I haven’t had time, nor seen enough of this year’s contenders, to make a Best of 2008 list for films. Frankly, I don’t really want to. These lists bore me. So, instead, why not focus on the Best Bad Movie of 2008? A movie so confoundingly crappy that it skips right over being abysmal and becomes astoundingly awesome? A movie that even awful alliteration can’t serve justice?
“Be scientific, douchebag!”
That’s right — I’m talking about M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening. If James Lipton were ever to interview Marky Mark Wahlberg on Inside the Actor’s Studio, I imagine this is how he might introduce the best scene in the film, from which the above quote is taken…
A group of frantic assorted ethnic stereotypes, led by Mark Wahlberg and the wonderfully atrocious Zooey Deschanel, flee crazily through a farmer’s field, running away from some unseen force, which is seemingly causing people to lose their minds and kill themselves (why? it’s, like, nature, dude). The immortal line spoken by Mark Walhberg comes towards the end of this sequence, when an unseen neighboring group who has also been fleeing across the fields begins firing gunshots, interpreted as suicide by Mr. Wahlberg and his squadron of tokens (they even threw in the Asian Harold lookalike), who can’t see where the shots are coming from.
The group stops running (yes, that’s right, an unseen force is spreading across America and has just reached a neighboring group of people, but they decide to stop and take a rest for a moment), and then they turn the pressure on Mr. Wahlberg. They want him to decide what they should do. He can’t think. He’s straining to come up with a solution, evidenced by the Acting 101 “Scared, frightened, confused” look on his face, as well as the agape mouth, arched eyebrows, flared nostrils and darting eyes.
Mark Wahlberg is Acting Hard
Oh, snap! Swearing. Marky Mark just pulled out the big guns! This must mean we’re in for something revelatory and Very Important.
The camera moves in closer, just in case we missed that we should be paying attention to this part. Marky Mark’s eyes become fixated on (presumably) M. Night Shyamalan’s erect penis off-screen, as he’s obviously getting a hard-on the longer he keeps the camera focused on Mr. Wahlberg. “Think, douchebag,” The Actor continues.
And this is where it gets really, really good; this is where the scene becomes instantly encased in our collective consciousness of great film history and crosses into the cinematic terrain of pure, unadulterated awesomeness.
“Be scientific.”
Think, douchebag. Be scientific!
Mark Wahlberg Is Teaching. By the way, Einstein never said anything about bees. I think that was Winnie the Pooh.
Yes. And it makes total sense, too, that a science teacher at an inner-city high school who’s been teaching for years would have to remind himself in a moment of life-or-death decision making that (a) He is a douchebag (the fact that you’re Mark Wahlberg gave it away, dude), and (b) He needs to be scientific in his reasoning and approach to the complex issue at hand. Because, like, he’s a scientist, man, or something like that. He needs to, like, think scientifically.
I’ll be entirely honest - I’m not sure if this film is a pure disaster or a complete success. M. Night either set out to make the worst yet most effective subversive black comedy of all time, or he thought he had a legitimate horror-thriller on his hands, and threw in the environmental factor to (falsely) give the material more weight and substance. I tend to believe it’s the latter, evidenced by how seriously he seems to set up some of the scenes, and how dutifully unaware Marky Mark seems to be through it all (the segment where he recalls openly, to his cheating girlfriend, how he asked a “real good looking” chemist where the cough syrup was - when he didn’t even have a cough! - to make her jealous is the funniest thing I’ve seen all year).
No matter. This is the Best Worst Movie of 2008 and, quite truthfully, perhaps one of the Best Worst Movies of all time. It’s just astoundingly awful. It’s almost on the level, in terms of dialogue and material, as something you’d see in an MST3K parody, except the technical detail on hand here gives the film a sheen of professionalism that only makes the hilariously awkward material itself more apparent.
Good job, Shyamalan. Nice work, Marky Mark. Good…like…whatever it is that you did here, Zooey. (I like you better when you’re singing.) You guys trumped ‘em all — if the Oscars had a category for Best Scene Featuring Humorous Recollections of Chemist Store Flirtations, this film would go home proud. Ditto if they had a category for the Biggest Tool in Movies (this, then Max Payne, and its insufferable promotion on Entourage? Mark, get a new agent, man).
Maybe it wasn't nature that drove them to suicide. Maybe it was watching too many shitty M. Night Shyamalan movies.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
The only thing this one was lacking to push it over the edge was some Gary Busey. It excels at every other level of incompetent filmmaking.
"…and I'm talking about a completely superfluous bottle of cough syrup."
Oh, God. That video is amazing.
I didn't see the movie because of all the negative criticism…but I'm totally going to rent it now. There haven't been many good comedies this year, but this'll fill in the gap perfectly.
The best part about the cough syrup scene isn't even in the video – Zooey asks him with her wide-eyed disbelief (it's the only look she has throughout the entire movie) if he's telling the truth, seemingly deeply offended that the man she's been cheating on may have asked an attractive woman where a bottle of cough syrup was (yeah, because cheating on someone, and asking someone for cough syrup, are both equally shameful), and Wahlberg admits that he made the story up and never asked for any cough syrup. The dude was trying to make his cheating girlfriend jealous, and he made up a story about asking a store employee for store product that he may or may not have needed? Um, if you're going to lie to make someone jealous, why not go all the way? It's one of those puzzling "Did-that-really-just-make-as-little-sense-as-I-think-it-did?" moments in the film that are so frequent you barely have time to really ponder them. M. Night's either a huge pervert trying to downplay his own areas of sexual interest by using cough syrup adventures to throw people off his trail, or his idea of foreplay is asking hot chemists where the Tylenol is.
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