Category Archives: George Romero

Listmania ‘10! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part One

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In the interests of not writing off-puttingly long 5000-word blogposts any more, my Miscellaneous Gubbins post has been split in two. The next one will feature more pictures than words, I promise. Also, apologies for relying on personal anecdote while talking about these movies. These are the films that don’t quite fit on my best and worst lists, movies that are not perfect or utterly imperfect, but fit right in between. They all have something to praise, or to criticise, and the level of enjoyment I got from them is often sadly linked to subjective experiences from either before or during my time with them. Hence, my clumsy authorial presence splattered all over this page like emoticons in an email from your mom.

Best Remake of the Year: The Karate Kid

When The Karate Kid won the weekend box office over the heavily plugged A-Team remake, I was befuddled. The remake of John G. Avildsen’s fondly-remembered-but-not-really-that-good coming-of-age tale seemed like a mindless low-rent cash-in, as lazily made as most of Jackie Chan’s US movies, while A-Team seemed at least to be making an effort. After seeing both, the depth of my error was made clear. Joe Carnahan’s shouty adaptation was not without its fun moments, but mostly it missed the mark, mainly by overestimating the appeal of Bradley Cooper and, sadly, Sharlto Copley. (N.B. I like Copley, and think he does a good job of mimicking Dwight Shultz’s original incarnation of H.M. Murdoch: the problem is that that character is not as amusing as you might remember. If you stumble across repeats on multi-channel TV, prepare for disappointment.)

Harald Zwart, on the other hand, helmed an indecently entertaining reworking of the threadbare Avildsen original, helped by Christopher Murphey’s clever tweaking of Robert Mark Kamen’s original script. The key to its success is the relocation of the story to China: placing protagonist “Xiao” Dre Parker in a new and unfamiliar country is far more effective at providing an alienating motivation than moving Ralph Macchio from one American city to another, and the cultural differences between Americans and Chinese are skilfully played up without veering too far into over-familiar avenues. It also makes the movie look distinctive: the location shooting is some of the best of the year. Occasionally it wanders into travelogue territory, but it’s never less than a fascinating window on contemporary Chinese urban life, even if there is likely some inevitable pro-tourism white-washing going on.

Best of all is the considerable emotional charge within: kudos to Zwart and his main actors Jaden Smith and a never-better Jackie Chan (seriously, he’s never hinted at being able to convey the emotional turmoil he does here). Treated with a potent mixture of solemnity and playfulness, the movie skips through its considerable running time with welcome momentum, building to a thrilling final half-hour of emotional revelation and cathartic resolution. It would take a truly stony-hearted person not to feel a thrill of emotion during Xiao Dre’s final battle. If every overrated movie of the 80s was remade this well, perhaps there would be less complaint about how there are no new ideas out there.

Worst Remake of the Year: Edge of Darkness

Regular readers will know that I tend to go easy on Hollywood product, partly due to long-standing fondness for populist cinema, partly as a corrective to the relentless negativity about mainstream culture from some cineastes who are unable to allow that there is any form of value or artistry present in such commercially funded baubles, and partly because I genuinely do think some “blockbuster” movies are properly thrilling, especially when seen as part of the expansion of cinema’s storytelling toolbox. Sadly, Martin Campbell’s second run at this tale is just the kind of thing that makes even a soft touch like myself despair of Hollywood’s distrust of anything even vaguely challenging. It’s especially frustrating as Campbell and writers William Monahan and Andrew Bovell often make a pretty good fist of things: I call this the worst remake of the year, but really it’s just the most exasperating.

Almost anyone who has seen Campbell and Troy Kennedy Martin’s original BBC mini-series will know what an amazing achievement it was: an emotional journey as well as a politically relevant story with an epic sweep. Its ecological message was timely, but that doesn’t mean to say it isn’t any less relevant today, which is one of the reasons why it’s so sad that the remake jettisons that plot in favour of a “topical” conspiracy tale about manufacturing bombs and making them look like they were made by Al-Qaeda. The BBC series’ focus on looming ecological disaster generated a frisson of cataclysmic terror even if the drama didn’t go in for apocalyptic histrionics. The movie is more interested in depicting Mel “The Gentleman’s Gentleman” Gibson’s grief over the death of his daughter: fair enough, as that was a key factor in the success of the original, and this is only a two-hour movie with a greater need to find one point of focus, but Edge of Darkness 2 is not really doing anything that hasn’t been done before.

