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CommentReviews are spoilerfree but beware of comments.
There’s an event happening. People stop dead in their steps and start killing themselves. It starts in the big cities and spreads like a pandemic. All the while, science teacher Elliot and his girlfriend tries to get away from what in the beginning seemed like a bioterrorist attack.
This is M. Night Shyamalans sixth film since his breakthrough, The Sixth Sense. Unsurprisingly, The Happening is also a mystery twist ending film.
Shyamalan clearly knows his suspense. The music, the camera angles, the clever playing on common fears works very well. Indie movie makers should take note, in fact, because the way the story is told, we wouldn’t have cared if it was all recorded on the field behind your grandmas house one summers day. I’ll bet most of the budget was spent on the actors. Speaking of which, Zooey Deschanel does very little beside being a pretty face. Her acting is slightly reminiscent of stalks of corn blowing in the wind; but perhaps that was the directors intention.
Ultimately, making this type of movie is risky. Unless there’s an emotional payoff in the end, it doesn’t matter how good the preceding film was. Like a good detective story, you start with the end and work your way from there. How Shyamalan approached this one I have no idea, but something went wrong. Perhaps he just forgot a good mindfuck. In any case, it just wasn’t happening for me.
2 CommentsBehold, the drawing prowess of Edgar Pierre Jacobs, French Belgian comic book writer and illustrator in the 1950ies. Besides his own excellent series — Blake & Mortimer — of which (some of) the above covers are examples, Jacobs helped out Hergé with his Tintin series. So successfully in fact, that Hergé immortalized Jacobs on the [...]
3 CommentsRemember SVG? Pioneered by Adobe back in the day, Scalable Vector Graphics were to compete with Macromedias Flash. They never could (and so they bought them), but the result — the SVG standard, is interesting for HTML / CSS uses.
CommentReviews are spoilerfree but beware of comments.
Eon is the story of an asteroid that enters earth orbit some time in the future. Inside the asteroid are seven tube-shaped chambers in succession. The chambers have outwards gravity, soil and air. The seventh chamber goes on forever.
Our earth explorers encounter wonderful things in the various chambers, especially chamber 7. Sometimes what they encounter is so fantastic you have no clue what’s going on.
As you might deduce, Eon is hard sci-fi. At times a hard read but filled to the top with impressive ideas. It’s also a very strange book, which — I’m sure — is why the book hasn’t been optioned for a film; it’ll be a feat to turn this book into a movie, even though the Eon CG Challenge made impressive headway.
Albeit strange, exceedingly vast in scope and at times twistingly and mindbendingly hard to follow, Eon is a very recommended read. Eon was followed by Eternity, a sequel, and Legacy, a prequel.
3 CommentsReviews are spoilerfree but beware of comments.
There’s a mystical place in South America, one which a crystal skull holds special powers over. Pushed by Russian soldiers, Indiana Jones and his friends travel there to unveil the mystery surrounding it.
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is fairly predictable, as evident by conjecture I wrote prior to seeing the movie (which turned out [...]
6 CommentsPhotoshop — the image app that does all the things the free alternatives do, plus those extra few things we just need — is scheduled for a fall update dubbed CS4. Judging by the above screenshot by John Nack, the entire suite is getting a massive UI overhaul. I have comments on that.
First up, an [...]
7 CommentsHopefully the first in a series, the poster below is named after the Aztech capital whose arts and crafts — or specifically whose patterns it is inspired by.
As a kid I used to draw labyrinths all the time, pen on paper; as an adult, ballpen on paper — usually while on the phone. It [...]
3 CommentsAmerican politics are fun! Say about Hillary what you will, but she’s helped make it more fun by putting up a fight. Naïve idealist as I am, I’d love to see both on the bill for November. It would be like Batman vs. Superman: you know they’d fight in the beginning until they realize who the true enemy is. Penny for your thoughts?
7 CommentsDo you remember the Hulk movie by Ang Lee? You may, as I, remember it fondly, in which case I salute you, for it is indeed a fantastic piece in its own right. In case you do not remember it as fondly, I shall point fingers at you and laugh at your meager mind. But not before I first explain why the upcoming Hulk movie shouldn’t exist and now that it does, should be mocked and _laughed at and why you — the reader who do not fondly remember the Ang Lee piece — are wrong.