Hancock Defeated By Wuxi Finger Hold And Awesomeness

I was really really rooting for Hancock. Shades of Caruso loves Peter Berg, and wants his movies to make enough money that he can salvage the many box office disappointments from his back catalogue. We also wanted Hancock to be good enough to silence the doubters who have been complaining about it since it was announced, and, possibly most of all, wanted to see Will Smith being generally excellent. Well, it's made a boatload of money (and its overseas gross is big too), and Will Smith was great, but his performance was not what we expected. In fact, the film is not what anyone would have expected, and for that, we have to blame the marketers for making this look like a funny film about a self-loathing superhero when it mostly isn't, and also we need to point a finger at writers Vincent Ngo and X-Files ace Vince Gilligan, and director Peter Berg, for not knowing how to make the material they had work.

I'll go into details after the spoiler marker, but consider this my capsule review. John Dykstra's effects are pretty undistinguished and messy. Berg's decision to film this the same way he filmed Friday Night Lights and The Kingdom might have made some sense thematically, but it's a horribly ugly film with a sickeningly grey palette that made my head hurt (not helped by seeing the jawdroppingly beautiful Kung Fu Panda first).


I didn't totally hate it, though. The three leads are great, which is a big deal for me as I'm not a fan of Charlize Theron but was impressed by her in this (Canyon was less impressed). Jason Bateman is so likeable in this he steals the film, adds a lot of emotion that would otherwise be lacking, and though he at first seems to be nothing more than Michael Bluth after marrying Rita, comes good in the otherwise frustrating final act. His dramatic role in The Kingdom was no fluke, it seems. Will Smith comes out okay too, and the box office gross suggests we are still on our way to renaming the next thousand years the Willennium. That said, in terms of his career, he just made his Golden Child, or Far and Away. I hope his next project is a 100% success. FYI, I will never apologise for being a Will Smith fan. Get used to it.

Even better than those little pleasures, my personal superhero movie bugbear didn't come into play; Hancock might start the film as an asshole, but he is really a hero, a proper hero who helps people and doesn't just fight supervillains with whom he has a personal connection. One of the main themes of the movie is about wanting to do the right thing even though it doesn't seem to be worthwhile. That character trait really pleased me, and made up for a lot of the unfocused events in the latter half of the movie.


Anyway, time to carp. Kung Fu Panda praise follows later.

--------------Hancock spoilers follow-------------

The biggest problem in Hancock is the mid-movie twist, which, after we left the cinema and discussed it, isn't really a twist, more a shift in story perspective that makes the first half of the film seem like a pre-inciting incident sequence stretched to 45 minutes. That section of the movie, concerning Hancock's depression and attempts to better himself and become a beloved hero, contains many funny moments and unexpected pathos, but if you've seen the trailer, you've seen a lot of the best parts. However, the trailers will make you think this is the whole point of the film, and give no hints as to what it really is. The depression and bad behaviour of Hancock are the set-up for the big reveal later in the movie, and if you thought you were going to see a superhero spoof, you're wrong. It's a straight superhero movie with a mythology that might have made more sense in the first draft (though some people are not too keen even on that), that has been mistakenly seen as a twist movie whereas it is a story different than the one we were sold, one which has its emotional centre buried in the final moments of the film, which then crawls over the finish line with zero energy and a frustrating lack of resonance. That's a problem with the script, but also with the handling of it. It's fair to say that Berg, who re-edited the finale several times in order to beat the bad feedback from test screenings, had to change even more than just the underwhelming ending, considering how the original script featured Hancock having ejaculation issues, something that is totally absent from the movie.

Too much of the movie is lying on an editing room floor for it to make any sense. Perhaps a two hour version would work better. This ninety minute version feels like two episodes of a TV show called Hancock shmushed together to make a feature film (just like in the 70s when Glen A. Larson was trying to squeeze more money out of his creations), but sadly the Hancock showrunners have ineptly combined a mid-season comedy episode and an end-of-season high drama episode, not realising they don't quite go together. With two halves battling against each other, what's the story it's trying to tell? Even once we had picked it over while eating an excellent burger just off Abbey Road neither of us had a clue, and after tinkering with it for a long time, I doubt Berg knew either.


The second half of the movie concerns Hancock discovering that he is one of many millennia-old heroes created by the Gods to protect humanity, but forced to be apart from them due to his immense power. Luckily, the Gods knew that their minions were bound to want to settle down eventually, and so created them in pairs, where each one of them acts as a power dampener for the other, allowing them to live as a human couple if they so wanted. That's happened to every other hero on the planet, except for Hancock and his opposite, Charlize Theron. All of the others are now dead, for reasons not clearly explained. It's either old age, accidents, or "Them" that have picked them off. Who are "Them"? You've got me. Neither of us could understand that plot point, or if the evil Red, played by Eddie Marsan, is one of these "Them"s that are important enough to be referred to but not important enough to be explained. One thing that is stressed very late in the film, however, is that proximity to each other sets off the power drain, and only living as far apart as possible allows them to remain super.

I can get behind the idea of a mythology not being fully explained, so as to generate some mystery (as in Unbreakable), but if the events of a movie make no sense (as the actions of the main characters seem completely mysterious without a full explanation), you cannot connect with the events on the screen. One gets the idea that editing the movie into this empty mush has taken out a lot of exposition that might have helped. To make things worse, a lot of the information I explained above is all delivered just moments before it becomes relevant in the last five minutes of the movie, so you spend the majority of the movie not really understanding what the hell is going on, or why you should care.


It's like the latter hour of Atonement, with a lot of things happening for no explicable reason, and then the final scene comes along to straighten everything out, except that here, nothing really gets explained properly. Again, it might have been in order to generate mystery, and curiosity about the mythology, and in that sense it works, as I'm inspired enough by the vagueness to want to read the previous drafts, and hopefully see a longer DVD cut to find out more about these individuals, but as it stands, the film falls completely apart at the end of the second act, and the third act did nothing more than annoy me greatly. Contrary to the marketing, the movie is not just about a drunken hero, but with a second half as ill-formed and messy as this, I guess it might as well have been.

Even worse, some iconic moments in the trailer are either omitted or just breeze by, so badly edited is the film. It felt like every decision made in post-production was a mistake. John Dykstra's effects are rushed and unappealing, the action scenes have no oomph as the editing obscures events, and the soundtrack is horribly misjudged, either trying to generate the emotional connection that is missing onscreen, or being brassy comedy plinky-plonks you'd expect on NCIS or something equally silly. As for the leads, I liked them, but their efforts often make no sense at all. The best thing I can say about it is that I went along with it simply because they obviously believed in what they were doing, but I have no idea what that thing they were doing was. Is Hancock about loneliness? About responsibility? Does Hancock do the right thing at the end to save Theron? Or is he still out for himself? I can imagine we're meant to think of his actions as selfless, but that's just because we expect the film to follow certain conventions. As it stands, the movie doesn't make it clear enough on its own. When it was over, we were approximately this nonplussed.