Basically, there’s no room for the weird here, and even if the intensity of Gibson’s grief is depicted with skill, it’s the details that are missed. There’s no way we’re going to have a “vibrator” moment in something this streamlined, and Ray Winstone’s Jedburgh is no match for the unforgettable oddness of Joe Don Baker in the original. The true killing blow has to be the absurd final scene. No spoilers here, but the mawkish daftness of it is an insult to the poignant final image that played out behind the credits of the series. For everything this version does right (such as casting “Dependable” Danny Huston as the bad guy), it does about 5.6 things wrong. It’s a missed opportunity.

Disappointing Movie of the Year: Machete

Man, I was totally psyched about this movie for so long, so imagine how miserable I was when it turned out that the invention displayed in the hilarious trailers was stretched so thinly over an hour and forty-five minutes. Planet Terror was perfectly weighted in the truncated version that ran as half of Grindhouse, cramming huge amounts of disjointed madness into a punchy 80 minutes of fun. I’ve not yet seen the extended version, but if Machete is anything to go by, I should stick with my memories of the original. There’s still much to love in Machete, especially the continuing resurgence of Mighty Jeff Fahey, but well before the final battle rolls around, my patience was at an end. Sad that this advert for iced tea is almost more fun than the movie it’s based on.

Surprising Movie of the Year: A Nightmare on Elm Street

Initial responses to the Platinum Dunes remake of Wes Craven’s beloved original were so negative it was hard to expect more than a misguided and cynical failure. Perhaps it’s just low expectations that led to me enjoying Samuel Bayer’s gloomy and depressing revisit, as well as a smarter and more respectful script by Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer than was necessary. It’s obviously no match for Craven’s eccentric and creepy masterwork, but as these modern retellings of “old” horror classics are so often phoned in and obnoxiously boisterous that an attempt to make something quiet and moody — albeit punctuated by grisly murder — should be noted.

The best move was to make Freddy Krueger less campy (though his awful jokes remain) and focus on what he really is: a disgusting and depraved monster who preys on children. His taunting of his victims is sickening and plays on the mind far more than the silliness of the later installments of the original series, to the point that the movie veers very close to tastelessness. Changing Krueger from a child murderer to a paedophile who is now killing his former victims during their dreams is a brash and unpleasant move, but it does maybe make the movie work on a new level, as a metaphor for the difficulty in healing horrific psychic wounds that flare up in later life. As I ponder it I go back and forth on whether or not this is an exploitative move too far. Nevertheless, it lingers in the mind longer than you’d expect: some scenes were still bothering me several weeks later. Recommended, hesitantly. (See also Breck Eisner’s well-played and bleak remake of Romero’s The Crazies, which was an early surprise in 2010.)

Overrated Movie of the Year: Monsters

Arriving on a tidal wave of positive word from festival screenings, and breathless talk of director Gareth Edwards being the next big thing, how could I not see it? Anything that expands the sci-fi genre has to be worth hunting down, and the frankly stunning Red camera photography shown in the trailer made it look like the most beautiful movie about aliens made this year. Well, it actually was the most beautiful monster movie of the year, but also the most inconsequential. Unlike District 9, to which Edwards’ movie is compared on a regular basis, Monsters has little to commend it other than its impressive low-budget production values. Though yes, much praise is due to everyone involved for making something so visually compelling on such a small amount of money, and Edwards needs garlands thrown at his feet for getting off his arse and making something this technically accomplished and ambitious. It’s a genuinely monumental achievement.

Nevertheless, it’s also a sci-fi movie that doesn’t even need to be a sci-fi movie, and merely serves as an indicator of critical opinion of the genre. The existence of the monsters is, for the most part, a MacGuffin just to keep these two self-absorbed ninnies together as they trek through pretty scenery and encounter “local flavour” during their travelogue ramblings. Only the final monster scene has some purpose other than to have a big effect in it, and even then it’s only tangential to the real will-they-won’t-they “plot”. Perhaps if you buy into the love story at its core Monsters is a moving experience, and certainly I’ve been told by many people that the slowly developing affection plucked their heartstrings, but if you find these guys as insufferable and tedious and annoying as I did, then no amount of off-camera grumbling sound effects will hold your attention.

