David Munro’s Full Grown Men finally gets a release later this month after two years of sliding through the festival circuit. It’s a bittersweet coming-of-age story about a guy in his thirties nostalgic for the good old days, and features a surprising dramatic turn from Judah Friedlander—not to mention impressive performances by Amy Sedaris, Allan Cumming and others. Most people can relate to the plight of the main character, Alby, who desires a return to his halcyon days, so Emerging Pictures has decided to hold a contest of the you-show-me-yours-and-I’ll-show-you-mine variety. Send them your story, and you might just win great prizes. Also, by participating in the contest you help a small film that deserves all the help it can get (because it’s pretty good), so head on over.
Some critics apparently enjoyed The Happening. I did not. It’s sloppily executed, poorly written and the very premise is absurd. My father, a quantum physicist recently involved in the study of artificial photosynthesis, might have a thing or two to say about the idea that the trees would get mad at wasteful humans to the point where they’d release neurotoxins causing us to off ourselves; we could probably reason with them before things came to that. I was thinking about artificial photosynthesis during the movie because it’s one of the many “real science” concepts that might work in an alleged sci-fi story like The Happening, but Shyamalan usually favors certain moods over cogent storytelling. Yes, The Sixth Sense twist worked well, but only to help explain the dour atmosphere. The movie’s creepiness arises because seeing dead people doesn’t make sense, but Shyamalan makes us believe it does.
Nothing in The Happening feels believable. It’s a hokey premise with an uninspired resolution. It’s got some heavy violence: A lion rips off somebody’s arm and spacey victims pass a gun around like kind of some lethal joint, but the shock value never gets fleshed out. Nobody important gets struck with the condition; we don’t get, say, Mark Wahlberg desperately trying to convince Zooey Deschanel that she doesn’t need to slit her wrists. There’s not much drama, and in its absence, we just get senseless death.
Anyway. That’s just a long-winded intro to my interview with Shyamalan, conducted earlier this week at a midtown hotel. I didn’t really want to discuss the movie with him, as you can probably tell, but I do find him a fascinating figure with some real potential as a storyteller, so I hope our conversation reflects that on some level. I would love to know what he thinks about my complaints, and I can only hope we meet again in a more casual setting to discuss them. As I left the hotel to reemerge in the sweltering afternoon heat, I couldn’t help myself. “In your next movie,” I told Night, “the bad guy should be the sun.” He laughed.
I dropped by the Webby Awards last night to watch the internet celebrate itself. Here’s a quick recap in today’s issue of Stream. Judah Friedlander was a great host. Maybe he should handle the Oscars next. Calculated raunch is the new cool.
I had the distinct pleasure of enjoying the ceremony with colleagues Karina Longworth and Liz Miller. Follow their names for more coverage.
Top: Michel Gondry with Rosie Perez at the Skirball Center last night. Gondry told me that he plans to release a DVD of new work, including a music video for The Leaf Birds, his band with hip-hop artist MC Paul Barman.
You’ve probably heard that Robert Downey Jr. pops up in The Incredible Hulk for a little Tony Stark action. The appearance is almost too self-aware, haphazardly tied onto the very end almost as if the studio were patting itself on the back for another box office success. However, the idea of an ulterior motive behind this fleeting cross-over—namely, an Avengers film that unites many of the characters currently in circulation—has an alluring ring to it. I would’ve preferred George Miller’s endlessly-delayed Justice League film, if only because Miller’s a genius and the results were guaranteed to be interesting, but any attempt to emulate the large scale structure of superhero comics (in this case, acknowledging that multiple heroes exist within the same universe, the standard operation procedure for Marvel and DC) promises to be an interesting (historical?) experiment. How the hell can Warner Bros. compete? Oh, that’s right: Superman vs. Batman. Exciting times.
I’ve got a date with him in midtown. See you puny humans later.
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