I've been listening to online streaming comedy all morning. Many comedians over the last five years seem compelled to inject a forced mantra of "America is the greatest country in the world" into their routines. It always seems to have just a little bit of that "the lady doth protest too much," kind of tone to me, like we as a country are trying to convince ourselves of something that's not quite true. You know, like when you try to convince yourself that your haircut isn't that bad when you just dropped 40 bucks on something that looks like the barber went to town on your scalp with a machete. You don't want to admit that you got ripped off, but you did. Anyway, I had just about had it up to here with this phenomenon when my supervisor sent me a link to this:




http://www.tankchair.com/default.htm

I take it all back. The comedians were right.

In the wake of the New Hampshire primary, where several precincts nearly ran out of ballots (the powers that be had budgeted enough ballots for approximately 62% of the electorate), it seems that the most definitive conclusion one can draw is this: the Bush administration's lasting legacy may in fact end up being that it was the most effective voter registration drive of all time.

*end snarkmission*

To ring in the new year, I finally got around to seeing "I am Legend." I read the original novel when I was but knee-high to a grasshopper and it blew me away. The key to the whole thing lay in the ending, in the granddaddy-long-legs of all Twilight Zone-style twists, from which the book derived its very title. This latest adaptation of Richard Matheson's book foregoes the revelation that was the heart of the novel – but through an elaborate system of tubes, wires, paperclips, and spare bottlecaps, it manages to construct a new heart for itself. Unfortunately, that one implodes about twenty minutes before the end of the film.

If I may digress for a minute, why do filmmakers insist on toying with the premise they're adapting? I know this is a common gripe, but I'm feeling gripey. I'm a huge proponent of adaptors not being slaves to source material – if the medium is different, concessions must be made – but why mess with the core of a property? The Spider-Man movies were effective adaptations: Peter Parker still gets bitten by a spider, but the spider's mutation was updated to be genetic in nature rather than atomic. The Hulk movie, on the other hand, completely missed the mark. Yes, Bruce Banner has daddy issues, but that's only background to the real tragedy of the character: someone who can only gain control over his life by completely losing control over himself. Banner is lonely; the Hulk merely wants to be left alone. It's an existential paradox that Ang Lee's film boils down to the Pop Psych 101 equivalent of "Daddy never loved me." And then addresses the issue straight on, bluntly, by throwing in the ridiculously soap-operatic introduction of Banner's dad as a physical presence. Anyone who's even seen "Jaws" or "Alien" can tell you that a monster's absence can be equally or even more effective a narrative device than its presence (and now add "I Am Legend" to the list of films that use this technique extraordinarily well, but I'll get to that in a minute). To say nothing of the complete loss of the original origin, the seminal core of the mythology: Banner saving young Rick Jones from a weapon of his own devising, and then paying a horrible price. That's Stan Lee/ Marvel storytelling, and after having been retold to comics' reader for almost 50 years, it's taken on nigh-Shakespearean overtones. There's no reason to do away with something so operatic and nearly poetic. Some slight retooling, maybe. But getting rid of it altogether? No wonder people didn't connect with the film. Hopefully the new movie will be less head and more gut; it may not be as artsy as an Ang Lee movie, what with Louis Letterier of "Transporter" fame behind the camera, but it may well be more true to Stan the Man's pulpy, angsty, melodramatic source material than anything an Oscar-winning director is likely to pump out. Only time will tell.

All this is to say, essentially, that if the book "I Am Legend," was a joke, then Akiva Goldsman, Francis Lawrence, and Will Smith, et. al, have retold it without its punchline. Imagine if the film version of "The Aristocrats" had kept the same title, but all the comedians in the film ended their versions of the joke with the phrase, "The moneyed elite!" On the surface, it's a similar sentiment, but the connotation, the core, is completely different. As I mentioned before, though, right up until the whole punchline fiasco, this version of "I Am Legend" finds a rhythm and a heart all its own.
This movie does what all great actors do to create great performances: it commits. It establishes a world, and doesn't stray outside of that world, right up until the third act. And it is a haunting world. A Manhattan completely devoid of life, save for Smith as virologist Dr. Robert Neville, his dog Sam, and a few choice pigeons. The film draws you in immediately, establishing that this post-Apocalyptic world is one where survival is the only thing that counts. The film literally goes from 0-60 in the first few minutes, as Neville tears through downtown New York in a cherry Mustang – and I mean tears. He drives fast and recklessly, careening thought the city's concrete canyons, nearly colliding with several roadblocks and other immobile objects. You get two messages right off the bat: first, he can drive like this, because there's no one to stop him, and second, he does drive like this because he is an angry, lonely man, trying to outrun something, or maybe just trying desperately to feel something.