---------------------Spoilers Over------------------

I think I liked it more than Wanted, and probably less than Jumper, another compromised movie from a director I like from a concept I loved, but it didn't help that prior to that we saw the eagerly awaited (by me) Kung Fu Panda, which was not only way better than anything else I've seen this year, but thousands and thousands of times better than I had hoped it would be. The opening scene alone was better than I thought Dreamworks/PDI would ever aspire to, the sequence so funny and clever and eye-blisteringly beautiful that I was helpless in the storytellers' grip. The voice casting is spot-on (especially my main man Jables, who is utterly sincere and hysterically funny), the direction perfectly judged, the action more exciting than most action films I can name, and the emotional arcs totally satisfying. The showdown between Shifu and Tai Lung was a magnificently cinematic moment, with genuinely resonant power. Make no mistake, the studio might not have made anything worthwhile before, but this is Pixar-good. I'd even put it above Cars, Finding Nemo, and maybe A Bug's Life, and possibly on a par with Toy Story 2, it's that good.


Some UK critics have treated it as a mildly amusing spoof of Hong Kong cinema (the increasingly off-target Peter Bradshaw reckoned it was dumbed-down and less sophisticated than the first two Shreks!!?!?!!!). However, the majority of critics got what it was aiming for. Even the perenially grouchy Cosmo Landesman loved it, which means we have seen eye-to-eye twice this year. The other time was Speed Racer; he was pretty much the only UK critic to like it, though the Times website has decided not to reprint it, thus making me seem delusional.


It's no wonder even critics who often turn a blind eye to genre movies understand the ambition of Kung Fu Panda. the opening ten minutes of Kung Fu Panda should have clued any viewer in to its utter sincerity. This is a real movie, a simple tale beautifully told by people who understand not only the conventions of the genre and the signifying details that make it distinct (watch the wonderful Master Oogway's final scene under a peach tree and tell me they don't love the genre and want to do right by it), but they also understand how to tell a story. Perhaps this story is less complex than what I assume the makers of Hancock were aiming for, and perhaps it is more straightforward than Wanted (a movie with a similar character arc involving destiny and self-belief), but it is almost infinitely better than either of them for one simple reason; everyone involved in the making of this film knew how to tell a story, knew what worked and what didn't, and just made it knowing the audience would be right there with them. Sometimes that's all it takes.


So yes, I recommend Kung Fu Panda with every fibre of my being. And Canyon's too! We loved it so much we're hoping to see it again this week, this time on IMAX. Something this beautifully crafted and sumptuous to look at needs to be seen on as big and clear a screen as possible. If I could describe its level of quality in one sentence while resisting the urge to just wail nonsense sounds of joy, that sentence would be, "It does everything right." It really, really does. If you've ever enjoyed a martial arts movie, you must not miss it.

Gaia Preserve Us, It's Still Happening!

Thanks to the miraculous nature of the internet, with its digital doohickeys and quantum doodads that I have no way of understanding due to being about 89 years old, a copy of the original draft of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening (at that time called The Green Effect) has fallen into my hands. I was looking for clarification on a line of dialogue from the film that I have been making fun of, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered, having heard that they were very similar and therefore there would be very little point in reading something that has already appalled and amused me earlier this week. However, I was in for a shock. The original script, and original vision of Shyamalan's, is simultaneously even more silly and yet more coherent from a storytelling standpoint, and therefore a far more satisfying project. However, instead of cheering me up, knowing that my suspicions that there was a potentially interesting approach to the story were well-founded, I'm actually angry. We were sold a lemon from a guy who had promised us a sleek supercar, and yet actually had that supercar lying around spare and ready to give us but figured we would prefer the lemon instead. No, Mr. Shyamalan, I wanted the supercar! You can keep your citrus fruits, thank you very much. Anyway, here is a description of the supercar, and why it is better than the lemon. (I'll stop with that stretched metaphor now.)

-------------More spoilers right here-----------------

In my previous post I railed against a lot of things, such as the weird negativity of some of the characters, the cutesy character quirks, the unsatisfying ending, etc. etc. I'm not kidding when I say the film just seems to stop, with the Happening coming to an end at a specific time, just as Elliot (Wahlberg) and Alma (Deschanel) walk out into a field with an innocent young girl just so they can get a hug. Such nonsense. In the sense that Shyamalan seems to be mimicking Spielberg's War of the Worlds, with global events being shown through the eyes of a bystander who gets lucky (though Tom Cruise's character still gets to be a hero at the end, one of the many things I don't like about the final act of that film), I get that ending, but it still feels like a cop-out.


Now I find that for some inexplicable reason, Shyamalan has ditched the original ending, which might have made audiences laugh, but would have at least been coherent. In The Green Effect, Elliot's ruminations on the mood ring that connects him and his wife are absent for the majority of the film, though he throws it out at the end, while talking to her through the slavepipe (I don't know what else to call it). Again they are hiding from the Gaia-toxins, but in this version of the film, in addition to the plants being triggered at first by huge groups of humans and then by smaller and smaller groups as the film progresses, it now gets triggered by other things. At one point it seems that Gaia might be angry at someone for using an electric saw, though it's unclear what Shyamalan is getting at; a shame as otherwise it's a very well-written piece of work.

Trapped in separate houses, Elliot re-woos his wife, who has been trying to divorce him throughout the film (because he feels too much and seems to be reckless whereas she is panicky and unable to open herself up), and upon mentioning the mood ring and how he can't remember the colour of love, he realises that the last trigger for the toxins is individual moods. The crazy lady - who is not as batshit in this version, sadly, though she does have a cool-sounding Room of Crazy filled with Revelations-style nonsense - has just been affected and is wandering around stabbing herself with a crucifix (seriously), and Elliot realises she was targeted as she is filled with negative energy, whereas he is filled with love, and would therefore not be targeted by the plants. He gambles on this by walking out, and Alma, now convinced by his display, walks out as well, and is not killed either. There is a suspenseful moment where Elliot seems to walk backwards, but he is just thinking, apparently, which makes me think the whole walking backwards thing is just there to make this moment work as a shock event. Unfortunately, any horror created by this moment would be utterly destroyed by the big reveal moments later, as he realises what the mood ring colour of love is; green! Gaia is love! ::hugs tree::


Okay, so that sounds increeeeedibly goofy, but if that had been included in the final film, it would explain the inclusion of a lot of weird stuff that makes no sense. The random hostility of some of the characters, Alma's isolation, Elliot's optimism, the insertion of a really horrible woman at the end, that bloody mood ring; it's all there to justify the final scene, with Elliot and Alma becoming reconciled, and that reconciliation being the thing that saves their lives. While I can imagine audiences all over the world throwing their hands up and screaming, "You've got to be kidding!", at least it's an ending. The one that got filmed is utterly unsatisfying. We get to see Alma and Elliot reconciled, but we get no idea why. Because they got lucky and she thinks they have a second chance? It just isn't convincing. The original ending, for all of its outrageous wishy-washy New Age sentiment, at least makes sense thematically. It was a huge mistake taking it out. Though really, all you need is love? That shit only passes muster in Ghostbusters II, and that's only because the Statue of Liberty walks around after being filled with Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis' lovegoop (if you'll forgive the confusing visual that conjures up). Otherwise, having your heroes prevail because Gaia likes the colour of their auras and is a bit sentimental about wuv (despite killing nearly six billion people) is pretty hard to take.

