Movie review: Urban flight in 'The Happening'

sfgate_get_fprefs();

The Happening: Suspense drama. Starring Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. (R. 91 minutes. At Bay Area theaters. See complete film lists and show times, and purchase tickets for choice theaters, at SFGate.com/movies.)

M. Night Shyamalan made "The Sixth Sense" in 1999, and things haven't been going right for him ever since. His new film, "The Happening," is his best so far this decade, and even then, it falls short of its filmmaker's aspirations. It's an entertaining movie, which is half the game, but it's not scary, which it should be. Neither is it something to be taken seriously, though it's intended to be.

Without looking over Shyamalan's shoulder, it would be impossible to diagnose the job precisely, but by watching his movies, it's easy to do a guess. He's being apprehensive with his talent. He's not being free and letting it spread out but forcing it to compress.

All fine art is a dance between inspiration and control, and ever since "The Sixth Sense" Shyamalan have been authorship tight instead of loose. Shyamalan will acquire a great thought - for example, "The Happening," which have a mulct premiss - but instead of letting his thought take a breath and develop and see where it might go, he leaps all over it and prematurely determines it into a story. He allows his mind boot in far too early into the process, muscling his imaginativeness into arbitrary structures. Instead of confidently allowing his thoughts to uncover the word form they desire to take, he jams them into some preconceived impression of what an M. Night Shyamalan film should be.

At least, that's how "Signs," "The Village" and "Lady in the Water" looked from here. And it further explicates why it's so easy to place the minute in Shyamalan's movies when inspiration runs dry. It's usually the point at which we acquire to get the Big Message, whatever it might be. It's also the point at which he begins to acquire obvious, making every stranger, for instance, into a certifiable weirdo. (Why is David Bruce Dern yet to look in a Shyamalan film?) But unlike the Alfred Hitchcock weirdos, who are genuinely unsettling, Shyamalan's creeps come in to the sound of a typewriter. We see them coming and cognize where they're going. We cognize where M. Night is going.

None of this would count - who cares if Shyamalan fulfills his promise? - except that this film maker is trying to make something worth doing, which is resuscitate the classic suspense drama, or perhaps update it for the new century. In "The Happening," he gets in New York's Central Park, on a summertime morning, in which people suddenly stand up stock-still and then continue to kill themselves. They utilize whatever's handy. A gun, a knitting needle. Construction workers begin throwing themselves off buildings. What gives?

Something is in the air. Maybe it's a terrorist attack, in the word form of a toxin. Maybe some chemical out of a Central Intelligence Agency laboratory have accidentally gone airborne. Or maybe it's ... something else. Whatever it is, everyone starts evacuating major Northeastern cities, just to be safe. That includes Elliot (Mark Wahlberg), a City Of Brotherly Love high school scientific discipline teacher, his sensitive wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel) and his best friend (John Leguizamo). They acquire on a railroad train headed for the countryside.

The stars are engaging, and the premiss is irresistible. That acquires Shyamalan almost there - and that's where he stays, almost there. (This is off topic, but have anybody else noticed that Deschanel is one of the most beautiful women in American movies? Seriously.) At Bay - again

Like most Shyamalan films, "The Happening" takes the word form of a national catastrophe, but the action gradually contracts around a smattering of fictional characters and ends up where most Shyamalan movies end up, with people in a small, enclosed space trying to maintain some mysterious, malevolent military unit from getting inside.

Once again, this is Shyamalan's fate, to begin out immense and end up small, cramped and enclosed. Are this secret plan motif a personal compulsion of his? I doubt it. My conjecture is that it's simply a effect of his process. Shyamalan takes tremendous thoughts and fourth estates down on them. He clutters and confines them to the point that they're stuck in a bantam room and can't breathe. Finally, when he acquires his thoughts so little that they can't acquire any smaller, he stops his movies. Thus, he uncovers himself: Plot motif as unconscious metaphor.

