I am Legend

I thought I liked this movie about as much as everyone else in the theater with me, but then when I began reading other reviews online, I felt like I was much more attentive than other critics.

One asked, "Why is Will Smith creating a vaccine if he is the only person alive? Is it for himself?"
NO!!! Didn't you hear that he is already immune?! Jesus! Pay attention!

Another noted an apparent discrepancy between a comment Will Smith makes about the social de-evolution of the vampires, and the subsequent events in the film. They read this as sloppiness, but OBVIOUSLY it is hamartia. Bone up on your Greek tragedy, man!

You may have heard that this film does not end well. That is true. But let us compare it to the outrageously ham-fisted Christ imagery that ends The Omega Man, an earlier film version of the same sci-fi novel. Charlton Heston, in the other two films of his big trio of dystopian films, Soilent Green and Planet of the Apes, really mastered the Anagnorisis or recognition scene: "Soilent Green is PEOPLE!" and "YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!" The Omega Man, on the other hand, ends ridiculously and badly, with Heston in total crucifix-mode, making a claim for its own importance that was blown from the first time the groovy white-afro'd subterranean medieval nocturnal evildoers show up.

Actually, the vampires in I am Legend aren't so hot, either, once you can actually see them. But for the first hour of the movie, where they are lurking in the dark, the movie is pretty fucking scary. Not the least reason for the film's success is in turning ubiquitous movie location, New York City, into a terrifying place for all sorts of reasons other than those that make New York actually kind of a terrifying place.

So, I hardly breathed during the first hour of this film, and there are no cheesy fake-out parts where, instead of something scary happening---oh, it was just something innocuous accompanied by the audio cues for scariness. In this movie, it's never, "I thought it was a monster but it was just my friend coming over unannounced and not knocking." And it is genuinely frightening. So, kudos.

I'll conclude by saying that, again showing how seriously I took this film, that I engaged in some "deep thoughts" during its running time. Why not kill oneself? How does one live without other people? What is the meaning of life? Is it just in routine? or in some of the other motives on offer here? So, that's embarrassing for me, but I put it forth as a recommendation that this movie at least partially justifies some attention and involvement from the viewer, which was not a given for the new Will Smith sci-fi vehicle.

The Savages

I have spent some time wondering if The Savages is a "post-Wes Anderson" film or not. You know what I mean: Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, Garden State, The Squid and the Whale, You Me and Everyone We Know. Although I saw the trailer for this film when I saw the new Wes Anderson film, and although there are some factors arguing for its inclusion in this dubious genre (dubious in more than one way), I have to conclude that The Savages is a more typical "indie" film than all of that.

What do I mean by a typical indie movie? Hokey title sequence? pretentious soundtrack? middle class white intellectuals for characters? impressed with its own cleverness? Yeah, that about covers it.

I tend to like or dislike movies based on how many false moments they have--and this had quite a few. Many of these faux pas could be located in the movie's superiority towards the pettiness and inanity of the world outside of "ours": support groups, nursing homes, office culture, tv commericals, fitness videos, college students, etc. While the experience of stepping into the world can often be profoundly embarrassing, I don't know that I find New Yorker-reading, angsty middle-aged, cold-blooded bourgeois any less embarrassing. The Savages is at its best when it realizes this, presenting John and Wendy Savage as unpleasant, small, people with whom we can only follow warily. This pair of bickering siblings is one pole of a dialectic; the other pole is an obnoxious world filled with death. The movie works best when that dialectic is re-located in the Wendy-John relationship, because the "educated, clever New Yorkers vs. the cheapness of the world" theme drops out, or is more subtly manifested in the personal relation.

The Savages never comes up with a plot, and so at 113 minutes it is exactly 23 minutes too long. I laughed, but I did not cry.

2007 in Film + some words of greeting

1. No Country For Old Men
2. Superbad
3. Eastern Promises
4. Grindhouse
5. Zodiac

Honorable Mentions:
American Gangster
No End in Sight

* * * *

As one gets older, the blogs one has begun and subsequently let lapse loom as so many stale concerns strewn behind one--like passions cooled but still embodied in some t-shirt you stole from that person. "Here was my youth," one thinks...or, more often, "Was I really like that? Did I think those things?"

This is a new blog about movies.