To make things worse, there are other changes that ruin the film, and suggest that despite Shyamalan's insistence on final cut, his vision was altered due to pressure from the studio. As the final budget was something like $60m, I get the sense that he had to take a big cut from what he originally wanted to spend, which would account for the localised nature of the Happening. In the original script, it happens globally, at the same time, which is far scarier. As some of the lines hinting at this are left in the film, it makes me wonder if those awful TV inserts of newscasters ineptly discussing the Happening were done later, as they are not well made and contradict some of the dialogue about the march of events (especially the train driver saying he can't contact anyone).


That also makes the finale more effective. In The Green Effect Elliot is seemingly a history teacher (or anthropology teacher; I was unsure) instead of a science teacher, but has read a paper on plants responding to the threat of nearby ant populations by releasing ant-killing toxins, which seems to be the inspiration for the whole movie. The plants stopped once the ants population had shrunk to .00006% of its original size, which suggests that the shots at the end of The Green Effect, of shiny happy people around the world venturing out into a now toxin-free environment, means that Gaia feels it is no longer threatened by humans. I guess that means there's only about a million people left on the planet. That makes a sobering kind of sense, not the vague ending with the first Happening being a warning that humans happily ignore, prior to Paris getting targeted, which leads to all sorts of confused guesses about the messgae of the movie. Perhaps Gaia thought Europeans would be more receptive to large-scale death; a comment on America being more steadfast in the face of threats, as opposed to France being more likely to surrender, according to silly insulting beliefs? I hope not. Stay classy, Shyamalan.

The Green Effect is also much more straightforward than the filmed script. No hotdogs, no "Use science, douchebag!" or whatever the line was, no calculus calculus calculus. I'm on the fence about whether that's a good thing or not. I've got nothing against quirk, but this stuff, when delivered in the super-serious Shyamalan style, just seems risible. The only real character quirks featured in the original script make the main couple more likeable, such as Elliot's insistence on carrying a guitar everywhere so he can chase his dream of becoming a musician, even though Alma thinks he's being silly (Shyamalan makes sure to paint him as a pretty bad songwriter, a touch I respected). In The Green Effect, motivations that were mysterious now make sense, such as Julian's (Leguizamo's) bitchy comments to Alma, and if it had been filmed like that, it might still have been utterly goofy, but it would have been consistent. I just cannot imagine why the finished version had to be made the way it did, removing motivation and logic and replacing it with whimsy, obfuscation, exposition, and happenstance.


I guess Shyamalan was trying to make a movie that had a mystery to it, that didn't hew so closely to potentially nuance-free McKee-style story mechanics, but what he created wasn't a 2001-style curio that inspires reappraisal and alternate interpretations. It's still pretty straightforward, but just has bits missing, bits that would add to the power of the story, not detract from it. It's bad storytelling, and the only reasons for these odd decisions that I can think of are that Shyamalan was annoyed at executive suggestions aimed at him and his vision, and decided to arbitrarily excise relevant scenes and neuter the script in order to wreck his film as a fuck you, which really doesn't sound like him, or he doesn't have a good sense of what he is doing anymore, and got too close to the film to see the error of his ways. Either suggestion saddens me.

I'm not saying The Green Effect would definitely have been a better movie than The Happening, as we would probably still have had the bizarre performances of the leads, performances so odd that I wondered if they had been hypnotised the way Bernard Rose hypnotised Virginia Madsen on the set of Candyman (as shown on the excellent documentary included on the DVD). We would still have had the unscary shots of grass swaying; the script features funny directions such as "THE GRASS OBSERVES THE HOUSE", which you just can't film without it looking like you're just filming a house in a field. We would still have the occasional outbreak of clumsy exposition. We would still have had the perplexing inability to generate suspense from a man who once seemed to be able to do it without effort. We would still have the awkward hypothesising of Elliot, which is awfully accurate considering he doesn't really have any way to evaluate his suspicions. We would still have the walking backwards, which looks dopey. We would probably not have any gore. The original script is much harsher than the finished film, with more death, and more cinematic and brutal death at that (people packing their mouths and noses with dirt, or crashing their cars on a busy expressway, for example). The original vision for the movie was obviously one of a really gruelling emotional experience, one that would really hammer home the crisis facing humanity, thus strengthening Shyamalan's message, but for some inexplicable reason he backed away from that. Studio interference? Or loss of nerve? Will we ever know?


Even after pondering it today I'm still not sure if reading the original script makes me feel better or worse about Shyamalan. I kinda liked it, and the movie that played out in my head could have been good, though with an ending that would have polarised the audience in much the same way as the end of Signs. I also don't know if I would rather have had the possibly merely average and forgettable Green Effect, or the accidentally entertaining failure that was The Happening. I'd like to think I can get more pleasure from an average movie than a ridiculous disaster, but then I think about calculus, and about hotdogs, and about Betty Buckley losing her shit right into the camera, and I think, you know, pleasure is pleasure. I'm glad The Happening exists, and I'm glad that I've seen it.

And anyway, it's not like it's the worst film of the year. Cassandra's Dream wins that particular award. Compared to that, The Happening is just fine. What's more worrying is that Shyamalan had something promising in his hands, and squandered it. Will there ever be a moment where he takes stock of himself, listens to the advice of those around him, and sees that perhaps he can profit from the experience of others? I truly hope so, and look forward to a great Shyamalan movie further down the line or something even more bonkers and misjudged, just to be a dick.

Did You See That? That. Just. Happened.(ing)

On Saturday a group of intrepid cinemagoers, comprising myself, Canyon, baggylettuce and decca (these are all our real names, btw), risked brain death by seeing The Happening, the last installment in M. Night Shyamalan's Career Destruction trilogy. If I had to judge between them, it was not as horrible as Lady In The Water, which was deranged and mean and vindictive and crushingly stupid, whereas The Happening was just bad and silly. As a former fan of Shyamalan, it was kinda bittersweet to see this nonsense play out in such an insipid, half-hearted fashion, and I have to admit I'm worried that my feelings about it have been coloured by the outpouring of negative reviews since its release (I gather press screenings were rare to non-existent). I mean, I really liked the premise, and remember getting excited about it a while back even though I had recently seen Lady In The Water and had been appalled. Sadly, that premise might be great, but really it's only as good as the execution, and that is where the pain comes in. Pain like this.


I'll be going into spoiler territory from now on, so back away if you don't want to know what happens, but believe me, the movie doesn't actually go anywhere. Here's a quick unspoilery wrap up. The principals are all terrible. There's less blood than in most 12/PG-rated movies. It's short but feels long. Nothing much happens. Tak Fujimoto takes some nice shots of trees under an oppressive pale sky. Respected Broadway actress Betty Buckley turns up in the final couple of reels and gives a memorable performance with almost Fiona-Shaw-in-The-Black-Dahlia levels of WTF. It's great. Nothing else is. It just sort of runs out of energy at about the 80 minute mark, and wraps up not long after that.

---------Here be spoilers------------

So why does it go wrong? It's mostly the direction, though the script squanders that terrific premise at every opportunity. I'm not a knee-jerk hater of Shyamalan, though. I have greatly enjoyed some of his movies, and even his failures often have something to like (Lady In The Water's photography by Christopher Doyle is stunning, and Shyamalan's compositions are lovely). He can do mood very well, and he can do suspense, and he can do dread. In fact, at some points of The Sixth Sense, Signs, and Unbreakable (my personal favourite Shyamalan movie, a film I absolutely adore), there are moments that are as creepy and unsettling as anything Hideo Nakata has put on film.