And yet, despite the thinly sketched characters and the lack of event — plus lots of mood that pleasingly flows from the screen like dry ice at a Spinal Tap concert — critics have fallen over themselves to point out that this is superior to other sci-fi as it’s about real people and not effects. Fine, whatever. Sci-fi does not require effects. Well done for spotting that. However, all stories need something — anything — besides an A-to-B structure to qualify as a worthwhile journey, and Monsters lacks this. As for the “real people”, yes, our heroes are like people in that they have torsos, limbs and heads and don’t run around shooting things or running away from explosions in slow motion, but what we really need in a movie is a pair of “characters” who contain multitudes. Instead, we get cyphers: he’s a bit of a dick who becomes slightly less of a dick, she’s getting married to someone offscreen and then she isn’t getting married to someone offscreen.

I’m not asking for McKee to swan in and add subplots and emphasise clunking arcs and second/third act transitions, etc. I’m just asking for some content to go with the lovely atmospherics. No critic wants to go out of their way to praise a genre movie: even the mainstream raves for Inception made an effort to paint the sci-fi elements as the brainy stuff Nolan puts in there to look smart like some big NERD or something haw haw.  Monsters gives them a get-out clause, as it’s about a “worthy” thing, about “people” and not spectacle (funny that the spectacle is the best thing about it). It’s about “love”, and so is deserving of praise. Because love is nice, and sci-fi is usually about robots or the helium-coated moons orbiting the gas-giant Zootrong or alien impregnation or something. Ew, icky. But look! They’re in love! Like in real life!

When Richard Linklater made Before Sunset and Before Sunrise — two other movies about people wandering through a foreign land — he  joined with Julie Delpy, Kim Krizan and Ethan Hawke to create arguably the most fascinating, complex couple in recent cinema history, two smart and funny people whose chemistry sparked and whose conversations flowed with wit and insight and personality, and whose relationship and affection grew organically and realistically. Edwards has made a movie about two people who don’t like each other, and then do. But with aliens. Call me a stupid cynical asshole if you want, but that’s really just not enough. (Disclaimer: I can’t wait to see what Edwards does with Godzilla. A more ruminative take on that classic character would be very interesting.)

Underrated Movie of the Year: Predators

And now I shall praise a big splashy sci-fi movie featuring alien hunters and lasers and macho men fighting! Hoorah! I am a philistine! And proud of it. Predators isn’t about love. It’s not about emotion, really, other than fear and gritty determination. It’s got little insight into humanity, and it features big action setpieces involving running through jungles and firing mini-guns at trees and stabbing things to death with knives. It’s gory and loud and fast-moving and has McKee structures and everything. It’s the polar opposite of Edwards’ sedate love story, AND I LOVED IT!

Which is not to say it’s art, but then, neither is Monsters. Predators is a sequel to a sequel, it’s about nothing more than not getting killed in space, and it’s mostly about bombarding the eyes and ears with spectacle. That’s all. But it does all of that with such verve, and sly narrative trickery, and good performances, that it achieves what all movies should: it sets out to do one thing well, and it exceeds its goal. And yet it was dismissed by mainstream critics (predictable) and genre-friendly critics (surprising) alike. Again, perhaps low expectations played their part. Nevertheless, what I saw was a punchy, well-paced and surprisingly smart actioner that easily matches the absurdly entertaining original.

The casting helps. Adrien Brody does a shockingly good impression of a tough guy as “The Tough Guy”, aided by equally committed performers as Topher Grace, Alice Braga, Mahershalalhashbaz Ali, and the magnificent scene-stealing acting colossus that is Shades of Caruso favourite Walton “Shane Vendrell” Goggins. Even more so is the peculiar casting of Lawrence “Also An SoC Favourite” Fishburne as the crazy survivor of a previous hunting round. Fishburne’s fidgety paranoia plays interestingly against his usual gravitas-laden personality, creating a pleasant disconnect that keeps the movie flowing through what would otherwise be a mid-movie lull. Perhaps that’s the best thing about Nimrod Antal’s movie: it moves at a clip, keeps you guessing, and places its key showdowns at exactly the right moments.