He soon spots a herd of deer, bounding through the labyrinth of abandoned cars and empty streets. With Sam by his side, he gives high-speed chase, again nearly crashing several times. He ultimately tracks his quarry on foot, only to have it snatched away at the last moment by a lightning-quick lioness, followed closely by her mate and cub. This is the world now. Neville is like the animals, just trying to survive. The scene establishes the world and the stakes nicely. Plus it gets your pulse pounding right away, something very important in what is essentially a very slow, very quiet movie. Not much happens in this film, but throwing this sequence at the front makes you want to see what comes next. It poses the question: will he survive?

It also introduces a feeling that permeates the film and makes all that slowness bearable – or rather, nearly unbearable: tension. Someone may have written this somewhere before, but if not, I'm writing it now: suspense is the inevitable not happening. You know something is coming, but it just refuses to actually happen. You're left with a horrific, Cassandra-like vision, having knowledge of the future and being able to absolutely zilch about it. "I Am Legend" does a superb job of letting you know just how terrible the things in the darkness are, and then it keeps them in the darkness… literally. Just as you're convinced Neville's going to ram that car into the side of a building at any second, you're convinced that something in the city is going to come to life and get him, even in a place and time when he's supposedly safe. It's the feeling of being a kid afraid of the monster in the closet. You know it's there, waiting, even though all evidence points to the contrary. This movie is about 70 minutes of that, with a few noteworthy events scattered throughout.

You come to learn, however, that even these seemingly exciting moments are routine, like the capture of one of the zombie-like creatures that used to be human beings; Neville has caught and experimented on them before in an effort to find a cure for the plague that has zombie-fied them. His life is routine, even - or perhaps especially - the horrifying parts. But his routine lets him survive. Smith has a couple of nice pieces of barely perceptible business to indicate just how important Neville's habits have become to his sanity. The jars of pasta sauce in the cabinet have to be arranged just so; he berates the dog for not eating vegetables (keep your best and only friend alive, keep him healthy); daily exercise; late in the film, he adjusts a table setting ever so slightly. Touches.

What's unusual about the film is that his routine doesn't get interrupted, the status quo doesn't really change, until almost three quarters of the way through. The change is big, and terrifying, and effective. It's the aftermath of that event where things start to fall apart storywise. The movie violates the rules that it's set for itself: it introduces other people.

And that's the true inevitable; it has to happen. Or something does. Introducing other people is just the most obvious choice: he's alone? Give him other people. See what happens. The problem is that as a character, Neville doesn't need them. He could have found an ending on his own, if given the chance. Amidst all the horror, he is surviving. His character is drawn in such a way that he can't help it. He's a survivor by nature. He is smart, disciplined, adaptable, prepared, and physically honed. He nearly dies as a result of a lack of foresight, but he manages to get out of it by the narrowest of margins. He then makes an enormous, sanity-threatening sacrifice in order to simply survive. You get the sense that he, and the movie, could keep going indefinitely. Just before the film launches into its clumsy final act, it begins to drag. Neville goes through yet another day, surviving. It may be the adaptation's fatal flaw that the very quality in the protagonist that has allowed him to continue to exist in this environment is the same one that makes him begin to grow dull about two thirds of the way through, and necessitates the shift in status quo that asses up the last third. The biggest injury this film does itself is offering him a way out that is so conventional and artificial that it completely violates the intimacy the film has engendered for the last hour or so. Bottom line? This movie is about 25 minutes shy of being a classic thriller, and a classic genre film.

In the end, the filmmakers manage to sandwich in the title in yet another clunky, ham-fisted story move. Spoilers ahead: The book ended with the vampires (the movie has no vampires, but doesn't suffer for it. It can even be forgiven the Van Helsing-esque CG zombies it does have) telling stories to their vampire kids about a mysterious and horrible "man who walks only by day," who doesn't drink blood, and is only out to kill them. It simply twists the vampire myth around, making Neville the human version of Dracula. That was the heart of it. Simple, maybe, but horrendously effective. That's why he's a legend in the book. The natural as supernatural. The norm as the aberration.

In the current film version, Neville becomes a legend, but he does so by saving the day. Fine. It works. But freakin' boring. That's what I mean about sticking to the premise: if that original ending was crap, then ditch it. But it rocks. And it made the book what it was. That was the core of it. The movie even starts to move in the right direction, as Neville somberly concludes that the zombies are nothing more than animals, and then they go and plan a trap for him. They even have a leader, which indicates the beginnings of a social structure. But the movie scraps all that in favor of deus ex machina convenience and a bunch of explosions. Now, I'm not saying scrap the explosions. I'm just saying, throw that badass mindfuck of a switcheroo in there, and you've got yourself a "Planet of the Apes"-level gutpunch of ending. Oh well. Maybe next time.