I think even The Village approached that kind of calm fear, but sadly by then he has begun to drag the timing of those moments out too far. It's all in the amount of time you leave the audience dangling, and while comic timing relies on microseconds of pause, horror deals in seconds approaching minutes, and Shyamalan started making the audience wait way too long for release. The longer you have to look at people standing stock still with a goofy look on their face while a man in a red cloak with twigs for fingers wanders around in the background (for example), the fear turns to laughter, and by now Shyamalan has accidentally reset the timer in his head so that he can't judge where the horror/accidental humour line is.


In The Happening, nothing is scary. The timing is utterly haywire, and even if it was working, the scary elements are already too dumb to work with. I salute the man for being willing to risk ridicule to create his weird vision, but sadly it can go horribly wrong. The doofy looking alien getting killed with water and baseball bats at the end of Signs, the Menacing Cloakman from The Village, and my favourite of all, Freddy Rodriguez With A Rubber Arm in Lady In The Water; they all go just a little too far and end up looking silly. Add to that the unfortunate slow pace, which also makes Shyamalan's movies look pretentious and self-important, and it's impossible to take them seriously, especially when he seems to give his characters Stephen-King-style mannerisms and phrases, of which the best has to be Wahlberg's self-immolating "Be scientific, douchebag!"

While Lady In The Water is worse because it is also a temper-tantrum disguised as a kid's movie, The Happening is sillier and funnier because Shyamalan has created a movie where the characters are scared of the wind, and where 20% of the movie is shots of trees being as threatening as, well, trees. And not even creepy trees, just normal trees. It's just not scary. I live near trees and a large patch of grass (which is apparently endangered, so we're talking about potentially angry grass), and yesterday it was windy. I walked to the shops yesterday, and did I suddenly think, "Oh God, please don't kill me, foliage!"? Nope. Litmus test failed.


Yes, if you've not heard already, the central idea is that Gaia is pissed at humans, and its minions, aka plants, are trying to send a warning to us to straighten-up and fly right by using deadly suicide-inducing toxins to kill off large groups of people in order to make us think twice about polluting the planet. Or something. As the toxins only appear on the US East Coast and, at the end of the movie, Paris, it's possible they also hate liberals, museum-goers, and people who eat croissants. Does this mean that people living in desert countries are safe? Considering how bad the pollution in Texas is, it's not the most verdant of states, and so it might be left off the hook. And what if Al Gore was visiting New York? Stupid plants!

As we're talking about a completely different species here, one that cannot communicate with us, the motivations are unclear, which works on one level, and fails on another, namely that the film seems to think that because science cannot answer everything, it's not really the answer to our problems, that some things are bigger than us. I'm not sure that was Shyamalan's goal, though his reliance on wishy-washy spiritualism tends to suggest he does. The finale, which features a scientist on TV having his theories of deadly plants dismissed by some gobshite pundit, was especially annoying. It's fair to say that it would be pretty easy to prove plants did it, but instead Shyamalan has a heavy-handed point to be make about post-9/11 paranoia and how it is making people irrational (a point made with much greater effect in The Mist).

So, that's silly, but what about the chilling effects of the toxin? There was real potential there for some creepy moments, but they only work once or twice (the weird headbutting attacks of the crazy old lady at the end of the film were half-horrible, half-hilarious). Some have asked why the toxins make people kill themselves and not just go on a rampage, which is more dramatic, but Shyamalan has to maintain that deathly pace, and 28 Days Later-style chaos would not work (plus we've seen stuff like that before, as far back as early Cronenberg and Romero films). The very very slow suicides we see here are in keeping with his usual style, even though his much-vaunted R-rated horror events translate into a bit of blood-spurting and quick cuts away from the actual moment of death, just in case we get mortally upset by the sight of nasty things. While I'm not saying the movie would have been improved by gore dripping from the lens, the cowardice of it seems to hint that Shyamalan has lost the ability to deal with adults and adult themes.


Compare the squeamishness here with Unbreakable, which featured a violent, murdering sadist, as well as a nausea-inducing scene with Samuel L. Jackson breaking most of his bones as he falls down a flight of stairs. That moment, with the brittle-boned Mr. Glass tumbling down an endlessly long staircase, was preceded by a shot of his glass cane hitting the floor and breaking into hundreds of pieces, and I suspect the current Shyamalan would have just shown that. An admittedly elegant way to avoid nastiness, but the original scene is incredible, horrifying, utterly visceral. Going with the single shot of his cane might let the scene work on the nerves of the audience by making them imagine it, but could they come up with anything as horrifying as what actually happens in the scene? It's something that critics agonise about, whether it's right to show the horror or not, but certainly in the case of The Happening, it really needs something more than the vanilla violence we get. Without a frisson of menace in the movie, a sense of the scale of what is happening and the toll it is taking on everyone, there is no movie there. The odd shot of corpses dangling from trees aside, it's devoid of power. Plus, the sight of groups of people walking slowly backwards would destroy even Hitchcock-level suspense.

Unbreakable also featured moments of relationship drama that seemed kinda stilted (in the way that Shyamalan's conversation scenes often do) and yet still real, as Bruce Willis' superheroic character tries to reconnect with his son and wife. The new Shyamalan now has Zooey Deschanel inexplicably being seemingly autistic, and having a torrid affair behind Mark Wahlberg's back with someone called Joey that drives her almost insane with guilt. Well, I say "torrid affair", when actually I mean "innocent meeting which involved eating some tiramisu". That's the extent of her infidelity. Oh, and who plays Joey? His one word of dialogue, on the phone, is spoken by Shyamalan himself. So, not only is he the most important writer who ever lived in Lady In The Water, he's also hott enough to make Zooey "Blank" Deschanel consider straying from Mark Wahlberg. Mark Wahlberg, people! That's some hottness Shyamalan's got right there.


So it's bad. It's really really bad. But I still like that central idea, and think it could, somehow, have been turned into a better movie if not held back by the hubris and self-regarding idiocy of its creator. After seeing it, we ate some sausage and mash and came up with some ways in which it would have been a better movie, and this is what we reckon.

At several stages throughout the movie, Mark Wahlberg rattles on and on about his mood ring, which is what he used to woo Zooey all those years before. It goes nowhere, except to give them something to talk about later when reconciling. Instead, considering the plants are silently trying to kill humanity, Wahlberg could try to communicate with them by putting the ring on a tree branch and asking it what it wants, with the colours of the ring being the responses. (I actually thought this would happen, so clearly was it telegraphed).

When people get encrazied by the toxins, they sometimes repeat things or say nonsensical phrases, of which my favourite was, "Calculus! Calculus!" At the end, I was really hoping the French crazies would refer to, "Le Calculus!" Instead, Shyamalan uses his first grade French to have the guy say, "Mon bicyclette", which is not as surreal, and not in keeping with the film's peculiar anti-science slant (ironic considering Wahlberg saves everyone by using science, the douchebag).

Only one plant wants to help humanity; marijuana! The crazy old lady is growing it under hot lamps in her basement, and our heroes smoke up a big bag of it, thus making them immune to the toxins.

The weird hotdog man has hotdog trees in his greenhouse, like in Pee-Wee's Big Top.

Change the title to "Did Gaia Just Fart On My Face?"

