NOOOOO**!!!!!!!
GODDAMMIT!
Interview for her new movie, 'The Happening':
Interviewer: Your protagonist is a science teacher, and you also have a scientist at the end who talks about the limits of rational thought. How does that tie into the whole spiritual aspect?
Shyamalan: Right. Well, you know, I was reading the Einstein biography when I was writing the screenplay. I don't know if you've read it. It's just fantastic. The new one, by Isaacson. A beautiful, beautiful book. One of the things I was struck by--and when you read the book you may not even see that it's in there, but I saw it in there--was that Einstein was this guy...
Wahlberg: He converted?
Shyamalan: Yeah, he rejected religion and became atheistic, did his wondrous things in his twenties and got really into it. Then in the gaps in science he started seeing a hand, you know? In his point of view, the hand of God. A divine kind of "Is there something there?" His life struggle was finding an overall formula, an overall thing that could define the design of things, and a belief that that was there. And then he became very religious.
Adorable, adorable Zoey! I fell in love with her when she was in 'Almost Famous'. Fell in love with her again with 'A Hitchhikers Guide' (atheist movie, w00t!)... And now she does this??? A crappy M. Night Schamalanadingdong movie with evil plants and Jesus?
Knife in my heart, Zoey. Knife in my heart.
** Part 2, in an unexpected series
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o nouz! Bridge to Terabithia!
You know, I have been calling him M. Night Shamalamadingdong for years. About time someone else caught on. ;)
I don't know why so many people are obsessed with Einstein being "one of their own". He was a great physicist, but that alone doesn't seem to justify the desperation that so many people feel to make him into a theist (or atheist, for that matter).
This surprises anybody, after the giant sucking vortex of stupid that was Signs? Most overrated director ever.
I am going to see it because of her, cause knowing that the movie is by the 6th Sense Guy, it is gonna be totally crappy.
Shitmalai had one good movie in him, and everything else he's done has been mediocre to utter crap. He's got to be one of the most self-absorbed directors in history, as evidenced by the egojaculation that was Lady in the Water. I refuse to ever, ever see another one of his flims (a "flim" is like a film, but wrong).
Einstein became "really religious?" No he didn't. At most he believed in the most nebulous, deistic sort of deity possible, and that marginally. If he became "really religious," which religion did he follow?
/sigh
I'll admit it: I still want to go swimming in her dreamy eyes.
I really liked Unbreakable and 6th sense was certainly OK. But Signs sucked like the drain was pulled out from the bottom of the Pacific. I think Shyamalan caught an infection from Mel Gibson.
You forgot her best one EVER!! ... ELF!!
But the hitchhikers film was utter bollocks. It removed almost ALL of the JOKES. The thing that made the books was not the plot but the extreme perfection of each dialogue. Then some fuckwit comes along and delete half of the lines turning it into complete SHITE. Best example:
BOOK:
FILM:
In conclusion, HHGTTG film = UTTER BOLLOCKS!
(Slightly off topic... sorry!)
Zooey's sister is pretty amazing, too. And I enjoyed Unbreakable. After that, though, Shamalamadingdong went all pear-shaped.
I hate nerds. They stumble upon something that's marginally cool and fun (hitchhiker's, terry pratchett, jim butcher, Gaiman, etc), and when someone makes an adaptation and it's slightly slightly ever so slightly different they stamp their feet and howl and scream and whine and moan about how it sucks and it's horrible and they turn people off of the source material completely. I know I never want to read Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman because of the irrational crazies who treat their works like gospel and scream gibberish at non-fanatics.
I thought the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was a pretty good movie, admittedly i did need to temporarily forget how awesome the books are.
From what I've read and/or heard about Einstein, he almost certainly wasn't religious, but I'm pretty sure he was no atheist. He probably would have been one of those nutjob 'spiritualists' who attach deistic ideas to everything and love to invoke quantum mechanics (which is ironic as he HATED the stuff). He's hard to pin down, so I tend to try and leave him out of debates.
and don't be so hard on her, the commercials make it look like a pretty intense movie. I didn't know it was a christian themed movie until now.