Neil LaBute is another talented writer-director World Health Organization got lucky immature and who have got an identifiable style that could easily have boxed him in. But he have been wise adequate to make other people's screenplays occasionally. Shyamalan necessitates that variety. He necessitates a opportunity to loosen up and draw from another side of his brain. And from now on, whenever he have the urge to compose another scene with people stuck in a room with bad things going on outside, he necessitates to allow that be the dismay bell - and bend off the computing machine and travel for a long walk.

-- Advisory: This film incorporates force and distressing images.

E-ail Mick Sieur de LaSalle at .

Movie review: 'Sex' improves with age

sfgate_get_fprefs();

Sexual Activity and the City: Comedy-drama. Starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Artemis Nixon, Kristin Davis, Kim Cattrall and Chris Noth. Directed by Michael Saint Patrick King. (R. 145 minutes. At Bay Area theaters. For complete film lists and show times, and to purchase tickets for choice theaters, travel to sfgate.com/movies.)

Fans of "Sex and the City" will love the film version.

Like the HBO series that gave birth to it, the film is tons of fun, but it's no frivolous romp. The show's great ambition, always present, goes even more than marked in the film - to document the emotional life and values of cosmopolite women of a peculiar generation. It's as if its Godheads realized the series' significance over the course of study of its run, and that displacement in the way of importance - subtle, but definite - goes on with this movie. Under the levity, there's a core earnestness about presenting these women's lives, one emphasized by the willingness of "Sex and the City" to turn and mature along with its characters.

Those who cognize these fictional characters will, of course, choice up on niceties and associations that novitiates volition miss. Yet even viewing audience coming in cold volition appreciate "Sex and the City" as the best American film about women so far this year, and probably the best that will be made this year. Indeed, at the charge per unit Film Industry have been going, it may stand up as the best women's film until "Sex and the City II," if that ever come ups along.

Coming in, Michael Saint Patrick King, the movie's writer-director, had two hard tasks: He had to present the fictional characters to a new audience without irritating fans of the show, and he had to take a series that ended perfectly and un-end it, without apparent arbitrary.

He strike hards off the first undertaking easily, (re-)introducing the principals during a credits sequence narrated by the chief character, Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), a best-selling author in New House Of York City. There's Samantha Mother Jones (Kim Cattrall), a successful publicizer with a famished sexual appetite. There's Charlotte House Of York (Kristin Davis), a gentle, princess-like wife and mother. And there's Miranda Thomas Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon), a lawyer and buttoned-down cynic, living in Brooklyn with her hubby and son.

Un-ending the perfectly ended series takes a small more than time. For the first 10 proceedings or so, the film hovers in place, emphasizing (and, for first-timers, introducing) the position quo. But then, the gearing gradually travel into place. Four old age have got passed. Carrie is still seeing "Mr. Big" - whose name is now revealed to be Toilet Jesse James Preston (Chris Noth) - and the two make up one's mind to acquire married. This soon turns into programs for the manner matrimony of the century, with a invitee listing of 200 and a gown by Vivienne Westwood. But, of course, things can't go on too smoothly.

Meanwhile, Samantha is dissatisfied with her life in Los Angeles, even though she is still in love with her much-younger boyfriend, Ian Smith (Jason Lewis), and Miranda and her impossibly sweet husband, Steve (David Eigenberg), are having matrimony trouble. Though the laughters are frequent and the film sparks with flashiness and fashion, an air of middle-aged disappointment is sometimes present, a realisation of limits, of having to take between imperfect options.

Suddenly, the women are most definitely in their 40s, and so their interaction with little women is different, erstwhiles long-suffering, sometimes almost motherly. Carrie takes on a personal helper (Jennifer Hudson, who's charming) and gives her sisterlike advice, the hard-earned wisdom of 20 old age in the New House Of York trenches. The mature vibe shows that "Sex and the City" is rubber band and capable of bringing in new elements of women's experience.

It times in at a brawny 145 minutes, but all that agency is that it's wish watching five episodes of the television show in succession. Think of it not as a long film but as the equivalent of an full television season muscled into one large megadose.

