so soft and inward, often uncomfortable. On the surface, it’s a bit of misdirection by Shyamalan: making David Dunn look like anything but a hero. But to watch the movie again, knowing David’s fate, is to see the sadness that he mentions, the emptiness, the result of him not doing what “he’s supposed to be doing,” an assessment that we don’t appreciate the gravity of until the end. Willis also shines early on in that uncomfortable scene on the train when he hits on a woman and it goes badly. And I adore the vulnerability he brings to the scenes with a terrific Robin Wright Penn as his estranged wife; you can really feel the distance that has grown between them as well as the love that’s there underneath it all.

Put it all together and Unbreakable is my favorite Shyamalan picture. It’s a movie that works better, or at least on a deeper level, the second time you see it, because you can appreciate all the allusions to the excessive do-gooderness of comic book heroes (little things, like David warning his son to step back during the weight-lifting scene so he doesn’t get hurt).

Also, it’s worth noting that what was arguably Willis’ finest moment as David didn’t make the finished film. Most of the time the deleted scenes you find on DVDs are a predictable waste, but Unbreakable has two deleted scenes that are powerful: one of Elijah as a child at a carnival, another of David crying in the shower. I’m not arguing with Shyamalan’s decision to cut either scene, because leaner is usually better. But I’m surprised at the latter cut: I can’t imagine there are too many directors brave enough to ask a tough-guy A-list actor to go to that place and then not use the footage.

Anyway, in Unbreakable Shyamalan takes the superhero origin story, which is always the best element, and spreads it out over an entire film (without us realizing what we’re watching) and makes it a very human story. When you think about it, David is a Christ figure, not as a martyr, obviously, but as an uncomfortable savior. He doesn’t want to shirk his responsibility and yet he’s doubtful that he could be so important. His destiny is a burden. As terrifying as it is for him to believe that he has this power, it’s just as terrifying to imagine giving himself up to that belief and finding out it isn’t true, that he’s just ordinary after all.



H: I love the Willis moments you mentioned. As a matter of fact, re-watching Unbreakable recently I was surprised that the film doesn’t begin with the train sequence. It begins with Elijah's birth – which is appropriate, but for me the film begins on the train, when we learn so much about David in a fairly silent sequence. We see his loneliness. We see that he likes kids. We see that he is considering being unfaithful to his wife, but then, when it doesn't work out, he puts the ring back on his finger. Ah, interesting – the ring – an important symbol in The Sixth Sense.

As far as considering the film as a whole, I think Unbreakable is M Night's best film. As you say, the whole superhero story is played out so originally. Forget Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, Iron Man – Unbreakable is my favorite superhero movie because it's about a real man with real vulnerabilities, yet with convincing super powers played out in the real world. David testing out his telepathic powers in the train station and then saving the two girls only to be thrown down onto the pool cover – his battle with the water, and then his confrontation with the killer, holding onto him with his Herculean strength and enduring a pounding against the wall – what wonderfully gripping sequences those are!

Without a doubt, Unbreakable is Shyamalan's best film. My favorite? The Village, for many reasons, but mostly because of the world that M Night creates that we are convinced is an isolated village in the 1800s surrounded by a monster-infested wood.

JB: Well, you were convinced that it was an isolated village in the 1800s. Supposedly many people saw through that farce a little too soon. But we’ll get to The Village and the backlash against the Shyamalan surprise endings in a bit. First we need to discuss Signs.

For me, coming off Unbreakable, Signs was a letdown. I liked aspects of it, scenes, but on the whole it didn’t give me much to sink my teeth into. I detested the ending with the awkward alien and I thought the “surprise,” to the degree there was one, seemed forced and wasn’t fulfilling. But you’re a fan of Signs. Defend it.


H: Yes, I'm a fan. It's Shyamalan's most gripping film. (It's my third favorite after The Village and Unbreakable.) I appreciate it for its take on the alien invasion genre from a single family's point of view, as well as for two very memorable moments:

1. Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) is watching the television in a closet. The news channel shows a video clip that captures a glimpse of an alien. The scene is a birthday party in Brazil. The children in the foreground shriek hysterically as they point to the dense palmettos outside in the courtyard. The video captures typically shaky images. The kids shift to another window. With a jolt from the musical score, the alien emerges from the foliage, looks toward the camera and then passes out of sight. Merrill jolts in shock. This fleeting view of the alien is masterfully edited – not too long a glimpse, not too brief – just what is needed to create the effect. This is a totally convincing, fleeting image from another realm, one of the best moments in all of M Night's films.

