Films

I Am Legend [2007]

Director: Francis Lawrence
Actor: Will Smith, Alice Braga, Charlie Tahan

There’s been quite a bit of talk about this film, which isn’t surprising since it’s a film based on a book, but also because of one particular scene in the film, which I’ll discuss a bit later. First, it used to be a novell by Richard Matheson and there are many different point on which it differs. Having read a synopsis of the book, I can understand how people can consider another case of intellectual property rape in order to create mass appeal, but…that doesn’t mean the film isn’t good, because it is. It’s very good, even.

.: The Film
Robert Nevill (Smith) is a virologist working for the U.S. Army as the so-called Krippin Virus starts an epidemic of global proportions, starting in New York City. The Krippin Virus was a genetically engineered version of the measles, which was used as a very effective cure against cancer. At a certain, unexplained point, the virus mutated and became something akin to Ebola. It’s not made clear in the movie what the effects were exactly, except that people “blead to death.” There’s a short clip of a woman showing early signs of being infected, blood dripping from her tear-ducts. Ninety percent of the people infected died within hours, while others turned into so-called Darkseekers, a cross between vampires and zombies; creatures with an intense physical strength and an overpowering hunger, filled with aggression beyond the point of cognisance. They have an intense aversion and allergy against UV light, which drives them to find shelter during the day and roam free during the night.

Robert is one of the very few people who is immune to the virus, and after living and surviving in New York City he believes he is the only remaining human survivor, while all others are either dead from infection or at the hands of the Darkseekers. He is determined to stay in New York in order to find a cure, to find a way to reverse the effects on the Darkseekers. He uses his own blood as the basis for experiments he conducts on captured Darkseekers, hoping to find a cure. He also hunts and gathers during the day, maintaining his fortress-home and stable of vehicles. Slowly but surely, disillusioned by his failed experiments and loneliness, he goes mad and becomes increasingly suicidal, willing to take incredible risks.

I think the acting is top-notch. Smith delivers a stunning performance of a man who is so starved for human contact that he decorates a video store with mannequins, holds conversations with them, to create the illusion of being among the people. His only contact is his dog, who he holds long conversations with. He also suffers from spells during which he becomes almost catatonic. The thing, however, that Smith manages to portray best is disappointment. Even in little things, disappointment almost seems to wreck him inside. You can see him dying a little every time something goes wrong. Great great great.

Seeing New York City completely empty, in disarray, and overgrown by weeds is just plain creepy. Wildlife has repopulated the city, and deer, birds and predators are running wild. The Holland Tunnel has flooded and the bridges off the island are still collapsed; an act by the U.S. armed forces in order to cut off the island of Manhattan from the rest of the world, hoping to stop the spread of the infection.

.: The Scene (Spoilers)
The scene that’s causing all the debate is about midway through the film, while Robert is hunting. “Hunting” means he’s driving around in one of his cars, hoping to spot some deer. He stumbles upon one of the mannequins that he has stationed just outside of the video store. He always says hello to “Fred” just as he walks inside. He suddenly spots Fred in a completely different spot in the city. He stops the car, gets out, approaches the mannequin, yelling at Fred to talk to him, in order to find out whether or not it’s really him. In the end, he shoots Fred with his rifle. He’s obviously devastated when he realises it really was Fred and not one of the Darkseekers. As he approaches, he’s caught in a trap, almost identical to the one he manufactures to capture the Darkseekers. He loses consciousness as he hits his head on the pavement, and is raised high up in the air, hanging by a his leg, suspended above the ground. He wakes up to the barking of his dog just as the sun is going down, and a Darkseeker alpha male approaches with three infected dogs and set upon Robert and his dog. In that exchange his dog is bitten and infected but they manages to get away. Later, when the dog turns, he has to kill it, and another part of him dies, sending him ever closer to the suicidal edge.

The debate is whether or not Robert set the trap or if the Darkseeker did. The setup of the trap is different than what Robert is used to. He never used a mannequin to set a trap, instead using a vial of his own blood as the bait, as the Darkseekers are attracted to the scent of blood. However, Darkseekers are portrayed as retarded killing machines, having no regard for anything, even their own safety, in their quest to feed. And even though there was a quick appearance of a Darkseeker alpha male that showed heightened resistance to UV, and is also first on the scene when Robert awakens in the trap, I feel that the trap was set by Robert, and that his advanced insanity was the cause for his memory loss.