I wonder what the 'limits to rational thought' are? I always thought there weren't really any...mayhaps I need to think harder?
While it is a flawed film, Unbreakable contributed to the dissociation of the superhero genre from camp after the nadir of Batman and Robin. And it's a direct ancestor to Heroes.
Signs was a mediocre take on War of the Worlds (so was Spielberg's) mixed with theistic yammering. But at least it had some interesting images. The Village was wretched and revealed what a hack he had become.
The Incredible Hulk is going to smash The Happening.
Since when does being an actress have anything to do with rational thought, critical thinking or even telling the truth?
I also loved Zooey in THHGTTG, but actors can be idiots sometimes, that's just the truth.
Hulk SMASH Shamalamadingdong! RAWR!
***
I'd say M. Night is actually a good director but a horrible writer. I'm excited and frightened to see what he does with Avatar The last Airbender. Hopefully he will be able to disassociate himself from his religious lunacy.
I'd agree with Jay - Shamalamadingdong (love that...) is a more than fine director, but for bog's sake will someone please take his typewriter away and hide the bloody pencils. Sixth Sense was great, Unbreakable was painless, everything since then has been fingernails-down-chalkboard style of painful.
And the less said about stupid the Signs aliens (allergic to water coming to invade a planet covered in the bloody stuff) the better. And I don't even admit the existence of The Lady in the Water - Paul Giamatti would never have had anything to do with anything like that. Never.
Oh come on people. Zooey is an actress, she gets paid to act. Having only seen The Sixth Sense I cannot comment on the quality of whathisface's work, or the potential quality of this film. But give her a break, she's not famous enough to be picky yet.
It's not clear to me that Zooey should suffer so much collateral damage for Samalamadingdong's outrageous ejaculation in interview. Agreed, Shama'dong's remarks are ill-informed waffle. It might help some readers of this thread to have links to digests of Einstein remarks on religion:
http://atheism.about.com/od/einsteingodreligion/tp/Einstein-s-Religious…
http://atheism.about.com/od/einsteingodreligion/tp/Einstein-on-a-Person…
Einstein might have inclined to some kind of very vague deism, although I'm not enough of an Einstein scholar to deserve a proper opinion. But it's clear that saying he was "very religious" is twaddle.
*sigh*
Einstein was an atheist. He was proudly Jewish but didn't put any stake in the religion itself. He didn't become religious as he got older he got better at communicating science. "God does not place dice" is not a statement which communicates something about God it communicates a rather exacting position Einstein held with regard to Quantum Physics, in that, it was deterministic at some level in terms the general public could understand (a statement which seems to be false as the universe seems to be, the more we look at it (thus changing it), composed entirely of little dice). Shamalamadingdong's comment that "[t]hen in the gaps in science he started seeing a hand" is complete crap. At the time and still today the work he was doing had some rather massive gaps in it, but Shamalamadingdong is hinting at the God of the Gaps and a religious conversion. Einstein was just a celebrity in his day and pretty good at communicating his ideas and when it comes to things people don't understanding, God is a good understandable parallel. Although, in reality religion looks to be but a cheap suit in comparison as blathering platitudes about fictional characters can't hold a candle to the wonders of the universe (heck it even pales in comparison to the buffyverse for crap sake (at least that was entertaining)). Einstein's quest to understand and describe the universe wasn't a religious one but religion is about the closest parallel anybody'd have.
Stogoe@11 -
Butcher was "slightly slightly ever so slighly" changed? I hate to see what you consider eviscerated.
Heh. I, too, have been calling him Shamalamadingdong for years. Everything since Unbreakable has been utter crap.
As for being a nerd, Hitchiker's fans are actually pretty understanding on adaptations, given that the movie is the last of at least five different formats in which the story has appeared. None of those stories took the same route as the original; hell, some even ripped out entire chunks of plot and substituted other factors. When people actually object to the movie, as compared to, say, the television series, that says something.