As soon as Wahlberg has decided it really is the plants killing humans with deathcooties, he should liberally use the word "Grassassins".

Trees and shrubs = boring. Ents and triffids = awesome. More of that, please.

Zooey Deschanel's reveal of her "torrid affair" with Joey and his elaborate desserts is obviously meant to be a big deal, though all it does show is that our heroes have the emotional maturity of Smurfs. Wahlberg's response to her reveal, that he had recently bought cough syrup from an attractive woman in a pharmacy even though he didn't even have a cough, is cloyingly vanilla (certainly in the middle of a ZOMG R-Rated movie!!!), so it might have worked better if, when Zooey Deschanel asks, "Is that true?" Wahlberg said, "No. Actually I went back behind the counter and banged the shit out of her for three hours straight, and it was awesome, and then we covered ourselves with cough syrup, and we was humping and just rollin' around in 'Tussin! It was so much better than all that cuddling we do. However, ironically, I've had a cough ever since."

Most importantly, what about explaining why John Lequizamo hates Zooey Deschanel so much. He's relentlessly nasty and hostile just because she's a bit distant? I can agree, it annoyed us a lot, but still, we wouldn't be nasty to her. She has such a lovely singing voice, after all.

That said, why were her pupils so small? Canyon wondered if she has glaucoma or something. Hopefully she'll have that seen to.

The actual Happening itself ends with the plants deciding to stop being deadly at a specific time, thus making the events of the movie nothing more than a warning, a prelude to another, deadlier attack. That only even slightly works because our heroes, who are separated from each other in different buildings but able to communicate thanks to a tube running between them (a tube that is mentioned earlier with the clumsiest exposition of the year), decide to end it all by walking out into the deadly grass, even though they have an innocent child with them, only for the Happening to stop happening, thus saving them at the last second. Bullshit. If I'd made this movie, an enormous rock head would have risen from the ground, a manifestation of Gaia that just happens to look exactly like James Lovelock, and as our heroes watch, terrified, its huge stony mouth opens, and says, "Don't tread on me, man!' Whoa.

I also thought about creating a Happening drinking game, but it seems Film School Rejects has beaten me to it, but there is scope to expand it a bit. Take a gulp of booze whenever:

Tree moves (two gulps if it is plastic and inside a house with no visible draft).

Someone is improbably mean to someone else for no reason (two gulps if no one does anything about it). This includes Deschanel's relentless snippiness towards Wahlberg.

A vaguely scary moment gets dragged out too long and ruins the suspense (two gulps if someone half opens a door and waits to open it the rest of the way, just to drag it out longer).

Someone unleashes a stream of ugly exposition because the writer/director has forgotten how to tell a story visually.

Mark Wahlberg uses science like a douchebag (two gulps if no one listens to him).

Someone is about to die horribly, and the shot cuts away right at the last second (four gulps if you actually see something unpleasant).

Someone says they can't contact anyone anywhere, which is a great trailer shot that makes it seem like the world is ending, but in actual fact the majority of the world is just fine and contact is re-established in the next scene.

Mark Wahlberg says, "Event," or, "Happening" in a sentence (this might actually overload your liver).

Three gulps if:

Mark Wahlberg's voice goes weirdly high for no reason.

Hotdogs are mentioned.

John Leguizamo uses math, douchebag.

A child talks like an adult.

Someone on TV overacts terribly.

Finish your drink if:

Someone screams at the camera and waves their fist at it.

You realise you could be watching The Birds or Spielberg's War of the Worlds instead, as this is practically the same film, except neutered and stupid.

A character, who knows plants are deadly, has plants in her house just so there can be some contrived tension in the final scene.

You realise Stephen King has written a dozen books that are just like this, but you enjoyed those even with his weird authorial quirks.

You expect that the negativity surrounding this film severely dents the chances of Fernando Meirelles' adaptation of the novel Blindness making money in the US as it's kinda similar.

Finish all the drinks in your house if:

You find out that even though it has a terrible reputation, and people thought it would fail horribly, it's actually well on its way to becoming profitable, mostly because it's relatively cheap for a summer film and groups of people are going to see it because they heard it was this year's Wicker Man. Which it almost is. Though there are a notable absence of BEES! BEES IN MY EYES! GRARGLE BLURG FLUMF!

That's right, people. Looks like we'll still be getting a very very slow-moving version of Avatar: The Last Airbender after all.

Introducing The Wahlberg Awards

I recently wrote about forthcoming summer movies, many of which were high on my own list of highly anticipated events though I foolishly missed off the Ferrell/McKay comedy Step Brothers. That should be a punishable offence, though it's nowhere near as egregious a sin as releasing it in the UK two months after the US GAH!

Anyway, since then I have been haunted by an image from the trailer for M. Night Shyamalan's It's My Happening, Baby, And It Freaks Me Out (as Canyon has retitled it). If you're a regular reader, you know the one.


It definitely ruins that trailer, and I'm looking forward to seeing it on the big screen, in the hope that the audience will react in the same way. That said, it struck me that Mark Wahlberg has an amazing face for selling "OH SHIT!" moments, and it occurred to me that I need to lavish praise on those moments in film in which an actor memorably conveys the feeling of pooping their pants with shock and sudden realisation. And so, I present to you the inaugural Wahlberg Award, for Best Response To Global Ecological Catastrophe.



The statuette's in the post, Marky Mark. Okay, it's not an Academy Award, but it's better than not winning one for The Departed and then having to put up with Ellen DeGeneres trying to involve you in an unfunny joke during the Oscar broadcast last year.

Further To Previous Summer Movie Filibuster

The first actual real proper trailer for El Hombre Incredible has arrived, and sadly it's apparent that the rumours that Edward Norton and Marvel are fighting over final cut are true. Those of us waiting to see a proper Hulk movie will be very disappointed by this new light comedic take, with Norton now playing Banner as a Catholic priest, Tim Roth playing a Rabbi instead of a gamma-irradiated monster, and both of them fighting over a recast Jenna Elfman who converts to Judaism at the end of the film. Lots of spirited discussion about religion, not so much with the Hulk Smash. See for yourself.



Okay, so it's only a teaser, but I really doubt this will interest many but the most excitable fanboys. That said, it's opening the same week as The Happening, which also might not interest audiences, driving everyone to see the green priest movie in the hopes that someone will get hit in the head with a car. That theory depends on the oft-unquestioned belief that every weekend during summer millions of people will always feel compelled to go to the cinema. For all we know they'll just stay home, crank up the A/C, and rewatch either Signs or the Ang Lee Hulk. Either way, it's cheaper than a trip to the local multiplex.

I'm on the fence about Ed Norton. I appreciate he is obviously very talented, but for some inexplicable reason I can't muster the enthusiasm for him that other people seem to. The two performances I like most by him are Fight Club (where his face is obscured by blood and scars for a lot of the film) and Kingdom of Heaven (where his face is obscured by a big mask for all of the film), so perhaps I just have a problem with his face, which is my failing and shame on me. I also get the blues thinking about his habit of fiddling with the films he appears in. Dude, if you want to be a perfectionist, hurry up and get Motherless Brooklyn going. Leave everyone else alone.

