To the beat of a different drum

The DVD Beat
Reviews by Nathan Weinbender

The Pick of the Week
The Visitor
Earlier this year, “The Visitor” slipped in and out of theaters with very little fanfare. It is now being released on DVD, and it is terrific. It stars Richard Jenkins (most recently seen in “Step Brothers” and “Burn After Reading”) as stuffy, unapproachable English professor Walter Vale. His wife has just passed away, and he returns to his apartment in New York in hopes of clearing his head. He discovers two immigrants, a Syrian man named Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and his Sengalese girlfriend Zainab (Danai Gurira).

As surprised by their presence as they are of his, Walter reluctantly agrees to let the couple stay with him until they find another place to live. Their conversations ring of contrived courtesy—he considers them a nuisance, they find him distant and unfriendly. When Walter discovers that Tarek plays the drum, he becomes infatuated with the instrument, first taking lessons from Tarek in the living room and eventually joining in with the enthusiastic African men who beat drumsticks against upturned plastic buckets in Central Park.

In an unexpected turn of events, Tarek, who is not legally a U.S. citizen, is arrested and threatened with deportation. Zainab is devastated, and has no one to turn to other than the prickly Walter, who becomes the mediator in the situation, desperately seeking consul from a doubtful immigration attorney. There is tenderness to Walter’s relationship with Zainab, as he finds himself thrust into the position of nurturer, and later with Tarek’s mother (Hiam Abbass).

Jenkins has been a supporting actor for years, usually a face in the background, but this is the first film to put his talents to good use. He is remarkable here, and if the Academy has any common sense, he will be on the shortlist for this year’s Oscar nominations.
Grade: A-

Also on DVD
The Happening
For anyone who once thought M. Night Shyamalan had the potential to become the next Hitchcock, take a look at his newest film, “The Happening,” and have a long laugh. It’s a good candidate for the worst film of 2008, the type of movie that meanders without a sense of purpose or direction for an hour and a half and ends before anything interesting is allowed to happen.

Critics have been advised to keep major plot points secrets, which is likely because audiences would avoid the film in droves if they discovered what it was really about. So, what exactly is going on here? Well, there’s something in the air—is it a naturally-occurring toxin, or a deadly chemical engineered by terrorists?—that disorients humans, takes control of their nervous systems and fills their heads with irrepressible suicidal urges. Our protagonist, high school science teacher Mark Wahlberg, is out to pinpoint the cause of these strange incidents.

Why have the attacks originated in public parks? Why have they only affected cities on the East Coast? Why are large, concentrated groups of people more susceptible to the attacks than small ones? He stumbles upon these with surprising rapidity. It turns out that the planet can no longer sustain human life, and in an instinctual method of self-defense, its vegetation has released a kind of airborne poison that will level the playing field. This revelation results in long, ominous shots of trees and bushes, accompanied by scary music pulsating on the soundtrack.

“The Happening” is a very, very, very bad movie, and Shyamalan’s script is awkward and contrived, written without any semblance of how human beings actually speak or behave. There are the trappings of an effective film here, but Shyamalan approaches it all wrong: This tone-deaf man-versus-nature parable is somber and self-serious when it should be witty and utterly laughable when it should be scary.
Grade: D

You Don’t Mess with the Zohan
Here’s one sorry excuse for a comedy. It’s even a sorry excuse for an Adam Sandler comedy. It doesn’t know what it wants to be or what it should be about, which I suppose could have been forgivable had it been at all funny.

Sandler plays the unmessable Zohan, a Mossad fighting machine who fakes his death and escapes to America to become a hair stylist. Soon, Zohan is working in a salon, and he becomes a neighborhood legend because he shtups his elderly female clients in the back room.

Some stupid storylines converge: Zohan strikes romance with the pretty Palestinan girl who owns the salon; he goes mano a mano with his nemesis, a terrorist called the Phantom (John Turturro); political turmoil between the local Israelis and Palestinians comes to a head; and an Evil Land Developer plots to bulldoze the salon and replace it with a shopping mall.

The screenplay is stylistically befuddled, and that it is credited to three talented writers (Sandler, Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow) is both enlightening and inexcusable—enlightening because it explains the origins of the film’s few fleeting moments of wit, inexcusable because all three men are smarter and funnier than this material suggests.
Grade: D