2. The family has survived the harrowing appearance of the alien in the coal chute in the cellar. Back upstairs the next morning it seems like the aliens have gone. Then Graham wheels the TV into the living room and we see the alien reflected in the screen – and the stage is set for the surprise, which involves all the pieces coming together: Bo’s glasses of water; Merrill’s strength as a batter; Morgan’s asthma; and, during all this, the sudden cut to the flashback of Graham's wife’s last words: “Tell Graham to see… and tell Merrill to swing away.” Yes, indeed, Merrill, swing away! And there’s a tone of joyous triumph to the musical score and the slow-motion breaking of the glasses and splashing of the water that makes this the most emotional of Shyamalan's first three Surprise Endings.

JB: I have to disagree with you there. The most emotional ending is from The Sixth Sense, when Willis’ Malcolm finds out he’s been dead all this time – which also puts his wife’s actions into tragic perspective. For me, Signs is the Shyamalan screenplay that’s trying too hard plot-twist-wise. I completely agree with you that the initial alien sighting (via the news) is masterful, and I loved them boarding up the house and retreating to the cellar (though I wish the entire sequence would have played out with just the sounds of aliens, rather than the one reaching through the coal chute). Another scene I respect is the one of Mel Gibson’s Graham having his first encounter with the alien locked in the kitchen. And I’m always a fan of alien encounters near corn fields. That said, none of the scenes I just described make me want to see the film again. However, with the caveat that I haven’t seen this movie in years, I’ll throw Signs this bone: I think it includes my favorite (read: least annoying) Shyamalan cameo, with him playing that catatonic doctor ready to hightail it out of town.

H: Well, I guess it's just how the film hits you, or not. I find myself going back to Signs more than The Sixth Sense. Haley Joel irritates me after a while. But I do agree Sense is very well made. In re-watching the first four films over a period of four nights recently, I found myself gripped by Signs. The acting is good – M Night's cameo is creepy, especially when we see him fleetingly in the town – Phoenix as Merrill is an interesting character (wayward and purposeless, like David Dunn in Unbreakable). I enjoy the boarding up, siege sequences reminiscent of The Birds. And it's hard to describe, but the ending comes together in such a joyfully chilling way – with the flashback thrown in (a risky interruption but a successful one, I think).

As for Night's appearances in his films, his appearance in Signs is more of a role (integral to the plot) than a cameo. I like his appearance in Unbreakable as the drug pusher; it's brief. Then, in The Village, he is very irritating as the head of the conservation area security; he's hardly necessary and he's sitting there reading his newspaper while the guard goes into the refrigerator and picks out bottles of penicillin. Lucky thing he was so engrossed in his newspaper! Silly and needless. Of course, in Lady he plays too much of a role and he's not a great actor. He needs to stick to writing and directing.


JB: Silly and needless, that’s the perfect way to describe Shyamalan’s appearance at the end of The Village. Now, I happen to love that film: I saw it three times in the theater and I never tire of watching it ... until the final quarter. My problem with The Village’s conclusion isn’t the standard objection lobbed at the film (which I’ll get to in a second), it’s two scenes: the clumsy, slow-motion attack in the woods and every single second that Shyamalan is on screen.

The first complaint is minor: it’s a stylistic thing. In the forest attack Shyamalan is trying to play with us, trying to convince us that maybe monsters really do exist out there in the woods (after William Hurt’s character has already revealed the charade), and by altering speeds and moving the camera he brings an alien quality to what is a human in a costume. Fine. But like the shots of the green thing in Signs, it smacks of a director who is uncomfortable with his own visuals, as if he’s embarrassed that he’s trying to make This Thing scary. Yeah, I know, it’s what we don’t see that terrifies (The Village is all about the fear of the unseen and unknown), but at some point you’ve got to stand by your monsters, right?

