By Aaron 6/23/2008

It’s all happening! That’s a line from one of my favorite movies, Almost Famous, and used by the rabid groupies/band-aides in the literal sense that everything is happening at once. M. Night’s movie is similar in that things always seem to be happening at once yet not at the same time in the sense that the pace is painfully slow at times. Instead of crushing the movie under a heavy weight of boredom, this helps the movie be more than it’s weaker peers, like The Day After Tomorrow.

When an unexplainable “virus” and possibly “terrorist attack” spreads from New York City through the whole northeast, causing people to kill themselves in gruesome ways. Science teacher Elliot (Mark Wahlberg) and his best friend, math teacher Julian (John Leguizamo), decide to flee west with their families to escape the blight from New York City. With them is Elliot’s wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) who is embarrassed when her marital problems with Elliot are revealed, and Julian’s daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) who is worried about her mother, trapped in Princeton.

Julian decides to go back to find his wife and Elliot and Alma take Jess west with them in a stranger’s car. The stranger turns out to be a botanist who in between crusading for hot dogs theorizes that plants are conspiring – with trees and shrubberies – to release a toxin to kill their greatest threat – humans. As Elliot begins to look for explanations for the massive fatalities the plant theory begins to make more and more sense. But then how do you escape plants and trees?

I love Wahlberg and Deschanel but they get off to a slow start. Wahlberg takes his overacting (that was funny in The Big Hit but just makes this movie corny) a little far with a key bit of science early in the movie and Deschanel overuses her starry-eyed stare. They rebound quickly and have good chemistry that really strengthens the themes on marital trouble and love, which is a slight departure from M. Night’s more family-themed movies

Someone asked me if I thought the movie was scary. “It’s hard to explain,” I began, mostly because you aren’t seeing dead people, or aliens or worried about an “attack” from those things. On the same note, ghosts and aliens always have weaknesses, and while plants are such an absurd antagonist, their absurdity makes them terrifying. To me one of the scariest scenes is one featured prominently in the preview – where the construction worker looks up to see his friends walking calmly over the ledge of a high rise. Scenes like these, where people act in a way completely contrary to what we think is normal is incredibly frightening.

On the same note some of these scenes with people killing themselves are unnecessarily violent. It is interesting to note that this is M. Night’s first R rated film and comes after Lady in the Water, a movie he said was a fairy tale for his kids. But here is gratuitous violence that seems out of place with the feeling of the film – but perhaps that is the point and part of what makes the movie so startling.  

The Happening is also different from M. Night’s movies in that it is 15 minutes shorter than his other movies – all of which are about 106-108 minutes long while The Happening is just 91 minutes. Normally I enjoy short efficient movies but this was too efficient in the sense that we needed more character development and more science behind all the mumbo jumbo plant stuff (delivered in newscast form just like in Signs). These questions come across as M. Night playing fast and loose with tenuously factual information which undercuts what M. Night is trying to do. He should have taken a page out of Crichton’s book and frontloaded the science to help understand the twist.

But my biggest surprise was how preachy the movie got – in the way Day After Tomorrow did. This sort of political or moral message was mostly missing from any of M. Night’s earlier movies. And it shows that this is his first attempt because he does it clumsily and obviously in a manner that is more annoying than inspiring. But I thought the movie got a bad rap and is underrated – more good than bad. 6/10 saltystix.

If you have questions or comments for me, don't hesitate to shoot me an email at aaron.saltystix@gmail.com.

Could “Avatar” Win Best Picture?

By Brett Hogan

 

Last week, the trailer for James Cameron’s sci-fi experiment “Avatar” debuted. While initially unimpressed with the teaser, I began to wonder: Could this film win best picture? 

 

Buzz has been generating for this movie for years. Years. The technology to make this movie didn’t exist when Cameron conceived it, so he invented it. When is the last time you heard of a director spearheading the invention of anything? The casting started in 2005. Most movies these days, even epics, are done in half that time. I could go on. 

 

The most important thing to take away from all of this is that people are saying this will be the future of movies. Now, I don’t agree with the idea that CGI will become more prevalent than it already is. But I do believe that this will set the bar miles higher for sci-fi. I mean, that is what Titanic did. And that won some awards if memory serves.

 

I’ll bet you’re asking yourself, how can you even suggest that a film like this will win Best Picture when the initial trailer was nothing better than visual stimulation? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First, the Academy has expanded Best Picture to ten films. This doesn’t guarantee anything other than improved chances for most films on the cusp.

 

Second, after last year’s Oscars debacle, which saw the best film of the year, “The Dark Knight,” not only get shafted in awards but nominations as well, the Academy is pulling out all the stops to appease those with the loudest voices in the film industry, the fanboys. Now, the Academy probably didn’t lose anything because of that other than some viewers of the award show. Perhaps if people are again outraged with the winners or nominees, the heads of the Academy would lose their jobs. So this is all about the Academy protecting itself, which is not so outrageous.  

 

 

Third, there is an economic motive here. I’ve heard this film will cost $190 million, not counting the R&D costs associated with Cameron’s inventions or the cost of getting 3-D cameras into every theater in the country. The Academy will do everything in its power to get people into the seats and make this the next “Titanic” or “The Dark Knight.” But the Academy doesn’t have much power, besides nominating and awarding, so they will slap the “Nominated for Best Picture” moniker onto every commercial and print ad to get the people who didn’t believe the critics to relent and see this movie.

 

Of course, all of this is pure conjecture, and no revolutionary film (Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, etc.) has ever won the Best Picture category because it changed the game. Except maybe Titanic. But still, could this movie actually win? My answer is no but a nomination is certain and who knows what could happen from there. We’ll know more come February 2010.