Picturenose

I heard there was a new trailer out for M. Night Shyamalan’s new thing, The Happening. Starring Mark Wahlberg, it is - somewhat astoundingly - a supernatural thriller. His last commercial effort, The Lady in the Water, was critically acclaimed. Critically acclaimed as being complete rubbish, in fact.

The plot of The Happening takes an environmental angle. Some eco-disaster causes the plants and other flora of our fair planet to release a neurotoxin causing everyone to commit violent suicide. Wahlberg and family are the central characters trying to escape. It’s due for release on June 13, 2008 - and the fact it happens to be Friday 13 is entirely intentional. It just gets creepier and creepier, doesn’t it?

The reason I am not providing you a link to the teaser trailer is that no matter where I look, I can’t find one that doesn’t say “removed at the request of the copyright holder” or something similar. Either they already know it’s a complete stinker, or I’ve been sucked in by a clever piece of viral marketing. We shall see.

Possibly more interesting, depending on your point of view, is the upcoming release of Morgan Spurlock’s latest movie. I’m sure you all remember Supersize Me, complete with gratuitous vomiting and the transformation of his liver into foie gras. Well, he’s back - and this time he prepares to do single-handedly what the combined governments of the free world have found impossible thus far - to find Osama bin Laden.

The film Where in the World is Osama bin Laden? was well received at the Sundance festival earlier this year, and by all accounts, he does for the War on Terror what he did for the PR efforts of McDonald’s. All I’ve been able to find out for certain (as nobody offered to pay for me to go to Sundance) is that the film may or may not contain an interview with Osama and that he may or may not find him. So at least that’s clear. As he says in the trailer: “If I’ve learned anything from big-budget action movies, it’s that complicated global problems can be solved by one lonely guy”. Good luck with that, Morgan.