Greetings, all. For the past week or so, issues with the power in my apartment have made using my computer for extended periods of time difficult. As I'm typing this, the light behind me is once again flickering, and I have few doubts that before I finish getting this entry up, the computer will a) cut off, or b) flicker out but not actually cut off, only to flicker back on shortly thereafter.
In short, I cannot trust anything to stay on very long. I rarely interject "real life" garbage into the Blogorium, because this is for writing about movies, not my day to day crap. My landlord is, not surprisingly, dragging his feet on the matter, so in the meantime I have to make the best of when the PC is working.
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What I can do in the meantime is put up another "From the Vaults". Last night's picture project took me the better part of five hours to put together with all the headaches this wiring has been, so forgive me if I simply cut and paste some "classic" Blogorium from the olden days of Myspace or Livejournal. I will return to normal as soon as possible, and hopefully with the promised A Serious Man review you voted for but don't have yet.
In the mean time, here's some old stuff...
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Excursions into the random, the weird, and the mundane:
Someone called into work today asking if we had the new Mel Gibson movie about Presidential Assassination called Vanishing Point.
Can you pick out what's wrong about the caller's question? Here are some hints:
1) Vanishing Point wasn't released recently, and it's about a cross country car chase.
2) Mel Gibson isn't in Vanishing Point or ANY movie involving Presidential Assassination.
3) Mel Gibson is also not in Vantage Point, which does feature said assassination.
4) Vantage Point won't be on dvd until July 1st
5) The Caller is an idiot.
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However, the John Wayne Westerns at Fox boxed set came in. I know this is probably not of interest to many of you, but it does include The Big Trail, which has a very young John Wayne and one other seriously interesting technical tidbit*:
* I'm about to get VERY geeky about cinema. You may not even be interested.
The Big Trail was a very early attempt to create the "widescreen" effect on a film. Twenty five years before The Robe ushered Cinemascope into theatres, The Big Trail was trying something like what Todd-AO Cameras did and present a western on an "epic" scale. For this reason alone, The Big Trail is something I want to check out. I don't know much more about it than that, other than it's a little bit like Stagecoach or How the West was Won.
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65,929 minutes.
1098.8 hours.
45.79 days.
That's the total amount of unwatched film I have here in the Apartment of Solitude.
Mind you, this is just movies; I'm not including television or stand up or mini-series or anything like that. Just movies.
If I didn't sleep at all and took virtually no breaks between viewings, it would take me 46 days to watch everything here I haven't seen yet. That's assuming nothing else is coming in. I didn't even factor in the times for movies I had seen.
To be honest with you, I'm stunned. It's more staggering than even I thought it would be. In order to see as much as possible, I tend to ferret away movies that I want to / feel like I should see with the promise of "we'll get to it some time soon."
I tried to do this earlier this year but got halfway through and accidentally cleared out the calculator. This time, being very careful, it took me two hours to get through everything here in the house. I'm not even going to think about my Netflix queue, which is in the range of another 440 movies I haven't seen. Strictly going by what's at home, I have a
Surprisingly, only a small chunk of it is horror. It is true that I do have a large shelf devoted to nothing but horror movies, but I do tend to pick up things I've seen or have a great deal of interest in. Only occasionally do I pick up random stuff like Garden of the Dead or Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter.
TV-wise, I'm just not willing to think about that. The movie running time is daunting enough, so I'd rather not think about the boxes with running times of 16 hours or more right now. Yeesh.
At any rate, I still have a lot to watch, and even more that I don't have here that I do want to watch. I guess it's good that this is what I want to do with my life, otherwise I'd be wasting 46 days (and then some) alone in a dark room.
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So I watched I Am Legend, and the verdict is...
It’s pretty good.
The main criticisms against the film I’ve read elsewhere are pretty much right on the money: the "infected" people look awful and really fake, there isn’t much of an explanation of how the other two survivors get to Neville, and accordingly the very very end is not to palatable. I’ll address those one by one in a moment, but first I want to talk about what DOES work, because when this movie is on, it’s better than The Last Man on Earth or The Omega Man and might even be as good as the Matheson novella.
The first two thirds of the movie works like gangbusters: we’re immediately immersed in a world that feels real, abandoned, and dangerous. Robert Neville’s daily routine is established in ways that feel organic to the plot and not simply "well, here’s what he’d be doing", and the flashbacks are employed in a useful and logical fashion. In this sense, it’s like The Last Man on Earth but without narration; we see, but don’t need to be told. Neville treats his dog Sam and mannequins he places around town like people, but it never seems stupid or trite. This is just how he copes with being alone.
Big chunks of this have to do with Will Smith. It may not seem like the conventional choice, especially looking at the two films that came before I Am Legend or The Quiet Earth, but I think a lot of people forget that Smith started his film career with Six Degrees of Separation, and that when asked to carry a film based on body language and facial expressions, he’s more than up to the task. Considering that his co-stars are a dog, lots of cg creatures, and much later two other people, he grounds the film and keeps it believable, even when he’s hitting on a mannequin.
When the infected / vampire / hemocyte* creatures are introduced, it’s in a way consistent with the story; they are a constant presence at night, first heard and then later seen, and the threat is very real. There isn’t too much scientific mumbo-jumbo to gum up the works, and director Francis Lawrence mines some real tension out of the first time Neville gets stuck in the dark.
But what I liked more than that was the escalating traps that Neville and the "lead" whatever you call it set for each other. Watching the extended cut, I don’t know how I would’ve read some of the things that happen in the middle of the film if I hadn’t seen the "alternate" ending. It wouldn’t make sense to set the kind of traps they set for Neville if they couldn’t reason, or to systematically take away what was important to Robert the way they do.
Anyway, I don’t want to spoil too much, because I think most of you will find things to like about I Am Legend. I will however give you the heads up about some of the problems I have with the film (which aren’t unique from the looks of it):
1. The infected are all CG. In no way at any point do they look like they’re organic to the world around them, nor do they look like they’re actually occupying the same space as Will Smith. It actually reminded me a little bit of the robots in I, Robot, because they have similar body movements. The problem is that I never once believe these were humans who were infected and mutated. The "infected" dogs were more believable than the people, and for the ending of the movie to really work, you need to buy the antagonists.
2. Early into the flashbacks they establish that all bridges to the island (
3. This is for those of you who saw the "alternate" ending, and already know what happens. Otherwise, please heed the SPOILER warning. At the very end of the film, Neville, Anna, and Ethan have made their peace with the infected and head north to Vermont (apparently the virus can’t survive the cold) and as we hear a new recorded message from Anna, you can see them driving across a bridge that is in NO WAY damaged. After 90-something minutes of seeing and understanding there’s no way in or out of the island, suddenly they just drive off. It doesn’t make sense, and that kind of cheapens the climax of the film.
But truthfully, I think the positives for I Am Legend do outweigh the negatives, and you’re going to enjoy most of the movie, even if it falters a little bit at the end. Oh, and the Bob Marley and Shrek scenes near the end are um, out of place. They aren’t really bad, they just don’t fit in this world.
I Am Legend is a 3 1/2 Stars out of 5 movie, and definitely worth seeing, but I would recommend the "alternate" cut, or whatever is on disc two.
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