You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 27th, 2008.
I just added a page of links to my best posts. Dig in, all you who hunger.
Yesterday, a group of five good friends in tow, I went to see M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening in the historic Byrd Theatre. If you don’t live in Richmond, you don’t know the Byrd. It’s a classic 1920’s movie palace, an ornate, single-screen theatre with a Wurlitzer organ under the screen that they play on Saturday nights. The walls are covered in classical murals, there’s a harp in the arcade, and a chandalier hangs above you. And the crowd! The Byrd hosts the biggest French film festival in North America, and the crowd out there Saturday rivalled that crowd, stretching around the block, waiting to get in. So I’m thinking, this will be a damn fine movie!
At the end I walked out the theatre, and my first thoughts were, “Well, that was certainly ninety minutes of footage.” And I was sad.
Where did the movie go wrong? It was pretty effectively acted by Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel as a married couple on the outs, and John Leguizamo as a worried father. It was even chilling in places. It didn’t really have a trademark twist, either, which was refreshing. But no amount of good acting or refreshing presentation can hold up an unjustified and ridiculous plot.
The trees are killing us. Or rather, they’re emitting a toxin that makes us committ gruesome suicides. The human element of the movie is well-done; the suicides themselves are chilling, and the movie’s pace twitchy and nervous, which is appropriate and effective. The nature of the threat is, if not realistic itself, realistically handled by our cast, and their growing horror over the fact that, in the words of Gorillaz, “you can’t even trust the air you breath / cuz mother earth wants us all to leave” is dealt with very well, almost masterfully, with a rising cadence of desperation, in that word’s most literal meaning — “without hope.” I never thought that the wind brushing over the grass could cause shivers
But seriously, the trees are killing us. It’s never explained, which is admittedly pretty much what he was going for, but it’s so far out in left field as to be incomprehensible. The insanity of airborne toxins inducing gruesome suicides was a glaring red mark against the movie, and Shyamalan spent far too much time showing us the blood and the viscera rather than inducing the just-off-camera dread he’s so damn good at.
The movie’s biggest problem, though, is without a doubt the extended “crazy-lady-in-the-woods” sequence, which goes from sensible to head-scratch-worthy over about five minutes. That sequence, along with most of the movie, is also peppered with ineffective comic relief that, rather than easing tension, grinds it to a halt. And the end — the implication that this will happen time and again, all over the world, destroys the films optimistic end with a crushing blow.
The movie was, in retrospect, better than my initial reactions. It needs severe re-editing, though, and a basic reconsideration of how to present the threat.
But it succeeded, to be sure, in one particular way: we were talking all night about the movie and the things that scare us. I’ve been to excellent movies that didn’t prompt honest conversation beyond “Oh, man, that was sweet!” Shyamalan is a skilled filmmaker, to be sure, because even his missteps are profound in their way.
I love Shakespeare. I’ve been reading him since I was eight, and while I can’t quote every bleeding play, I’ve at least seen a bunch of them. I remember when I was a kid and I stumbled across my dad’s college poetry textbook, and inhaling the Sonnets — “That time of year thou mayst in me behold / when yellow leaves or none or few do hang / upon those boughs that shake against the cold / bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang…” — and struggling my way through Hamlet – unsuccessfully, I might add — when I was nine.
Eventually I reached a point where I could follow his language pretty well in performance without being completely lost in its archaicisms. And I’m glad for that, because it’s beautiful writing that I’m proud to say was written in English. Spanish may have Lope de Vega, French Baudelaire, and Italian Bocaccio, but English has Shakespeare, dammit. You’ll never see sold out crowds for Moliere’s La Tartuffe.
Anyway, so speaking of Shakespeare, this is cool. There was a Shakespeare mashup produced, not terribly successfully, called Choose Your Own Shakespeare. It hits me, with the profusion of mixing and matching in culture these days, everything from KIll Bill (pop culture pastiche, without one original thing to say) to American Edit (take a seminal album and turn it into a different seminal album), that our time’s biggest contribution to pop culture will probably be the turning of reappropriation to an art form. We have a great love of pulling things out of context and turning them into something new. It’s junkyard art, and it’s amazing.
Check out Nick Milne’s posts on mashups for more.
