Kim Newman joins the Guardian’s film blog with a less-than-convincing defence of M Night Shyamalan’s latest offering, The Happening. As a riposte to the film’s poor takings and overwhelmingly bad press, the piece doesn’t start too well.
It’s an effective, mid-ranking genre picture. Mark Wahlberg isn’t the strongest leading man, but the rest of the cast are fine, and its puzzled, panicky characters act in a more or less credible manner.
Mid-ranking. Fine. More or less credible. Newman is already kicking the feet from under his own argument. It goes on,
His scripts are sometimes mawkish, sometimes pretentious,
And sometimes they’re just aggravatingly bad. The ending of Signs springs to mind as inexcusably lazy and contrived. Humanoid aliens descend on a blue planet whose surface is covered in water and whose atmosphere contains large amounts of water, only for those aliens to be revealed, abruptly and for no clear reason, as being laid low by… a glass of water. And this improbable lack of alien foresight restores the protagonist’s faith in a merciful deity. Truly, the Lord moves in bewildering ways.
He’s an earnest film-maker whose weird streak of humour doesn’t always work – a speech delivered by Wahlberg to a plastic plant just dies on screen – and he comes across personally as privileged, superior and faintly creepy (traits he’s well aware of, since he has used them in his own “significant” cameo appearances in film).
Having listed a dozen or so reasons to dislike Shyamalan’s recent efforts, Newman delivers the final, perhaps inevitable, defence:
Can it be a kind of racism that the Indian-born, Philadelphia-raised auteur is hammered for his apparent character (or funny name) rather more than, say, Quentin Tarantino or Spike Lee?
Ah. That’s obviously why The Sixth Sense was widely acclaimed and enormously successful and yet The Happening was not. It’s racism, see? And his funny name. Clearly, these are the things that govern the viewing decisions of a mainstream movie audience.
Zack Snyder’s forthcoming film adaptation of the graphic novel Watchmen is, by any measure, a long shot. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ comic book yarn remains one of the most densely plotted and satisfying examples of the form. The book is artful in its telling, at times ingenious, and rewards repeated reading. And this, for Synder, is part of the problem. The pleasures of Watchmen are very much about how the story is told, i.e., as a comic. The plot often hinges on tiny visual details; graffiti, partly-obscured adverts, a pocketful of sugar cubes – all of which become significant as the story unfolds. Skipping back and forth through the pages and revisiting these details is hard to avoid, and indeed is intended. How this might translate to film isn’t clear.
Moore described the book as “unfilmable,” not least because of its narrative structure, with flashbacks, supplementary “research” and a comic-within-a-comic that serves to counterpoint events. In an interview with Amazon, Moore recounted his reaction to Terry Gilliam’s abortive 1989 attempt to turn “the War and Peace of graphic novels” into a film: “I had to tell [Gilliam] that I didn’t think it was filmable. I didn’t design it to show off the similarities between cinema and comics, which there are, but in my opinion are fairly unremarkable. It was designed to show off the things that comics could do that literature and cinema couldn’t.” In The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, David Hughes quotes Gibbons making much the same point: “With a comic book the reader can back-track; you can reach page twenty and say, ‘Hey, that’s what that was all about on page three,’ and then nip back and have a look. We wanted to take advantage of that difference… We wanted to make a comic book that read as a straightforward story, but gradually you became aware that it had a symmetrical structure.”
Those unfamiliar with the comic’s plot can find a summary here. Essentially, Watchmen is a detective story set in an alternative 1980s in which Woodward and Bernstein were assassinated and Nixon is still president. The comic’s twelve chapters mark a countdown to armageddon as one by one a group of retired and questionable heroes are eliminated and the world teeters on the brink of thermonuclear war. Investigating the death of a former masked colleague, a disheveled vigilante named Rorschach uncovers a plot of unspeakable proportions and uncertain intent. The looming showdown of military superpowers could in theory be prevented by the one character with super-powers of his own, the casually miraculous Dr Manhattan. Freakishly disembodied by a laboratory mishap, Manhattan is, quite literally, a self-resurrected man. All but omnipotent, this blue transfigured being is assumed to be America’s deliverance and the ultimate deterrent. However, the doctor’s godlike perceptions are proving incompatible with human imperatives: “A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there’s no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?”

