majorarcana

Makes The Shield look like a model of community policing.

Which brings us to the half-way point of the project. With only two and a bit months to go. Shit.

Which, as it happens, links seamlessly to the subject of this post, M Night Shyamalan’s Godawful The Happening. I’d previously given up on Shyamalan with The Village, although my disillusionment began earlier with the hugely disappointing Signs. Consequently I still haven’t seen Lady in the Water, and had no real intention of seeing The Happening, however a small window of opportunity to go to the cinema opened up unexpectedly and The it was screening at precisely the right time. How bad could it be, I thought.

Well, it’s a genuinely dreadful film. The plot is - putting it mildly - fucking retarded; an incoherent mess that was painful to follow. It’s mind blowing to think the same man who wrote this has an oscar standing on his mantlepiece for best original screenplay. This would have made a particularly shit episode of The New Twilight Zone, and i find it genuinely disturbing someone - anyone - could think it would make a good movie. I actually felt slightly embarrassed for the man. The cast seemingly conspire to make things even worse, with some of the worst acting I’ve seen in a long while; Mark Wahlberg in particular utterly humiliating himself. Dreadful, dreadful movie.

2008 - the year Phil’s bookmarks folder went mainstream. Crass sensationalism aside, this is an utterly predictable, by the numbers shlocky horror complete with gratuitous sex, gore and murder by outboard motor. I enjoyed most of the first half however, mainly because it’s a low budget British horror that involves recognisably British characters and situations. In the same way that encounters with murderous rednecks must have seemed eerily plausible to cinema goers familiar with the wildernesses of inner America back in the 70s, slappers from Leeds getting e-ed up on a boat in Mallorca with a bunch of lairy poshos and having a really bad night just has the shape and form of an urban legend by way of Club 18-30 about it to someone who’s woken up on his fair share of Balearic beaches.

Probably the finest film about an amoral supervillain who terrorises a mildly fascistic central European country whilst clad in black PVC in order to have sex with his girlfriend in his underground lair on a rotating bed covered in 10 million dollars worth of cash ever made.