I actually really liked The Happening

June 17, 2008   

4

The movie got terrible reviews, but I actually really liked its slow and deliberate pace. It was perfect for setting an appropriately eerie mood. It also feels very a propos.

  • I agree the movie received overly negative reviews. His last movie, Lady in the Water, also suffered from poor reception, but I think we are seeing a maturation. He is letting go of the trick-twist ending that helped propel him to popular acclaim. This seems like the natural path for many a great artist.

    On a parallel note, the band Weezer recently released a new album, which was not generally well received. I am a big fan of their work, and this album struck me as a force to divide the true fans of Weezer from the people who just liked them when they made good pop. It seems like there is a similar situation with Shyamalan’s work.

    I was actually a little disappointed that he did not keep up the slow, steady tension as well as in Lady in the Water. The latter for me was a movie equivalent of a long, evenly building, sonorous violin tone. While the fans of the twist ending films of Shyamalan found this boring and anti-climactic, I found it an amazing feat that I am waiting to see again.

    For me, the obvious fault, however, was one Marky Mark trying to be believable as a school teacher, or for that matter a character worth caring about. I’ve enjoyed some of his work, but this performance kept jerking me out of the moment that Shyamalan was trying to create.

    Despite Walberg, the movie still had a number of moving situations and I enjoyed once again Shyamalan’s ability to paint ideas without ever directly mentioning them at all.

    I will be waiting for the next one!

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  • I agree with Fabrice. Actually I thought that the movie got too much negativity. While Mark Whalberg does seem to struggle a little bit to look like a teacher, his facial expressions are often key to his performances and again this is the case in “The Happening”. A friend of mine who survived 9/11 told me that the images of the people jumping off the building brought back painful memories as he saw many people jump to their deaths that horrible day.

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