No, it’s not “art” and it won’t “fulfill” you like the sight of two photogenic people going from point A to point B with the odd well-shot glance of something resembling an emotion, but it will give you space-boar rampages, multiple canny references to John McTiernan’s original action-horror classic, Adrien Brody with his shirt off, Danny Fucking Trejo, some well-conceived last-act surprises, and a Yakuza enforcer with a katana facing off against a Predator in a samurai duel. A YAKUZA ENFORCER WITH A KATANA FACING OFF AGAINST A PREDATOR IN A SAMURAI DUEL! Monsters can’t even begin to compete. Predators can rip out its skull and spine and turn it into a nice trophy, for all I care.

Critically Acclaimed Award-Winning Movie That Almost Sent Me To Sleep: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Remember what I said about being a philistine? Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s mysterious… something or other won the Palme d’Or, and came garlanded with ecstatic praise from critics I respect and trust. It should have knocked my socks off, but instead I was wrapped in a confusing fog of baffling symbolism. Upon escaping it, I was left utterly bemused and — most crucially — utterly unmoved and intellectually isolated. Much has been made of Weerasethakul’s facility with mood, and certainly there were moments where hazy atmospherics held the attention, but these moments were not enough to make up for the frustration I experienced as I tried to parse the obscure events depicted.

Maybe I thought about it too much. Maybe I should have let it flow over me. Maybe I would have been able to surrender to Weerasethakul’s vision if I saw anywhere other than the ICA, which is the home of fidgety women scribbling on rustle-paper notepads directly behind me in a miserable room heated in the middle of winter by a tiny tiny radiator hidden behind a chair near the perpetually open exit. When the last baffling image faded, I dragged my consciousness away from the theta-wave mire it had almost fallen into and scoured the Internet for the meaning of these symbols, assuming that my ignorant ass was just in need of a quick primer on Thai culture or Buddhism that would unlock all of these mysteries. But no. Instead it seems that Weerasethakul’s symbolism was specific and meaningful only to him.

That’s great for him, and I’m not saying it’s not a valid way to make a movie, but I’m not that interested in watching his large-scale doodle-pad/dream diary get brought to life. It’s not put me off catching up on seeing his other movies — which I hope will be more comprehensible, less alienating — especially as there were truly wondrous moments in Boonmee that rocked me in my seat: not just the dread-soaked images of the monkey ghosts emerging from the darkness with their eyes blazing red, but the outrageous catfish sex scene, and the descent into caves that turn into a glittering starscape. It’s apparent that Weerasethakul has a unique directorial eye and ear, enough that I desperately want to be on board with him. However, this was not the movie to do it.

I’m not gonna get into a debate over who is to blame for my inability to bond with this movie: Weerasethakul for selfishly making a movie with the express intention of making audiences feel stupid as an act of cultural warfare, or poor, blameless me who was fooled into spending money to see this film instead of donating it to a puppy charity. Whoever is at fault, the fact remains: of all the cinema experiences I’ve had this year, seeing Boonmee was one of the most frustrating and boring. Even more so than seeing Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, which I was convinced would blow my mind but ended up alternately thrilling and annoying me. Now, who shall I blame for that exasperating experience? Bryan Lee O’Malley? Or the pungent tramp sitting on one side of me, and the shoeless guy on the other side who kept creepily hugging his son throughout? ::sigh:: If only I could buy the right audience when I buy my ticket.

One last one to come! If my shameful praise for base Hollywood confectionery hasn’t put you off, dear reader.

Did You See That? That. Just. Happened.(ing)

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On Saturday a group of intrepid cinemagoers, comprising myself, Canyon, baggylettuce and decca (these are all our real names, btw), risked brain death by seeing The Happening, the last installment in M. Night Shyamalan’s Career Destruction trilogy. If I had to judge between them, it was not as horrible as Lady In The Water, which was deranged and mean and vindictive and crushingly stupid, whereas The Happening was just bad and silly. As a former fan of Shyamalan, it was kinda bittersweet to see this nonsense play out in such an insipid, half-hearted fashion, and I have to admit I’m worried that my feelings about it have been coloured by the outpouring of negative reviews since its release (I gather press screenings were rare to non-existent). I mean, I really liked the premise, and remember getting excited about it a while back even though I had recently seen Lady In The Water and had been appalled. Sadly, that premise might be great, but really it’s only as good as the execution, and that is where the pain comes in. Pain like this.