The allocation of silver screen clip never looks obviously apportioned, but each actress acquires a opportunity to shine. Charlotte's life is the most stable in this installment, but Davys have some of the best amusing moments, and Cattrall demoes a flimsy mellowing (and a definite deepening) in Samantha. As Miranda, Richard Nixon is just brilliant, presenting her as person increasingly locked into the forms of her ain personality, less hopeful and verging on bitterness. At the same time, underneath it, she's painfully sensitive.

Parker is lovely, alive to every nicety of feeling, her confront the film's venue of meaning. Her deficiency of amour propre is becoming. When Carrie acquires beaten up emotionally, Charlie Parker lets herself to look round up. In one's 40s, a individual doesn't take an emotional whipping and aftermath up the adjacent morning time looking as fresh as a 20-year-old. Charlie Parker allows us see Carrie's, and her own, true face.

There's something alive here. There's a feeling about this movie, that it's not some perfunctory cinematic appendix to a popular series, but the beginning of a whole new twine of films. There's certainly no artistic ground "Sex and the City" can't be the women's equivalent of "Star Trek," with human emotion being the concluding frontier. Like outer space, that frontier is infinite.

-- Advisory: This movie incorporates strong linguistic communication and nudity.

E-mail Paddy Sieur de LaSalle at .

Movie review: Sibling rivalry in 'My Brother'

sfgate_get_fprefs();

My Brother Is an Lone Child: Drama. Directed by Daniele Luchetti. With Elio Germano, Riccardo Scamarcio, Diane Fleri, Vittorio Emanuele Propizio. In Italian, with English Language subtitles. (Not rated. 108 minutes. At Bay Area theaters. For complete film lists and show times, and to purchase tickets for choice theaters, travel to SFGate.com/movies.)

From the authors behind the first-class "The Best of Youth" come ups this coltish expression at two Italian blood brothers who take very different stands during the intoxicating years of the '60s and '70s, when would-be radicals fancied they had a existent shot at taking over. Director Daniele Luchetti's scheme is to personify the long-standing divisions of his fatherland in a brace of siblings, but make the fictional characters so critical that we don't experience we're being browbeaten with political allegory.

Accio (Vittorio Emanuele Propizio) is the odd adult male out in his working-class family - his dada is a devoted Communist, whose political beliefs are echoed by Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio), Accio's aged brother. Along with their sister, a adept musician, Manrico acquires the lion's share of the family's attention, and immature Accio develops quite a contrarian streak.

The temperamental male child comes in a seminary, where it's soon clear he's unsuited for a hieratic life. Some old age later, Accio (now played by Elio Germano) falls under the sway of a local fascist, and falls in the man's lout squad. Manrico now works at their father's factory. A talented speechmaker and agitator, Manrico is perfect as the working-class hero, and he's a fine-looking dog. Soon he pulls the notice of Francesca (Diane Fleri), a gorgeous immature adult female of left-of-center sympathies.

Accio also wishes Francesca, but instead gets an matter with the fascist's wife, who is old age older. As the human relationship continues, Accio gets questioning the political relation of his right-wing buddies, especially when they step up direct onslaughts on Manrico's leftie faction.

The action, by the way, is played out in the town of Latina, created by Benito Mussolini in a former swampland South of Rome. The film makers don't do a large trade out of this - it's just a nice fact to be aware of.

The movie's political concerns and clip time period may set some viewing audience in head of aged Italian film makers with extremist beliefs, like Pasolini and Marco Bellochio, but Luchetti and film writers Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli ("The Best of Youth") are more than focused on character. The intense feelings of the blood brothers are a crisp direct contrast to the picture's overall temper - Luchetti's more than interested in observation than agitprop. In fact, he have merriment with the overheated political clime of the time, especially in a scene where an orchestra of belligerent collectivists offerings a radical remake of the "Ode to Joy."

Adept playing by Germano and Scamarcio imparts the sense that the brothers, despite strong feelings that Pb to respective punch-outs, aren't quite the true trusters their words would take us to believe. Accio's attractive force to fascism is tegument deep, and he looks drawn to it more than because of his bristly nature than from any love of its ideas. Manrico - at least in his early years - certainly basks dramatic poses, and doesn't mind the attending he acquires from females. (However, he eventually makes go trapped in his chosen role.)

