So Chris Orr really doesn’t like The Happening.  No, that doesn’t quite capture it: he glories in how supremely horrible it is.  This is very much in line with other reviews of it that I have read, most of which have been in the vein of “I wonder if Shyamalan will ever find the place where he left his talent?  It’s probably still sittng in some Pennsylvania farm town even as we speak.”  I have to wonder if Shyamalan wasn’t already tempting fate more than a little to have it released on Friday the 13th, but from everything reviewers have said about it there would have been no day auspicious and lucky enough to save this clunker.  I say all of this as a confirmed Shyamalan fan, one of those few people who thought there were a few interesting parts to Signs and who thought that the premise of The Village was mildly interesting.  Shyamalan’s interest in the peculiarities of places and his constant attachment to Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania countryside kept intriguing me even when the stories and the Big Ideas they were supposed to be expressing became increasingly hard to take.  Even after I saw The Village, I kept hoping that there had been some terrible mix-up, but then I saw Lady in the Water and my hope died like a badly-wounded narf in an apartment complex.  The Happening is the result of failing to pay attention to anything anyone said about why Lady in the Water was an awful movie and was also the result of the insistence of “writer-director M. Night Shyamalan” to keep writing his own scripts.  The last few years of following Shyamalan has been like watching the arc of George Lucas’ creative career, but without the really impressive first decade.