Let the review parade continue with this quickie I punched up for Flixster on Facebook, concerning the strange case of one Sweeney Todd, Demon Barber of Fleet Street:

I may simply be too accustomed to movie formulae for this sucker to have been wholly satisfying. It is Burton, Depp and Carter at the top of their respective games (Carter's voice is fragile and tinny, but it suits the role and the film), but somethi...(read more)ng is still lacking. While the Burton, et. al, committed to adapting the musical, the may not have committed enough. The pacing is stop and go, something that may work on stage or in a novel, but here feels like the movie is hiccuping and has about two too many stories too tell. In the same vein, the coincidence of characters convening in one place at one time is something that works on stage, but here feels contrived. I enjoyed the hell out this on every superficial level, but left feeling unsatisfied. It's gory, demented fun, but I ultimately put it up on the shelf next to "The Golden Compass" as a film with all the right pieces, but without the proper placement. It doesn't help that only the main story is wrapped up, and at least one other plotline is left dangling in the wind with nary a denouement. 3 stars (out of four).

I've got four days off around this whole holiday/winter festival thing that we're fast approaching right now, so it seemed like a good time for me and Sara to catch up on the ever growing list of films that we haven't had a chance to see due to mitigating annoyances like work, grocery shopping and sleeping.

The spree started Friday night at what is, for my money, Atlanta's best movie theater, the Landmark Midtown. It's not state of the art, and the actual individual viewing rooms are a little run down, but you can purchase beer and wine coolers at the concession stand, as well as huge, brick-like brownies and blondies. The whole place has a homey feel, not to mention amusing postings on the box office window. For instance: written in multicolored sharpie on an unlined notecard: There are no student discounts on weekends, but we know you'll always make us proud anyway. Or something to that effect. The theater has a sense of humor. I like that in my large, inanimate buildings that smell like popcorn.

We went to catch the 7:30 showing of Juno on Friday, the first day it was open here. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE in the ticket line was either buying tickets to Juno or talking about the movie. This sucker is the word of mouth king… or maybe queen would be more appropriate. It's doing incredible business for a small little indie-type (but not actually indie…Fox Searchlight, I believe?) film. Diablo Cody, the screenwriter, is the first overnight celebrity screenwriter I've ever heard of. Kevin Williamson might come close, but I'm pretty sure he was writing before Scream hit, and Charlie Kaufmann was writing for years before he and Spike Jonze hooked up for being John Malkovich. So, does Diablo Cody deserve her rapid propulsion to the behind-the-scenes elite of Hollywood?

Short answer: Hells yeah. In truth, I teetered on the edge of being annoyed by the script's self-conscious hipsterism for about the first third of the film. Cody overuses the slang stylization that makes the dialogue unique. For the most part, it works for the teenage characters in the film, but, for about the first thirty minutes, the problem is that every character speaks in the same pidgin txtmsg/IM dialect. Chief offender would be the Rainn Wilson drugstore clerk cameo in the second scene in the film. It takes a while for his aggressive "I'm a dork but I use the word 'homeskillet' with a straight face" performance to work its way out of your consciousness. Once the script becomes more concerned with developing the characters and their relationships than it is with showboaty, cutesy language, it hits its stride. The stylization sticks around, but it is whittled down to a less oppressive volume.

The script, however, is only the jumping off point for a movie that will undoubtedly become a generational touchstone. The interesting thing is that this is a movie that is going to appeal to at least two generations: people in their teen years now, and people approximately Diablo Cody's age, who will still appreciate the film's protagonist shouting "Thundercats are go!" at a truly unique moment.

