A Defamer operative was kind enough to forward us his Arclight eNewsletter, and noticed that the prestige cineplex's snobby Classifications Committee has deemed the R-Rated M. Night Shyamalan's *SPOILER ALERT* eco- *END SPOILER ALERT* thriller The Happening a "comedy." We find this new trend beyond distressing, as studios and theater-owners are now taking it upon themselves to accelerate the crucial window that evolves a truly awful movie to camp-classic status. Clearly, there's too much revenue at stake from cutting-edge new upstarts like the Flopz channel to merely let the audience sort the so-bad-it's-bads from the so-bad-it's-goods. [Arclight Cinemas]

Welcome back to Defamer Attractions, your guide to the latest surges and scourges among this weekend's new movies. After a fairly predictable go of things last week, we face a pair of high-profile releases that couldn't be further apart in their critical and commercial futures, a nifty and thoroughly unnerving art-house project (hint: wheelchair sex) and a surplus of worthwhile DVD debuts for the shut-ins among us. As always, our opinions are our own and, of course, exceedingly tasteful and accurate. We are always looking out for you!

Call it a midlife crisis, queasiness or just sheer boredom, but good soldier Mark Wahlberg may have finally reached his leading-man saturation point with The Happening. It was bad enough that the gossips attribute his persistent new jitters to his work with "that scary motherfucker Manoj" Night Shyamalan, or that the actor fled Tuesday's premiere and afterparty to watch his Celtics battle the Lakers in the NBA Finals. But no on-screen spookiness could prepare him for the terrifying onslaught of questions about his past with the Funky Bunch:

ManojWatch has been underway at Defamer long enough to know that the director's latest, The Happening, faces a bit of an uphill climb when it reaches theaters at last this Friday. But while previously we'd only had one anonymous review and a pair of introspective pre-mortems with the "press-shy" Shyamalan — the latest appearing yesterday in the LA Times — the film officially screened for press for the first time on Sunday evening. Naturally 20th Century Fox lost our invitation (and thus, we suppose, instructions for a review embargo — we'll never know!) in the mail, but we heard from a reviewer who was there and has new word on Manoj's Folly:

Whether it's the work of just one Manosh-targeting vandal or a number of copycat subway saboteurs, the one thing we know about The Happening adbusting is that we find it fucking hilarious. After New York public transit patrons were left wondering what twist and turns lay at the end of The Penis (spoiler alert: balls!), they now have a whole new slew of questions regarding a Friday the 13th release called, chillingly, The Crapening. [copyranter]

Lest you thought that literally everyone with access to a modem was piling on the ever-accelerating M. Night Shyamalan/Happening Backlash-Wagon, we have found one defender of the faith — one deeply committed Shyamaphile whose allegiance to the beleaguered filmmaker manifests itself today in a pro-Manoj screed so penetrating it could cut glass. Or maybe lick the glass. But don't take our word for it; after the jump, Brad Brevet has what may be the final word on the myriad misunderstandings trailing The Happening to its June 13 release.

With the exception of Iron Man, the quality of the '08 summer movie vintage has been more than a little underwhelming. While we await salvation (we hope) in the form of July entries The Dark Knight and Tropic Thunder, a glance at the latest downbeat buzz on a few other key offerings has us thinking it might be a long June.

Antipathy toward Manoj Night Shyamalan was easy after Lady in the Water, but the slip-sliding trajectory of his upcoming eco-thriller The Happening has our hearts suddenly and surprisingly enlarged with pity. After a while, there's only so much you can hold against a guy whose actors' line readings are scarier than his plot, who unironically claims he's got something on The Exorcist and whose latest double-shot of bad buzz suggests Shyamalan's days as Genius Autocrat Brat are spiraling to a close. For starters, the flagging Manoj Mystique™ gets the point-counterpoint treatment in today's NY Times:

It's been two surprisingly brisk years since M. Night Shyamalan unleashed his last utterly unwatchable labor of love upon us. That would be Lady in the Water—a project Disney would successfully argue was legitimate grounds for divorce, and that would ultimately go on to teach Warner Bros. a valuable lesson about never making movies about swimming pool mermaids hunted by weredogs with grass fur, regardless of how compelling the pitch sounded in the room. During that time, the highly self-regarded auteur and sometimes-actor has been toiling on yet another secretive project: The Happening.

From last week's revelations about his new "90-minute paranoia film" The Happening to his latest disclosure to USA Today that the movie is "terrifying," M. Night Shyamalan is full of surprises for the first time in years, The concept, that is — not necessarily the execution. And as usual, his enticements have us asking all kinds of questions from the womb-like remove of our Manoj-free sanctum:

It's been nearly two years since we last detected the whimperings of M. Night Shyamalan, who followed Lady in the Water (and the pouty studio exile that preceded it) with a quiet retreat to his shrouded, moated enclave in the Pennsylvania wilderness. But the LA Times's Susan King smoked him out in advance of his return to theaters this summer, reviving the classic Manoj Twist for a readership craving every word:

There are two ways of looking at 20th Century Fox's decision not to air an ad for The Happening during the Super Bowl last night (Ed. Note: teaser trailer removed by the request of 20th Century Fox). The first is that the company made a financially savvy decision by choosing not to blow $2.7 million on a thirty-second advertisement (like all those other studios did). The other is that the studio is feeling a bit gunshy on the financial prospects of Night's first film since the unmitigated disaster that was Lady In The Water. And as for which theory we think holds more water? We're going with the latter.

