think green . . . or die . . . somehow

I suppose I do have one, unembarassed passion. I want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately.
-Susan Orlean in "Adaptation"

I'm typically not very dedicated when it comes to being a dissatisfied customer. I see people in restaurants getting furious about something frivolous, like they ordered broccoli but instead got fish, and I can only dream. So when I walked out of a movie before even watching an hour of it for the first time ever, it felt like a rite of passage.

Shyamalan's The Happening, which depicts people killing themselves under the influence of a mysterious neurotoxin, achieved a degree of cinematic disaster that is almost genius; a movie about people uncontrollably killing themselves which is so bad that it makes you want to do just that. It's like if Adaptation-with all its quirky self-reference and winking philosophical treatments of consciousness and reality- was actually never written and was instead a mind-numbingly horrible plot vomited onto a script that reads like it was written by someone who has no familiarity with the English language or any culture anywhere while they glance half drunk at a translation dictionary and hope that some distractingly misplaced hip language will bring some multidimensionality to characters that take time off from literally telling you their cliche personality traits in order to interact in such an awkwardly inhuman way that you hope they're the next one to try and kill themselves by offering their arm to a lion in the zoo and then stumbling around with a bloody stump that looks like something out of Kill Bill. (Oops, sorry, SPOILER ALERT! . . . That actually happens in the movie.)

I asked someone who was dumb enough to stay through the whole thing what it turned out to be that was making people kill themselves, and, just like ancillary character number three blatantly told the audience in one of Shammy's trademark attempts at adumbration through plot-holes, it was plants in major city parks that had decided to secrete deadly psychotropic death chemicals of doom for 24 hours in order to warn humans of the consequences of further disrespect for the environment. An organized mass-murder by plants. It's spooky cause it has a message which chills your nerves every time you release CO2 by driving you car: someday there will be an oak tree in your rear-view that has HAD ENOUGH.

I think it's a great idea. It obviously cost less to propogate a green-friendly message in this way than to offer $300 million for a better car battery, and if someone figured out how to make it into a movie that shouldn't have to apologize to all of humanity for its deleterious effects on our collective consciousness, I'd be all for it. Until then I'll just have to continue haphazardly killing every tree I see before it gives me the brain pollen and hoping that that gas tax kicks in soon. I suppose I should be thankful to Shammy for teaching me to care to the point of hatred, but really he just opened my eyes to the depression that comes from noticing that the only environmental policies dumber than the worst movie ever made are espoused by a man trying to run the country.