This Trailer Isn't Really "Happening" For Me...

Well, The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable are timeless classics in my opinion. Signs was an amazing interactive experience, if you were lucky enough to see it on a rainy night in a jam-packed movie theater, but it didn't hold up well to another viewing at home. The Village was ruined by its own misleading advertising. Lady In The Water was, well...bad. Except for the score.

M. Night Shyamalan's next, The Happening, stars Mark Wahlberg (The Departed), Zooey Deschanel (Elf, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), and John Leguizamo (Ice Age, Moulin Rouge, Super Mario Brothers), and features one of the worst film titles in recent history. When a word is very rarely used as a noun, it probably shouldn't be a movie title. As for the story, imagine Alfred Hithcock's take on An Inconvenient Truth, and you'll have a general idea of the premise.

I actually read an early, leaked version of the screenplay, and was less than impressed. I was hoping that Shyamalan's original trouble selling the script would have urged him to rewrite it, but watching the trailer, the scenes look exactly the same as they were when I read it 8 months ago. The most exciting part for me was seeing shots of Philadelphia's Fairmount Park and Rittenhouse Square, both of which were stops on my solo visit to the City of Brotherly Love three summers ago. I also saw the church, school, restaurant, and house from The Sixth Sense, and the restaurant and art gallery from Unbreakable while I was there.

The teaser poster above was enticing, but the trailer below looks fairly run-of-the-mill. I'm starting to think that Shyamalan, like George Lucas, fell and hit his head some years ago. The Happening opens this June, Friday the 13th.