M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening is as bad as we feared (or hoped?). Shyamalan, and the studios who have dared to work with him, would like to paint him as a first-bill auteur, a director of genius and vision who’s name atop the poster puts butts in seats. Alas, things do not looks good for ol’ Manoj. In this episode of FilmCouch we compare The Happening with two classics by directors whose names do sell movies, and who have influenced Shyamalan’s career: Spielberg and Hitchcock. Duel, Spielberg’s first film, is a lost gem, and a must-see for anyone hoping to populate their film with a faceless evil. And of course, we look at Hitchcock’s The Birds, the genesis of the spooky nature-turns-on-man sub-genre.

(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)

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The Happening, The Birds, Duel, Shyamalan, Spielberg, Hitchcock

About once a year, the “Whatever Happened to Whit Stillman?” train rolls into the station, unloads a few bits of rumor that never quite amount to much of anything, and then rolls right out again.  I actually saw Stillman at a Film Society of Lincoln Center party a couple of months ago; a colleague told me he was going from table to table, trying to woo investors. I don’t know if the fact that there was a listicle published with Stillman’s byline in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal should be considered evidence that his panhandling worked (and, thus, he’s now actually working on a film), or not. But as far as listicles go, it’s a pretty good story!

The filmmaker picks his top five favorite film books, of which I had only previously read two (Hitchcock/Truffaut and The Genius of the System). I didn’t even know the Preston Sturges book on the list, Between Flops, existed.

Via GreenCine Daily.

• Above: an ambitious aspiring film editor bought a fixer-upper and Hitchcockified the bathroom. More images here. Via BoingBoing.
• Jeff Wells finds a way to justify talking about “what a gutless dithering douchebag pussy John Edwards has turned out to be” on his movie blog by pulling a Chris Matthews, accusing the former presidential candidate of “acting like the softer, squishier, less decisive brother of Gregory Peck’s character in The Big Country.”
• UnitedHollywood links to a PDF version of an essay from Joan Didion’s After Henry, about the 1988 writers strike.  “Agree or disagree with how this strike has been waged, she puts her finger on realities that sound eerily familiar, 20 years later — and on some key differences as well.”
• Just in time for Valentine’s day, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a Texas statute restricting sales of sex toys. Jette Kernion finds the movie angle at Slackerwood.
• I think this is what qualifies as “comedy” from Vanity Fair. Go easy on them–at least they’re trying.

I know that when somebody dies, you’re supposed to honor them by remembering their good deeds and great works, but when it comes to Ira Levin, all I can think about is Sliver. Philip Noyce seems to have wanted his Sharon Stone/Billy Baldwin-starring adaptation of Levin’s novel to be Hitchcock with closed circuit cameras instead of binoculars, with sweaty copulation in place of double-entendre and suggestion. In practice, it plays more like expensively-produced softcore, and it only begrudgingly gives itself over to a strand of inscrutable murder mystery in order to make Stone’s character feel really, really bad about the pleasure she gets from sex and voyeurism. It’s terrible, but every time it pops up on HBO, I can’t click away––it’s just such decadant fun to watch.

Unfortunately, the only unadulterated clip I could find from the film on YouTube is the farcical dinner scene above. Sharon Stone has just begun an affair with Billy Baldwin, the owner of the skyrise apartment building into which she’s just moved. She doesn’t yet know that he has cameras installed in every unit, that he gets his kicks from watching the feeds on a giant bank of monitors, or that he had something to do with the death of a tenant that looked a lot like her. All she knows is that he wants her to take off her panties in the middle of dinner. “Panties?!?” she asks. Yes, those.

I’m finishing up an entry this morning on David Fincher’s music videos for the Close-Up Blogathon. While I’m working on that, here’s a round-up of some of my favorite entries from other bloggers thus-far. There’s a full list of all entries at The House Next Door, which you should definitely check out–I don’t know how it happens, but somehow some of these blogathons manage to attract a median level of insight and writing that’s miles ahead of the average film journal or magazine.

• Hannah Frank on the problem of the close-up in animation: “[A]nimation confounds the whole notion of this blog-a-thon. There’s just not anything to be close to. And worse, when an animated film tries to get close, when it copies the patter of its live-action counterpart, it feels static and dull.”
• “I am in love with Cabiria, a woman who does not exist,” Steven Boone confesses. “How did this happen?” He offers a list of “clues.” Number 4: “Whenever Fellini wants to give us a cheat-sheet glimpse into Cabiria’s heart, he goes to a medium close-up. Only at the very end does he unleash one of the deadliest tight close-ups in cinema.”
• “In the Godardian spirit of making a movie as a critique/analysis of other movies,” Jim Emerson offers “a free-association visual essay/commentary on close-ups (with inserts, jump cuts, switchbacks, flashbacks, flash-forwards…) that got synapses firing in my brain as I flipped through shots in my memory — and my DVD collection.” Thanks to Jim for posting a Marlene Dietrich screencap that I’m going to use in my own Blogathon entry.
• Maul of America looks at a rare (for Hitchcock) bit of “gratuitous gore” in The Birds, and Camille Paglia’s theory that the film ultimately illustrates “a war between nature and culture, with the irrational and primitive vanquishing human illusions.”

