[on film]

Two For One:
Anghus reviews two piles of garbage

By: Anghus Houvouras

The Happening: 0 stars (out of four)
You Don’t Mess With the Zohan: * star (out of four)

Maybe twice a year, when the mood strikes me, and I feel like inflicting punishment upon myself, I spend a marathon session watching all the movies I didn’t have time to see. In June I missed a few, mostly on purpose. These aren’t films that get me all excited. In fact, they leave me creatively flaccid.

I heard about The Happening once the script hit the Internet—another M. Night Shyamalan film that was stuck in development hell. See, Shyamalan doesn’t like to do rewrites, and he doesn’t like people criticizing his scripts. After The Village seemed to alienate audiences, the executives that spent untold millions on making his films asked to read the script for Lady in the Water. Once they read it, they scratched their heads in confusion and told him they didn’t get it. Like any reasonable adult, M. Night threw a hissy fit of epic proportions and cried like a girl, saying his creative vision was being compromised by fat-cat corporate whores who didn’t understand what art is. That was a fine argument until the film came out and vomited all over the audience. To say Lady in the Water was awful just doesn’t capture the shear level of cinematic malevolence it inflicted on fans eager to see what the creator of The Sixth Sense and The Signs had come up with.

After Lady in the Water, many critics and film-types were declaring that M. Night had nothing left to offer. I was a little hesitant to join the unruly torch-wielding mob declaring him to be the seventh sign of the apocalypse—that is until I saw his latest film, The Happening. After watching this 81-minute massacre, I am officially a member of the torch-wielding mob. Yes, I know, I’ve spent untold paragraphs bashing bad films, but The Happening barely even qualifies as a film.

It’s akin to watching a first film by someone who ignored all the cinematic rules of story, structure and character development. In fact, it’s more akin to a film made by someone who read about the rules of story, structure and character development, and decided to abandon them, burn the textbook and rub the ashes into audiences’ eyes, ears, nose and mouth as punishment.

I barely know where to start on The Happening. The most glaring absence of talent comes from the story, which literally goes nowhere fast. To readers who care: I’m about to spoil the whole movie—not that there is much to spoil. But in order to truly dissect how bad this is, I’m going to have to discuss the absolutely moronic “story” for the film. It starts with a real simple setup. People are killing themselves en masse, throwing themselves from buildings, shooting themselves in the head, laying down in front of lawn mowers. This causes panic as everyone begins to freak out, and head out of the cities to try and avoid the attack. Most believe it to be terrorists, but we soon learn that it’s a toxin being released by plants because apparently the Earth is pissed off at people. (Did you get that? That’s it. That’s the story. Earth is pissed, so it releases some kind of chemical that makes people want to kill themselves.) We learn this major plot point from Mark Wahlberg, who plays a high-school science teacher that manages to figure out this mystery. The rest of the film features Wahlberg and company running from the wind. Yes, I said it: running from the wind.

See, the wind is the cinematic symbol for this unseen, silent-but-deadly emission from our old friend, the Earth. The only way to avoid it is to run, close the windows and lock the doors. Even though Wahlberg plays a science teacher, he apparently didn’t read the chapter that explains air is capable of moving in and out of homes despite locked doors. While we all would love to believe that closed doors and shut windows would protect us from toxic vapors, the basic science behind it proves otherwise—and that’s a key phrase here: “the basic science.”

Somehow, a typical high-school science teacher can surmise that a chemical emission coming from plants is wiping out human life, but he believes he’ll be safe from this microscopic vapor behind a closed door. There’s so much of The Happening that is utterly ridiculous, for a moment I believed perhaps it was some Ed Wood-style homage. Sadly, it’s not. It’s fundamental proof that Shyamalan desperately needs a producer who will not indulge every stupid idea he has. Trust me, The Happening is stupid, poorly acted and utterly directionless. The only thing the film succeeds at is making me feel like one of its characters, desperately trying not to kill myself.

On the other end of the “what the high holy hell” spectrum is another apocalyptic film, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan. Adam Sandler films have never been consistently funny, but most of the time they’re entertaining. Even when it’s not a laugh fest, audiences at least feel entertained by his antics enough to declare the film salvageable.

Sure, some of the films are downright awful (Click, Mr. Deeds and Little Nicky spring to mind), but for the most part I always give Sandler an “A” for effort. As of this moment, I’m not quite sure where Zohan ends up. It’s a strange little flick about an Israeli super agent named Zohan who wants to leave the life of super-spy behind to become a hairdresser. He spends his days fighting terrorists and his nights obsessing over the 1985 edition of the Paul Mitchell catalog. Even though Zohan has everything he wants in Israel—mostly women and fame—there is still a part of him that feels incomplete. So he does what anyone in the same situation would do: fakes his own death while facing off against his arch nemesis, the Phantom, and flees to the United States to try and make the world silky smooth.

The utter insanity of the premise was enough to keep me interested, and the film only gets crazier as it goes on. Zohan begins to cut hair in a salon run by, get this, a hot Palestinian. How’s that for conflict? He’s an Israeli working for a Palestinian! Who didn’t see that coming? The only more obvious choice would have been having the shop run by Hitler.

The film plays by the rules for the most part, treating the characters as awful, awful stereotypes while trying to infuse them with a little heart. In their efforts to be generally inoffensive, they have ended up with a rather limp comedy. The stereotypical jokes about Palestinians, Israelis, terrorism and hummus wear painfully thin. I can handle stereotypes, but what I can’t handle is the hackneyed way they try to work a moral into the story. Trying to reduce a 2,000-year-old conflict to a “can’t we all just get along” mentality in the last five minutes is ludicrous. To spend an hour and a half playing up stereotypes and then try to make it seem like empowerment in the last two minutes (by having them crack jokes and slap each other on the back playfully) felt kind of insulting. It would be like watching a two-hour film about Belgians and calling them “brussel sprout-swilling waffle-makers” and right before the credits saying, “No, seriously, they’re good people.”

What saved Zohan for me is what made The Happening so incredibly frustrating: the bizarre. Zohan is an incredibly odd character taken to all kind of broad extremes. He likes to disco dance, has the abilities of a superhero, styles ‘80s hairdos and has sex with his customers. In fact, he has sex with everyone. In fact, I was a little flustered by all the geriatric sex going on in the film. Nothing can describe the incommutable mixture of arousal and fear I experienced watching Charlotte Rae (Mrs. Garret from “The Facts of Life”) in lingerie being seduced by Zohan. This is not something I want to relive.

Still, the over-the-top aspect of the film is what kept it from being a complete nightmare. As confused as I was while watching it—seeing Sandler walk around in cut-off denim shorts, cutting hair and making sweet love to the elderly—it was funny enough to make me reluctantly recommend the film when it comes on television and to audiences who don’t have to pay to see it.

Two very different films, two very different experiences. The Happening is just plain terrible. Do not see it unless you need a good laugh. Unintentional hilarity is something Shyamalan is becoming an expert on. As for Sander, a little more intentional hilarity would go a long way to reinvigorate the mediocrity he’s been churning out.