I AM LEGEND
(Review)

Emma Thompson destroys the world.
I love it, I love it, I love it! She may have missed out on playing God in Kevin Smith’s Dogma, but boy, she can really bring down the house, can’t she?
In an all-too-brief (and uncredited) cameo, Thompson plays Dr. Alice Krippin, who, in engineering a viral cure for cancer, turns those poor souls unlucky enough not to be Will Smith, into hyper-active, sunlight-fearing CGI constructs.
All this Hollywood insanity can be found in Francis Lawrence’s big budget take on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (by way of the script for the 1971 Charlton Heston-starrer, The Omega Man).

For this latest re-do, megastar Smith is Robert Neville, the last uninfected man in New York. Roaming the overgrown, deserted streets by day with his trusty dog Sam—he’s completely immune to the Krippin Virus, while Sam, like all canines, is immune to the airborne strain—holed up in his nice, well-stocked (and fortified) digs by night, Neville continues to try to find a cure for the virus, some three years after the original outbreak.
Thus, for the most part, I Am Legend asks us to spend about an hour and a half watching Smith do his thing. Fortunately, Smith is an A-lister who can actually act, so that part of the equation is dandy.
Smith’s Neville is likeable enough, his rapport with Sam easy and amiable. Soon though, the cracks begin to show, as, realistically, given his situation, Neville really isn’t all there anymore. It’s interesting to watch him go from a subdued version of his usual Will Smith cinema persona, to a slightly crazed semi-loon complete with mini-meltdowns (the one involving Shrek is probably the most disturbing).
So, given that this is nearly a one-man show, Smith effectively carries his own weight. The script meanwhile—which is based on the ’71 adaptation—by Mark Protosevich (The Cell and the upcoming Thor) and Akiva Goldsman (who may have won an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, but will always be remembered by yours truly as the man responsible for inflicting the script of Batman & Robin upon my delicate sensibilities), smoothly gives Smith leeway to play action hero, obsessed scientist, haunted father, and borderline nutcase, and the man doesn’t miss a beat.
But, like Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf, the problem isn’t so much in the script (though the third act developments may prove a tad too Hollywood for some) as it is in the pixels.

For some reason, director Lawrence chose to forego the use of human actors to play the KV-infected because he wasn’t quite getting what he was looking for in their performances. What that was, I’m not exactly sure: an air of gross artificiality?
The CGI bits are dodgy, and quite frankly, terribly distracting. As a result, you have a film that has some genuinely moving emotional scenes (notably, Neville’s regular midday idylls), but which falls hard and flat when it comes to the sequences that are supposed to be thrilling and tense.
Actually, the only effective thrill sequence comes when Sam inadvertently chases a deer into a dark, apparently abandoned building, and we catch our first glimpses of the infected. The build up, as Neville desperately tries to find the dog without waking the slumbering occupants, is taut, a well-constructed tension that snaps into so many brittle shards when the CGI monsters wake up and give chase.
The things look patently fake, so, knowing that Smith is out there running from and struggling with a bunch of pixels kind of bursts the bubble, you know? (The fact that Dash Mihok—who recently appeared in Pushing Daisies’ “Pigeon” episode—gets third billing as the “Alpha Male,” is truly odd, considering he’s not recognizable beneath the computer-generated, mo-cap sheen, and the performance doesn’t strike me as one that reaches an Andy Serkis-level.)

It’s sad since I Am Legend could have been a legitimate Hollywood portrait of a viral apocalypse, instead of the hobbled, compromised creature that it is.
Anyone looking for white-knuckle, viral apocalypse thrills would do well to look towards the 28 Days/Weeks Later area of zombie cinema. I Am Legend, while certainly better than Lawrence’s previous effort, the lamentable Constantine, may have a beating heart, but it clearly lacks any real, organic teeth to make it a formidable and threatening cinematic construct.*

* Of course, given that I Am Legend has made, at the time of this review’s writing, a staggering US total of $228 million in just 4 weeks of release (that puts it at # 6 on the US Top Ten Films released in 2007, having just edged out The Bourne Ultimatum by a measly million; it’s also raking in the moolah across the globe—as of January 1, it already had a cumulative gross of $126 million, from 25 markets), shows that the film has found an audience, so what do I know?

Parting shot: Reviews of 28 Weeks Later, Beowulf, and Constantine, as well as episodic recaps of Pushing Daisies, can be found in the Archive.

