The Last Airbender (2010)

Hey, have you watched Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Nickelodeon cartoon series on which this movie is based? No? Me neither. Apparently that's a crying shame, but let me tell you something: maybe that shouldn't be the main criteria critics should use to judge the film.

Perhaps that's an odd sentiment coming from a purveyor of Book vs. Films, and I know I've hated on movies before because of how poorly I felt they represented the source material. I've also thought that I would have liked certain movies on their own merits if I hadn't already experienced the source.

In essence, I think that's what happened here. The story, at the very least, is cool: the earth is divided into eight kingdoms, north and south for each of the four elements: air, water, earth, and fire. Within these kingdoms, there are people who can "bend" or control their element (kind of like those kids on Captain Planet, only without the goofy heart stuff). To each generation an Avatar is born: a child who can bend all the elements and maintains the balance between the kingdoms and between the Earth and the spirit world.

About 100 years ago, the Avatar went missing, and the Fire people took over the planet, forcing benders into prison camps. The world's lived in topsy-turvy chaos ever since. Until now, that is, when a Southern Water Kingdom hunter (Jackson Rathbone) and his undisciplined bender sister (Nicola Peltz) find Aang (Noah Ringer)/the Avatar trapped in a bubble/suspended animation. When Aang realizes what happened when he shirked his duties, he sets out to complete his training and bring order back to the world.

Alright, so maybe I wouldn't have let writer/director/producer M. Night Shyamalan write his own adaptation. We don't need Dev Patel (with a credible American accent) to repeat his motivation every single time he's on screen. I promise to remember who he is. And maybe I would have looked a little harder before settling on Ringer for Aang. I know quality child actors are hard to come by, but this kid didn't bring it as the role requires.

All that said, I do think the movie looked cool (I gave up on 3D a few movies back, and I doubt this one is worth the extra money given that it was added after the fact), and I may have gotten a little misty eyed during the montages of the Earth people liberating themselves from their Fire overlords because apparently team work gets me right here. So what if it doesn't live up to the cartoon? It's good summer fun, and I'd much rather see it again than or The A-Team or Clash of the Titans. Isn't that enough? C+

I am going to have to watch the cartoon, though. There's no way this movie is going to do well enough at the box office to develop into a trilogy.

The Happening (2008)

Idea: After an assumed terrorist attack hits Central Park, Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) and his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) decide to leave Philadelphia to hide out in the country with Elliot's best friend Julian (John Leguizamo) and his daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez). When Julian decides to ditch Jess with Moores to go find out what happened to his wife, it's up to Elliot to protect them from what's happening.

Oh, you love it.

I think I am just going to come out and tell you what the Big Bad here is. It's all over the damn intertubes these days anyway, so you might as well hear it here last: it's the plants. There you have it. The plants are pissed because of pollution or global warming or some such, so they decide to get together and rapidly evolve some toxins to kill everyone in a tight north eastern corner of the US as a warning (or something). A guy (Horace, as he'll always be to me) who runs a nursery figures it out and just straight up tells Elliot, so there's really no reason for me not to just tell you.

Given that writer-director-producer M. Night Shyamalan himself lowered my expectations going into this thing, I even can't say that the bar was set too high walking in. Even so, I found myself in minor awe over how bad it was. I spent a good chunk of the movie (you know, after we all figured out that it was evil trees), looking at how bad Sanchez was, how completely out of left field Leguizamo's line readings were, how risible Deschanel's performance was, and how wildly unconvincing Wahlberg was at every turn, and thinking about how I would like to take the opportunity to have Wahlberg in particular meet me over at Camera 3 to discuss how he, himself, is better than this and that he, himself, should know better, when it occurred to me that this was all on purpose. The tin-eared line readings, the ridiculous turns of phrase (e.g. "the town of Princeton." Oh, thanks for that. None of us have ever heard of bleeding Princeton before, so I am glad you explained that it is a town. Maybe you should have also told us that it is in New Jersey in case we forgot about the whole nor-east thing), the habit of having Wahlberg look directly into the camera and utter things like (and I am not making this up), "Why are you giving me one useless piece of information at a time? What's going on? Hey, why would you just stop?" It was all on purpose.

And when you look at it that way, it's actually a pretty good B-movie. If that's the level on which it is meant to function, it succeeds for the most part (we'll get to the other parts in a minute). It's got a good combination of camp and gore, not wholly unlikely the seriously underrated Supernatural, minus the hard bodies, deep wells of angst, and tough guy jazz hands. For that reason, it's really only Shyamalan himself that I'd like to see over at Camera 3.

