Shyamalan, Please Stop

By Steve Evans

Film buffs mock the wretched cinematic exertions of Uwe Boll, who specializes in directing movie adaptations of video games, but M. Night Shyamalan is now the heir apparent to Ed Wood Jr.'s legacy as worst director in motion picture history. At least Wood's movies are entertaining. Plan 9 From Outer Space is a great comedy, even if it was never intended that way.

The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan's 1999 debut, can now be seen clearly as a fluke. Each of his seven subsequent films has been significantly worse than the picture it precedes -- no small achievement. The Shyamalan oeuvre is a clinic in sloppy writing and ludicrous plot twists, with movies featuring bored-looking (or merely puzzled) actors delivering bland dialog. How Shyamalan’s career lasted this long is one of the perverse mysteries of Hollywood. Virtually his entire output could be used in a festival of bad cinema:

Anyone who was surprised by The Village would have to be living in one.

Lady in the Water is possibly the most ridiculous non-comedy ever made; easily the low point in Paul Giamatti’s otherwise excellent career.

The Happening was a non-event. Killer plants? Day of the Triffids was an awful film about malevolent flora -- and still better than The Happening.

The Last Airbender might as well have been about a man suffering from terminal flatulence; ticket sales would have been no worse.

And now, we have the first certified bomb of 2013: After Earth. This Will Smith sci-fi snoozer, co-starring his son Jaden, is expected to recover less than half of the $240 million reportedly spent on production and marketing. Losses like that are sufficient to make studios think twice before greenlighting another Smith & son casting gimmick. Smith and his wife Jada produced the picture from a story credited to Smith, adapted into a screenplay co-written by Shyamalan.

With all these multi-hyphenate talents stirring the kettle, After Earth is a hodgepodge of philosophical gibberish, bland CGI effects, and dull characters/creatures with names like S'krell, Ursa, Senshi and Kitai Raige. Who the hell thought this was a good idea?

Kitty Rage?

Ho, ho.

For Shyamalan, finding work just got a whole lot tougher. He would be wise to return to Philly and get back to making somber little pictures with a supernatural flavor.

In The Sixth Sense, Haley Joel Osment famously intoned, “I see dead people.”

After 14 years of shoddy Shyamalan pictures, in retrospect I see only stupidity and ridiculous over-reaching for an artistic ambition that was probably never there to begin with. Just like Dr. Malcolm Crowe, a forlorn character in Shyamalan's only good film.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2013 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.

Big Brother Google Goes Hollywood

By Steve Evans

With The Internship, a new film starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, Hollywood sets a new standard in the execrable practice of product placement. It appears the entire film is a product placement.

The Internship revolves around two fortysomething guys desperately trying to get a job at Google. It’s supposed to be a comedy, with two stars who specialize in playing lovable lunkheads (Wedding Crashers, anyone?).

CNN reports that Google gave the filmmakers extensive access to company headquarters (although much of the movie was actually shot in Atlanta at the Georgia Institute of Technology, not the Google campus in Mountainview, California). More than 100 Google employees served as extras. An array of Google products and services will also be promoted throughout the film.

Although Google allegedly did not pay for this extensive product placement, the company reportedly had a say in how Google and its brand would be depicted on screen. Still, news reporters who play up the fact that Google didn’t pay for this free exposure are missing the point: the exposure itself is invaluable.

Google is one of the most profitable and widely recognized companies on earth. It also collects and stores data from billions of computer users worldwide. If you have ever used any Google product, whether it is the company’s ubiquitous search engine, Gmail, Google drive, Google plus, ad nauseaum, you had best believe that Google knows more about you than you might like. If you send a Google email to a friend and casually mention you’re in the market for a new car, it is no coincidence that advertising for car dealerships and automotive financing immediately appears on your email dashboard.

If ever there was a commercial enterprise capable of colluding with the government and evolving into Big Brother, it is Google. More people depend on the Google search engine than virtually all other competitors combined (Yahoo, Bing, Ask.com, etc.). Google collects and sifts through all this search data. Whatever you are looking for online, Google knows – and keeps good records.

Sounds paranoid?

This week The Guardian newspaper published a classified court document from April authorizing the U.S. government to seize all of Verizon’s phone records on a daily basis. Although the government allegedly didn’t eavesdrop on anyone, Verizon supplied all outgoing and incoming numbers for millions of phone calls, plus the unique electronic codes that identify individual cellphones.