(I Am Legend OS courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com.)

STRANGER THAN FICTION (Review)

Having missed Marc Forster’s Monster’s Ball, I’ve since kept my eye on his emerging body of work, liking Finding Neverland well enough, though feeling it was a tad too much the inspiring Oscar biopic, while Stay was one of the most visually arresting films of 2005, but did have a significantly compromised script.
I’ve been waiting for Forster to find just the right screenplay to finally give us that first great film that I feel lies within him.
That screenplay is Zach Helm‘s Stranger Than Fiction.

Harold Crick (played by a marvelously restrained Will Ferrell) is an IRS agent whose life is circumscribed by numbers and routine, who suddenly begins to hear a voice that seems to be narrating his life.
Karen Eiffel (the sublime Emma Thompson) is a depressive writer whose next great book, Death and Taxes, is about a decade late. Her publisher has even sent her an assistant, Penny Escher (Queen Latifah), to help finally get the book in.
Karen’s problem: she can’t quite figure out how to kill her main character, Harold Crick.

Stranger Than Fiction is a funny and surprisingly moving examination of life and how we live it, grounded by excellent performances, not just from Ferrell and Thompson, but also from Dustin Hoffman (as Professor Jules Hilbert, a literature professor who Crick approaches for help) and Maggie Gyllenhaal (as Ana Pascal, a baker whom Crick must audit).
Forster casts this film brilliantly, assembling performers who are skilled in both drama and comedy, who are adept in finding poignant honesty even in the lighter, more comedic moments of the story.
And though Thompson is a casting coup (her voice alone is worth the price of admission), the revelation here is far and away Ferrell. Few comedians have the right stuff to pull off drama, and I’d never have guessed Ferrell capable, but here he is, the Everyman thrust into a situation out of the Twilight Zone, and managing to sell the notion well enough to move and elicit tears.
You may be aware of the possibility that Harold is a fictional character, that he may not even be real, but still, you feel for him and his plight. And of course, the post-modern trick here is, Harold is indeed a fiction. Ferrell is playing a fictional character who may actually be a fictional character. Does he not then become truth?
But all the post-modern bits in Stranger Than Fiction aren’t there for the sake of being there, they’re there in service to the narrative, to (among other things) highlight our own questions regarding our lives: who are we, why are we here, are we living a comedy, or a tragedy?

Through Prof. Hilbert, Helm’s script references literary trappings and conventions, using them as a tool to help us understand our lives, an idea which at first may seem dubious, but makes a whole lot of sense, really.
That is, after all, what the best fiction (whether on the page or on the screen) is there for: to illuminate. To make us go, “Oh, yeah. I see that. I get it.”
His script is also able to find the humanity at the core of the humdrum Harold, and give us a character we can identify with and root for. Forster then gets us in Harold’s corner from the word “Go.”

With that visual flair he displayed so masterfully in Stay, Forster sets up a regular day in Harold’s life with onscreen graphics reminiscent of some sections of David Fincher’s Fight Club. We are there, immersed in Harold’s world, as he counts the number of times he brushes each tooth, or the number of steps he takes to get to the bus stop. He even has what seems to be a sentient watch. (A little bit of apparent whimsy that takes on an ultimate relevance in the final act.)
This isolation and melancholy made bearable by the redundancy of routine resonates because we’ve all been there at one point or another in our lives. Harold is there as a stand-in for each and every one of us who may have thought we were living, but instead were merely coasting, skimming the surface of the potentially rich and singular experience that is our life.
And when Harold first hears the voice apparently narrating his life, it’s funny, yes, but we see the panic there as well, as Harold’s world begins to unravel at its meticulously ordered seams. Like I said, Ferrell sells the Twilight Zone idea.
If Helm’s script finds Harold’s humanity, Ferrell puts it on proud display, reinforcing the idea of the power of fiction, and how that reflects upon our life, how a “mere” story can shape and influence, and hopefully leave us a better person than we were when we started it.

Stranger Than Fiction takes the conceit of films like Life Or Something Like It and Latifah’s own Last Holiday, gives it a postmodern spin, and safely gets it light years away from Movie of the Week territory, proving that we can absorb important life lessons without having to be subjected to cheesy schmaltz out of the Hallmark School of Filmmaking.
It also ultimately reminds us of the grace and beauty of the seemingly insignificant, of the tiny, everyday miracles, and in this day and age which runs on the delusion of “Bigger is better,” that’s always a good thing.