I just have to tell everyone - we watched The Happening the other day. All I can say is oh my gosh that was a terrible movie.
M. Night’s movies are really hit/miss. I hope we can all agree that The Sixth Sense is by far the best of the set. Great movie with the always enjoyable Bruce Willis and Toni Collette.
After that we had Unbreakable, which I actually enjoyed. I found the end to be a bit painful and it left the door open for many things, but then nothing else happened. I felt left at the edge of a cliff.
Signs was next and I remember it more because of the parody than the movie itself - in fact for a long time I thought Simon Rex was in the real movie instead of Joaquin Phoenix. Alas…
I loved The Village. Mostly because Bryce Dallas Howard was just awesome. I loved the plot twist, and I love the tension I felt watching it. Very effective, although many people say it was predictable right from the beginning.
Lady in the Water came next, and I haven’t seen it yet. It got bad reviews, but I still want to see it just because of BDH. Let’s hope she wasn’t a one hit wonder.
So now we finally get to The Happening. What a piece of junk. It was almost painful to watch Zooey Deschanel try to act. I am totally in love with her sister who is the star of Bones, but come on…Zooey doesn’t need to follow in the family path. She was difficult to watch in The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and even more so in The Happening. You could almost tell that Marky Mark was struggling to work with her.
Plot points were crap, writing was crap, dialogue and acting was crap, we got to the end of it and we could barely function. “Did we really just watch that?” and “What the hell was that?” were repeated phrases in our living room. What a ridiculous mess. There was so much potential here of people suddenly killing themselves in various odd ways, but when we find out that it’s because of the plants, it’s like…why? Why are we watching this? It makes no sense - the plants kill us when we are in groups so we split up into smaller groups? WTF?
I really can’t go into more detail because I’m trying to block the movie from my memory. It hurt my brain to watch. Heed my warning and avoid.
I’ve only seen The Sixth Sense and Signs… I love The Sixth Sense, was disappointed by Signs, and haven’t really felt an urge to see any of the others. Although now I have an anti-urge for The Happening.
I would recommend The Village. As I mentioned, Bryce Dallas Howard is quite wonderful in that movie (her debut). I have not seen Lady in the Water, which she is also in. I worry when a director uses the same actor back-to-back…
Unbreakable is worth watching for Bruce Willis, who is quite good - but again, it bothered me that M. Night used the same actor in multiple movies because you lose believability after a time.
Hmmm… what with move-prep I haven’t been looking at the new releases much. I would probably add it to my Netflix queue, but won’t be in any rush. I think approaching a crappy movie knowing that it might be crap is better than discovering it’s crap while watching it. I can’t remember the name of the movie, but there was a similar let-down just within the past months, but I was able to get past the bad since I knew what might to expect.
The last DVD disappointment that I had was Sordid Lives, The Movie… Ghod it was awful compared to the TV version on Logo… the Logo one is perfect. The movie version is actually based on the play and I’d bet that filming the play would have been better. The only bright spot of the movie was The Corpse Goes Off. So if you rent the movie version on DVD, just watch that.