As for the Shyamalan appearance: His acting in The Village is stiff and forced and the entire scene is, what were those words you used? Silly and needless. That’s exactly right. What a waste! The newspaper headlines of real-world horror are like Spielberg at his overly-overt worst. The only useful part of the scene is the line of dialogue explaining that planes aren’t allowed to fly over the compound, but along the way we get the worst, most unjustifiable dialogue in the film (“Don’t have conversations?” Conversations? Who talks like that?). Yet Shyamalan keeps the scene in all its misery because he’s in it, I guess. That’s the only justification.

Having said all that, you are one of the few people I know who love The Village like I do. In his 1-star review, Roger Ebert called it “a colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn.” He was hardly alone. I know several people who watched the movie and found it both boring and, here’s the kicker, “obvious.” They determined quickly that the late-1800s setting was a hoax. What mystifies me, though, is this: even knowing the secret of The Village, I find it to be one of Shyamalan’s most engrossing pictures. I know you’re with me on this, so this won’t make for good debate, but what’s your take on The Village and its backlash?

H: My first viewing of The Village was on opening day in a suburban theater in California. When the end came, two beefy guys in wife-beaters got up and said, "That movie sucked." A poor boy who had seen the movie with his parents had to listen to his mother bitch all the way down the aisle as she exited, with things like, "That was so disappointing... I'll never go to the movies again." But the boy bravely said to his mom, "But don't you see..." and he went on to try to articulate some of the themes.

I think the big disappointment came because viewers were expecting monsters and blood. I was expecting monsters too. But when they didn't come – when I realized the monsters were us and our violent society that the villagers were hiding from – I loved it. Even without the Surprise or Not-So-Surprising Ending, I love this film.


There's so much to this film beyond its surprise. It's a touching story of true love's dedication. Phoenix and Bryce Dallas Howard give great performances. I love the very-removed otherworldly atmosphere of the village, complete with people speaking without contractions. I think the atmosphere is the film's triumph. I love Ivy's surrealistic journey through Covington Wood, with the memorable images of the rain turning to splinters of ice on the bushes; that overhead shot of the rain falling on the tarpaulin; the field of berries of "the bad color;" the trees entangled in briers; the muddy sink hole. And I love the musical score – the best of James Newton Howard's Shyamalan scores – with Hilary Hahn's haunting, melancholy violin strains.

For me, the ending isn’t disappointing. It's chilling. The voiceover explaining the loss of loved ones to violence. And then the final shot (there are many finely executed shots in this film) of Lucius lying in his bed, the door open to the outside, and then Ivy appears in the frame. "I am back, Lucius." Beautiful. Even the credits, with the music and the spooky old photographs, is wonderfully done.

As I said before, M Night is terrible in his cameo. As for the appearance of the "monster." That certainly could have been executed better. But the paradoxically colorful, almost artistic image of Noah lying amidst fur, feather, and bones at the bottom of the pit is memorable. For its acting, story, cinematography, musical score – despite its shortcomings here and there – The Village is a masterpiece.

JB: Wow. Masterpiece is a big word, and I hesitate to use it. But I will say this: those who say that The Village’s surprise isn’t a surprise at all are full of it. I don’t doubt that some folks deduced the secret in advance of its unveiling, and I’m sure their dissatisfaction is nothing short of sincere. But here’s the catch: the secret of The Village is obvious only to those looking for it. Reverse this film’s release with The Sixth Sense and no one would have seen The Village’s secret coming, and I bet quite a few people would have gotten to the bottom of The Sixth Sense, because they’d be looking for a riddle.

Now, let me be clear here: I think The Sixth Sense better executes its plot twist and that its twist is more rewarding. The Village wouldn’t have been the phenomenon that Sense was if Shyamalan made that his first film. However, Sense is also far more reliant on its surprise.

