Reviews

Film

The Happening

Directed by M Night Shyamalan, starring Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, Ashlyn Sanchez

The Happening is all too clearly supposed to be a thought-provoker, a conversation-inducer, a film that comes with its own water cooler for you all to gather round and chat excitedly.

The action begins in New York, on a summer's day in Central Park. In among the panoply of ordinariness, people start behaving strangely. Then fatally. The strange behavior begins with the whole city crowd standing stock still, and then very, very slowly starting to walk backwards. It looks like an iPod advert.

At the same moment, in Philadelphia - where the plague is heading, fast - Mark Wahlberg is playing Elliott, a serious high school science teacher, wearing a sleeveless jumper. He is quizzing his intrigued class of teens about recent reports of honeybees disappearing from North America overnight - an ill omen.

Elliott's wife Alma is played by Zooey Deschanel, who gives the most baffling performance of her life. Almost her very first shot is a big close-up showing her face apparently in clinical shock. She staggers around in a daze of bad acting, and the only thing Deschanel looks genuinely frightened by is the silliness of the script.

But even she is not as weird as John Leguizamo, playing another mathematics teacher at Wahlberg's school. Leguizamo looks like a querulous spaniel heading for its final trip to the vet's.

Perhaps Shyamalan wanted to be a 21st-century George A Romero. Instead I'm afraid he is turning into Ed Wood Jr.

Book

The song of the whale

Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound by David Rothenberg

During the cold war, the US government conducted secret research into how sound travels underwater. The Americans were looking for ways to locate enemy submarines, and to hide their own.

While listening to the ocean, the scientists heard low moaning and rumbling noises that they gradually learned to identify (and dismiss) as the sound of "biologicals". By listening to humpback whale songs through hydrophones, they discovered that whales do not keen and moan randomly. The songs - always sung by males - had long-range structures, sometimes lasting for hours.

They were shaped like any good musical composition, with themes, phrases, climaxes, resolution and dying away. Moreover, the songs were repeated after a pause. They seemed to be transmitted to other whales living in the same area who sang them too. Different groups in other oceans had their own distinctive songs. The songs were too long and formal merely to be passing on simple information about females, food or the ocean floor.

Sound in the deep ocean spreads out evenly from its source, making it very difficult to tell where it comes from. And so it is with Rothenberg's style in this erratic but engaging book. He writes now as a philosopher, now as a new age pantheist, now as a jazz clarinettist, and finally as a sober scientist. A musician himself, he considers the whales to be "grooving" in their own dark nightclubs.

Included in the book is a CD of music that he has created around their songs. Most of the tracks use fragments of whale music he has sampled, transposed, speeded up, slowed down and interwoven with his own clarinet playing, which in turn is a sort of respectful mimicking of the barking, keening and tocking noises of the whales.

Best are his live duets with them, recorded by broadcasting clarinet tones into the water. No matter how fine the motive, his interventions often seem an unwelcome dilution of the ancient, haunting noises the whales make when left to their own devices.

In this timely book, Rothenberg warns us that because of motorized shipping and seismic exploration of the ocean floor by oil companies, the seas are getting much noisier. There is evidence that whales are trying to sing louder to make themselves heard. The Guardian

(China Daily 06/17/2008 page20)