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This is it. All the posts to the Film Pigs site in one giant, cumbersome list.
Commentary #25 – The Happening (2008)
M. Night Shyamalan’s first R-rated movie! M. Night Shyamalan’s first R-rated movie! Those were the words that sent people to theaters in – what’s the opposite of “droves” – to experience some stupid thing about angry plants making people walk backwards before killing themselves. And Marky Mark as a science teacher. We know he’s smart because M. Knight makes him wear an awkward sweater vest.
Finally crossing the line into Ed Wood territory, Shyamalan actually expects the audience to feel fear and tension when he stages his characters running away from light breezes. Oh, and instead of a stupid twist ending, the ending is just stupid. In the end, The Happening has all the terror and gravity of a fabric softener commercial AND a criminally underused Alan Ruck. We love Alan Ruck. (IMDb)
TO SYNC WITH MOVIE: Start this commentary 10 seconds after starting movie.
Could Be Applied To A Few Different Actors
Who Says Communists Don’t Have A Sense Of Humor?
From the Yahoo! Movies article “From Russia With Scorn: Bond Girl Denounced by Communists”:
…the Communist Party of St. Petersburg, which in an open letter on its website condemned [new bond girl Olga Kurylenko] for aiding “the killer of hundreds of Soviet people and their allies.” The group’s statement describes 007 as “a man who worked for decades under the orders of Thatcher and Reagan to destroy the USSR.”
They seem halfway serious, which only makes them twice as adorable. Awww! They think Olga is a traitor! Isn’t that just precious!
Review – Saw V (2008)
Me, The Jonas Brothers, And The Farting Dog
The longer I stay in this business, the more I think I’m ultimately not cut out for it. At least when it comes to movies.
I sold my first film script about 6 years ago, and began a feature career marked with, well, eventually being rewritten by somebody else. This is par for the course with movies — you do your contractual drafts and then they bring in a Closer, someone with a track record, as extra insurance against the weakness of their own wills, and their flibbertigibbet bosses whose taste remains a mystery to even their closest foot-soldiers while their aversion to risk only multiplies with each vertically-integrated corporate restructuring. Meanwhile, while slowly growing a TV career that would eventually steal my full attention, I was also trying to write feature specs. But because of a very commercial-minded manager and my own mounting confusion over how to navigate the studio system, I started writing worse and worse shit. The nadir coming when I found myself, somehow, writing a movie about a talking dog. (Specifically, a dog who turns into a person. I know. I hate myself too.) Around that time my TV career was hitting a good stride and I basically gave up on movies. I stopped taking meetings on assignments. Stopped writing specs. Stopped becoming excited even about seeing movies. TV captured my imagination fully. I couldn’t sit in a room anymore and be told by an executive that they were looking for the next Liar, Liar. Liar, Liar is, I assure you, a terrible thing to try to aspire to. And they know it too. They hate themselves for saying it, but they say it anyway. “We need the next Liar, Liar!” (Eventually they just said fuck it and remade it as Yes Man.) Continue reading Me, The Jonas Brothers, And The Farting Dog