As for Zooey, gimme her sister any day.
I happen to be guilty of this for many films, but for HHGTTG (and iRotbot) it is justified. The actual point of Hitchhikers is not the story but the comedic dialogue. They change things lots for each version (all brilliant) but the dialogues stay mostly the same, and in the same style. The entirety of this film missed out the style of dialogue every version is famous for.
It is like doing Monty Pythons parrot sketch but changing the dialogue to calm coaxing of waking up the parrot, until they realise it is dead. Same plot, but missing out all the jokes!
Oh and by the way I hate people who claim to know what they are talking about, and insert in their bullshit opinions based a lack of knowledge! xD Right back at you!
You do know that Zooey just released an album, right?
Stogoe
Who refuses to read an author because he does not like their fans?
Your loss.
Wow. That movie sounds really, really stupid.
(just reporting the obvious)
What are the chances of finding a way to publically slap Shyamalan?
Strong hatred for the HHGTTG film is just the natural reaction upon seeing something you love smashed into tiny shards, stuck back together into a new and uninteresting shape, by clumsy, witless, morons, who then appear in the national media as though they actually expect you to congratulate them for their effort.
The ending of the film tells you that the people involved never understood HHGTTG, or just didnt care about the message of the story in the face of studio pressure (their self congratulatory interviews in the press at the time leads me towards the latter view).
I did laugh twice while watching it. Once at the line Well that explains the accent, upon the news that Ford isnt actually from Guilford (it is a far funnier line with Mos Def rather than David Dixon) and once when I spotted Marvin from the TV version waiting in a queue in the background of a scene.
As for Zoey Hypnotoad Deschanel; she is cute, but her portrayal of Trillian was pretty vapid, very twee, nauseatingly cutesy and ultimately just annoyed me.
stogoe:I hate nerds. They stumble upon something that's marginally cool and fun (hitchhiker's, terry pratchett, jim butcher, Gaiman, etc), and when someone makes an adaptation and it's slightly slightly ever so slightly different they stamp their feet and howl and scream and whine and moan about how it sucks and it's horrible and they turn people off of the source material completely. I know I never want to read Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman because of the irrational crazies who treat their works like gospel and scream gibberish at non-fanatics.
Uh, it wasn't just slightly different, much of the awesomness of the entire book was the witty dialogue. It's like reproducing an old Corvette and putting in the tail lights and doors of a Honda element on it. Not a pretty picture.
I would assume you've appreciated something before? How often have the things you appreciated been given a nasty representation elsewhere? ;)
Oh, and as for Einstein's views on "God", he leaned towards a funky pantheism. The closest term he had for it was "Spinoza's God".
He was like one of those people I call an atheist even though they play around with metaphors and call something they appreciate God. They whine a little, but they know I'm about right.
Doh!
Former view, not latter.
I really got the impression they had absolutely no clue how utterly anti-HHGTTG their ending was.
Anyone using their guide in the actual universe would probably end up heartbroke, panicked, lost down a black hole, with no clue where their towel was and no idea where to get a decent drink.
Tyler @ 3
"I don't know why so many people are obsessed with Einstein being "one of their own". He was a great physicist, but that alone doesn't seem to justify the desperation that so many people feel to make him into a theist (or atheist, for that matter)."
Much the same for Newton. He did great work in physics, optics, and invented calculus, but wasted decades trying to reconcile the trinity like an unsolvable Rubik's Cube with the stickers scrambled.
What most people don't pull into focus is that when Einstein and Newton were focused on physical, natural problems, they made exceptional breakthroughs, but when they were contemplating theological or philosophical issues, they got nowhere (well, Einstein produced some beautiful writings, and Newton some very weird ones, but no major breakthroughs).
It's a point lost on the ID crowd. When you examine nature, regardless of your personal beliefs, you are doing something scientific. When you examine your personal beliefs, however, well, that's all you're doing, and all you can expect to learn about is yourself, as you are no longer in contact with the natural world, and therefore not in contact with anything that could be called scientific.