He's also producing a documentary about Barack Obama right now, which will either be a historical document of immense import or a depressing curio, depending on how America votes. Normally I'd keep my cards close to my chest and not talk about politics, but earlier this week, after I discovered the Amazon tag system, looked at the scary covers of several books that are Amazon tagged as "editor promised cake", and I suddenly realised that I was wrong all along. Liberals are desperately eager for dirty bombs to blow up right in our faces because they hate life and money and want us all dead and poor, in that order, which leads me to unhitch myself from the Obamanon wagon and put my support behind the hot independent duo of Rufus T. Firefly and Dickie Pilager on the "Wait 'Til I Get Through With It" ticket. (Sorry Canyon, I know your political heart lies elsewhere!)


Enough with the politics. I may have been severely underwhelmed by that trailer, but just to prove I was on the right tracks, the latest trailers for Speed Racer and Wall*E appear to have made some of the internet doubters rethink their annoying hatery. I'm not 100% crazy about the Wall*E trailer, thinking the propulsive music doesn't go well with some of the comedy asides shoved in towards the end, but visually it's still astonishing, and it shows some of the reportedly enormous scope of the film. Speed Racer, on the other hand, looks better than ever. That trailer is already one of my favourites of the year, and features the phrase, "Cool beans!", which makes me love it even more. Hopefully all of the fanboys who have been crying about it being a "kids" movie (ugh) will cease their yappeting and get onboard now.

ETA: Speed Racer trailer!



Speed seems like a young Ricky Bobby at the start.

Who Could Care About Hellboy With Batman And Iron Man Around?

Another poll ends, but this time there's a tie between a psychotic billionaire and a murderous academic who doesn't believe in a lot of superstitious hocus-pocus (though really he probably should).

Batman Agains - 6 (30%)

Indiana Jones And The Inevitable Joke About His Age - 6 (30%)

It's The Baby Mama Starring Tina Awesome Fey - 4 (20%)

Wall*E Robot Film - 2 (10%)

Man Of Iron - 2 (10%)

The Wachowski Siblings Present: ANIME - 0 (0%)

James McAvoy Is Wanted! - 0 (0%)

An Incredible Hunk - 0 (0%)

Hellboy II: The Golden Zzzzzzz - 0 (0%)

Jumpier - 0 (0%)

M. Night Shyamalan's The Hopefully-Not-Suckening - 0 (0%)

Narnia II: Narnier and Narniarer - 0 (0%)

Will Smith And The Amazing $85m Opening Weekend - 0 (0%)

Tom Cruise Vs. Hitler - 0 (0%)

Producer Director Writer Wunderkind J.J. Abrams' Trek Through Space And Time - 0 (0%)

I'm not surprised it came down to a dead heat between Indy and Bats. At least, I'm not surprised after seeing the trailer for the former, which turned out to be infinitely better than I thought it would be (to the extent that the shot of Indy's shadow as he puts his hat on made me cry like the big sentimental idiot I am). That said, if The Dark Knight is even a tenth as good as Batman Begins (which was my favourite film that year, and stands up to repeated viewings) then Indy is screwed, alien skulls and Commie Cate Blanchett notwithstanding. Check out this article on Chris Nolan, possibly the best thing to come out of England since Thom Yorke or Adam Curtis.

Next in line, with a jawdropping four votes, is Baby Mama. To be honest I hadn't heard of the movie until Canyon pointed it out to me a couple of hours after I started the poll, which led me to amend it pronto. The trailer's funny enough, but does it have a bigger profile than I thought? Or are people so besotted with Poehler and Fey that they would go all bonkers with excitement over the thought of seeing them all enlargened at the cinema? Actually, this is understandable.

Next up, two votes for Wall*E, with one of those votes coming from me, which is odd only in that the film is directed by the one director at Pixar that I find sub-par. Try though I have to love it, Andrew Stanton's Finding Nemo annoys me no end, being mechanical, cloying, and not particularly funny (though gorgeous to look at). That it is the studio's most successful film keeps me up at nights, as I try to understand why that slab of pretty whimsy has all the dollars while the masterpiece that is Ratatouille fared so poorly (in comparison), and why something as clever and unique as Monsters Inc. gets treated like Pixar's redheaded stepchild.

I know sentimentality sells to families, but it still irks me. However, everything I've seen and heard about Wall*E has astonished me, in terms of the scope of Stanton's vision and his bold choices. Plus, of course, it's the last movie Pixar have on their roster that bears the fingerprints of Joe Ranft, who was so instrumental in creating Pixar's storytelling factory. There's only one other movie vying for my Most Anticipated Movie designation, and that comes later. This isn't a trailer, just a quick clip of Wall*E interacting with a vacuum cleaner, and it is pure joyous brilliance.



Also with two votes, Iron Man! I'm not the biggest fan of the character (especially in his current role as the Marvel Universe's Head Douchebag), and I worry that Favreau won't be able to pull it off, but my God, the baiting of the fanboy section of the audience has been nothing short of incredible. Every con appearance, every clip, every trailer; each has been better than the last, and the one below is the armour-plated cherry on top.



Though there are movies I'm looking forward to more, this is the one I want to succeed the most. It's got a lot going against it. Robert Downey Jr. might be one of the most charismatic and entertaining actors around, but a box office draw he is not, plus his blackface appearance in Tropic Thunder is bound to annoy a lot of people and that could turn public opinion against him. The character of Tony Stark isn't that well known outside nerd circles, and some people might just think it's a film about Ghostface Killah, though I'd pay to see that too. There are a lot of other movies coming out that could do better. Gwyneth Paltrow seems to generate a negative knee-jerk response a lot of the time (I don't get it, but I'm not the majority of the hatey internets).

However, if a shitty heap of wretched, pointless nonsense like Ghost Rider can make over $100m then, going on the quality of that trailer, this can knock a box office record or two into orbit. I hope so. If this is a success, it bodes well for Marvel Entertainment's roster of forthcoming movies, and will pave the way for an Avengers movie, which must happen or I will run out of the room crying and blaming the cinema-going public for ruining my dreams.

That could also work for The Incredible Hulk, though interest in it has been much more muted, perhaps because we've already seen an adaptation of it recently, and it left people underwhelmed. Actually, everyone seemed to like the crazy editing and hate the Hulk effects, and I was the other way around, for the most part. I still maintain the digital performance of the Hulk was superb, even if the effects weren't as photo-real as some really really really demanding viewers wanted. Will NortonHulk be accepted in a way BanaHulk wasn't? Who knows? The trailer hasn't even come out yet. Perhaps that's why I find it hard to muster any enthusiasm about it.


Iron Man, Incredible Hulk, and The Dark Knight are not the only superhero movies vying for the nerd dollar/pound/Tögrög. Also included was Timur Bekmambetov's adaptation of Mark Millar's supervillain epic Wanted, now with 100% less superpowers. As fun as the movie looks, for a start it's directed by someone with nothing more than a great eye for the visuals but a life-threatening allergic response to story structure. I hate when directors get criticised for not understanding how to tell a story, as even the worst filmmakers can crank out something that can be mentally ordered into some semblance of a narrative by any viewer who has seen a film before. Not Bekmambetov. Night Watch was a series of startling images glued onto cards and then shuffled for an hour before being presented as a finished movie. I'm not an idiot, seriously, but that film was incomprehensible. If he can pull this off I will be very surprised. That's before we get to the part where all of the cool supervillainy of the comic is replaced with sexy assassins sexily shooting people in sexronic slow motion ZOMG! Call me crazy, but that's been done before, right? James "Digi-Pecs" McAvoy could be this year's Bald Timothy Olyphant. And who wants that?