I’ll be going into spoiler territory from now on, so back away if you don’t want to know what happens, but believe me, the movie doesn’t actually go anywhere. Here’s a quick unspoilery wrap up. The principals are all terrible. There’s less blood than in most 12/PG-rated movies. It’s short but feels long. Nothing much happens. Tak Fujimoto takes some nice shots of trees under an oppressive pale sky. Respected Broadway actress Betty Buckley turns up in the final couple of reels and gives a memorable performance with almost Fiona-Shaw-in-The-Black-Dahlia levels of WTF. It’s great. Nothing else is. It just sort of runs out of energy at about the 80 minute mark, and wraps up not long after that.

———Here be spoilers————

So why does it go wrong? It’s mostly the direction, though the script squanders that terrific premise at every opportunity. I’m not a knee-jerk hater of Shyamalan, though. I have greatly enjoyed some of his movies, and even his failures often have something to like (Lady In The Water‘s photography by Christopher Doyle is stunning, and Shyamalan’s compositions are lovely). He can do mood very well, and he can do suspense, and he can do dread. In fact, at some points of The Sixth Sense, Signs, and Unbreakable (my personal favourite Shyamalan movie, a film I absolutely adore), there are moments that are as creepy and unsettling as anything Hideo Nakata has put on film.

I think even The Village approached that kind of calm fear, but sadly by then he has begun to drag the timing of those moments out too far. It’s all in the amount of time you leave the audience dangling, and while comic timing relies on microseconds of pause, horror deals in seconds approaching minutes, and Shyamalan started making the audience wait way too long for release. The longer you have to look at people standing stock still with a goofy look on their face while a man in a red cloak with twigs for fingers wanders around in the background (for example), the fear turns to laughter, and by now Shyamalan has accidentally reset the timer in his head so that he can’t judge where the horror/accidental humour line is.


In The Happening, nothing is scary. The timing is utterly haywire, and even if it was working, the scary elements are already too dumb to work with. I salute the man for being willing to risk ridicule to create his weird vision, but sadly it can go horribly wrong. The doofy looking alien getting killed with water and baseball bats at the end of Signs, the Menacing Cloakman from The Village, and my favourite of all, Freddy Rodriguez With A Rubber Arm in Lady In The Water; they all go just a little too far and end up looking silly. Add to that the unfortunate slow pace, which also makes Shyamalan’s movies look pretentious and self-important, and it’s impossible to take them seriously, especially when he seems to give his characters Stephen-King-style mannerisms and phrases, of which the best has to be Wahlberg’s self-immolating “Be scientific, douchebag!”

While Lady In The Water is worse because it is also a temper-tantrum disguised as a kid’s movie, The Happening is sillier and funnier because Shyamalan has created a movie where the characters are scared of the wind, and where 20% of the movie is shots of trees being as threatening as, well, trees. And not even creepy trees, just normal trees. It’s just not scary. I live near trees and a large patch of grass (which is apparently endangered, so we’re talking about potentially angry grass), and yesterday it was windy. I walked to the shops yesterday, and did I suddenly think, “Oh God, please don’t kill me, foliage!”? Nope. Litmus test failed.


Yes, if you’ve not heard already, the central idea is that Gaia is pissed at humans, and its minions, aka plants, are trying to send a warning to us to straighten-up and fly right by using deadly suicide-inducing toxins to kill off large groups of people in order to make us think twice about polluting the planet. Or something. As the toxins only appear on the US East Coast and, at the end of the movie, Paris, it’s possible they also hate liberals, museum-goers, and people who eat croissants. Does this mean that people living in desert countries are safe? Considering how bad the pollution in Texas is, it’s not the most verdant of states, and so it might be left off the hook. And what if Al Gore was visiting New York? Stupid plants!

As we’re talking about a completely different species here, one that cannot communicate with us, the motivations are unclear, which works on one level, and fails on another, namely that the film seems to think that because science cannot answer everything, it’s not really the answer to our problems, that some things are bigger than us. I’m not sure that was Shyamalan’s goal, though his reliance on wishy-washy spiritualism tends to suggest he does. The finale, which features a scientist on TV having his theories of deadly plants dismissed by some gobshite pundit, was especially annoying. It’s fair to say that it would be pretty easy to prove plants did it, but instead Shyamalan has a heavy-handed point to be make about post-9/11 paranoia and how it is making people irrational (a point made with much greater effect in The Mist).

