There’s no way to talk about M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Happening without spoiling the basics, so stop reading right now if you want to stay cherry. The bottom line is that except for two speed bump moments, this is an entirely respectable, deeply unsettling ecological horror film. It’s not mythic or profound — Shyamalan recently told Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet that it’s a “high-end B movie” — but the direction, as always with this guy, is highly skilled and assured, and the effect is one of deep-down penetration and an absolute absence of comfort.

Which is good if you’re making a horror film, which this absolutely is. A horror film for liberals with an appreciation for expert craft and “saying the right thing,” and a willingness to forgive the two missteps. (Which I’m not going to bring up until tomorrow, or maybe, come to think of it, until Friday.)
The difference is that instead of Jason or Freddy or aliens or a homicidal Harrison Ford trying to kill Michelle Pfeiffer, the boogey man this time is…Mother Earth. The basic idea is what if nature, slowly dying from the greenhouse gases and all the other abuses and pollutants catalogued by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, decided to get rid of us? Or at least sound a warning by getting rid of a few thousand random souls?
In this sense The Happening is a cousin of The Birds but a direct descendant of The Day The Earth Stood Still. It’s saying the exact same thing as that 1951 Robert Wise film, which no big-city film critic will tell you is labored or heavy-handed. And yet some of these same critics, I fear, will come gunning for Shyamalan’s film. It has an issue or two, granted, but it doesn’t deserve a major thrashing. It’s too refined, too expertly fused.

It doesn’t have the chops or the heft of the Wise film, granted, but it’s clearly following in its path by saying to its audience and the world beyond, “You’re on the wrong course and you’d better damn well do something about it.”
Does this mean that Shyamalan’s save-the-earth message is endlessly fascinating? Perhaps not. Or that the whole thing doesn’t feel a little too simplistic by the end? Maybe. But to me the film was basically a surprise. It’s a much, much better thing than the advance buzz had indicated.
It gives you the creeps and the willies all through, and it never really eases up — not even at the end. It scares, un-nerves and guilt-trips you simultaneously, and I can imagine some people — young looking-for-entertainment types, I’m guessing — not caring for this combination. A couple of twentysomethings who attended my screening were muttering about it on the way out, and I could feel what they were thinking without hearing a word.
But if they don’t like The Happening, it’s their problem and not Night’s. For this is unquestionably his third-best film — better than The Lady in the Water, Unbreakable and The Village, but not as good as Signs or The Sixth Sense. But that’s still a pretty fair compliment.

I’ll get into the rest of the ins and outs tomorrow morning, but I wanted to at least post a bare-bones reaction before the day went any further. I saw The Happening today at 2 pm, but I missed tonight’s The Incredible Hulk screening. (Went to the wrong theatre.) So after my Hulk screw-up I drove right home and tapped this out. And now — horrors! — two or three hours of relaxation.

A pass-along from L.A. Times/”Dishrag” columnist Elizabeth Snead that Paul Newman is on the ropes with lung cancer, and thoughts about the sadness to come from Oregonian critic Shawn Levy, who’s been working hard on a Newman biography for a long while.

“I have known for a while that Newman was very ill, probably with cancer, and today the internet is flooded with the news that it’s lung cancer and that it’s not good. There aren’t very good sources on any of these stories, and nobody has any shocking exclusives, but given what I know I find every word of them credible. He’s 83, and his next birthday is in January, and we can only hope he’ll make it. I suspect I’ll be writing an obituary before I hold a copy of my book in my hand.”

I’ve come up with a new reason to leave movies before they’ve ended. Over the last two days I’ve left two as they got into their third acts because — I’m being serious — I liked them so much I didn’t want their endings to spoil them.
I did this with a showing of Clint Eastwood‘s Breezy at the Aero on Sunday night. This wasn’t the main reason I bailed last night on the last 15 minutes of You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, but it was an underlying one.
You’re liking the film, it’s going well, everything’s working…so why mess with the possibility of the ending screwing everything up? Leave 15 minutes before it ends, ask your friends what happens, and then catch the whole thing on DVD three or four months hence. Especially if the film in question is a drama that’s subtly telegraphing that some kind of heavy or unpleasant turnaround is just around the corner. Or if some guy is sitting next to you and ruining everything by saying “wow!” when hot girls in hot underwear make a brief appearance. Get out while the going is good.
Obviously this is an incredibly lowbrow attitude for someone such as myself. I’m not confessing to it with any pride or suggesting in any way that I’m going to watch films with this attitude henceforth. I’m just saying that over the last 48 hours I’ve left two films that I liked, and that my reason or doing so made sense to me, and that it left me in peace.

An increasingly desperate Warner Bros. is offering a seven-minute Get Smart preview on the iTunes store as a free download.