The other straight comic adaptation on there is Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. For the record, as much as I appreciate Guillermo Del Toro's knack for creating great visuals (not as impressive as Bekmambetov's, though), and though I respect his ability to create coherent stories (way way WAY better than Bekmambetov), his movies kinda bore me. Not so much that I won't ever watch them. Pan's Labyrinth was very good, and I still love Blade II though I do tune out once they go into the sewers. It's just that Hellboy is utterly lifeless. Plus, Selma Blair's death voice makes me want to fill my ears with caulk. Next!


The only other superhero film I'm looking forward to is Hancock. I'll watch Will Smith in anything, though when I heard this tale of a useless hero coming back from the depths of depression was being directed by Jonathan Mostow, whose films have failed to impress thus far, I figured it would be a minor distraction. But I was wrong! And so was IMDb for a while! Turns out the film has had a complicated history, but ended up being directed by Peter Berg. Shades of Caruso loves Peter Berg (even though Very Bad Things is among the ten worst films ever made and The Kingdom was less than perfect)! We now officially endorse this movie, and hope that it is the success that Berg deserves, considering the insane fact that Friday Night Lights and The Rundown/Welcome to The Jungle didn't make $1bn between them.

Also gathering no votes is M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, possibly because the name is stupid, possibly because most people who sat through The Village and The Lady In The Water have washed their hands of him, and understandably so. I hated both movies (and thought the latter was such a pissy little rattle-throwing rant that he should be banned from making films until he gets some perspective), but loved the idea for this movie, and thought the teaser trailer was very effective. Then I saw this one.



Now, there's some great moments in that, and it looks like there will be some terrific set pieces, but right in the middle there's that seemingly endless shot of Marky Mark looking horrified and confused, and every drop of awe generated by the trailer evaporates.


Shyamalan's one of the most infuriating directors in the world, because he keeps shooting himself in the foot. In The Lady In The Water he shot himself with Freddy Rodriguez's rubber arm. This time, he's shot himself with Mark Wahlberg's perplexed face. And the movie isn't even out yet! He truly is his own worst enemy.

So out of all the movies on that list that aren't Wall*E, and considering I've seen Jumper, hated the first Narnia film enough for seven sequels, am keeping my fingers crossed for Star Trek but am expecting some pain, and have had my interest in Tom Cruise films damaged to such an extent by his shenanigans that I can't even watch trailers for Valkyrie without wincing, the one that I'm looking forward to most seems to be a garish CGI showreel based on an anime I've never seen, featuring Roger "Peter Mannion from The Thick Of It" Allam as the bad guy, John Goodman (who I've never really warmed to) as Speed's dad, and starring some guy from a Sean "Is that my daugh-dah in they-ah?!?!" Penn film I only heard of last year. But my God, just look at this beautiful trailer.



The moment I saw that, I fell totally in love. The Wachowskis made my favourite ever movie, so I'm always going to see their movies no matter what they make, but this incredible vision, this unique visual wash, this incredibly ambitious attempt to rewrite the rules of cinema! I had no idea they would be presenting my eyes this wondrous present. Just look at these screencaps.

The astonishing colours!


The stunning visual imagination!


The crazy cartoony concepts!


Anime-faced Christina Ricci in a short skirt for the fellas!


Foxy Matthew Fox in a leather jumpsuit for the ladies!


Car chases and crashes and incredible dynamism!


I expect to watch this 80 times this summer. Truly we do not deserve to be breathing the same air as these geniuses. ::prostrates himself before sibling masters of cinema::

Remy the Rat PWNs Puppet Angel and Cleveland Heep

Pull that fine thick hair of his, Remy, you adorable rodent, you! Make him dance! And cook! Preferably something without garlic. The smell of burning vampire flesh can put off the diners.

On Saturday we caught Ratatouille, a movie released in the US so long ago that the Region 1 DVD release is in a couple of weeks. That this made my summer movie viewing a bittersweet experience is a statement as accurate as it is devoid of the shouty fury I unleashed upon learning about the outrageously long wait I had ahead of me. Even if Disney's reason for delaying the release that much was that an orphanage was saved from being pulled down, I'd still be pissed beyond reason. How many ratless months? How much suffering Chez Canyoneck? And why, so some megacorp can make a few extra bucks? Don't care! Orphans saved from begging on the streets? Don't care! Me want rat movie pronto. Stupid Buena Vista. Me smash megacorp for tardy release, and hold grudge for rest of year. That show them!

Thankfully, it was worth the wait. Actually, that doesn't even cover our reaction. My eyelids were peeled back for the length of the movie, blinking only when tears poured forth, which they did with increasing frequency as the movie progressed. As a result, I have a bone to pick with genius director Brad Bird. I was already pointlessly annoyed that I would not be able to pick my favourite film of the year from the double whammy of excellence that was Zodiac and The Bourne Ultimatum, and now this comes along. Three totally different movies, but all of them absolutely perfect. Ratatouille is the pinnacle of computer animation, filled with remarkably fluid movement, beautiful colours, believable textures, and to top it all, it provides more food for thought than almost every other movie I've seen this year.


Damn, I'm so late to the party. All of this has already been said, but I have to chime in, because my love for this movie is so overwhelming. Technically, it is as good as movies get. I felt like the silver screen was kissing my eyeballs, and just to rub it in, the pitch-perfect voicework and Michael Giacchino's adorable soundtrack were nuzzling my ears. If a movie could hug you, that's what Ratatouille would do from the first frame to the last.

If that was all the movie did, it would be enough to put it high up on any self-respecting film watcher's top ten list for the year (if list-making is your bag; certain other contributors to this site are not so keen), but Brad Bird expands and clarifies some of the themes introduced in his masterpiece, The Incredibles. Though I'm more than a little unsure about some of the potential Objectivist, Ayn-Randian philosophies suggested by that film, I find the idea of celebrating excellence very appealing. When I heard that Ratatouille featured a similarly controversial message to that of The Incredibles, I was worried that a trend was developing that might retrospectively make the lesson of the earlier movie seem less endearing. Was Bird going to use all of his movies to espouse some awful, selfish, right-wing nonsense I would find it hard to get behind?


Thankfully, I'm convinced the movie is less about promoting devotion to the all-powerful uber-mensch, and more about celebrating excellence and intelligence. I took from it a message about having faith in yourself and doing everything you can to do what you do best, even in the face of indifference or lack of support. Early on in the film Remy's talent and curiosity and yearning for knowledge are treated by his family as a waste of time and energy. His rat brethren might come around by the end of the film (without ever being able to see the big picture the way Remy does), but at the start of the movie they are an ignorant mob who distrust intelligence. I could hate the movie for making them step into line at the end, but it's not presented as the actions of an automaton army governed by the confidence of a Objectivist right-wing control-freak, but as an expression of trust in a natural leader. Arguments can rage for years about whether Disney just funded a fun, vibrant, colourful, kid-friendly adaptation of The Fountainhead, but I thought it was about trusting someone you love to do what they need to do to be happy, and encouraging and helping them in achieving their goal. It's one of the most uplifting endings I've been lucky enough to see.