So, that’s silly, but what about the chilling effects of the toxin? There was real potential there for some creepy moments, but they only work once or twice (the weird headbutting attacks of the crazy old lady at the end of the film were half-horrible, half-hilarious). Some have asked why the toxins make people kill themselves and not just go on a rampage, which is more dramatic, but Shyamalan has to maintain that deathly pace, and 28 Days Later-style chaos would not work (plus we’ve seen stuff like that before, as far back as early Cronenberg and Romero films). The very very slow suicides we see here are in keeping with his usual style, even though his much-vaunted R-rated horror events translate into a bit of blood-spurting and quick cuts away from the actual moment of death, just in case we get mortally upset by the sight of nasty things. While I’m not saying the movie would have been improved by gore dripping from the lens, the cowardice of it seems to hint that Shyamalan has lost the ability to deal with adults and adult themes.


Compare the squeamishness here with Unbreakable, which featured a violent, murdering sadist, as well as a nausea-inducing scene with Samuel L. Jackson breaking most of his bones as he falls down a flight of stairs. That moment, with the brittle-boned Mr. Glass tumbling down an endlessly long staircase, was preceded by a shot of his glass cane hitting the floor and breaking into hundreds of pieces, and I suspect the current Shyamalan would have just shown that. An admittedly elegant way to avoid nastiness, but the original scene is incredible, horrifying, utterly visceral. Going with the single shot of his cane might let the scene work on the nerves of the audience by making them imagine it, but could they come up with anything as horrifying as what actually happens in the scene? It’s something that critics agonise about, whether it’s right to show the horror or not, but certainly in the case of The Happening, it really needs something more than the vanilla violence we get. Without a frisson of menace in the movie, a sense of the scale of what is happening and the toll it is taking on everyone, there is no movie there. The odd shot of corpses dangling from trees aside, it’s devoid of power. Plus, the sight of groups of people walking slowly backwards would destroy even Hitchcock-level suspense.

Unbreakable also featured moments of relationship drama that seemed kinda stilted (in the way that Shyamalan’s conversation scenes often do) and yet still real, as Bruce Willis’ superheroic character tries to reconnect with his son and wife. The new Shyamalan now has Zooey Deschanel inexplicably being seemingly autistic, and having a torrid affair behind Mark Wahlberg’s back with someone called Joey that drives her almost insane with guilt. Well, I say “torrid affair”, when actually I mean “innocent meeting which involved eating some tiramisu”. That’s the extent of her infidelity. Oh, and who plays Joey? His one word of dialogue, on the phone, is spoken by Shyamalan himself. So, not only is he the most important writer who ever lived in Lady In The Water, he’s also hott enough to make Zooey “Blank” Deschanel consider straying from Mark Wahlberg. Mark Wahlberg, people! That’s some hottness Shyamalan’s got right there.


So it’s bad. It’s really really bad. But I still like that central idea, and think it could, somehow, have been turned into a better movie if not held back by the hubris and self-regarding idiocy of its creator. After seeing it, we ate some sausage and mash and came up with some ways in which it would have been a better movie, and this is what we reckon.