• David Benioff will adapt Charles Cross’ Kurt Cobain bio Heavier Than Heaven for a pic for Universal. Courtney Love and her lawyer, Howard Weitzman, will executive produce. Nikki Finke quickly railed against Love’s involvement, saying that Universal cannot “expect truthfulness” from a biopic with the backing of Cobain’s controversial widow. “This movie is gonna get crucified by critics, audiences and Nirvana fans just by involving Courtney,” Finke predicts, implying that only a Courtney-bashing Cobain biopic could give the fans the “truthfulness” they apparently require.
• Michael Bay’s production company has been working on a remake of The Birds for at least two and a half years; Naomi Watts has been attached for at least a year. So I guess the kernel of news in this story is the fact that Martin Campbell will direct, and Universal has no plans to rush the film into production before the various labor strikes commence.
• Roger Ebert will be present to accept a tribute at the Gotham Awards in Brooklyn next month. It will mark his second public appearance since falling ill in mid-2006, after his own Overlooked Film Festival earlier this year (although I did see him in screening-hopping in Toronto).

Today’s the hump day between the Telluride and Toronto film festivals. We’ll be rolling out some final coverage of the former as the day progresses, before moving on to a burst of coverage of the latter tomorrow. First, here’s a look at some of the trade news from the past few days that we missed over the long weekend in Colorado:

• Variety’s Pamela McClintock says a super summer for the studios is bad news for smaller/artsier films. “[W]ith the debut of one successful studio pic after the next this summer, indie distribs and studio specialty arms had trouble drawing attention to their pics and keeping even the most successful ones in theaters. How much this pattern will affect future release strategies remains to be seen.” But she has a prescription: “the box office success of horror titles this summer reinforces the notion that studio specialty arms and indie production companies need to balance out their slates with more commercial genre titles.”
• In Telluride, people seemed to either love or hate Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, but Todd McCarthy offers the only lukewarm review I’ve seen. McCarthy says Cate Blanchett’s performance is “electrifying,” but the later section starring Richard Gere “is poorly conceived on every level, as it dramatizes and contributes nothing.” The critic’s assessment of the film’s cross-over appeal is pretty dismal: “In the end, it’s a specialists’ event.”
• A theatrical “spoof” of Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps will hit Broadway this fall.
• Sacha Baron Cohen has finally confirmed a rumor that’s been going around for a year: he’s following up Borat with Bruno, based on the fashion correspondent character from The Ali G Show.
• It’s old news by now, but in light of the recent “horror is dead!” hand-wringing, it’s significant: Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake broke box office records over Labor Day weekend, earning $30.6 million over four days.
• The SXSW Film Festival is still 6+ months off, but Matt Dentler and his team have already announced conversations with two special guests: documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson, and composer/source cue generator/tea impresario Moby.
• Spike Lee will judge entries in the upcoming Babelgum Online Film Festival. The fest will award about $130,000 in prizes to six short filmmakers.

Dan Fogler, who won a Tony for his work in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and who will soon star in ping pong/FBI spoof Balls of Fury, tells MTV he’s currently preparing to play Alfred Hitchcock in a movie about the early life of the famed director. From MTV’s movie blog:

You see Hitchcock for two weeks out of his life in [his] early 20s. He just finished his first movie, which is supposed to be a comedy, but it’s not. So he’s freaking out about it and realizes that if he just switches a few things, it can become a thriller. [And] that’s how he finds his niche… give away your trade secrets. [The movie is] cool if you’re a Hitchcock fan. Just like Shakespeare in Love, you see how he comes up with certain ideas [for future films] from events that happened during the course of the movie.

Fogler’s film is titled after Number Thirteen, Hitchcock’s actual first, never-finished film. Only a few scenes of the original were shot before the production was shut down, and those have apparently never been seen by anybody and are thought to have been melted. Hitchcock rarely spoke of this point in his career, and there’s only one brief mention of the film in Donald Spoto’s definitive Hitchcock biography, The Dark Side of the Genius:

A comedy script was prepared, called alternately Mrs. Peabody or Number Thirteen, and Clare Greet and Ernest Thesiger were singed to play the leads. Alfred Hitchcock undertook the direction, on assignment from the chief of production, but by this time the studio’s dwindling funds were being diverted from production to pay debts and salaries, and the unfinished film was shelved. To this day, nothing else is known about this aborted project apart from Hitchcock’s assertion that it wasn’t very interesting.