Even better than that is the arc of Anton Ego, the curmudgeonly critic who haunts the movie as a passive antagonist until the final few minutes of the movie. I don't wish to ruin the end of the movie for those of you who have yet to see it (and if you read this and have any sense, you will rush to a cinema immediately), but there is a scene involving him that is filled with such simple, honest beauty that I blarted hot tears all over Canyon, who was in a similar situation, from what she told me later. My heart, it melted.

The see-sawing negative and positive treatment of Anton Ego and the art of criticism sadly reminded me of M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water, which is one of the bitterest films I've ever seen. Stung by the reviews of The Village, Shyamalan and his very thin skin went all out to get his own back on critics. In the middle of his preposterous, badly-thought out, dreary tale of Scrunts (dog/lawn hybrids), Narfs (Bryce Dallas Howard after an injection of creepy), Tartutics (angry monkey warriors, and no, they're not as cool as that sounds), and Great Eatlons (just a really big eagle), Shyamalan introduces Harry Farber, a film critic (played by Bob Balaban), who thinks there is no originality left, and as a result is incapable of joy or empathy or anything. He treats everyone like dirt (including adorable semi-hero Cleveland Heep, played with typical intensity and commitment by Paul Giamatti), and his confidence in his own ability to parse the mechanics of story-telling nearly dooms Bryce Dallas Howard to death by LawnDog when he inaccurately interprets some unnecessarily complex rules of Narfdom conveyed in obnoxiously grandiose and slow-moving scenes of ear-tugging and, and, and... Ugh! It's too complicated, contrived, and stupid to go into in full detail. Just believe me, it's horrible horrible storytelling.

If anyone here has the DVD and has seen the deleted scenes, please tell me if there are any featuring Farber throwing kittens off his balcony, or making baby stew. He's practically that villainous and unpleasant in the movie. It's an even worse directorial decision than basing the plot around a writer who will save the world by writing the most important book ever, and then deciding that the only person qualified to play that part is, well, M. Night Shyamalan himself. Actually, it's a toss-up. Both decisions are monumentally wrongheaded.


The worst scene in the film (or in any film that year except for certain unsavoury scenes in Neil LaBute's ode to woman-hating, The Wicker Man) comes when Farber gets killed by Shyamalan's instrument of justice, the Rogue Scrunt. Farber is cornered as in the photo above, and has watched so many dull and uninspiring movies (unlike Shyamalan's, of course), that he now see everything through a Robert-McKee-Story prism. This is his external monologue prior to being eaten:

Farber: Hello? Is the bathroom on this level working? [Scrunt walks into view and menaces Farber] A dog inside the building! Go! Shoo! Why you're not a dog at all. My god, this is like a moment from a horror movie. This is precisely the moment where the mutation or beast will attempt to kill an unlikable side character. But, in stories where there has been no prior cursing, violence, nudity or death, such as in a family film, the unlikable character will escape his encounter, and be referenced later in the story, having learned valuable lessons. He may even be given a humorous moment to allow the audience to feel good about him. This is where I turn to run. You will leap for me, I will shut the door, and you will land a fraction of a second too late. [turns to walk away]
Scrunt: [Leaps onto Farber and starts eating him] Growl! This is for saying the twist in The Village was obvious! Rend! Tear! Signs was a masterpiece, you nasty hurtful meanies, and not an hour and a half of genius followed by twenty minutes of potentially career-killing stupidity! Chomp! I'm the best director in the world, and not the patron saint of arrogance and hubris like what you said! Slurp! You taste like poo, you poo man! And you smell like poo! Glurp! Who's laughing now? I just made a movie about how poo you are! [finishes eating, runs off into the night, sobbing]

It's literally jaw-dropping. I know executives told him he would never get away with filming that scene, but to still go ahead with it takes brass balls. (Confession; I might have added the Scrunt dialogue. Or I might not. You'll have to rent the movie and find out, won't you?) In case I come across as someone harbouring a grudge against Shyamalan, I will add a disclaimer. His style is one of the most distinctive in Hollywood, and though he could stand to speed his movies up just a bit, that style can work amazingly well. He has a directorial eye that is second to none. The Farber death scene might be monumentally dumb, but it's framed in such an original way and shot with such ravishing style and precision that the stupidity of it seems even worse in comparison. As for his other films, I liked The Sixth Sense a lot, and absolutely adored Unbreakable, which I think is his best movie. Even his dreck hasn't put me off his next movie, The Happening, which sounds fantastic.

Sadly, Signs was good, up to a point, and after that, he's disappointed me repeatedly. His style may be distinctive and his films may be beautiful, but only when he reins himself in. As soon as he goes too far with his stylistic tics, it falls apart. Critics who said The Village was nothing more than a Twilight Zone episode were not wrong. It's a 45 minute story padded out to over twice that length with lots of slow walking and ponderous dialogue scenes, albeit shot with typical beauty by the wondrous Roger Deakins, and performed with immense conviction by a talented cast.

Lady in the Water too has glorious, award-worthy photography by Christopher Doyle, and features some great performances, but takes forever to tell an absurd and badly worked out story, featuring fantasy characters forced to adhere to nonsensical behavioural rules that serve only to drag a thin story out to feature length. Why can't Narfs talk about their world and their relationship with Scrunts? Because Shyamalan says fairy tales are like that, so shut up and deal with the fact that that little arbitrary rule just added 20 very slow scenes to a movie that otherwise would have been over in half an hour. Why do all the Korean and Italian characters spend the movie shrieking and freaking out like a bunch of lazily written caricatures? Just say no to racial stereotyping, Shyamalan. And what was with Freddy Rodriquez's pointless rubber arm?


That just made me laugh every time it turned up. Small comfort, though. It broke my heart to see Lady in the Water, not just because it's an overlong and dreary vanity piece that's as technically perfect and beautiful as it is moronic, but because it's so so nasty, and confirmed reports of Shyamalan losing the plot while pitching the movie to Disney production president Nina Jacobson. I mean, I can kind of see why he reacted so badly. I've got a thin skin too, and I know if I got reviews that are half as severe as those received by Shyamalan (a notoriously criticism averse perfectionist), I'd cry for months. What I wouldn't do, though, is build an entire movie around that anger and upset. That's a hell of a complicated and expensive rattle to throw out of the pram.

Compare that to Brad Bird and Jan Pinkava's creation, Anton Ego. At first I thought Bird was also demonising critics with many unsubtle directorial choices: making Ego look like a cross between a vampire and an undertaker; hinting that he is somehow accidentally responsible for the death of Gusteau; designing a study for him that is shaped like a coffin; making his motivation a desire to destroy the restaurant for no other reason than that he enjoys giving bad reviews. I was seriously beginning to flash back to Harry Farber being mauled by a Rogue ShyamaScrunt. If Bird had gone that way for the entire film, it would have ruined Ratatouille for me completely. Remember I said I didn't want to ruin the film if you haven't seen it? Let's just leave it like this; bearing in mind what I think the worst finale of the film could have been, and how unsubtly the character was set up earlier, I was surprised at the direction Bird went in. Deliriously, joyously, tear-inducingly surprised. Shyamalan should be dragged from the set of The Happening and made to watch Ratatouille. Hopefully he will learn something about what criticism is, or can be. You never know, his heart might even melt.