Thus the timing of this conversation is appropriate given all the attention swirling around Ken Tucker’s recent ‘I don’t care about spoilers’ comments in Entertainment Weekly (“I spoil if I must – and I sleep just fine”). As I see it, Tucker’s take is absurd. He thinks that it’s impossible to write thoughtful reviews while protecting spoilers and that he, as the critic, should be allowed to watch a TV show or a movie without having crucial plot points revealed ahead of time, though the average review-reading audience needs to “grow up” and accept their surprises-revealed fate. That’s bogus. If a film’s ending is so crucial that it must be detailed in a review – and sometimes it is – all that’s required is a simple parenthetical spoiler warning so people don’t stumble upon it accidentally. Then everybody wins. (An aside in favor of revealing spoilers: I remember all too well that Million Dollar Baby received heaps of disproportionate praise in large part because critics were so careful to protect its secrets that they didn’t dive into the truckload of faults in the movie’s latter half. But I digress.)

Here, though, is an area where I agree with Tucker: “The very fact that a plot twist becomes the most sacred bit of information, the key to enjoyment, doesn’t speak well for audiences’ appreciation of the performances, the direction, and other elements that make a show (or movie) worth pondering.”

Often, that’s quite right. People who went into The Village looking for the twist were cheating the movie and thus cheating themselves. Then again, Shyamalan is partly to blame for this. If his first three films informed audiences that his only worthwhile storytelling device was clever deception, moviegoers had every right to go into The Village hoping to be rewarded with a blow-your-socks-off finale, the same way people going into a Saw movie expect to see vile, bloody acts.


My view of Shyamalan echoes yours: the atmosphere or ambiance he creates is what entices me, not the twists, and I agree that The Village does the best job of that. As you said, the Hilary Hahn-powered score is a crucial ingredient (along with Richard Deakins’ lusciously muddy cinematography), and the interesting bit of trivia there is that Hahn wasn’t brought on until late in the process (according to the making-of extra on the DVD). I can’t imagine The Village without its score, nor can I imagine the score without Hahn.

Still, at the heart of this film is that terrific love story, with Howard’s Ivy and Phoenix’s Lucius. Some of the film’s acting is showy – I like Adrien Brody’s twitchy portrayal, but I have no argument for anyone who doesn’t – and that might be why this is about the only movie in which I can tolerate William Hurt: because Hurt, as the leader of the clan, a pompous college professor who masterminded the entire scheme, plays a character playing a character. That contraction-free dialogue isn’t meant to be an accurate representation of history but a reflection of the village elders’ ideas of what that era’s speech should sound like. It’s all an act. That’s why the tombstone at the beginning of the film with a late-1800s date on it isn’t a lie to the audience, as some have complained, it’s an element of the role-playing these characters have committed their lives to. Is it a cheat? Maybe a little. But no more than Cole failing to tell Malcolm that he’s dead right from the very start in The Sixth Sense.


Anyway, on top of the wonderful scenes or images you mentioned, I give you Ivy and Lucius on the porch; the two scenes where Lucius emerges from outside the frame to take Ivy’s hand; and, of course, “Do your very best not to scream.” What a straightforward and chilling line, bursting with suspense! I believe that The Village would be at least Shyamalan’s masterpiece if not for the flatness of the scenes on the other side of the wall.

H: Yes, Shyamalan ruined it by bringing himself into it. But, for me, I was so satisfied by what I had experienced before the wall that I forgive him this slip-up. Nevertheless, the film comes back to the village. Look at that closing shot: the elders in the room with Lucius, lying head to the bottom of the frame, with the door open. We can see this very believable world still going on outside. The news has spread: Ivy has returned. She killed a creature (Noah) and it leads to the elders reinstating their commitment to the village. Then Ivy walks in, and by that time I've forgotten all about M Night and his newspaper.


As you suggest, there is so much more to his films than the Surprise Endings. Look at each of the four movies we have discussed, and consider the suspenseful sequences that precede the endings, consider the acting, the framing of memorable images, the use of musical score. (The frantic score during the "Merrill, swing away" sequence in Signs is what helps capture the emotion for me and makes it my favorite ending.) As for spoilers, I simply won't read a review of a film until after I have seen the movie. I've had my experience spoiled too many times. Would a spoiler have changed my appreciation of M Night's first four films? Not much. I still would have been chilled by the ring rolling on the floor; shocked by the flashbacks elicited by Elijah's climactic line, "This is where we shake hands;" churned up emotionally by Merrill's bat-swinging triumph; touched by the voiceover, "My sister didn't live past her twenty-first birthday..."

