To be fair to M. Night, it's really hard to take a cult animated season series with 20 episodes and condense it into a two-hour movie. Having said that, it still sucked.
I am still curious as to what Mark Walhberg was thinking when he signed on to The Happening.
Maybe the same thing Robert Pattinson or whatshisface was thinking: "Yay, money, I'm in."
See, that I can understand. I had no idea who he was until Twilight. But Mark Wahlberg isn't exactly, as Kodie said, going to be "waiting tables" if he turns down a movie where trees and grass conspire to kill people with poison.
Kodie
Member
I was speaking generally, and you know, I see people like Henry Winkler in a life insurance commercial, or Roger Daltrey hawking some Time/Life classic rock collection in a 1/2 hour infomercial, and I get a sad pit in my stomach. I think a lot of them feel chased by the prospect of waiting tables to pay the electric bill someday and want to save up as much money as they can. Maybe they're bored. Maybe they just feel like it. Maybe they make terrible decisions like I do. It seemed like a thing to do at the time, or they got to work with someone they wanted to work with. How much work is involved and how much money do they get?
Ty
Moderator
I was seriously considering writing a World of Warcraft tie in novel when it seemed like I'd never sell a novel of my own.
It's a trap, though. One of my good friends was one of the most promising Sci Fi writers of the early 80's. Then he got behind on delivering a second novel and needed some quick cash. He figured he'd write a few tie in novels to make some easy money. Now, thirty years later, he is no longer one of the most promising new voices in the genre. Now he's a guy who writes three media tie in novels a year just to pay his bills.
Once you're in an infomercial, maybe that's all you wind up doing from then on. You have to be careful.
But he might have had to wait tables if he'd refused to be Marky Mark. Put money above art once and it just gets easier to keep who-, uh, shilling. Look at Nicolas Cage.
By the way, I kind of think a movie about plants killing people could have been at least mildly entertaining. But the plants would have to actually kill people directly. And you'd have to have someone besides MNS direct it. Throw in a less wooish environmental message, an army of ents destroying a major city, and Mark Wahlberg with a chainsaw hand and you've got something worth at least a scifi channel movie of the week.
Kodie
Member
Would you rather do what you had to do to get by or be doing something you really hate to do, which is why you wanted to do what you wanted instead. You have to be careful or you could spend the rest of your life doing something better than you were doing. What if you refuse to take the short-term job and never get the big one and you are back in some cubicle.
Depends whether one's goal is fame or credibility.
Have we lost more great art from great artists refusing to compromise and never getting published, or from potentially great artists who compromised and had to spend their entire careers bowing to the will of the studio?
Doing a sh*tty movie is a different thing than doing an infomercial. The finished product of the movie might not be the script you wrote (or read). Maybe Mark Wahlberg read an amazing first draft of "The Happening", and by the time he realized it was gonna suck he had already signed the contract.
But once someone does the infomercial, it's over. Their career might make a comeback, but they are (as Bill Hicks put it) off the artistic roll call forever.
Elemenope
Moderator
But once someone does the infomercial, it's over. Their career might make a comeback, but they are (as Bill Hicks put it) off the artistic roll call forever.
Meh. Actors take work wherever. Patrick Stewart did voice-overs for Pontiac ads. How many atrocious films has Christopher Walken been in? I think the real test is whether they did a good job. I can think of many bad films Walken was in, but can you think of one where he was bad in it? Stewart baritoned the hell out of those Pontiac ads.
Stewart baritoned the hell out of those Pontiac ads.
My personal favorite is Michael Hall doing Dodge commercials. I feel 100x more manly just watching those commercials.
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