 What makes this an absolutely wonderful film is a kind of perfect storm of creativity. You often hear various show-biz types talking about how filmmaking is such a collaborative process. In most cases, the marketing of films is hung so much on a star, a director, or in rare cases a single producer (Bruckheimer) or writer (Williamson, Kaufmann), that all that lovey-dovey talk of collaboration seems like so much horse puckey. That's not the case here. Yes, Ellen Page is phenomenal, and I had to fight myself from stopping at the B-Buster on the way home to rent Hard Candy. But she's not alone. I left this movie wanting to sit down and have dinner with J.K.Simmons – granted, I've wanted to do that after the release of each Spider-Man film, as well. Allison Janney is spot-on as Juno's stepmother – mostly liberal and unbelievably forgiving and understanding, but not above pulling out the maternal lioness claws in defense of her adoptive daughter when the titular step-offspring is offhandedly insulted by a mouthy ultrasound tech. And both Michael Blu…Damn, I mean Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner turn in truthful, nuanced performances as characters that are essentially archetypes: the fallow mother with the rapidly ticking biological clock and the boy in a man's body. And of course, there's Michael Cera, who turns every second of screentime they give him into bittersweet, earnest, awkward deadpan comedy gold. I'd like to see him stretch his range eventually, as he's still basically being himself/George Michael Bluth. This is only his second feature out of the gate, though, and he's pretty much redefining both teenage comedy and cinematic adolescence every time. It may be the same character subjected to different circumstances, but that character is so engaging and endearing it's hard to have a problem with it this early on.

And topping off this hot fudge sundae of talent is the understated direction of Jason Reitman. He basically gets out of his cast's way and lets them have at a smart, funny script. I wanted to like "Thank You for Smoking" a lot more than I actually did, but with this flick, Reitman is fast establishing himself as the crown prince of subtle deadpan comedy in feature films.

I've run into a lot of hype about this movie, and very little of it has focused on the morality of a high school student getting pregnant. I have a feeling that this is because the movie itself doesn't spend a lot of time dealing with it.  It doesn't approve or disapprove of the main character. Her excuse for getting pregnant is that she was "bored." This is not a film concerned with "is Juno good or bad for having sex and getting pregnant?" The story would rather explore the fallout of the act and let the audience judge for itself. Ultimately, it's a coming of age story. And what better way, from a dramatic standpoint, to draw the line between being a kid and being an adult, than to introduce a pregnancy? But Cody doesn't stop there. By investigating all the people around Juno, her script surpasses being a mere coming of age drama and turns itself into a commentary on maturity and immaturity in a more far-reaching sense. And on top of all that, the movie is funny. By the time it was half-over, I turned to Sara and said that we'd have to come back for a second viewing to miss all the throwaway lines that were drowned out by laughter. And in the modern-day world of the Apatow comedy, it's nice to get a slightly different take on the awkwardness and hilarity of growing up, particularly from a female (if super-tomboyish) voice. Oh yeah, there's a bitchin' soundtrack to boot.

This is a bit late at this point, but what the hell?  My wife and I went to see an utterly unpublicized advance screening at a local AMC theater here in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago, the week before it went into wide release. She has read the entire "His Dark Materials" trilogy (quite recently), while I haven't. I'm just about done with an M.F.A in animation, so I mostly wanted to see the WarBears (not their proper name, I know, but it still kind of has a ring to it, doesn't it?), but her eyes burst out of her skull when I found the single showing listed on Fandango. Was the movie worth my wife's ocular rupture? 

The short answer is no. This film would not justify any amount of bodily pain beyond uncomfortable gas produced by stale movie-theater popcorn. However, I'm far from sorry I saw it. It was generally enjoyable and harmless. I left the theater both liking the story, the film, and all the characters, and yet not truly caring about any of them. 

The movie has a lot going for it. Top notch production design (the Armored Bears, the SpyFlies and the Airships are all gorgeous), decent script, near-perfect casting, and excellent performances. Just when I think I can't take one more mustachioed instant of perennial cowpoke Sam Elliot, he pulls me back in. 

I've never totally bought into the mystique of Nicole Kidman v2.0, a.k.a. Post-Cruise. She's like the Hillary Clinton of acting for me. Technically fine, but with the exception of "The Hours," and "The Others," there's just no heart. Even when I can tell she's doing a decent job, it seems like she's miscast to me. I just saw her in another villainous, although much more complex, role in Noah Baumbach's "Margot at the Wedding." Again, she does a fine job, but I just didn't buy it. Even Jack Black seemed more suited to the material. 

But I digress. In "Golden Compass," she is perfect. Cold and sly and chilling and brittle and devious. Philip Pullman has said he imagined her in the role even as he was writing it (which seems like maybe a bit of a stretch, since I'm pretty sure he was writing it back when she was making movies like "Far and Away" and "Malice").

Dakota Blue Fanni…I mean, Richards, is spot on as the spunky, defiant "Chosen Child" that drives this thing forward. She embodies what "girl power" should always have been about, instead of what The Spice Girls turned it into. Although the device of "the child whose coming was foretold in the obscure prophecy" is showing signs of wear and tear, Lyra Belacqua manages to gracefully and all-but-miraculously keep it from jumping the shark.

