Did You See My Movie?

M. Night Shyamalan is the kind of renaissance man that thinks the slightest flatulent bubble that escapes his nether portal is like manna from heaven. And this critique of an ego so massive in scale, so unyielding in its narcissistic glee is coming from someone who is in actuality a fairly substantial fan of his films.

I forget which one it was on, but on one of his DVDs, Shyamalan includes, as an extra, a brief homemade, straight from a camcorder horror short film.

Clearly the guy is so in love with himself that he is capable of including something this inside as something that the world at large will in some way be better off for seeing.

I get this impulse.

See, when I was a but a wee misanthropic whiner I took part in a short film of my own with the assistance of my father (who owned the camera, house, clothes, stereo, soft drinks and pillows involved), and my always game brother. It was the 80s and what we did in essence was a retelling of any generic episode of Miami Vice, a show which, at the time, was a huge hit.

I'm not claiming that our film was anything but the tripe that it essentially was, but I will claim that it was every bit the first film that Shyamalan had the stones to put on his DVD release.

When The Sixth Sense came out I dutifully watched it despite my fears that the combination of douchebag (Bruce Willis) and child actor (that gap-toothed assmunch whose name escapes me and isn't worth looking up) protagonist one-two punch would do little to help my fear that I would hate the film.

My worst fears confirmed, The Sixth Sense turned out, for me, to be one of the biggest let-downs in recent memory.

As a result of this, I was more than a little reluctant to spend any more of my life giving another imaginary "genius" any more of my time and money. This meant that I heartily avoided the release of Unbreakable, Shyamalan's nod to comics and superheroes.

In fact, the next project of his that I did end up watching was Signs, and this was only rented in a moment of weakness one evening at Blockbuster where I was trying desperately to avoid the endless rows of movies starring John Leguizamo and featuring a plot that revolves around zombies and hip-hop.

I realize that settling for Mel Gibson is a sorry state of affairs all the same, but I had read the reviews and I was up to the challenge. Plus, I like big-budget alien-invasion stuff, so I figured it might be worth a laugh if nothing else.

So this is the part where I try to explain why it was that I actually ended up enjoying a silly alien movie with a subplot about god and faith starring Mel Gibson instead of hanging myself during the opening scene.

I can't explain it actually.

The movie simply worked for me. I liked it. It wasn't great, but it sure as hell was no Sixth Sense. And, I kind of thought that Shyamalan did a fairly decent job of telling the story without giving off a vibe that I was supposed to run off and join a fucking church or some such shit.

I just dug it.

Then came a little movie called The Village. What a polarizing project this turned out to be! Most critics - and audiences for that matter - hated this movie. To me, the trailer looked fairly cool, though I must admit to being more than a little turned off by the idea of it starring Richie Cunningham's daughter, Bryce Dallas Howard.

Once it came out on DVD I rented it with pretty low expectations.

It was flawed, I can admit that. But nonetheless, I fucking loved that film. I loved the visual style, I loved the ridiculous premise, I loved the surprise ending which was so goofy that I should have sought out the director and personally killed him myself. Instead, I simply loved it.

By this time I was into it and ready to give Unbreakable a shot.

Lo and behold, I loved the shit out of this one too. I love it when someone is able to make Bruce Willis be something more than the utter dickhouse that he obviously is. Terry Gilliam did it. Moonlighting did it to a certain extent, as did the Die Hard franchise (to a certain extent as well), and despite my almost total loathing of the man himself, Quentin Tarantino summoned magic from that withered husk of a man in Pulp Fiction.

Yeah there were obvious issues with Unbreakable: Sam Jackson's wig for starters. But overall? I thought it was great stuff.

And from there, the great downturn, the long day's journey into night.

First there was Lady in the Water.

Okay, okay, fine. I'll admit it. I liked that one too. But the cracks were beginning to become evident in the veneer. Something essential for me was being left out. The whole urban mythological allegory nonsense was too silly even for me. The pool to the magical otherworld concept was so outright retarded that I felt politically incorrect not liking it.

And this was the point at which I virtually told myself that Shyamamlan was a rocky road to travel as a fan. At his best he is not only willing to take the strengths of big-budget genre populism and make it somehow his own, but he is also capable of somehow conning the studio to allow him to make the movies the way he sees them in his mind without their interference. Unfortunately, at his worst he is tedious, pedantic, and outright childish (in a bad way) in his ability to tell a story. This makes you wonder why the studios would ever allow that much money to go into anyone's hands when this much silliness is at stake.

Audiences are not interested in art. They want cheap thrills, self-affirming twaddle, preachy moralistic fables with little actual depth, and lots of titty.

Shyamalan somehow is able to convince rich people to give him their money so that he can make whatever movie it is that he has decided to make with apparently few questions asked.

The reason this is a huge risk is exemplified in what may possibly be one of the worst films ever made in any genre: The Happening.

I like Mark Wahlberg. I know he's a cockeater, I know he has the intellect of a wheel of Swiss. But, I also happen to know that he can act given certain qualifications.

For one: He has to play tough guys. Any derivation from this rule will always end in disaster.

I know you think that in Boogie Nights he did a great job not being a tough guy, but think about it. He thought he was a tough guy in it. If he can tap his anger, he's in. Let him get all mushy for long and you have trouble. Look at Rock Star. When he is the arrogant, singular-minded rock singer he is a huge success, pulling off his performance as an overconfident everyman with ease. But at the end of the movie he gets all Kurt Cobain and croons his way back into Jennifer Aniston's heart. If it wasn't so funny I would issue a Fatwa against this sort of heavy-handed super-sincerity.

In the turd that is The Happening this fucking Wahlberg character goes and agrees to play a science teacher! No, I'm not kidding. The guy teaches high school science while wearing a sweater vest of all things.

And when he opens his mouth it's almost as though he may have become a castrato since his last screen appearance, so wussed out is his work in The Happening.

The story is idiotic.

Angry plants take the earth back by poisoning us into killing ourselves off.

Huh?

Is this meant as a joke, or are we actually so stupid as an audience now that large, populous audiences are somehow actually supposed to buy that the dialogue was written by anyone over the age of about seven?

It is easily that bad.

Easily.

And then there's the Johnny Legs factor.

Yup, you guessed it. That bucktoothed hack from every urban-zombie-hiphop-funfest is now inexplicably in another huge Hollywood production and is delivering yet another nearly forgettable and lackluster performance.

I dare you to watch The Happening and not feel deeply in your heart that were you to instead be seeing the Cramer version of Miami Vice, that not only would you be forced to acknowledge that Shyamalan is now almost completely culturally washed up, you would also have to recognize the wizardry and creative brio that goes into a Cramer production (okay, the only Cramer production), and in the process note that this guy, M. Night Shyamalan, has had his moment, and that it is now time to shove him into the forest and let the creatures do with him what they will.

Only then can we sleep in peace and view the world once again as our bitch and not as a delivery device for hacks.