the blog of nathan loding

The Hap­pen­ing (2008)
Star­ring: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel; Directed by: M. Night Shya­malan
Rat­ing: * (one star out of five)

Sum­mary: The story begins with an out­break in Cen­tral Park. Tourists, res­i­dents, peo­ple are mak­ing their way through the park when the wind picks up. Every­one freezes, and begins slowly back­ing up a hand­ful of paces. Then they begin to kill them­selves, by any means they can. At a build­ing site in the city, con­struc­tion work­ers begin to walk off the top floor of the build­ing to their crush­ing deaths. In a school in the city, Elliot (Wahlberg) and Julian (John Leguizamo) are pulled from class to a teachers-only meet­ing where they told there is an “event” hap­pen­ing, most likely a ter­ror­ist attack using chem­i­cals. Then every­one runs for their lives from the New Eng­land area, where the “event” appears to be spread­ing to less pop­u­lated areas. It quickly becomes clear that it’s not terrorists.

Thoughts: A stun­ning fail­ure. And by stun­ning, I don’t mean it looked pretty; it was absolutely awful. Which hurts me a lit­tle inside to say, as all of Shya­malan’s pre­vi­ous movies had some redeem­ing quailty (I have not yet seen Lady in the Water, though). Beau­ti­ful cin­e­matog­ra­phy was some­thing I could rely on — not any more. The dia­logue itself was writ­ten well; but the direc­tion and the act­ing behind it were ter­ri­ble. There were awk­ward pauses, but not awk­ward in a real­is­tic way. The expla­na­tion for what was going on should be of no sur­prise to peo­ple at this point, but I won’t spoil it here. Suf­fice it to say that the expla­na­tion is no twist, and it’s not sci­en­tif­i­cally plau­si­ble. Sci­en­tific rea­son­ing is not some­thing that I nor­mally hold against films, but the way that the infor­ma­tion was pre­sented made it such that I found it hard to ignore the hard sci­ence behind it all. In a word: Skip it. Period.

The Descent (2005)
Star­ring: Shauna Mac­don­ald, Natalie Men­doza; Directed by: Neil Mar­shall
Rat­ing: ** (two out of five stars)

Sum­mary: After Sarah’s (Mac­don­ald) fam­ily is killed in a tragic car acci­dent, her friends try to bring her life back to some sem­blance of nor­malcy. Juno (Men­doza) invites the group of friends out on a spelunk­ing trip in a basic cave sys­tem. The friends then jour­ney into the cave sys­tem, which imme­di­ately begins to crum­ble behind them, seal­ing the entrance. They must then find their way out and band together as well as they can. This is, how­ever, a hor­ror film: the req­ui­site vio­lence does ensue.

Thoughts: Ulti­mately, it was a dis­ap­point­ing movie. I hon­estly can­not say if it’s because I was expect­ing more or if the movie is just weak. I do not wish to spoil any­thing, but the first 50 or 60 min­utes of a 100 minute movie are spent wan­der­ing the caves, with no real action. Had this been a movie about lost explor­ers, it would not have been that bad, though it could have done bet­ter. Unfor­tu­nately this is billed as a hor­ror film, and sup­pos­edly a dis­turb­ing and bloody one at that. With what I thought was a rep­u­ta­tion behind it, I expected the ter­ror to begin much ear­lier in the film, but until about 40 min­utes from the end, the only scene of any­thing ‘hor­ror’ related is a severely bro­ken shin. All that being said, once the Crawlers are encoun­tered, the film suc­ceeds. The dark­ness of the caves, the eerie glow of the flares and fail­ing flash­lights work in mag­i­cally hor­rific ways. And the end­ing — what a ter­rific bum­mer of an end­ing. The end­ing works, and is by far the best of the movie. In a word: The hor­ror fan in me has to rec­om­mend it for the last 40 min­utes, but to the aver­age viewer, I’d say skip over it in favor of other fare.

