the groundhog day project

Plan 9 from Outer Space is, on its surface, an awful film, far worse than The Happening , but even if you've not seen Ed Wood and seen Johnny Depp's take on the titular director as a man so in love with film he cannot see its flaws, this movie has charm. It's just so... earnest and overwrought; its voiceover is too much, its melodramatic underpinnings are too big for its short running time; and its straightforwardness of plot coupled, its simplicity of sets (like this airplane cockpit which is barely more than a wall with a curtain; they don't even have steering columns), its simplistic acting (without being goofy or inhuman like Walhberg or Deschanel in The Happening ), it's mix of cheap original footage and stock footage, and its ridiculous premise make for a weirdly entertaining thing. Jeff's (Gregory Walcott) rant about how he can't tell anyone about the flying saucer he saw because he's "muzzled by army brass" feels like the kind of ran...

The one woman's confusion about her book and then stabbing herself in the neck--that's good cinema. The other woman seeing people clawing at themselves, but we don't get to see that clawing--that's just offensive filmmaking. Something Shyamalan does far too much in The Happening ; he has characters and fake newscasters tell us things rather than show us things. And, at the climax of the film, while Nursery Owner has already offered up bits of the explanation for what's happening, we aren't offered visual clues to figure it out, and we don't really get to observe the process of Elliot figuring it out... Okay, we are literally allowed to observe him figuring it out but it's so... lame: Click and see. The construction site scene is a better opening because we see the action. We don't just hear about it. But, the best scene comes later-- (Three hours into the "event" that's happening, we've already had autopsies, we've got a ...

I saw two good movies today. One a horror film, far better than it should have been (though with one annoying flaw right at its center). The other a nice family drama with echoes of last year's Captain Fantastic (which I loved), and based on a true story. That is, Annabelle: Creation and The Glass Castle , respectively. But, right now, I'm watching The Happening because, I suppose I hate myself. Now, The Happening isn't all bad. Until Mark Wahlberg shows up on screen, telling us (or his students) about some article about bees that Shyamalan (or Wahlberg's character, though I'm not sure he has one) read in the news, the movie is actually pretty good. A slow burn handful of minutes, that lady losing her place in her book twice then slowly pushing her hairpin into her neck, all of those bodies leaping from the construction site... And then Elliot (Wahlberg) teaches science but doesn't understand what "theory" means. Cameron Fry has become a princip...