Shyamalan has tried very hard to deliver the Surprise Ending to his fans, but, as Tucker suggests, they are unfaithful fans to be disappointed with the whole movie if the ending isn’t surprising. I'm going into The Happening not expecting a Surprise Ending. Who says M Night can't diverge from his formula? If there's a surprise I'll be happy, but if there isn't, there'll be a lot to enjoy as the story is told – that is, if he doesn't go wacky and wayward as he did in Lady In The Water.

JB: See, I don’t think that’s what Tucker is suggesting. Yes, he’s looking down his nose at people who only care about the plot twists, but even more he’s disparaging the art. He’s suggesting that if the TV show 24, to use his example, is only as good as its “I didn’t see that coming” twists, then it’s not very good. As someone who saw the first season of 24 and got nothing out of it, I’m in agreement with that argument. So, that being said, maybe Shyamalan’s following has only loved him for the Surprise Ending all along. Maybe none of the rest has really registered. Tucker would suggest that if The Sixth Sense is only a “great” film because of its conclusion then it ain’t great, and I agree.

But let’s move on and get to Lady, because that movie isn’t great in any respect. In my review at the time, I called it “a movie without grace, intrigue or common sense,” and I said it is “so muddled that it feels unplanned.” Having just read The Man Who Heard Voices, I can say with certainty that Lady was far from unplanned, but the book makes it clear that Lady was a muddled project from the very start. Shyamalan thought he was making his ET, inspired from a bedtime story he told his kids, but the result is something that feels like a mermaid version of “Dungeons & Dragons.” There are funny names and funny rules and talk, talk, talk, with no effect except to leave us tired of the characters.


At least once in the book, Shyamalan expresses that audiences don’t know what to expect from him anymore – and this was before Lady. That seems to be what Shyamalan thinks The Village did for him: he made a love story about people rather than a picture about the supernatural. The audience didn’t appreciate it. And then Lady came along and – wow – try as I might I find nothing to hold on to except for the setting (the eerie apartment complex called The Cove) and Paul Giamatti’s determined performance.

I know you liked this movie more than I did (which is to say somewhat), but here’s a question for you: Based on audience reaction to The Village (unfair though we think it was) and the rightful disaster that is Lady, should Shyamalan be returning to his supernatural roots (which appears to be the case in The Happening) or should he have gone even farther away from his comfort zone? There was a time when people thought Spielberg could only make popcorn movies, and for a while they were right (The Color Purple, surprisingly deep though it was for Spielberg at the time, isn’t all that mature in retrospect).

I guess what I’m asking you is this: Is Lady a sign that Shyamalan can only make films in his pigeonhole?

H: That's a good question. But what's his pigeonhole? The supernatural? What I like about Shyamalan’s first four films is that, yes, there is a supernatural base, but they are distinctly different in many ways: ghost story; superhero movie; alien invasion movie; fake monsters/real love story (to be followed by mermaid morass). These are the backdrops, but then you get stories that reflect significant topics: man struggling with loss of life, identity, faith; the endurance of love; the violence in our society.

I enjoy the films for the sci-fi sort of elements, but I don't label them that way. I think they are unique. I'm already seeing The Happening as a different contribution; it seems to be M Night's take on the disaster movie, or maybe another sort of genre – I have a hunch, but out of respect for not revealing spoilers, I won't say a word about it. So, except for trying to deliver the Big Surprise his audience now expects, I see his films as diverse. That's one of his big attractions for me.


As for Lady In The Water … You can do very fanciful things with mermaids and water – check out John Sayles' The Secret Of Roan Inish as an example. But there was no wonder in the water imagery (that scene in the underwater mermaid midden was a ridiculous borrowing from The Little Mermaid). One of M Night's many mistakes was taking Story out of the water. Keep her in the water! Keep her vulnerable! I was disappointed by this film. I feel Giamatti was doing his best but he's M Night's weakest lead. Yet I found things to like, including the echoes of his previous films: the main character suffering a loss; the different pieces of the puzzle that need to be solved in order to save Story; the creature in the tall grass. And I admire some of the images he captured. After Cleveland has made his emotional farewell to Story, we see the blurry image of the eagle swooping down and carrying her away from under the shimmering surface of the water. It’s a wonderful shot!