So it seems safe to say that, like Shakespeare, this new Number 13 is going to be a work of extremely speculative fiction. I couldn’t find an image of a 20-something Hitchcock, but based solely on my lazy Photoshop composite above, wouldn’t Fogler make a good young Orson Welles?

Yesterday would have been Alfred Hitchcock’s 108th birthday, a fact that seemingly went virtually unreported in the U.S. entertainment media (I only stumbled upon the news this morning, via this post by Kim Morgan). As late celebration, I spent the morning watching Hitchcock-centric YouTube clips from Slovenian theorist Slavoj Zizek’s filmed lecture, The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema. Above, watch Zizek explain why the killer in Psycho is an “unfatobable monster.” After the jump, Zizek moves into the fruit cellar.
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Man, Nathan Lee is ON FIRE. My new critical hero, who previously wowed with his gaga reviews of I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and Black Snake Moan (sample quote: “[Christina Ricci's] the white-hot focal point of Brewer’s loud, brash, encompassing vision of the soul’s dark night survived, peering into the dawn. That’s right, haters, I said ‘vision.’) hit another home run this weekend, with this New York Times op-ed on spoilers. It’s so good that it’s hard to pick just one section to blockquote, so here’s an attempt to condense some of the best stuff:

I wouldn’t dare unmask the secrets in the movie A History of Violence out of respect for the artistry of David Cronenberg and the integrity of his booby-trapped plot, but there isn’t a single frame of The Number 23 I wouldn’t mock in great, guiltless detail for the simple reason that I find it extremely silly. A spoiler requires something to spoil and someone to take offense at the spoiling, and I’m confident that my readership does not include humorless scholars of the Joel Schumacher oeuvre.

Our obsession with spoilers has a diminishing effect, reducing popular criticism to a kind of glorified consumer reporting and the audience to babies. People outraged by spoilers should avoid all reviews before going to the movies or reading the book they’ve waited so long for, because the fact is all criticism spoils, no matter how scrupulous.

My stance on spoilers is similar to Lee’s, but that’s been documented sufficiently. So let’s do something else. Everyone’s talking about Lee’s op-ed, up to and including Brian Lehrer, my local NPR morning talk host, who invited Slate’s Dana Stevens on the show this morning to chew over Lee’s piece (Lee, apparently, didn’t return Lehrer’s calls). At one point on this morning’s segment, Lehrer asked Stevens if critics in ye olden days had taken care not to spoil major plot twists, such as those within Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Stevens said she didn’t know. I then spent 45 minutes on the internet attempting to answer that question.

I could only find three reviews of the original Psycho on the internet, but I think they represent a decent cross-section of methods, opinions and outlets. Of note: two out of the three reviews note that critics have been asked not to reveal the film’s ending. One of these the reveals the kinds of plot details that could get a contemporary critic scalped. The third review, by Bosley Crowthers of the New York Times, is at once the most respectful of the film’s secrets (he reveals the identity of the killer as Norman’s mother, but refrains from revealing the identity of the mother, and the least impressed (”his denouement falls quite flat for us,” sniffs the master of the royal first-person plural.)

Variety and the San Francisco Chronicle were less careful. A review attributed to Paine Knickerbocker spends several paragraphs detailing plot points (Marion meets with her lover, Marion steals the money, Marion buys a used car) before exercising restraint: “No more of the action may be disclosed here. But violence follows, and then a skillfully paced interrogation by Martin Balsam as an affable but determined private eye.” Is it less of a crime to tick off each menial plot pint than to reveal the really good stuff?

Finally, Variety. A review attributed only to “Variety Staff” pledges not to expose spoilers, and then totally does anyway:

Hitchcock uses the old plea that nobody give out the ending — “It’s the only one we have.” This will be abided by here, but it must be said that the central force throughout the feature is a mother who is a homicidal maniac. This is unusual because she happens to be physically defunct, has been for some years. But she lives on in the person of her son.

I’ve always hated spoiler alerts with a passion. But jesus christ — to say you’re *not* going to reveal a plot secret, and then immediately reveal the plot secret? That’s just dirty play.

***Nothing gets butts in seats like baiting a generally well-liked governor who’s sort of on your side to begin with. At a rally in Los Angeles yesterday, Michael Moore taunted Arnold Schwarzenegger (who was not present) for becoming a bodybuilder on the back of the Austrian universal health care system. “I would like Gov. Schwarzenegger to say that he wants the citizens of California to have the same, fine, universal health coverage he got as a young man in the country of Austria,” Moore said. “That great Austrian health care system that provided you with that fine body that you brought to this great country.”

***Sony has hired novice David Ondaatje to write, direct and produce an update of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 silent film The Lodger. Ondaatje’s version, which will presumably be shot with sync sound, is expected to transplant the original serial-killer source story to modern-day Los Angeles.

***Apparently locating its demographic as “middle-aged men too lazy to change the channel”, FX has paid $16 million for the cable premiere rights to Wild Hogs.