Camera 3: Dude, wtf? You think this is a B-movie? Have you seen a B-movie? Do you know why this doesn't cut it as a B-movie? Because it has moments of legitimately good filmmaking, which makes the rest of the laughably bad running time all the more difficult to bear. It's mean. You know, I get that it must be hard to be you, that you don't want to be the guy who does the movies with the twists nor do you want to be the golden child gone to seed. There's something almost Welles-ian about what's become of you, and that must suck. Too bad, so sad, let's move on already. First off, if you are going to make a B-movie, I would recommend that you go for broke, Grindhouse-style. Make the gore ridiculous instead of horrifyingly gross. Don't give us occasional sequences of genuine terror, like when the bodies come raining down on poor Richard. It should be silly. The bodies should have, I don't know, bounced or something. Do me a favour. Watch that scene where Elliot tries to talk a houseplant into not killing his family. Watch it again. Watch it a third time. That scene is funny. We weren't laughing because it was bad. We were laughing because it achieved its goal of being funny. Build from there. I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it until you listen: find a writing partner. Heck, find a story partner. Find someone whose opinion you trust and you'll listen to, and stick with that person. I have every confidence that you'll get richer rewards if you do.

As for the rest of you, if mostly laughing at a crappy movie and sometimes having to cover your eyes appeals to you, go for it. C-

Lady in the Water (2006)

Idea: Building manager Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) discovers Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) swimming in the pool after hours. She's fragile, so he takes her in for the night. Cleveland soon discovers that Story is a narf (think sea nymph), seeking the Vessel to whom she must tell her tale before she can return to the Blue World. As Cleveland tries to track down the right writer within the apartment complex where he works, he also has to locate other participants that Story needs to safely go home.

Much as Mission: Impossible III served as a national referendum on the formerly enduring popularity of Tom Cruise, Lady in the Water seems to be one on writer, director, producer and now supporting player M. Night Shyamalan. I don't want to defend him, per se, because I don't think it's a defense that he needs. He needs . . . he needs a co-writer is what he needs.

Let me explain. With only seven directorial credits to his name, Shyamalan is disproportionately, Cameron Crowe sized famous. That's the way it is, and I'm not in the business of assessing fame, so just take it at face value. He made two movies that no one has ever heard of, and then he rolled out The Sixth Sense. Suddenly, he was an Oscar-nominated prodigy, and every one wanted a piece. Looking back on the varying success of the three intervening movies, I wouldn't go as far as to call it squandered promise. I'm not sure what the promise of The Sixth Sense was, anyway. Artsy? Kind of full of itself? Not that surprising? It was a well done movie, the ghosts creeped me out, and I'd watch it again.

Some critics complain that Shyamalan should drop the art house pretentions and just surrender himself to what he is -- a horror director. Which he isn't. Sure, he and composer James Newton Howard rely on blank camera vistas and sudden musical crashes to scare us, and you could call each of his movies, to a certain extent, creature features, but that's oversimplifying. Simplifying is an idea Shyamalan could benefit from, yes, but that's certainly not the problem with this offering.

A narrator pretty much lays the story out in an opening monologue, and I was rolling my eyes, groaning, and fidgeting my way through it. For a bedtime story (a fairy tale in my parlance), it was awfully self-serious. Kids don't play that way. But then the real movie started, and I got into it. Shyamalan has always done a great job setting the story and characters up, and, as he always brings it in under two hours, I wouldn't say he takes too long doing it.

It is at this point that he should bring in a co-author. It's not Shyamalan's ideas that need work, it's the execution. Someone to look over his shoulder, reading the dialogue, and politely, gently asking, "You sure you wanna go there?"

For all his thriller efforts, all Shyamalan's main movies are about a few simple things: right and wrong, good and evil, the interconnectedness of all things, and interdependence. If anything, it's equilibrium he seeks to achieve. As a director, he has a knack for finding the one actor that would fill whatever role perfectly and bringing out the one quality that s/he possesses that brings it all together. As a director, he can be strangely literal (esp. here), but he understands humanity in a way that a lot of others don't. As a writer, well, I'm starting to look back on roles in his other works and realize they were the ones he would have played if he could have. A writer often creates a proxy, and I'm too partial to the technique to criticize it.