· Victims of the upfronts II: Pam is down! We repeat, Pam. Is. Down.· (Don't worry, she's going to be OK.)
· The Lede blog rounds up the misguided commercial-to-sitcom projects of the past.
· While a Shrek the Third drinking game sounds mildly diverting, we'd instead recommend that you get so shitfaced at home that you can no longer drive yourself to the theater.
· Paris Hilton: object.
· At the end of M. Night Shyamalan's open house, prospective home-buyers discover that the mansion isn't actually for sale. (The clues, of course, were right in front of their eyes the whole time.)

A funny thing happened to notoriously sensitive Lady in the Water director M. Night Shayamalan after a round of studio meetings about his new spec script, The Happening, ended without the blockbuster sale he expected: Rather than storm out of the disappointing sessions soaked in tears and wracked with doubt, pledging to cooperate with a tell-all book about how the executives wouldn't know Art if it blew them underneath their desks during a conference call, he instead took their notes, rewrote the screenplay, and ultimately reached a deal with Fox to make the movie. Huzzah! Shayamalan's incredible transformation from Difficult Personality to Humble Cog In The Collaborative Process Of Filmmaking is officially complete! Reports Variety on how the project came together:

As we mentioned earlier, the glamorous and insane Sharon Stone and her failed comeback vehicle, Basic Instinct 2, won more awards than any other at the Razzies—the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation's flatulent response to Hollywood's biggest night. Stone picked up Worst Actress, and the film won Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay, and Worst Prequel or Sequel. The Wayans brothers' dwarf-in-a-diaper comedy, Little Man, won two awards: a shared Worst Actor award for the siblings, in addition to Worst Screen Couple (beating out Stone's "lopsided breasts"), and Worst Remake/Rip-Off. M. Night Shyamalan won Worst Director for Lady in the Water, and a Worst Supporting Actor Razzie, for casting himself in the "pivotal role of a writer whose book will one day bring salvation to humanity." The results are somewhat bittersweet, as we were hoping until the very end that there would be a Wicker Man upset, and that the bad movie genius that is Nicolas Cage in a bear suit clocking a coven of honey-hoarding schoolmarmish types would get its proper due. Alas, it was not meant to be.

Mere hours after Fox shocked the world by announcing that director James Cameron had ended a decade of well-publicized indecision by choosing a project called Avatar as his long-awaited follow-up to Titanic, Paramount proudly revealed that it was getting into the M. Night Shyamalan business by hiring the master of gotcha! cinema to adapt a Nickelodeon TV series into a possible movie franchise. The name of this high-profile undertaking? You probably already see where this is going: Avatar: The Last Airbender. The projects have nothing in common except the small matter of their nearly identical titles, but both studios are already claiming sole ownership of the name, according to Var:

· Following in the footsteps of fellow sickly A-lister Jim Carrey, M. Night Shyamalan shitcans his longtime rep at UTA, succumbing to CAA's promises to lovingly suckle him back to health with the career-restorative milk flowing from its pair of demon teats. Details are sure to follow, but we're sure that the sudden dumping occurred at the end of a meeting in which the twist-happy director deceived his former agency into believing he would remain with them forever, no matter how cold his career had become. [Variety]
· AOL is close to poaching NBC TV Group president Randy Falco. Feel free to be utterly titillated or completely uninterested by this executive-shuffling development. [THR]
Variety eulogizes the VHS tape. You will weep openly for the obsolete format that once brought you so much joy, then smash your tape-rewinder in agony over the loss. [Variety]
Astounding numbers of people continue to be interested in Dancing with the Stars, which scores 26.7 million viewers with its last performance show. Additonally, the premiere of William Shatner's gameshow, Show Me the Money, proves decidedly less shat-tastic than its exuberantly shat-punning ads promised. [THR]
The Weinstein Company signs an exclusive four-year video rental deal with Blockbuster, cruelly withholding titles like Bobby and School for Scoundrels from the world's crap-craving Netflix queues. [Variety]

To read the various media accounts of the contents of The Man Who Heard Voices, the biography of M. Night Shyamalan's Christ-like struggle to realize his vision for Lady in the Water in face of opposition from vision-stifling, low carb soup-serving Philistines like erstwhile Buena Vista studio head Nina Jacobson, the tome is an utterly inexhaustible supply of anecdotes illustrating the tragically misunderstood director's insecurity. In a column about "the outbreak of Shyamaladenfreude" following Lady's disappointing™ opening at the box office this weekend, the LAT's Patrick Goldstein spotlights some more illustrations of the insecureteur's congenital neediness:

· In addition to revolutionizing the field of network color coordination with its dazzling green, um, everything, The CW is also already doing fine work in the area of hiring hot pages.
· Justin Timberlake admits to "dabbling" in drugs; we admit to "abusing" them to get through his horrible new single.
· And speaking of drugs, we are happy to present director Oliver Stone, who never met a hallucinogen he didn't like.
· M. Night Shyamalan opens mouth, sounds like hypersensitive jackass: "What I've watched in other careers is that when there's an early success that was not preordained—it just happened, you know?—there's a long period of earning that respect. And so there's a great suspicion that hangs over you for a long time. With the media, I'm saying. You know what I mean? And so they're like, 'No, he's not the real thing. He's not the real thing.' You know, maybe one day when I'm an old man they'll be like, 'All right.' But maybe they won't. Maybe they won't, you know?"
· The onset of World War III really fucked up Macaulay's vacation.

The NY Times' Janet Maslin reviews The Man Who Heard Voices, the soon-to-be-released hagiography of oppressed, misunderstood auteur M. Night Shyamalan, who somehow survived a creative stoning by Disney Philistine Nina Jacobson and took passion project The Lady in the Water to the more nurturing executives at Warner Bros. We've already heard about Night's infamous Valentine's Day flaying at the the hands of Jacobson, but Maslin highlights a far more appalling indignity visited upon the auteur's loyal assistant: