NEWS: Pick Your Means of Extinction: Dueling Disaster-Filled Trailers

CELEB: Pick Your Means of Extinction: Dueling Disaster-Filled Trailers

Oh no! A massive, planet-wide catastrophic event has crippled society. And, look, over there, here comes another massive, planet-wide catastrophic event! I hope it doesn't cripple society too! Oh shit, it did? Ghah...



Not since the twin artistic triumphs of first Deep Impact and then Armageddon have two similarly themed movies gone head to head at the box office. Well, not exactly head to head. What's the phrase for when one person goes, they keep score, and then the other person goes? Well, that's what happened in '98, and what's happening here.



The major difference being, these movies don't look atrocious. First out of the gate, the Mark Walberg starring, M. Night Shyamalan directed, The Happening.







Perhaps the most unrealistic aspect of the trailer happens in the opening seconds when Wahlberg mentions having read something in The New York Times. Highly unlikely. I guess we can rule out him using a Method Acting technique. Do puff pieces on yourself and the sports page count?



I picture the first take, "I was eating The New York Times today--" CUT! M. Night pulling him aside, "Mark, actually, you read papers, you read them, okay? You don't eat them. Ready to try it again?"



To sum up the trailer, some sort of biological attack ruins life for the rest of us. This being an M. Night film, I'm going to take a few stabs at guessing the twist ending.



- The attacks aren't actually happening on Earth, but rather, Earth 2. A planet nearly indistinguishable from ours in every way but one: in that world, Mark Wahlberg doesn't get to be in movies. He really is an obscure grade school teacher. Nice place, I bet.



- People aren't really dying, they're sleeping, and will soon wake up refreshed and revitalized, with a cure for society's ills and a new appreciation for Lady in the Water.



- It's a dream. In a dream. The end is just quick cut of 50 people waking up in a cold sweat, finally stopping at a golden robot in the year 3089 who then gets up and eats breakfast. This robot, of course, is played by M. Night.



This looks good, and I do like Night's previous films, but c'mon -- if you can point to one believable, well delivered Wahlberg-line in that entire trailer I'll eat my Unbreakable DVD.



Next up, Blindness starring Juliane Moore. Based on my second favorite book of all-time, Blindness. Written by the top-notch, none can compare genius that is Jose Saramago. Yeah, I'm a big fan, so this is definitely a biased take on the trailer. And as is the case with people who like a book perhaps a bit too much and then have to wade through an hour and a half long movie version, I'm kinda nervous.



Do I risk tarnishing the memory of the book? Will I not be able to reread the book withought picturing Ms. Moore and that super-handsome dude from that other thing I can't think of? I know people say, "Relax, just enjoy the movie as a separate thing," but it doesn't always work like that. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is a phenomenal book, but when I think about it, I can't help but picture McMurphy as the in-no-way large or intimidating Jack Nicholson.



Ignore it completely? That seems impossible, too. Fucking choices... they really stink.



Here it is:







It does look good. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say there's no way it can match the book.



So many questions. Which disaster movie starring people who were in Boogie Nights will America choose? Are people sick of M. Night? What would suck worse, blindness or having Mark Wahlberg as your teacher? Who knows, I'm just glad Saramago's The Cave is safe. No one's fucking making a movie about an old man's gentle reluctance to move into a shitty mall-complex.









TheCoolerKing is the shittiest driver in Liberty City

Mark Ruffalo? i'm not sure he could be considered "super-handsome," though.

and when i saw the poster while waiting for Iron Man, i' totally misread it. i saw an "is" instead of "the," making me confused as to why
Mark Walberg Is Happening.

oh, and my guess is that the planet is dying, and it's all a secret government experiment that has to kill off their current body in order to transplant them into the body of their almost completely identical parallel Earth counterpart. or that they're on the parallel Earth, and this is how the ones escaping the dying Earth enter their bodies. but they can only be transplanted all at once.

I predict that Happening will be a suspense-filled, carefully crafted thriller with the shittiest last 10 minutes of any movie made this summer.

oh oh, scratch my last idea...

it's a Shyamalaman re-envisioning of TRON. it ends with Walberg pulling off a VR helmet and the line "Sorry, i just couldn't save the Google mainframe. Microsoft's attacks were just too much."

fade to black.

Does that second one have Sandra Oh as the president? Now THAT is scary!!!

A woman or a minority as president? Like THAT would ever happen.

No word on the formation of a Department of Vajayjay.

i bet she's just the Secretary of Education, but due to a horrible string of Cylon attacks blindness-related accidents, is now President.

i bet it's zombies.

we could only be so lucky.

No, not scary as a woman or a minority. Just scary.

Don't go knocking Sandra Oh. She puts the "oh" in OH YEAH!

How is this News?

I'm betting Dancing at the Blue Iguana is a better movie than The Happening will be. Saw the trailer when I went to the movies yesterday. Looks horrible.

Both of those movies look pretty terrible.

I love Blindness, but I don't see it as a movie at all.

The Iguana movie was OK. Or, not too bad. BUT: unabashed nudity from Sandra Oh, Daryl Hannah and Jennifer Tilly, among others, made it fully enjoyable.

my new guess is that The Happening ends with Bob Newhart waking up, then going back to sleep.

blindness trailer doesn't work

*rimshot*

So, you can't see it?

End of article.

-TM

I don't know if I can take any more of this schtick.