I just heard the greatest line ever in a movie trailer

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"There appears to be an event happening."

lol!

what movie?

"The happening" right? From what I could tell from the trailer the movie's about people being scared of evil doors.
Seriously, half the trailer was a door opening followed by someone looking frightened.

I think that's it (I never really paid attention to the title - that's pretty bland ). These movies are getting so bad that it's really useless to make fun of them.

Shouldn't the title be "The Event", to correspond to the noun?

When I saw that trailer and heard the line "There appears to be an event happening," I couldn't help but think, "No REALLY, Sherlock?" I felt rather insulted that they expected me to get all psyched-up by such a brainless title. What's supposed to be the appeal of this movie? It's like... WOW, I've never seen a movie where something HAPPENS in it...

I wrote about entry about this...I'm gonna copy it here. It's been slightly edited though.



You know...there's nothing that ticks me off more than an artist who thinks it's the audience's fault for not liking a film.

Now, we're not talking someone in a workshop group trying to explain to their few group members what they don't understand about a first draft of their work. I'm talking when an artist, writer, or director releases their FINAL PRODUCT publicly, to a WIDE audience, and then get angry when almost everybody in the audience doesn't like it and try to explain to them how they're wrong, how their work of art is utterly brilliant and they don't need anyone's second opinion about it--no editor, no co-writer, nothing. Anne Rice was a b***h to her fans with "Blood Canticle." Uwe Boll is pretty bad too, especially given how atrocious ALL his films are and the fact that he calls himself "the only genius in the whole f[bleep]ing industry." But even he isn't the worst. That dishonor belongs to someone else...this man here:



An early review of The Happening: http://www.collider.com/entertainment/reviews/article.asp/aid/7903/tcid/1

A clip from The Happening: http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809921595/video/7827805

Apparently, like "The Village," the acting is abysmal and "Marky-Mark" Wahlberg is the biggest offender.

The beginning of the above clip is basically two minutes of M. Night explaining to the audience how awesome his movie is. It is followed by a clip that more or less proves that early review right: Wahlberg is terrible, the dialogue is tripe, the film isn't scary. That music was so overblown that I almost chuckled at its wannabe-seriousness. Part of why "Unbreakable" worked was because the music was so subdued most of the time. Effective music is CRITICAL to a horror film: if the music's overblown at all the wrong moments, it just doesn't work. The music must be quiet at scenes like this, letting the actors drive it, though if like this the acting sucks then the music seems like a last-chance attempt to liven up a dead scene.

But what really pisses me off is M. Night's aforementioned introduction. You don't give some pretentious two-minute speech about how scary your film is, and then follow that up with a painfully bad clip from the film. Then again, I guess it was to be expected: he was essentially pimping the gore aspect of it ("HOMG this is my first R-rated movie so that means it's my scariest!"), when most gore-horror films (meaning the horror films that focus on gore rather than actual SCARINESS) have terrible acting, and M. Night's post-"Signs" films have had terrible acting as well.

M. Night should, in my opinion, do several things.

1) Direct other people's scripts rather than writing his own...or at the very least get an editor who will tell him with critical honesty, "Dude, that's a terrible freaking decision."
2) Stop being a pretentious egotistical prick. He needs to stop arguing with the audience about his films before he alienates what few fans he has left.
3) Really understand WHY people responded well to "The Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable" (they hold up today even when you know the twist), and emulate THOSE films. They had a strong mood, strong storytelling, strong performances, strong hooks...and his later films did not. I mean, come on, we've all seen crop circles and heard of isolated villages, that was nothing new. Nor, really, was "Unbreakable," which was essentially a superhero movie--but the way it went about it made it seem original. A man surviving a trainwreak, being the only survivor, and not having a single scratch on him? THAT is a great hook.

If audiences don't respond well to "The Happening" (they won't) and he argues with them on it, then how many more films will he be allowed to make? What studio will fund him? How many more chances does M Night have?

I didn't even go to see The Lady in the Water because I was so disappointed by The Village.

So I had stopped keeping an eye out for his stuff. The clip/trailer actually looks alright, I think. I get the sense of stress and panic in a train and the weirdness of stopping in the countryside/nowhere.

The idea sounds interesting. But then The Village did too! If the timing, acting, and story-ending are worse than in The Village ( though there were some good moments in it) then it must be absolutely catastrophic.

Me too I love "The Sixth Sense", like you say it more than stands up to repeated viewings, and I enjoyed "Unbreakable", so I feel sad and sorry that he has so totally imploded.

It's weird too, as if he completely forgot how to make a film.

Thanks for posting the clips/links.

I might actually see "The Happening". Mostly because Zooey Deschanel is in it, and she's a very good actress (always makes the movies she's in watchable even if they aren't any good. "Failure to Launch" for instance).

Zooey D is great but one actress can't save an entire film. She sure as hell didn't help Sci-Fi's "Tin Man." God, I couldn't even sit through the first hour of that.

My impression after seeing Signs on DVD is that Shyamalan hasn't done his homework. It seems all he knows about SF/F/H is from other movies (+ TV, comics), and that he doesn't seem to read the cutting edge stuff in print. If I knew the guy I'd get him a subscription to Locus, the magazine for SF/F/H, and I'd tell him to spend five years just reading everything he can get his hands on in the genre - good, bad, awful, classics, cutting edge, etc., until he's saturated with it. Then go back to writing, with a new perspective. I'd like to see him write more, I just think he doesn't have the background right now. Every writer needs to take a sabbatical now and then.

It is a good line, though.

And I think to a certain extent he's dealing with racism, and perhaps being a bit too defensive in response. That's the impression I get from his acting.

i tried to watch Lady in the Water. my roommate had it on DVD and i sincerely tried to watch it with a friend...we couldn't even get past the first hour. i can forgive a movie for being bad, even awful, but i can NOT forgive a movie for being boring. Lady in the Water was boring as hell, on top of being illogical and pretentious.

Shyamalan only gets away with the stuff he does because he's considered an "autuer". usually i've found the artist who does everything themselves will eventually disappear up their own as*hole. it's not a matter of not giving the audience what they expected, it's a matter of just putting out a bad product period.

and no line in any trailer ever will be able to top "they just f****d with the wrong mexican!"

This is what is so weird. Sixth Sense is gripping the first time, and still deeply enjoyable and profound second third and fourth times, and Unbreakable is pretty interesting.

But in The Village there are points where I was watching tried and tested experienced actors looking as if they didn't know how to act. And being totally boring at the same time.

How did this happen? It's almost as if Sixth Sense was made by someone else. How could Shyamalan have so totally lost the knack. Produced such wrecks.

It's not the same thing as Emmerich making films like Stargate and The Day After Tomorrow, unfortunately interspersed with Independence Day and now 10,000BC, because at least the latter films still "function", still "turn".