SEARCH
Archives
Interesting Sites
Categories
- Academia
- Agonies of the Left
- AI
- And Then It Caught Fire
- Anthropology
- Architecture
- Armed Forces
- Arse-Chafing Tedium
- Art
- ASMR
- Auto-Erotic Radicalism
- Basking
- Bees
- Behold My Massive Breasts
- Behold My Massive Lobes
- Beware the Brown Rain
- Big Hooped Earrings
- Bionic Lingerie
- Blogs
- Books
- Bra Drama
- Bra Hygiene
- Cannabis
- Classic Sentences
- Collective Toilet Management
- Comics
- Culture
- Current Affairs
- Dating Decisions
- Dental Hygiene's Racial Subtext
- Department of Irony
- Dickensian Woes
- Did You Not See My Earrings?
- Emotional Support Guinea Pigs
- Emotional Support Water Bottles
- Engineering
- Ephemera
- Erotic Pottery
- Farmyard Erotica
- Feats
- Feminist Comedy
- Feminist Dating
- Feminist Fun Times
- Feminist Poetry Slam
- Feminist Pornography
- Feminist Snow Ploughing
- Feminist Witchcraft
- Film
- Food and Drink
- Free-For-All
- Games
- Gardening's Racial Subtext
- Gentrification
- Giant Vaginas
- Great Hustles of Our Time
- Greatest Hits
- Hair
- His Pretty Nails
- History
- Housekeeping
- Hubris Meets Nemesis
- Ideas
- If You Build It
- Imagination Must Be Punished
- Inadequate Towels
- Indignant Replies
- Interviews
- Intimate Waxing
- Juxtapositions
- Media
- Mischief
- Modern Savagery
- Music
- Niche Pornography
- Not Often Seen
- Oppressive Towels
- Parenting
- Policing
- Political Nipples
- Politics
- Postmodernism
- Pregnancy
- Presidential Genitals
- Problematic Acceptance
- Problematic Baby Bouncing
- Problematic Bookshelves
- Problematic Bra Marketing
- Problematic Checkout Assistants
- Problematic Civility
- Problematic Cleaning
- Problematic Competence
- Problematic Crosswords
- Problematic Cycling
- Problematic Drama
- Problematic Fairness
- Problematic Fitness
- Problematic Furniture
- Problematic Height
- Problematic Monkeys
- Problematic Motion
- Problematic Neighbourliness
- Problematic Ownership
- Problematic Parties
- Problematic Pasta
- Problematic Plumbers
- Problematic Punctuality
- Problematic Questions
- Problematic Reproduction
- Problematic Shoes
- Problematic Taxidermy
- Problematic Toilets
- Problematic Walking
- Problematic Wedding Photos
- Pronouns Or Else
- Psychodrama
- Radical Bowel Movements
- Radical Bra Abandonment
- Radical Ceramics
- Radical Dirt Relocation
- Reheated
- Religion
- Reversed GIFs
- Science
- Shakedowns
- Some Fraction Of A Sausage
- Sports
- Stalking Mishaps
- Student Narcolepsy
- Suburban Polygamist Ninjas
- Suburbia
- Technology
- Television
- The Deep Wisdom of Celebrities
- The Genitals Of Tomorrow
- The Gods, They Mock Us
- The Great Outdoors
- The Politics of Buttocks
- The Thrill of Décor
- The Thrill Of Endless Noise
- The Thrill of Friction
- The Thrill of Garbage
- The Thrill Of Glitter
- The Thrill of Hand Dryers
- The Thrill of Medicine
- The Thrill Of Powdered Cheese
- The Thrill Of Seating
- The Thrill Of Shopping
- The Thrill Of Toes
- The Thrill Of Unemployment
- The Thrill of Wind
- The Thrill Of Woke Retailing
- The Thrill Of Women's Shoes
- The Thrill of Yarn
- The Year That Was
- Those Lying Bastards
- Those Poor Darling Armed Robbers
- Those Poor Darling Burglars
- Those Poor Darling Carjackers
- Those Poor Darling Fare Dodgers
- Those Poor Darling Looters
- Those Poor Darling Muggers
- Those Poor Darling Paedophiles
- Those Poor Darling Sex Offenders
- Those Poor Darling Shoplifters
- Those Poor Darling Stabby Types
- Those Poor Darling Thieves
- Tomorrow’s Products Today
- Toys
- Travel
- Tree Licking
- TV
- Uncategorized
- Unreturnable Crutches
- Wigs
- You Can't Afford My Radical Life
Recent Comments