Does Lady In The Water prove that M Night can only do – or try to do – one sort of film? I don't think so. I know that he is fascinated by elements of horror and whimsy, and themes of love and the dark side of humanity, and he likes to revisit them. In Lady he just tried to fit in too many plot elements that didn't come together into a satisfying whole. With The Happening, I'm hoping for a tighter, more streamlined story. Could M Night go mainstream and make a love story or a character-driven story without the supernatural elements? I'm sure he could. Look at many of his well-staged sequences that could fit into movies that have nothing to do with the supernatural: Malcolm coming to the restaurant late; David lifting weights or having breakfast with his son; Graham overcoming his contempt for religion to embrace his children and brother; a girl setting out into a hostile wilderness in order to save the young man she loves.

JB: Good points. Going back to Ebert’s pan of The Village, one of the things he notes is that Shyamalan is “a director of considerable skill who evokes stories out of moods.” Maybe that’s Shyamalan’s pigeonhole, and so far it’s been rooted in the mysterious and fantastical. And that’s fine. Alfred Hitchcock made tremendous suspense pictures, and I don’t fault him for never making a war epic. (And it’s worth remembering that Hitch had quite a few misses scattered between his hits.) Still, every one of Shyamalan’s films so far has dealt in some way or another with belief and faith and the supernatural (even if it’s just the perception of the supernatural). I wonder how long he can keep that up, how many times he can tell that story with those repeated moods, before we start to feel like we’ve seen it all before.

We can be sure that The Happening will bring newness in at least one way: it’s Shyamalan’s first R-rated picture. There’s a voice in my head that wonders if that’s a sign of desperation rather than vision, as if Shyamalan is saying, “You think I can’t scare you? Watch this!” But if The Happening does well, Lady will seem like a misstep and maybe some people will start to look at The Village with fresh eyes (though I doubt it, because I’m not ready to bring fresh eyes to Signs). In any case, win or lose, I think his next film has to leave the supernatural in the garage if he wants to stay relevant and continue to draw Spielberg comparisons. Shyamalan needs his The Color Purple if for no other reason than to make people appreciate his future fantasies.


OK. So, we’ve looked over his films, and The Happening is about to happen. To wrap things up, complete these two sentences:

The Happening will succeed because ...

But it’ll be an uphill battle if ...

H: First, I agree with that quote by Ebert, but I feel each of M Night's first four films has a different mood. Interesting thing about Spielberg: he created his non-sci-fi masterpiece with Schindler's List, but I rate Jaws and War Of The Worlds among his tightest, best films. A lot of his ventures elsewhere have not been as memorable. But that's a debate for another time. So ...

The Happening will succeed because Shyamalan knows how to get touching performances out of his actors, he knows how to set a memorable mood, he knows how to frame stunning images, and he knows how to tell a meaningful story.

But it'll be an uphill battle if he appears in the film longer than 30 seconds (hey, stay behind the camera this time!) or if the film has anything to do with mermaids.

Here's hoping that Friday, June 13, brings M Night Shyamalan lots of good luck!

JB: I agree with you on the cameo and the mermaids.

I’ll go at my own questions this way:

The Happening will succeed because Shyamalan, after the impressive string of successes that was his first four films, needed to test his limits, like David Dunn, to figure out what they were. Lady In The Water was that test, and it proved that, like the Unbreakable hero, Shyamalan has limits (and should stay away from swimming pools). Having failed last time, he’ll bring his A-game.

But it’ll be an uphill battle if Mark Wahlberg’s performance is as flaccid as Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights’ famous mirror scene. Truth be told: I’m secretly hoping that Wahlberg is actually going to be the first to go, ala Janet Leigh in Psycho. Now that would be a surprise!

See you Friday, Hokahey!

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Cooler readers: What are your thoughts on M Night Shyamalan?