I had an idea last night, after watching The Happening for the second time: I'd like to create a metric that I could use to measure the badness of bad movies, so that I could not only figure out what the worst major-studio movies are, but also say in what way they're bad. At the very least, my metric would include acting, dialogue, story conception, story execution, and suspension of disbelief. Each of these categories seem like they could also be broken down further; for example, acting can be bad because there's no sense of a mind in the character, because emotions are poorly expressed, because a particular actor doesn't suit a character, etc. Dialogue can be overly dramatic, or can overstate the obvious, can fail to distinguish between characters, etc.

I'm not a student of films, and I don't have an abundent interest in discussing them (which is why I'll probably never do anything with this), but the idea came to me, as I said, after watching The Happening for the second time last night. Anne and I went to see it on Friday, after I saw that the movie had at that point earned a 12% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and that even the positive reviews said things like, "this is not as unmitigated a disaster as Shyamalan's last movie, Lady in the Water" (and frankly I'm surprised that it's possible to get worse than The Happening, so now I want to see it that one too) and "neither great nor a total waste of time and money." (It's also not excellent, good, decent, or tolerable. It's just not a total waste of time and money. By the way, I disagree.) Oh hey, it's now up to 19% positive, woot!

So knowing fully what we were getting into, Anne and I went to see the matinee showing a week after the movie opened. I don't have a television, and I don't read articles on culture, so I was barely aware that this movie existed. I think I'd seen posters in the theater. I'd tired to skip the bits of plot summary in the reviews that I read, but I hadn't really managed because I already knew what the movie was about. So we sat through the opening credits, which played over a rapid shot of clouds as mournful violin music played. The opening scene: Central Park, jogger with dog, densely packed athletic people running very close to one another. Then we saw two women on a park bench reading what appeared to be two hardcover copies of the same book, and the first line of dialogue in unloaded: "Where am I again?" At first the viewer thinks she's asking where she is physically, but then the other woman explains, "You're at the part where [scene from a spy thriller novel]." "Oh."

I'll begin by noting that what these two characters just did is ridiculous. Never in my life have I seen someone forget where they are in a book, ask someone else, and get an answer. First, why would the asker think that the other person knows? Second, why would the other person know? Was she looking over her friend's shoulder while continuing to read herself? Third, this exchange doesn't make any more sense in retrospect; once I saw the rest of the movie, this scene is still offensively bad: even though we soon see that people who are affected by the happening of the movie's title sometimes engage in disorderly speech, these first lines of dialogue still don't make any sense, because the first speaker, when told where she was in the book, said "Oh," which indicates that she wasn't being affected, she was actually asking the extremely improbable question.

Now I'll move on to the acting: the woman who asks where she is in the book she's reading has an altogether innapropraite dreamy tone of voice. She sounds more like she's feigning ignorance to pull one over on her friend, as though she can reliably expect her to belive that she doesn't know where she is in the book. The scene would make a lot more sense if she then laughed and said, "You really fall for it every time, don't you!" Indeed, she spoke with a big, dumb smile on her face, which apparently wasn't feigned innocence; my only other interpretation was that she's retarted and also autistic, and thus unable to properly express emotions with her face, and her sister has taken her to the park to get her outdoors. But if that were the case, wouldn't her sister be reading to her? No, the scene really appears to be intended as straight-forward, exactly what it is.

"You can do both: you can make it meaningful on a personal level. Also, enchant the world with the writing. I do both." -M. Night Shyamalan

Now, I would assume that Shyamalan put a lot of work into this first dialogue exchange, seeing as he's a writer director with pretensions to Hitchcock, and it's the introduction to his themes and concept. Why did he write these lines? Was he indicating that we the viewers ought to ask where we are in this world, or ought to think metaphorically about where the characters are? Was he setting the audience on edge, so that the didn't interpret everything to be the way it first appears? Was he riffing off of Hamlet's "Who's there?" If any of these were the case, then he should have made a movie that followed up on these ideas, but he didn't. He made a meaningless piece of trash.

As the movie went on, I very quickly felt a sense of awe while watching it. It failed on so many levels that it could be used in film school as an example of bad direction, bad acting, bad script writing, bad premise, bad execution. It truly felt like I was watching something so awful that it was significant, a straightforward offering that was so devoid of merit that people should take note. I was watching a happening, all right. I was watching what ought to be a career-ender for everyone involved. The studio that produced this movie should have reason to question the purpose of their lives, if this was the culmination of a year of their time. Everybody who sees it should feel a little more free, because they know that if they were to produce a movie of their own, it couldn't possibly be this bad.