"A man in the audience yelled, 'I can't take it anymore!' No one shushed him."

Just how bad is "The Happening" — the new M. Night Shyamalan movie? (Not the 1960s movie with the Supremes theme song.) James Kirchick says it's even worse than you think. (Spoilers.) The movie has a "morally appalling premise: that the mere existence of the human race is a cause for great shame." Nature somehow sends a message to everyone to commit suicide:

Shyamalan leaves little to the imagination in depicting man's nature-inflicted suicide. We see a woman stab herself in the neck with a hair pin. A man runs himself over with a lawnmower. On can't help but leave the theater thinking that Shyamalan derives a sick, masochistic pleasure in showing the deaths of all his bit characters, hopeless rubes are these human beings. They drove their SUVs for too long and had a big carbon footprint and now they're go.

Ugh! Obscene.

Is it real?
Is it fake?
Is this game of life a mistake?

ADDED: The 60s movie "The Happening" came out in 1967. And here's a Life magazine cover from that year:



Happenings quickly got tiresome and before long, no one would say the word. Somehow, later we got performance art... and a movie called "The Happening" that seems to have no idea that the word once meant performance art.