  • At several stages throughout the movie, Mark Wahlberg rattles on and on about his mood ring, which is what he used to woo Zooey all those years before. It goes nowhere, except to give them something to talk about later when reconciling. Instead, considering the plants are silently trying to kill humanity, Wahlberg could try to communicate with them by putting the ring on a tree branch and asking it what it wants, with the colours of the ring being the responses. (I actually thought this would happen, so clearly was it telegraphed).
  • When people get encrazied by the toxins, they sometimes repeat things or say nonsensical phrases, of which my favourite was, “Calculus! Calculus!” At the end, I was really hoping the French crazies would refer to, “Le Calculus!” Instead, Shyamalan uses his first grade French to have the guy say, “Mon bicyclette”, which is not as surreal, and not in keeping with the film’s peculiar anti-science slant (ironic considering Wahlberg saves everyone by using science, the douchebag).
  • Only one plant wants to help humanity; marijuana! The crazy old lady is growing it under hot lamps in her basement, and our heroes smoke up a big bag of it, thus making them immune to the toxins.
  • The weird hotdog man has hotdog trees in his greenhouse, like in Pee-Wee’s Big Top.
  • Change the title to “Did Gaia Just Fart On My Face?”
  • As soon as Wahlberg has decided it really is the plants killing humans with deathcooties, he should liberally use the word “Grassassins”.
  • Trees and shrubs = boring. Ents and triffids = awesome. More of that, please.
  • Zooey Deschanel’s reveal of her “torrid affair” with Joey and his elaborate desserts is obviously meant to be a big deal, though all it does show is that our heroes have the emotional maturity of Smurfs. Wahlberg’s response to her reveal, that he had recently bought cough syrup from an attractive woman in a pharmacy even though he didn’t even have a cough, is cloyingly vanilla (certainly in the middle of a ZOMG R-Rated movie!!!), so it might have worked better if, when Zooey Deschanel asks, “Is that true?” Wahlberg said, “No. Actually I went back behind the counter and banged the shit out of her for three hours straight, and it was awesome, and then we covered ourselves with cough syrup, and we was humping and just rollin’ around in ‘Tussin! It was so much better than all that cuddling we do. However, ironically, I’ve had a cough ever since.”
  • Most importantly, what about explaining why John Lequizamo hates Zooey Deschanel so much. He’s relentlessly nasty and hostile just because she’s a bit distant? I can agree, it annoyed us a lot, but still, we wouldn’t be nasty to her. She has such a lovely singing voice, after all.
  • That said, why were her pupils so small? Canyon wondered if she has glaucoma or something. Hopefully she’ll have that seen to.
  • The actual Happening itself ends with the plants deciding to stop being deadly at a specific time, thus making the events of the movie nothing more than a warning, a prelude to another, deadlier attack. That only even slightly works because our heroes, who are separated from each other in different buildings but able to communicate thanks to a tube running between them (a tube that is mentioned earlier with the clumsiest exposition of the year), decide to end it all by walking out into the deadly grass, even though they have an innocent child with them, only for the Happening to stop happening, thus saving them at the last second. Bullshit. If I’d made this movie, an enormous rock head would have risen from the ground, a manifestation of Gaia that just happens to look exactly like James Lovelock, and as our heroes watch, terrified, its huge stony mouth opens, and says, “Don’t tread on me, man!’ Whoa.

    • I also thought about creating a Happening drinking game, but it seems Film School Rejects has beaten me to it, but there is scope to expand it a bit. Take a gulp of booze whenever:

  • Tree moves (two gulps if it is plastic and inside a house with no visible draft).
  • Someone is improbably mean to someone else for no reason (two gulps if no one does anything about it). This includes Deschanel’s relentless snippiness towards Wahlberg.
  • A vaguely scary moment gets dragged out too long and ruins the suspense (two gulps if someone half opens a door and waits to open it the rest of the way, just to drag it out longer).
  • Someone unleashes a stream of ugly exposition because the writer/director has forgotten how to tell a story visually.
  • Mark Wahlberg uses science like a douchebag (two gulps if no one listens to him).
  • Someone is about to die horribly, and the shot cuts away right at the last second (four gulps if you actually see something unpleasant).
  • Someone says they can’t contact anyone anywhere, which is a great trailer shot that makes it seem like the world is ending, but in actual fact the majority of the world is just fine and contact is re-established in the next scene.
  • Mark Wahlberg says, “Event,” or, “Happening” in a sentence (this might actually overload your liver).

    • Three gulps if:

  • Mark Wahlberg’s voice goes weirdly high for no reason.
  • Hotdogs are mentioned.
  • John Leguizamo uses math, douchebag.
  • A child talks like an adult.
  • Someone on TV overacts terribly.

    • Finish your drink if:

  • Someone screams at the camera and waves their fist at it.
  • You realise you could be watching The Birds or Spielberg’s War of the Worlds instead, as this is practically the same film, except neutered and stupid.
  • A character, who knows plants are deadly, has plants in her house just so there can be some contrived tension in the final scene.
  • You realise Stephen King has written a dozen books that are just like this, but you enjoyed those even with his weird authorial quirks.
  • You expect that the negativity surrounding this film severely dents the chances of Fernando Meirelles’ adaptation of the novel Blindness making money in the US as it’s kinda similar.

    • Finish all the drinks in your house if:

  • You find out that even though it has a terrible reputation, and people thought it would fail horribly, it’s actually well on its way to becoming profitable, mostly because it’s relatively cheap for a summer film and groups of people are going to see it because they heard it was this year’s Wicker Man. Which it almost is. Though there are a notable absence of BEES! BEES IN MY EYES! GRARGLE BLURG FLUMF!

    • That’s right, people. Looks like we’ll still be getting a very very slow-moving version of Avatar: The Last Airbender after all.