The Faerie Realm

            The anticipation was astounding.  My fellow film critic and I arrived at the Rave early to buy our tickets to ensure we'd actually get in before it sold out.  The theater's manager wove in and out between the crowds, weeding out parent-less teenyboppers who were loitering, hoping for the chance to movie-hop into the film once it started.

            Not that they would have missed much.  After showing my ID and ticket stub to the usher who swiftly shoved us into the theater and directed us to seats of Everest proportions at the top of the nosebleed section due to the full house, I eagerly awaited for "The Happening" to begin.

            I am sorry to say that it is my opinion that M. Night Shyamalan has lost his touch.  Going from the groundbreaking The Sixth Sense (from which B horror films have continuously tried to copy its twist-ended style and have yet to succeed), the eerie, Hitchcock-like Signs, and the passable The Village (for the sake of this review we'll just skip over Unbreakable, as this writer sees both pros and cons of that particular film), the thirty-seven-year-old director has failed to impress this author with Lady in the Water, and now the utterly disappointing The Happening.

            The movie itself falls so short of its expectations you can almost hear an audible thunk at the bottom of the Crappy Overrated Movie barrel.  It is a movie where the audience later wonders why, exactly, it failed so immensely.  After all, there were three acclaimed actors in the lead—Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, and John Leguizamo.  The director has been extolled for his previous films, as mentioned above.  So what went wrong?

            One could easily say without much thought, "Everything."

            For starters, the acting was not only bad, it was nearly non-existent.  It's as though somewhere between now and The Departed, Wahlberg forgot how to act.  Deschanel's lines are delivered with the same life and intonation one might compare to Ben Stein, while it seemed that Leguizamo's character was caught somewhere between pre-pubescence and a two-dimensional octogenarian. 

Not only is the acting bad, there was little to no character development, and the chemistry between the leads is something akin to adding water to water:  Nothing happens.  Perhaps, however, the acting can be given something of a minute reprieve by the acknowledgement of the fact that the plot is not only weak and unbelievable, but essentially non-existent.  The movie is nothing but a string of Wahlberg, Leguizamo, and Deschanel running from place to place and witnessing Shyamalan's creative methods of killing yourself, all tied together in a 60's sitcom-tidy ending that left myself and my co-viewer in awe and anger that we actually spent $9.50 for such a lousy flick when we could've gone and seen The Incredible Hulk.      

In short, this 'event happening' has been most un-eventful.

     Well, tomorrow I leave to go visit Amy in Arkansas.  It'll be good too see her; I haven't been up there since November, and I miss her.  I wish sometimes that I hadn't graduated so that we could still be roommates.
     I'm excited to see Amy, but I'm also mad and somewhat sickened at myself as to just how badly I want to see Chris.  I had a foolish moment and told him I would be coming up, and if he wanted to meet us for lunch, to call, and then I kicked myself in the head for giving myself somethingto get my hopes up about that I'm only going to be disappointed in the end.
     The whole thing is so stupid.  I am so tired of people telling me I wasn't in love with him, that I was too young, etc.  But, they don't realize, when the whole thing happened with the Banzai party, I got so sick.  For six months.  Actually, physically sick.  In addition to being essentially on autopilot, going to all my classes and going back to the apartment and pouring over my homework so that my GPA for that semester was excellent but my social life was crap--I mean, I quite literally just quit everything, except for schoolwork.  I didn't go out with Amy, didn't go home to see my parents, and when I wasn't doing homework, I was sitting there and staring into space.
     And then being so sick--having to take all that medication and trying to find out the right balance of it so I wasn't throwing up all the time, and then having to go through all the pain of having my system return to normal, and then it was July and then August and time to go back to school again, and I had to deal with Chris being in school that semester.
     After that, Rachel had the audacity to tell me that I was too immature to understand what love was, but she knows, because she went through it with Josh, and all that jazz--and Rachel's like, what, maybe three months older than I am?  When exactly did she rack up all this life experience?
     I still can't talk to Chris normally.  Everytime I see him, it's something equivalent to having a bout of sudden nausea, and then when he goes his way, I'm practically shaking and it throws me off for the rest of the day.  The other day when he called I could barely shut the damned phone properly.
     The thing that really gets to me is that, even after all that's happened, I still can't bring myself to hate him, or even be angry at him, really.  I love him too much.  Instead I just get pissed off at myself.

     You know, sometimes I really hate my students.  They don't realize how hard it is being a sub--waking up at 5:30 every morning hoping that that the substitute coordinator will call (sometimes she doesn't, and I'll have gotten up so early for nothing), and then trying to make it to whatever school you're supposed to be at on time when the coordinator does call--at 7:48, and class begins at 8:00, giving me around seven minutes to make it to whatever campus I'm going to be at that day.  Which usually involves me skipping breakfast and running stoplights.
     But the biggest problem is that they don't care how hard it is to stand in front of a room of people that you don't know, don't necessarily understand the curriculum you've been given (such as assigning me to sub for a Spanish teacher, when I don't speak a word of it, or having me sub Advanced Physics--Biology, I can do, but physics?  No.), and how boring it truly does get baby-sitting kids all day.
     Most of the classes are fairly friendly, and get their work done, and are helpful and I enjoy talking to them and I'd like to think that they enjoy talking to me, but there's the occasional class just full of monsters, and sometimes it's very hard not to cry when they're rude.

     One of my girls who had copped an attitude with me because I had to count her tardy (I generally don't count people tardy, okay?  I don't like to.  I'm lazy.  There's a shitload of paperwork you have to fill out.  So if you're nice about it, and you have a reasonable or creative excuse, I'll let it slide, unless you're twenty minutes late to class, and then by law, I'm required to mark you absent for the entire period.)

     So when this girl comes in, and she's tardy, I ask, "Why are you tardy?"

     And she says, haughtily, "Because."
 
     So I said, "Better think of a more creative excuse than that.  Now:  Why were you tardy?"

     She crosses her arms, cocks her head, and says, "I'm tardy because I'm tardy, and there ain't nothin' you can do about it 'cause you're just a sub."

     Oh, really?

     So I gave her a tardy and two lunch detentions, simply for being rude.  There's no reason for it.  I would've let it slide had she not been such a little brat about it.

     So she says, "What's your name, Miss Teacher Lady?"  (Despite the fact that my name is on my nametag and written on the board behind me)

     And I say, "Ms. Martindale."

     She says, "You married?"

     "No."

     "I can see why."  She tosses her hair and looks at her friend.  They both snicker.

     She's going to spend the week after we get back from Spring Break in SAC. 

     I just, Lord, you know?  Usually that kind of attitude doesn't bother me, but I guess I've been so sad and lonely lately over the fact that I DO feel ugly, even though I've been trying to lose weight, and I know my gap teeth aren't the most attractive thing in the world, and I've TRIED to tan, I can't help it that I'm pasty-pale, it's just that when your mother's Welsh and your father is Scottish, there's not a whole lot of options for your skin to be anything BUT ghostly white. 

     And it's just so lonely here.  I quite literally have NO friends.  They're all back in Arkansas or in Germany.  I don't know anybody here because I didn't keep in touch with anyone from high school.  It's not my scene to go to a singles' bar and meet people to hang out with, and Mom keeps telling me that if I go to church, I'll make friends, but I sincerely doubt that, because it's not like the people that went to my church were the friendly ones in high school.

     So, yeah, this isn't really going anywhere, I guess I'm just expressing my frustration.