Side note: Whether I liked the film or not, a sequel is cur­rently in the works, pick­ing up exactly where this one left off. I love it when sequels pick up at the exact end­ing of the first (take Under­world and Under­world: Evo­lu­tion). Unfor­tu­nately, the plot of The Descent 2 sounds ridiculous.

Brick (2005)
Star­ring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas; Directed by: Rian John­son
Rat­ing: *** (three stars out of five)

Sum­mary: This is a hard one to sum­ma­rize. Bren­dan (Gordon-Levitt) is a loner in high school, a loner with a bit of a past. He receives a dis­tress­ing phone call from his ex-girlfriend shortly after she’s sup­pos­edly gone miss­ing. He tries to track her down, but arrives too late, dis­cov­er­ing her dead body out­side of town. Bren­dan enlists the help of a friend and enters the crim­i­nal under­world of his school, work­ing his way up to the top of the felo­nious food chain to The Pin (Haas), the young ruler of the under­age syn­di­cate. Bren­dan tries to play both sides to swing the out­come the way he wants.

Thoughts: Extremely well made for a first endeavor; it’s a com­pli­cated film for a young auteur. The stylings behind it are strongly rooted in the clas­sic film noir crime dra­mas: every­thing from the cam­era angles to the story to the deliv­er­ance of the dia­logue mimic some of the great­est films Hol­ly­wood pro­duced. The plot is some­what con­vo­luted at times sim­ply because of that dia­logue, but that is not a detri­ment to the story. I did feel that the film had a bit too much of a hint of ama­teurism and that drew away from the films final pol­ish. The over­all plot was ridicu­lous, if you stopped to think about, but that’s the beauty of set­ting such an intri­cate film noir in a high school — it is ludi­crous. And it works sur­pris­ingly well. It could have been a much tighter film (see Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) and that would have made it bril­liant. As it sits, it’s a fine first film for what could be a promis­ing writer/director. In a word: Rec­om­mended view­ing for those who love film noir.

The Ruins (2008)
Star­ring: Jonathan Tucker, Jena Mal­one; Directed by: Carter Smith
Rat­ing: *** (three stars out of five)

Sum­mary: A group of friends on vaca­tion in Mex­ico are look­ing for one last adven­ture before they head home. At the hotel the meet a young Ger­man, Math­ias (Joe Ander­son), who tells the group of an uncharted, recently dis­cov­ered Mayan pyra­mid. His brother, an archae­ol­o­gist, is explor­ing the site, and he invites the group along with him to be among the first to see the pyra­mid in hun­dreds of years. When they arrive at the site, they are imme­di­ately sur­rounded by locals with guns and arrows who are yelling at them. The nearer the group gets to the tem­ple, the louder the locals scream; at one point, one of Mathias’s friends tries to make peace and is imme­di­ately killed. The group retreats up to the top of the pyra­mid, only to dis­cover no one from the archae­o­log­i­cal team sur­viv­ing — they are all wrapped in plants. Then things get worse.

Thoughts: I was dread­ing see­ing this movie, and avoided it for a long time. The plot sounded absolutely ridicu­lous and some of the visu­als shown in the trail­ers weren’t that entic­ing. In the last few days, I’ve seen some inter­est­ing head­lines float­ing around about how this unas­sum­ing film got under the critic’s skin. I had to watch it and I’m glad I did. This movie gave me what I was hop­ing The Descent would. This film is not really hor­ror, but it is def­i­nitely graphic. The hor­ror aspects of the plot don’t kick in until near the end. Sev­eral scenes made me wince (the first death is timed per­fectly to be unex­pected). The ‘sur­gi­cal’ scene involv­ing the three males in par­tic­u­lar made me grit my teeth. For being a movie about a five peo­ple trapped on top of a ruined Mayan pyra­mid, with creepy plant life and threat­en­ing natives sur­round­ing them, this movie actu­ally suc­ceeded on a level I never imag­ined it would. The only down­side is that the final few shots are extremely pre­dictable while the rest of film is not. In a word: I never thought I’d say this, but I’d rec­om­mend this film. Check it out, it might sur­prise you.