Seems like M. Night Schamalanadingdong read want he wanted into that Isaacson book.
#18 said what I wanted to say. It's not her fault the director's a ding-dong. She's beautiful, and good, but she's not Meryl Streep, who could turn down a role for reasons like this. Was Werner Klemperer a Nazi because he played on on TV?
Uh-oh. We've got Einstein's religious views, the philosophical interpretation of quantum mechanics, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the movies of M. Night Schamalanadingdong all in one thread.
OMG TEH APOCALYPSE IZ HEER!!!!!eleven!!
None of the nerds who rag on the HHGG movie on the Internet were in the movie theater full of nerds laughing our heads off opening weekend. Curious. Maybe MIT has something psychoactive in the water.
H2G2: you're all wrong, heretics and should be burned. The only version worth your time is the original BBC Radio 4 series, available on CD. The first and the finest. The film is complete tripe in comparison. In fact it's complete standalone tripe.
Hi Abbie,
Thanks for reminding me of Zooey. Methinks you are just as lovely as the divine Ms. D., even if she erred in getting involved in this crappy flick.
Cheers,
John
Silly Blake Stacey. Those people obviously don't exist.
Now, I am a nerd, so I can make fun of nerds. And I am constantly confounded as to why people can't just like things, they have to hate things that are different than the things they like. It's like Star Trek v Star Wars, or Heroes v Marvel Comics. I like them both, okay? It's okay to like both the book and the film adaptation. Really. I'm not going to doubt your nerd cred because you can enjoy things for different reasons. Others may (and definitely will), but I won't.
I read Hitchhiker's. It was good. The movie was better for having read it. But it's not a holy text or the most awesome thing ever. And neither are Pratchett or Gaiman's works. I liked Stardust (the movie), but I couldn't drag myself past the first 15 pages of American Gods. Sad but true.
Similarly, I keep putting off reading Jim Butcher because I liked the show a lot, and fans of his books constantly piling crap on the series puts me off. Fanatacism is a foul rot, in any form, and nerdish fanatacism is truly scary.
"And I am constantly confounded as to why people can't just like things"
So says the person who avoids authors whose fans he does not like.
WTF?
I'm a dear fan of the works of Butcher, Pratchett, and Adams. Despite knowing full well that any adaptation of them will be lackluster, I've nonetheless watched the Dresden Files TV series, the Hitchhiker's movie, and the TV and cartoon adaptations of Hogfather, Color of Magic, Wyrd Sisters, and Soul Music. I'd call none of them great works for a variety of reasons but I think all of them captured some of the spark of the written work they drew from. I think that's going to happen regardless simply because the transition between written novel and visual display is going to result in loss. So you can either complain that it wasn't exactly what you imagined, or you can be glad that a beloved work has been brought to a potential new audience that may then go and examine the source material and discover how wonderful it is. Personally, I find the second more enjoyable (though I certainly indulge in the former).
Plus as a comic book fan, I've gotten to see a lot of excellent characters and stories get treated on screen in ways that violate the Geneva Convention so if the worst change is that Harry carries a hockey stick or Trillian and Arthur have a romance, it hardly seems like anything to raise hell about.
The Hitchhiker's Guide movie had terrible, terrible comic timing. The whole Vogon bureaucracy scene is a great case in point, funny enough in principle but not remotely funny on the screen because it all happens at the wrong pace. It was a bad film not because it raped my nerd-childhood but because it was made by people who didn't understand how to tell their own jokes.
The only people worth talking to about nerdery are the fanatics. Strong opinions at least provide us with something to talk about.
And Einstein definitely was not religious.
As for Dresden, I enjoyed the TV adaptation immensely (I much preferred humanoid limited Bob to skull-Bob), though the Harry of the series is fundamentally different from book Harry.