As an actor, Shyamalan's natural in front of the camera, and he does alright. None of it is ever quite enough (not scared enough, not shocked enough, not happy enough, etc.), but I have seen so much worse so many times that complaining seems unnecessary. Besides, Giamatti, Jeffrey Wright, and Sarita Choudhary (among others) are so enjoyable that it almost doesn't matter.

I say almost because, seriously, what is with Howard? I liked her so much as Ivy in The Village, where her stilted delivery and strange accent worked with the setting. If this is the way she normally talks, then she needs a dialogue coach immediately. She borders on animatronic most of the time. There was one scene where she started talking normally, but it didn't last. If it was an acting choice, I fail to see the reasoning behind it.

Overall, it's a tough call. There's no big twist, just a series of hiccups. It's too self-serious at times, but it gets the job done. You know what? If this was some animated movie for kids, not a single critic would wrinkle his/her nose at the idea of narfs and scrunts and giant birds that carry people away. There's nothing wrong with a fiction writer creating new worlds. Wes Anderson (the contemporary with whom I most closely associate Shyamalan) does it all the time, and critics are quick to embrace his vision. People are unfairly harsh with Shyamalan. This isn't the best movie ever made or even his best, but it's not that bad. And that, my friends, is pretty good. B

Garden State (2004) and The Village (2004)

So, if you're a loyal reader, and, even if you're not, you might have a sneaking suspicion that I have reviewed both these movies before. And you'd be right - I reviewed them when I saw them in theatres this summer.

But for about four months now, or at least as long as I have been exploring and extolling the wonders of Zip.ca, I've been thinking of a new feature for Feria Films. As you well know, if I like a movie, I want to watch it again and again.

Esp. if it has hotties like Joaquin Phoenix in it.

Okay, well that's not entirely true. I don't think I'll be watching To Die For again any time soon.

But the point is that I like to rewatch movies, and I find that my opinions occasionally differ the second time around. I never go from loving to hating a movie, or vice versa, but the dark, cold, quiet full-emptiness of the movie theatre tends to polarize my responses to movies in a way that the TV screen never does. (I do, however, long for one of those projector and white screen home combos - I knew someone who had one once, and I thought it was the greatest thing since cheese).

I realize that this is the longest intro since the dawn of the running narrative (I device I've started to loathe due to a rash of biopics), so the basic point is that I will occasionally feature running commentary on movies that I've already reviewed. New ideas that I've come across or thought of or read somewhere between now and the original review. Feria Films is only a little less than a year old, so I'll do my best to let a few months pass before I drudge anything up. Bear in mind that these commentaries will feature no warnings and no holds barred, so those who like to live spoiler free had better steer clear.

First up - Zach Braff's quiet, sweet, subconscious rip-off of Beautiful Girls. Still the voice of an age group long since abandoned by Hollywood in favour of money grubbing teen look-a-likes, I found Garden State more quotable and Peter Sarsgaard more captivating this time around. It took Princess Conseula a while to get into it (who can blame her?), and I'm still the only person who laughed their head off at the lady singing "Three Times a Lady" at his mom's funeral. It's just funny, okay?

I also still feel a bit sold out by the ending. It's that battle I brought up earlier about whether it's better (movie-wise) to simply know that you need to find yourself or to actually find yourself. I think Large should have either headed off to California or he should never have even gotten on the plane. If he did a), I would have liked it if Sam showed up with a bunch of cardboard boxes and a roll of packing tape. The end. Or b) He goes up that escalator and comes right back down the other side. Because that struck me as the kind of thing he would do, and he would have raised quite the customs ruckus to get back out there so quickly, unless we are supposed to believe that Sam stood there crying for over an hour.

Now, onto The Village: Joaquin is definitely the sexiest thing since sex. I know because Princess Conseula and I actually agreed on a guy, and that never happens. But the movie's pretty much not surprising or scary after you see it once. The love story is still killer, but I found myself more entranced with all the clues I should have noticed before to care much about Those We Do No Speak Of.

See, as much as I think that M. Night Shaymalan delivers psychological thrillers that actually thrill, they don't have the staying power of, say, Memento. At least not when it comes to my psyche. I've watched Memento way more times than Signs or The Village, but I still always root for the wrong guy.

Christopher Nolan really knows how to put a puzzle together.

Signs (2002)

Plot: Six months ago, Graham Hess' (Mel Gibson) wife died, prompting Graham to leave the church and care for their two children, Morgan (Rory Caulkin) and Bo (Abigail Breslin) and their farm. Graham's younger brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) moved in with them to help out, although he feels useless to his brother. The Hesses become interested in the supernatural activities around their Pennsylvania farm after they discover crop circles too perfect to be made by human hands.

April takes requests: part 3!

Alright, Signs isn't so much a request as it is a discrepancy, but you get the idea. As you may recall, when I referred to The Village as M. Night Shyamalan's best, Carol quickly pointed out that I hadn't, in fact, seen all of his films. Signs was missing from my critic's collector's edition.

Now, I have seen it. I maintain my earlier statement. The Village is his best work to date.

As such, I don't particularly feel it necessary to enter into another discussion about his work as a writer/director/producer. I've mentioned it in the past, and I am happy to say it again: Shyamalan understands that what you don't see is far more terrifying than what you do.

As always, half the film seems to go by before you glimpse anything. There's nothing there, then something suddenly walks out and James Newton Howard's score goes, "DUNNNN!!!!!" when whatever it is appears.

What I didn't know was that Shyamalan had a little comedy in him! I definitely did not see that coming, which made those few laughs all the more enjoyable for me. Gibson trying to act scary by screaming, "I AM INSANE WITH ANGER!" was almost too much. And he didn't kill anybody or anything! He wasn't violent at all. I liked that.

Or Phoenix telling the Brazilian children to vamanos through the TV screen, only to be so frightened that he went flying off his chair. I liked that as well.

Of course, grown male leads aside, it's the children who steal the show. For all that's made about Dakota Fanning being an adult in a child's body, I believe that's a title that rightly belongs Caulkin. There's a scene right at the beginning where Gibson turns Caulkin's head so that he looks into his father's eyes, and Caulkin turns Gibson's head back by the chin to see the crop circle. That one gesture was possibly the most chilling for me in the entire movie.

Mind you, he's also quite endearing. At one point he's walking away to a bookstore, and it kills me when he just reaches his hand out behind him as he goes, waiting for Breslin/Bo join him with being told or asked.

Breslin steals your heart with her huge eyes and strangely steady delivery. The role that she plays in their eerily connected family is possibly the most significant, and she manages to convey an understanding beyond her years through little dialogue.

Like all of Shyamalan's films, this movie deals with a belief in the interconnectedness of all things. I'm not sure where he comes down in terms of religious belief himself, but it's clear that he doesn't want us to take anything for granted.

Perhaps that's the real point of all his movies.

Perhaps that's what I'll discover when I make them talk to each other.

The Village (2004)

Premise: Set in a small village surrounded by Covington Woods, a place where “those we do not speak of” keep the citizens in constant terror, the residents of the village have always had a “gentle understanding with the creatures” that they will not enter the woods, and the creatures will not attack. As the simple Noah Percy’s (Adrien Brody) entrance into the woods prompts greater and greater attacks on the village, Lucius Hunt makes ever pressing demands to cross the woods into “the towns” to gather medicines, much to the chagrin of his mother (Sigourney Weaver) and the awe of the town’s mayor, Mr. Walker (William Hurt) and his daughter, Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard).

I apologize for the long plot description. As anyone who has seen any M. Night Shyamalan (writer/director) film will know, that plot description will be blown to smithereens at least twice over as the movie progresses.

I say that this is Shyamalan’s best work to date. I understand (although I have not read) that the critics are divided on this one, and I maintain my sentiment. Not only did he reiterate that he is ready to challenge Alfred Hitchcock’s mantle as the master of terror, he also managed to tell a compelling love story. I didn’t even know he was capable of such a thing.

And it was quite a sexy one at that. I never thought of Joaquin Phoenix as sexy before (usually scary and/or pathetic, e.g. Gladiator, The Yards), but I can definitely say that there was some crazy chemistry between him and Howard, who turns in an astonishing performance for her fourth movie.

On the other hand, I feel very at odds about Brody. The more I see of him, the less I understand him. No one can doubt that he earned his Oscar for The Pianist, but I’m not sure what he’s doing here.

There is, however, scene between him and Phoenix in Lucius’ workshop that is stellar.

Weaver is always a pleasure to see, and she is supported well by others such as Cherry Jones, Brendan Gleeson, Celia Jones, Michael Pitt, and Judy Greer.

Hurt, on the other hand, tries way too hard.

James Newton Howard, as in all Shyamalan’s films, curdles your blood with music. After all, we would feel very little while watching films if they weren’t scored.

You should see it in theatres. Well, not exactly.

You should experience it in a theatre.