UniqueName76

Love him or hate him, his movies have a unique signature upon them that definitely separate him from the dozens of movies release each month from Hollywood. As a matter of fact, Hollywood apparently has run out of ideas remakes upon remakes, and now worse with movies like The Departed, Strangers, The Ring, and Bangkok Dangerous they're down to ripping off European/Asian movie directors for their ideas.

This time M. Night strikes back with notable differences from all his other movies. First of, M. Night usually forgoes direct violence and gore and replaces it Hitchcock styled atmosphere/sound over gore. Looks like studios are tired of this and forced his hand. Interestingly enough, even with the added gore and violence, there was still a great deal of that "atmosphere" utilized to heighten everyone's awareness. A good deal of work was put in the sound fx to also put some flavor into several key moments.

Like all M. Night's movies, there are SERIOUS flaws in The Happening. Bad acting across 4-5 scenes you simply cannot deny, just really dry delivered lines. A surprising number of no name actors is probably the reason for this, which leads to the music of the film. I haven't seen music this bad in a film this decade. It sure seems as if studios are cutting M. Night at the knees financially. Lastly, this blame will fall solely on the director, the pacing was a tad uneven, abrupt in some places that failed to achieve the desired effect I would say.

Despite it's flaws, the plot and premise is quite interesting, even if it's a bit far-fetched. Once again I found myself smiling throughout the movie and enjoy this movie as if it were one of those old 50s B&W goofy horrors about a giant brain eating up half the planet. Shyamalan doesn't explain the plot in total detail, leaves you with several clues as to what triggered the main events and how the main characters dealt with those events. If you like weird sci-fi with dashes of brilliant horror footage, this is your movie. If you like M. Night movies not because they're full of action and violence, but because they're interesting and different.. you'll love The Happening. However if you have ADD, adrenaline junkie, or hyper-critical in your films.. you'll hate this film steer away.

There's few things that are memorable about Midnight Sun, I suppose if the movie's main song catches you, you will take the most from this film. Otherwise you'll be pretty bored most of the time. A girl who has some rare disease called XP, is forced to live her life at night. She often watches this one particular guy from her window as he goes about trying to learn how to surf.

The movie is quite forced, the director tries to force upon you a slow movie by extending several shots and scenes unnecessarily, there's not much depth, some decent amounts of humor though, which is nice, but overall I found it to be yet another average Asian movie, nothing more.

Reading a synopsis about Zoo and chances are that you probably be interested in this film. 5 stories, 5 young upcoming Japanese directors, dark tales of murder, weird happenings, etc..

What Zoo actually is, is five young Japanese directors who've learned what a still shot, or slow shot is. They use it a few times and pretend to be Takeshi Kitano I suppose, then the stories they show you will be explained to you in the most idiotic way possible.

• The first short film is about these two twin sisters, who are played by the same person, one is hated by the mother the other is not. Everything in this first story is pedantic and trod-ding, and it leads up to a climax that is completely ... NOT surprising.

• The second is a rather semi-interesting one, called 7 Rooms, people are for some unknown reason, each locked into a room, by some unknown guy, who wants to kill them after they've been there for 7 days and eaten 6 slices of bread and 1 bowl of soup. The ending. Is a giant roll-eyes unfortunately.

• The third is absolutely ridiculous I don't even want to talk about it's so stupid.

• The cartoon is boring and dull.

• The final piece actually attempts to be spooky and sort of take chances, but leaves you empty and hollow. There is absolutely no real story told, a mild statement is made and the movie's credits roll.

The end. Save yourself the trouble, this is not for suspense/horror fans AT ALL, go see Tale of Two Sisters or Audition or something else Asia has done that is really worth something.