Indiewire is reporting that Zeitgeist has picked up Trouble the Water, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal‘s doc about the Katrina disaster. It’s a sad and honest film, but the viewing experience is all when it comes to shaky-cam docs. I called it “the King Kong of hand-held nausea jiggle movies” after seeing it at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. The Zeitgeist people are dreaming if they think people are going to rush out to see this.

(l. to r.) Trouble the Water executive producer Joslyn Barnes, co-directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, exec producer Danny Glover.

As I wrote last January, “Half of it was shot by Lessin and Deal in the usual fashion and is no big challenge, but the other half is shakycam footage of Katrina’s devastation shot by one of the film’s main subjects, Kimberly Rivers. (The other is her husband Scott.) The footage is so scattered and whip-panny that I was starting to think about bolting less than ten minutes in.”
I’ll feel better about this whole matter if Rivers agrees to take an ad in Variety pledging that she’ll never shoot any more video footage of anything ever again, will never go to film school to try and learn how to shoot, will stay away from the visual art world for the rest of her days, etc. If she does this, it’ll start to undo some of the damage.
All I know is that as I watched Trouble the Water at the Park City Library, I was saying to myself, “Whatever it is that good amateur video photographers have, this woman has absolutely none of….the gene that tells you how to hold the camera and how to shoot in a way that’s pleasing or at least non-jarring to the eye has bypassed her entirely. Lemme outta here!”

You Don’t Mess With the Zohan was a huge surprise for me in that I almost loved it. I was certainly cool with most of it — smirking, smiling, content, zero pain. Either I was exactly on its wavelength from the start or it was on mine, but Zohan was the first dumbass Sandler comedy I’ve felt fairly okay about. I was actually charmed at times.

The trick is that it crosses the total silliness threshold early on and stays there. Plus it has actual political content, satirical machismo, fantasy narcissism, a kind of vaudevillian energy, crudely boorish but dead-on Hebe humor (and I know whereof I speak, being a former New Yorker and occasional Brooklynite) plus one relentlessly stupid performance after another — Adam Sandler, John Turturro, Rob Schneider, Shelley Berman, Lainie Kazan, etc. Schneider and Turturro are off-the-planet funny now and then.
Zohan (Sandler) an Israeli superstud Mossad agent or whatever, fakes his own death to escape the repetition (i.e., constantly fighting Palestinians and other anti-Zionists) and realize his personal dream of becoming a hairdresser in the States. He knows about cutting hair, but hours after hitting Manhattan his Israeli-ness leads to a quick banishing to Queens and yaddah-yaddah blah-dee-blah. It’s all about the balance, the shtick, the dopey effects and…well, the you-know-where-it’s-going-so-just-enjoy-the-how-of-it aspects, of which there are many.
I was disappointed to learn that the Zohan team, nominally led by director-stooge Dennis Dugan, didn’t shoot the opening scenes in Israel but in Cabo San Lucas and La Paz. They’re going to make tens of millions on this thing and they couldn’t muster the courage to shoot in the actual Holy Land? When you’re doing a fantasy comedy, you need to be as real as possible. My respect for Sandler and Dugan would be that much higher if they’d filled up their man shorts and risked death in order to get it right.

The only thing I really didn’t like last night was a reaction from a guy sitting next to me when the camera showed Turturro lying in bed with 10 or 12 hotties. The guy, a twentysomething, was so impressed that he said “wow!” out loud. He was momentarily dumbstruck by a standard throwaway shot in an Adam Sandler movie! What a bumpkin!
I decided to leave right a couple of minutes after that. There was another 10 or 15 minutes to but I was happy with the film and had definitely gotten the gist. I just knew I couldn’t sit next to that guy any longer. His Clem Kadiddlehopper reaction had eye-dropped a spot of dye into the well, so I figured I’d better get out before the entire experience was ruined.

Dark Horizons‘ Garth Franklin is mezzo-mezzo on The Hulk, and others, he’s saying, are more or less on the same page. “There’s a definite feeling that there’s a much longer and more substantial movie in here which has been truncated, and talk of Edward Norton‘s unhappiness with the final product is understandable if” — he’s saying if — “many of the deeper character scenes have been left on the editing room floor.

“What remains, though certainly not the dud many were expecting, is not good enough to justify the need for such a restart. Unless you\’re a fan, the new Hulk isn’t one to rush out for, but it is worth catching eventually.” What…on a plane, he means? An iTunes download in September or October?
Franklin says he talked to three reviewers afterwards, and that “no one outright hated but no one really liked it…two gave an ‘it was all right’ reaction.” Proper reviews have started going online as well — very mixed it seems. Here’s Eyefilm, Cinema Blend, Urban Cinefile and Emanuel Levy.
See? See? I told you Kris Tapley wasn’t to be trusted on this one.