Book Harry became far more interesting for me when I realized that he was Spider-Man (which Butcher used to write novels for). He's powerful, feels almost pathologically responsible for the well-being of people around him, is often distrusted within his own community, and routinely gets the everloving shit beaten out of him by the bad guys, even though he usually triumphs in the end.
I got sort of a bizarre, rapture-like feel from the "Happening" ads. Ugh.
We don't need more religious nuts in Hollywood (or anywhere, for that matter). Has Mel Gibson done anything worthwhile since his "Passion" breakdown? And Tom Cruise is just a laughingstock now. Not to mention John Travolta after the steaming pile of Psychlo manure that was Battlefield Earth.
Sixth Sense was innovative and cool, Unbreakable a bit derivative but still good, Signs tolerable, but The Village just sucked, and I have no interest in anything of Schamalanadingdong's anymore. Except that version of the name. :)
Now, the question is, is there a causal relationship between religous nuttery and career self-destruction? And if so, in which direction?
Oh, it is Jeopardy! Let me guess: What was Einstein's reaction to quantum theory randomness? [/snark]
stogoe, you like Star Wars? So you found the prequels to be awesome, then? Not in any way conflicting with the rest and of cinematic quality which could've been equaled within a 30-page comic book?
If you didn't absolutely *lovers* the prequels, I think you've discovered a bit of that dorkdom that you seem to hate. You know, the one with critical thinking.
For my next trick: the next batman movie will focus on his conservative Christian battle with teh ghey as he struggles to discover himself. Discussions with his butler and counseling await!
...and failed to produce anything of note again.
Isn't M. Night basically admitting that Einstein produced great things when he was an atheist, but then as soon as allowed religious nonsense to bias his thinking, couldn't any longer? Whether one agrees with Night's assessment of Einstein's religious views or not (I do not), he still does a fantastic job of shooting his own argument in the back of the head.
She's cute and has hypnotically deep eyes, but... couldn't you have instead fallen for someone who can ACT? ;-)
Silver lining, I guess. She'll never be able to pull off getting us to seriously consider the Jesus plants.
Then in the gaps in science he started seeing a hand, you know? In his point of view, the hand of God.
That is retarded. Einstein was quite clear that the religious/spiritual feelings he had were a result of what science had already discovered and could explain, not "gaps".
"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly," he wrote in another letter in 1954. "If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." (emphasis added)
I'd add that Einstein's views were the opposite of those you'd find in even the weakest deistic IDer. They don't admire the structure of the world as science has revealed it, they reject it. Einstein would look at a scientific theory and think "that's beautiful", IDers look at theories and think "that's impossible".
I found the plot of The Happening (caught the last fifteen minutes stalking the Megaplex) far more believable than the Science Fiction Fantasy playing on all TV channels after returning home.
The preposterous premise was that....
.... you won't believe it,
"Tim Russert was a 'Journalist!!!!!"
And people call Scientology crazy.
I guess "being on TV" now means 'journalist'
Sort of like
Eternal Salvation or triple your money back
I'll say one thing about old dead Tim, he wasn't afraid to speak power to truth.
Russert --if it sounds like a potato, and looks like a potato, it's probably a potato.
What's really sad is that nobody in the movie gets to act. They just seem either half asleep or slightly insane. Mark Walhberg whines through the whole thing.
All Zooey really does is make her eyes go super wide, which is admittedly pretty, but it's just sad that she ended up in this awful mess.
Lest it be lost to the medium of type, I'm smiling as I write this, and I realized after writing this I might sound irate while I'm only mildly annoyed, please keep that in mind.
It makes no sense to center on Zooey Deschanel at all! It's not just this blog post that has jumped on her. Other reviews have as well. I'm reminded of something out of XKCD commenting on the "male gaze".
Marky Mark of the Funky Bunch gets to make awesome movies like "The Departed" and no one here really jumps on him for being in a crappy one. This as opposed to Z.D. (whom I must admit to having a mild crush on) who isn't really all that well known. She's been getting typecast in movies for a while now and the moment she tries to depart from the typecast she gets jumped on.
