Mark Wahlberg I am not. Paramount’s new iPhone game app, which the studio boasts is the first true shooter game for the iPhone, puts users into Wahlberg’s role of marksman Bob Lee Swagger in the 2007 film Shooter. The game follows the movie script, but the story line feels more like filler before the real playing, when you’re dropped on the field to shoot and kill enemy snipers.

That’s where Shooter hits its mark. Paramount takes full advantage of not just the iPhone’s touch screen, but also its motion sensors, so players have to tilt the phone to just the right position to aim the rifle and touch the screen to shoot. (Read full story …)

For a movie called “The Happening,” not much happens.

M. Night Shyamalan effectively delivers the usual broody air of foreboding that has been a trademark of his hits (”The Sixth Sense” and “Signs”) and misses (”Lady in the Water” and “Unbreakable”).

And this fear-mongering story of an airborne toxin that causes victims to snuff themselves in nasty ways — shoving hairpins into their throats, hurling themselves en masse off a high rise, the like — induces plenty of seat-squirming. The shock value wears off quickly, though, and writer-director Shyamalan strands us (along with Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel) in an ultimately boring cautionary tale with an infantile eco-message. (Read full story …)