All of this was done by the National Security Agency under the auspices of The Patriot Act. The spying has been known publicly since The New York Times reported on it in 2005. But the government always insisted that it was narrow and designed to keep Americans safe. I wonder whether reasonable people would agree that collecting the records on millions of phone numbers is a "narrow" use of Patriot Act powers.

Less than 24 hours after The Guardian report, The Washington Post broke the story about another government spying initiative currently underway and code-named PRISM. Authorized by a secret court order, this cute little program allows the NSA and FBI to tap directly into the servers of major U.S. Internet companies, including Apple, AOL. Facebook, Microsoft – and Google. The purpose? To gather email content, instant messages, video chats and virtually all other forms of online communication.

All of this is being done in the name of fighting terrorism and protecting American sovereignty, of course. Google, meanwhile, burnishes its image as a benign and benevolent purveyor of information, with slick marketing campaigns dressed up as popular entertainment for people unencumbered by deep thought.

The timing of this new movie, released yesterday, couldn't be better.

While moviegoers shuffle off to see The Internship, an unabashed valentine to the search-engine giant, I’ll be holding out hope that some enterprising producer will make a documentary about PRISM. Failing that, I’ll take a thriller about malicious government persecution in the digital age, where people voluntarily reveal the most personal details of their lives, typed up neatly in an email or into a search-engine box, and then press that little key labeled “enter." Little do they know how these queries might be used against them.

Perhaps that’s a paradox. People can hardly demand privacy when they willingly post everything about their lives on Facebook.

Truth be told, this blog is hosted on a Google server. If I should suddenly disappear from this space please contact deijeo7johrg...
                       ...w4hoid^%E#$Rd
                                             jr84e3344)(*&^%$....

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2013 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.

P.T. Anderson Tackles Pynchon's 'Inherent Vice'

By Steve Evans

One of my favorite active directors, Paul Thomas Anderson, is working on an adaptation of Inherent Vice, a novel by one of my favorite authors, Thomas Pynchon.

Anderson (There Will Be Blood, Boogie Nights) makes some of the most challenging and intelligent films of anyone working today, albeit he makes them far too infrequently to suit me. Pynchon's material seems tailor-made for Anderson's sensibilities, which is a roundabout way of saying I am excited. His new project reunites Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon (Walk the Line).

Inherent Vice follows a late-1960s private eye investigating drug traffickers connected to a former lover. Crosses and double-crosses pepper the noir plot.

Anderson's screenplay adaptation has reportedly received the blessings of the reclusive Pynchon, whose debut novel V. (1963) is considered one of the great literary works of the 20th century.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2013 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.

Laughing at the World’s End

By Steve Evans

Delighted to report that The World's End from British director Edgar Wright will release stateside in August. He reunites with funnymen Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who romped through Wright’s previous comedies Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. World’s End is no less high-concept.

Wright’s new film follows a group of childhood friends on an epic pub crawl through the little Hertfordshire town of Letchworth on the night of an extraterrestrial invasion. Their goal is to consume 50 beers each at a dozen bars, culminating with a nightcap pint at The World’s End, a famed pub that they failed to reach during their first attempt 25 years earlier. The friends vow to get annihilated. Little do they know. On this night it’s literally the end of the world as aliens attack. But when you've knocked down 50+ pints of beer, how can you really tell?

The trailer contains unmistakable similarities to Wright’s near-classic zombie-spoof Shaun of the Dead (2004), though astute genre fans will see a tip o’ the hat to old chestnuts like Tobe Hooper’s insane science fiction zombie film Lifeforce (1985) and Children of the Damned (1963), as well. Lots of influences bubbling in this Mulligan's Stew of a movie.

Despite the whiff of familiarity in the trailer, I’m thinking this picture will be a hoot. The Shaun of the Dead trailer did not do justice to that film, which only found an audience months later on DVD. I loved it, and zombie-minded director George Romero reportedly did, too. Three years later, Hot Fuzz turned the buddy-cop genre inside-out, making it impossible to watch a noisy action movie like Lethal Weapon ever again with a straight face (which is not to say you ever could).

Pegg and Frost make one of the cinema’s great comedy teams, while Wright brings a twisted sense of humor and encyclopedic knowledge of genre to his films. Here’s hoping their third outing delivers some badly-needed anarchy to a summer film schedule dominated by sequels and superheroes.

If only childish movies will be playing this summer, at least this one promises to be truly juvenile.

The first trailer for The World’s End:

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2013 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.