Things go decidedly serious by the end, but the movie still won't delight ideologists in the audience, because it steadfastly worsens to back one side or the other, remaining a provocative fictional character survey and portrait of the times. More powerfulness to it.

E-mail Bruno Walter Addiego at .

Movie review: Get rewrite on 'Get Smart'

sfgate_get_fprefs();

Get Smart: Action-comedy. Starring Steve Carell, Anne Anne Hathaway and Dwayne Johnson. Directed by Simon Peter Segal. (PG-13. 110 minutes. At Bay Area theaters. For complete film lists and show times, and to purchase tickets for choice theaters, travel to sfgate.com/movies.)

Remaking "Get Smart" for the large silver screen might have got got sounded like a bad idea, but the film shows it to have been something else: a really bad idea.

The tallness of hip in 1965, the television sitcom had already outlived its welcome and its minute by 1970, with its odd premix of absurdist humor, catch phrases and straight-up violence. Delicately poised between two epoches - reconciliation Cold War values with irreverent new-style comedy - "Get Smart" was the merchandise of a specific clip and place. Under the best of circumstances, transferring 1965's winning expression to 2008 was going to be difficult.

Yet it could have got been done, if person had a ground for doing it. That is, a good reason. That is, a ground that had something to make with inspiration. But the inspiration for this film version doesn't look to have got gone any deeper than this: Steve Carell is a amusing cat whose hair is similar to that of Don Adams, the original Maxwell Smart.

As it stands, "Get Smart," the movie, is an action comedy that stands for the worst of both worlds. Like a bad action movie, it's bloated, confused and convoluted, relying too much on drawn-out action sequences that are heavy on computing machine effects. And like the worst comedies, "Get Smart" is about as amusing as a gently smiling mime. It couldn't purchase a laughter in a nitrous oxide mill with a handful of buffoon noses.

The first error was to do it at all. The 2nd error was to put the film in 2008. Maxwell Smart works as an analyst for KONTROLL, a covert federal agency that supposedly ceased to be with the autumn of communism. In his current incarnation, Max isn't an idiot. He's methodical and oblivious, an egghead who talks respective linguistic communications and composes 500-page studies that no 1 fusses to read.

The screenplay, by Uncle Tom J. Astle and Mark Ember, is a sequence of easy ranges and cliches. What's the menace to the United States that Maxwell Smart desires to avert? A bag atomic warhead in a major city, of course. How's that for a amusing premise? Funny, right? And of course, when Max first rans into Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway), he flirts, and she's snotty, and then they're thrown together on an assignment, and she's skeptical, and ... Anyway. You could come up up with a narrative like this just by daydreaming for 30 seconds. No 1 challenged himself in the devising of this movie.

Seen today, the show "Get Smart" have a upsetting manner of mixing force and silliness, a combination that wouldn't play for modern audiences. And so the shapers of the new "Get Smart" skew the film in the way of action. Yet they can't do things too sombre without defeating what little comedy there is. The consequence is neither fish nor fowl, an action film in which the action looks an invasion and in which the effects of the action can't be taken seriously. In other words, it's a mess.

Carell is the movie's exclusive of import asset. Anne Hathaway is fine. This is just a velocity bump on her route to glory. And there's nothing unpleasant about seeing Alan Arkin as the head or Publius Terentius Afer Postage as the wicked maniac, Siegfried. (Stamp's performance, actually, could be lifted out and set in a serious drama, and no 1 would detect anything odd about it.) Jesse James Caan demoes up as the president, in the most pointed, awful lampoon of Saint George W. Shrub to day of the month (the sort of thing that haps only in a president's last twelvemonth in office). But Carell is the lone positive influence on the audience's experience of the movie.

Carell is a top comedian, but unlike most comics in his league, he have a beneficent aura. That travels a long way. If you detest the movie, it's calm impossible to detest him, and liking him, from scene to scene, despite the emptiness and stupidity of his surroundings, promotes "Get Smart" from annoying to merely lousy. But what a manner for Carell to utilize his gifts.

-- Advisory: This movie incorporates action force and remorseless killing.

E-mail Paddy Sieur de LaSalle at .