Two of the best performances are not seen, but rather heard. Both Chris Weitz and Newsweek seem to think that the producers' decision to include Ian McKellen in yet another franchise film targeted at an audience half a century younger than the man himself may be too much of a good thing. But McKellen's performance as Iorek Byrnison, the outcast IceBear, is a testament to what a fine actor he truly is. Yes, it is fundamentally the same voice the as Gandalf the Grey, in that both voices emanate from the same physical pair of vocal cords. The similarity ends there. McKellen has modulated that voice, making it harder, rougher, angrier. Where Gandalf's authority was fatherly (kind, but capable of making you feel six inches tall), the authority that pours from Iorek's throat is regal, at once both proud and desperate. Where Gandalf scolded, Iorek roars. The other vocal performance that's notable -- if for no other reason than I barely noticed it due to its subtlety and naturalism -- is Freddie Highmore as Lyra's daemon, Pan. Credit here goes to the animators, as well. Pan is an omnipresent, adorable animal sidekick who serves as the voice of Lyra's doubts and conscience, and he never once becomes grating or annoying. You actually feel something for the character besides a twinge of nausea at the merchandising possibilities his presence creates. He is funny, sympathetic and unobtrusive…the highest compliment I can give an animal sidekick.

Where the film fails, ultimately, is its running time. This screening started at roughly 7:05. We were out of the theater by ten to 9.  The movie jumps from event to event to event, with very little time to allow the audience, or any of the characters, to really consider what the consequences any of those events might really mean. There is a moment in the film, towards the end, that should be nightmarishly heartbreaking, and it simply isn't. It is the single worst thing that can happen to a child in this universe, and while the scene has all the trappings it should have, something is missing, and I think that something is time.

The movie never catches its breath. The filmmakers are so concerned with getting everything that happens in the book onscreen, that we don't get to feel much of the significance of all these happenings. It's as though you were on your way to your grandmother's funeral and on the way out the door, your mother took your favorite teddy bear from your hands and threw it in a dumpster, but you didn't have time to worry about that, because as soon as you got into your station wagon, winged harpies swooped down from the heavens and carried the car off into the sky with you still inside, but you managed to climb out the window onto the roof, defeat each of the harpies in hand to hand combat, and jury-rig the car's airbags into a makeshift parachute to let the vehicle float gently back down to earth. After all that, who the hell cares about a goddamn teddy bear? Or your grandmother, for that matter?

What I'm trying to say is that the film could have used a few more quiet moments to let all the relationships build, so that when those relationships change, it seems out of the ordinary. Everything moves so fast in this movie that you end up feeling like that's how things always are, so it's not such a big deal. The event-event-event structure has a desensitizing effect. I found myself wondering how much of the pacing is due to studio edits. There is one cut that is ridiculously obvious, and that I am reasonably certain was not the director's intention. It will be interesting to see if a director's cut gives some of the scenes more time to breathe, especially toward the beginning. This is the first movie in a long time, and probably the first fantasy film ever, that I think needed footage added to it instead of taken away. All the pieces and players were in place, but ultimately the pacing and editing take what should have been a home run and turn it into merely a solid hit.

My cat Lola wandered in front of my webcam the other day. This is the result.




This is the sort of thing that gives blogs a bad name, isn't it? *shaves head in shame*

The funny part is how many frames I wasted while she was just staring out the window, completely still. I edited that sequence out. Look for it on the DVD, though. HiiiiiiiiiiiYAH!

Thank God. It's been far too long since a bizarre, previously unknown life form has blipped up on my radar. Check this sucker out.







Apparently, Indonesia is full of Fire Swamps. Who said no news is good news?

For the full article, check out

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/12/17/giant.rat.ap/index.html

Brrilliunce

I went to the BP around the corner from our apartment complex this morning to get some coffee. There was a pad of official entry forms by the checkout window, and an official entry box right behind them. There was, however, absolutely no indication of what the forms were form, what contest one could enter by filling one out. Neither the form or the box had any kind of logo, or showed any evidence of sponsorship, or possible rewards for participation. The box was plain white cardboard. The entry forms, printed on paper one step above newsprint, used a playful, gray font, and there was a space on them for both a child's name and the name of said child's guardian. Presumably the mystery contest is directed at kids. But we may never know.

Now, I wouldn't call myself a connoisseur of the absurd and the surreal - I've seen Dali"s paintings, but never studied much about the man or his thinking (or his moustache), and I've read Albee, but only Zoo Story and The American Dream - but I am certainly an enthusiast for the non sequitirial bizarre. As such, this incident made sure that my day started with not only coffee, but a big fat smile. I'm thinking about entering. I would encourage you all to do the same.