Becoming The Overman

ALRIGHT, I COULD go on and on about why I love M. Night Shyamalan but, regretfully, I went and saw his newest progression in the art of film making early Saturday afternoon. The Happening is the story of Elliot Moore, a high school science teacher with an estranged girlfriend who is forced to head west by whatever means available to escape a mysterious "virus" that is spreading through Northeastern America, causing people to kill themselves in some of the most creative ways possible.

I'll start off by saying, once again, how much I love M. Night's story telling; his ability to create suspense out of thin air and the almost childish ways in which he lets us view his world. He's had his downfalls -- as all good story tellers do -- but in the end there should really be no doubt in the creativity he can weave through his films.

The problem is...I think M. Night knows this. And, no matter how much I love him, when I see characters sprinting through an empty field literally trying to outrun the wind, I have to stop and think about what I'm watching and what the writer/director is expecting me to think and feel.

The acting style is uniquely Shyamalan, so Wahlberg's character ends up acting the same as Bruce Willis' in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable and Mel Gibson's in Signs. In the end, they are really the same characters, just placed into different situations. They are the classic story archetypes that have been used for generations: the doctor, the everyman, the preacher, the teacher. In the end, when making a thriller of Hitchcockian proportions, we need to be with characters we believe exist, not that we understand have been created to show us something in a theatrical setting.

Let me finish by saying that The Happening isn't a bad movie. It actually does keep you rather interested with a short screen time studded with some gorey, if not superfluous and slightly ridiculous, images of suicide that stretch the movie to a seemingly promotional "R" rating. I just wish that, considering the title -- and from a director so plot-driven and creative -- something had actually, well, happened. No wonder the characters look bored out of their minds.

Posted by C. Nicholas Walker at 2:07 AM | Permalink | Comments

SO, I JUST got back from a midnight showing of The Incredible Hulk in Durham with my friend James and his children. I saw the first one, Ang Lee's version, and had not nearly the bad things to say about it as did some others I've spoken to.

The problem is that, in his essence, the Hulk is really just a smash and crash kind of character. He's not even really that much of a superhero, because his motivation is not usually to "protect" citizens from danger. He just wants to hit things, and he just usually has a pretty good reason to be doing so (in other words, he gets pissed at bad people). Ang Lee tried to take that and push it almost solely in the opposite direction, working more on the emotional development of the big guy than on all the things he likes to break. Ang Lee's Hulk was not what Hulk fans were looking for, but he gets major credit for effort.

This Hulk does a remarkably, and surprisingly, good job at managing both sides of the character fairly and effectively, making for an all-around highly entertaining movie. Mean Green Hulk ends up getting just about as much air time as Edward Norton, whose portrayal of the woeful Bruce Banner is without fault (yet another surprise to me, bearing in mind his more recent roles). This Hulk is definitely more of a crowd pleaser than its predecessor; it had my audience applauding twice during the final fight scene at signature "Hulk moves" and once again at the roll of the credits, a feat not often performed at many of my movie-going experiences. The big surprise that is usually held for after the credits is delivered just before them, but we all stayed afterwards anyway to a large, audible sigh of disappointment at the final "Marvel Studios" logo that meant the end of the reel.

So, in the end, this movie ended up trumping my negative viewing of Iron Man, despite my original bias against this movie and for the former, and has reinstated my excitement about the Avengers film coming in the late Summer of 2011 (after the awaiting Thor movie in 2010 and Captain America: The First Avenger just three months prior to Avengers).

Posted by C. Nicholas Walker at 4:18 AM | Permalink | Comments