I will be watching these two pages for more details in the coming months. Please no Shia LaBeuf. Please no Shia LaBeuf. Please no Shia LaBeuf.
Archive for the Movies Category
A week or so ago, Jen and I watched the Sharkwater documentary. It is about a conservationist who is concerned about the shark fin trade. Sharks are fished and hunted and killed for their fins. The fins are like pieces of gold in Asian countries where Shark Fin Soup is not only a delicacy, but a culturally significant status symbol. As a result, the shark populations around the world are being ravaged in order to fill the demand for soup, and thus, money.
The documentary was brilliant. It had plenty of underwater scenes, and all the things you would expect. It also had a storyline where the filmmaker joins up with a rogue boat that goes after poachers’ boats with battering rams, and water canons. We have the rogue boat racing a coast guard to international waters so that they could avoid prosecution. It is more than your average documentary.
I am not a PETA member or anything like that, but this film will leave you wanting to help conserve sharks. I was on board relatively early in the film, but there was one scene in particular that just enraged me to the point that I wanted to run out and do something right away. You see the poachers catch sharks, pull them on the boat, and de-fin the sharks by hacking at their still-alive bodies with knives. After they remove anything resembling cartilage on the shark, they push the still-moving, breathing, soon-to-be carcass back overboard so that a completely immobilized shark can float to the bottom of the ocean to die a paralyzing death.
Watching from an underwater camera, we see one such shark float to the bottom of the ocean to die, but his eyes are still moving. I am getting goosebumps right now as I type it and it has been a couple weeks since I saw the movie.
M. Night Shyamalan has fallen a long way since his debut, The Sixth Sense. He was moving along nicely with Unbreakable, Signs before falling slightly with The Village. Then he hit the wall with Lady in the Water according to most critics. If you look at his career on RottenTomatoes.com it really tells the tale.
The Sixth Sense had an 84% approval rating. Unbreakable had 68% and then Signs jumped back up to 74%. The Village dropped down to 43% before Lady in the Water bottomed Mr. Shyamalan out at a horrendous 24%. Bottomed out, that is, until Shyamalan’s latest, The Happening starring Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel brings him to an all-new low of 20%.
So, exactly how bad is The Happening? The answer to that question depends. It depends, because I have a theory.
But first, The Happening really was that bad. It seemed disjointed. The performances were uneven and bad. It was tough, if not impossible, to feel anything for the characters. The development was nonexistent. Wahlberg and Deschanel are a married couple that has lost their spark. We are not quite sure why. We never really find out. All the strife that these characters have between them seems false at best, as if it was a horribly planted storyline used just to augment a standard sci-fi, bio-thriller storyline that serves as the base for The Happening.
Trust me. It was bad. This is where my theory comes in.
I think M. Night Shyamalan was mocking the concept of the summer movie. I know this is an outlandish claim, but follow with me for a second.
Mark Wahlberg seemed almost to be doing an impression of his character from Boogie Nights. Of course he was doing so with a different character – a high school science teacher – but the style and mannerisms of the Dirk Diggler character. He was sweet, innocent and seemed almost a little dumb or simple. I truly think it had to be a put-on. I have seen Mark Wahlberg act, and this wasn’t him trying to act well.
It didn’t stop with Mark Wahlberg. The tertiary characters in the movie seemed like cliched plants. It seemed as if Shyamalan was putting characters in to try and reference other over-the-top shlock-fests that pepper our movie screens every summer. The crazy old lady was a cross-reference between Tim Robbins’ character in War of the Worlds and the old lady who led the rebellion in Stephen King’s The Mist. The military policeman who was so innocent that he replaced his curses with “cheese and crackers” was impossible to believe as a real attempt at characterization.
That is the conclusion I came to. The Happening had to be a parody of summer movies. M. Night Shyamalan is defending himself against critics who have tried to sink him in his last two films. I get the feeling that Shyamalan feels punished for trying something new and different. His response? You want a typical movie? Shyamalan seems to be saying, “Fine. I will take all those awful, conventional things that people flock to see every summer and I will make a mockery of them.”
Either that, or Shyamalan has made the world’s largest, steaming, heaping pile of garbage and dragged Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel along with him for the ride. Unless your last name is Shyamalan, there probably is no way of knowing for sure. As of now, I will just assume Shyamalan is purposefully sending a message to critics.
The only other alternative is to contribute to that minuscule 20% approval rating from RottenTomatoes.com.
Since I haven’t written much lately, here is a rambling unedited post that could have been a review on a better day.
Jen and I have been watching John Adams on HBO starring Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney, both of whom I like. But, for some reason, despite needing to watch every episode, I am generally unimpressed by this mini-series. It looks great. The history is interesting. I think the writing is over the top. I understand that John Adams was a lawyer, a thinker, and all that, but it still seems a bit much. It feels to me like it was written in a booze and drug-fueled orgy of Ken Burns and Aaron Sorkin. The perfect sentences and unbelievable conversations fly as if every pre-revolutionary person had a sense of perfect balance in dialog.
I guess I could have just stopped after saying it is unbelievable.
And still, with all that being said, I am drawn to watching it because I find the history so fascinating. Paul Giamatti does a good job when he isn’t over-acting and over-delivering the lines that have been written. Laura Linney’s performance feels the same.
The bottom line for me is that if I was in high school and I was watching this, it would be the greatest movie ever, primarily because I would be watching it in school. Because I am not in school, all I can say is that it is entertaining, and interesting, while mildly annoying in spots.
I guess the fact that it I am comparing it to Band of Brothers because they were both HBO historical dramas doesn’t help John Adams’ case either. Adams wants to be as good, moving and as important as Brothers, but there is just no way to pull it off. Maybe it is because we have so much more distance away from John Adams’ era in the historical timeline.
Then again, maybe it is just not as good.
Apparently everyone in the world has seen this video already, but nobody ever linked me to it. Well, I will go out on a limb and figure that I can turn some people onto a website called “Funny Or Die.” Will Ferrell makes videos for the site like this one.