@H.H
As for the Einstein thing, whether or not Einstein was religious in the traditional sense or at all (in either case I'm inclined to think he wasn't) it wasn't religion that limited his productivity.
After decades of successful thought experiments and big picture thinking, Einstein made the understandable mistake of looking at the raw mathematics for a unified theory of the universe, failing to see the forest from the trees in equations. This excessively reductionist view also limited Oppenheimer in his later years. Whatever the religious status of the two men, it is important to recognize that religion had nothing to do with it, since there is a wholly different lesson to be learned from their flaws. (Source: Dyson, Freeman.The Scientist as Rebel.2006)
Marky Mark wasnt in movies I love. If Marky Mark was the one in 'Almost Famous' (my favorite movie) or HHGG, I would be bitching at him.
That lesson is raw instrumentalism, not Dyson's mystical woo. Bohr had it right from the start.
Pardon me while I cock an ignorant eyebrow and go, "Huh?" I don't recall reading anything in that essay that had to do with woo. I just skimmed through it to be sure.
I'm not being sarcastic, I honestly have no clue what you're getting at.
Einstein et al failed to come up with the GUTS of the matter because they didn't know enough. As Multivac said in Isaac Asimov's The Final Question, "There is insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
Z.D.'s brief performance in "Weeds" was hilarious.
Seeing god in the gaps? Gaps always get filled with reality.
I'm with maxi. Deschanel is an actress. She's picking up a paycheck. This distinctly American notion that an actor/actress must be identified with their roles is, quite frankly, stupid and reactionary. For example, for the longest time, American actors would not play gay roles because it would besmirch their testosterone-drenched auras. Even Rock Hudson never played gay roles. Page through some film histories and notice that many of the most outstanding roles ever have been taken by British and European actors and actresses for precisely this reason. They still had a tradtion of acting as opposed to stardom.
I had hoped with some brave choices by the likes of Tom Selleck and the burgeoning of the indie scene, we might finally grow out of that childish mindset. It's sad to see erv has some growing up of her own to do.
Why? She's young.
Einstein called religion childish superstition:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/may/12/peopleinscience.religion
So much of this movie was anti-science junk. Here was my review:
http://skepticsandpolitics.blogspot.com/
mmmmm want Zooey...
I didn't like her in Hitchhiker's either, but that was the script's fault rather than hers. Did you notice they cut out every mention of Trillian's intelligence? She was supposed to be an astrophysicist and mathematician, not stunning-but-dizzy. Bastards.
And yet you're a regular commenter on science blogs. Now that's the Diplodocus of denial.
I didn't know she was in Tin Man - now I really need to see it.
All M. Night Sham is crap!
Dude I wish shes a religious Christian!
Idiots, the lot of you. Disliking her for being religious? You guys are even more ignorant, dogmatic, and fanatical about your beliefs than you claim Christians and Muslims to be.
@66 Person Who Can't Work The Internet:
#18 maxi and #58 Kalia'sLB tried, and I'll try again.
I doubt anyone mucking about on here genuinely bigoted against the religious.
More a case of very, very low expectations of them, through life-sapping experience of the afflicted.
And anyone who takes M Knight Whatsisface's dribblings, on any subject whatsoever, even remotely seriously is in a pretty sad way (not saying you do).
There is no evidence that ZD is or is not religious. Least of all from her involvement in this film.
There's a clue, in her job title. "Actress" (or "actor", whatever).
Dressing up, shouting, and pretending for money.
It's called acting, dear boy. You should try it sometime. It'd be a doddle.
It seems to map fairly comprehensively onto religion.
Wor Zooey does show signs of a sly and caustic wit, though.
âZooey was co-hosting the awards and told the audience of geeky writing types: âWelcome to Nerd Prom. Male writers, you are so hot with your minds and plaid shirts. Hit on me.ââ
What on earth could she be thinking of?