.: The Novel
The novel shows Robert to be a very average, middle-aged guy, battling alcoholism and depression, who is not trying to find a cure, but is just trying to survive and kill as many vampires as he can. However, while there are vampires, there are also others infected by the virus that are called “the still living,” who are not the same and who retain their cognisance and aren’t just mindlessly in search of food. Robert doesn’t know this because the still living are as afflicted by the strange comatose state that the vampires are in while the sun is out, so he kills the still living and vampires alike. Eventually he is caught by the still living and executed in their newly formed society. It turns out they are terrified of Robert, as he is to them, what vampires were to humans; a myth, a legend. He becomes what he is afraid of. He becomes the legend.

There are a lot of elements in the novel that never make it to the silver screen, and while they did try to turn that aspect of Robert turning into a legend into it – I guess to justify the title of the movie – it doesn’t work well. It would’ve been better if they had found a way to stay a little truer to the original story. However, the ending to the film isn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, just not quite as powerful.

88 Minutes [2007]

Director: Jon Avnet
Actor: Al Pacino, Alicia Witt, Neal McDonough

When I heard about this movie, I wondered why it hadn’t caught my attention before. I mean, seriously, Al Pacino in the lead, how can it not catch my attention, you ask? Oh, it’s easy, make it the worst piece of shit ever, and the first andonly Al Pacino film to be released straight to video. Let me summarise this film in one sentence, because it doesn’t deserve much more than that;

Pacino plays a forensic psychologist – and a pretty succesful one, it seems – who played a key role in putting this serial killer (played very well by McDonough, who is the only redeeming thing about this movie) on death row, and now it seems a copy-cat has it out for Pacino’s character, organising attacks and more killings, while everyone thinks that the death-row guy is innocent, forcing Pacino to dodge bullets and figure out how the serial killer is orchestrating all of it from his jail cell.

Oh; what the fuck is up with Pacino’s hair!?

Eastern Promises [2007]

Director: David Cronenberg
Actor: Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl

I’ve always had a strong interest in the Vory v Zakone, a particularly branch of the Russian organised crime world. The vory have strict rules that they abide by, and they consider prison their home, freedom being a temporary thing. Of course, in reality things don’t really work this way, but the vory did spring forth from prison culture, and their characteristic prison tattoos, while not even half as beautiful as the famous Yakuza tattoos, do tell the tale of your life, and are as important. As a result, when I saw the trailer for this film not so long ago, I knew I wanted to go and see it. Cronenberg, Mortensen and the vory, can’t go wrong, right? :)

The movie is part of a set of movies, starting with A History of Violence, also by Cronenberg, also starring Viggo Mortensen. This film, while different, has a lot of similarities to its predecessor, and should really be seen as two parts of a whole. For instance, where in A History of Violence the seemingly normal, every day man seems to have a touch of violent in him, in Eastern Promises it’s the seemingly violent man that has touches of calm in himself. Anyway…

…Nikolai is a driver for a Russian crime family in London. He is confronted by Anna, a midwife at a hospital who is trying to get in contact with the family of a fourteen year-old girl that died while in labour, in order to bring to them her new-born baby. She has nothing to go on except her diary, which shows that she was a girl smuggled to London under false promises of work, only to be forced into prostitution. The information in the diary is potentially very harmful to the crime family, and the head of the family, Semyon (Mueller-Stahl) asks Nikolai to make sure the information never reaches the police. In the meantime, Nikolai is caught between the degenerating relationship between Semyon and his son Kirill (Cassel).

From all accounts, the main actors in the film, none of who are Russian, manage to speak Russian rather well, and a lot of research was done into the authenticity of the language, customs and mannerisms. Regardless, it’s a great film that I think I might go and see again sometime soon.

Director: Greg Mottola
Actor: Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Bill Hader, Seth Rogen

After American Pie everything changed. It was alright to have really shitty plots and stereotypical charicatures in comedies that were mostly about men trying to get laid. Some of them were funny (Old School, Wedding Crashers), some of them were not. This one was not.

Seth (Hill) and Evan (Cera) are two dorky high school students about to graduate. They are also best friends. Seth is the chubby clown, not too serious about anything but pussy. Evan is a good student, socially a little awkward but a guy who has his head on straight. They’ve been best friends since they were 8 years old, and now, on the eve of their graduation, they decide to try and get laid before hitting college, so that they will have some experience before facing college chicks. A party thrown by a friend of theirs provides them with the right opportunity to get their respective girls drunk enough to sleep with them. They reluctantly team up with their friend Vogel (Mintz-Plasse) who has obtained a fake ID, and goes by the name McLovin most of the movie, in order to buy the alcohol for the party.

From then on the movie finally gets going, but it goes in a bizarre direction. Two cops (Hader and Rogen) with some deeply disturbing emotional problems and personalities that are both incredibly dim as well as frightfully unpredictable, take McLovin on a tour through the city, going from one call to the next, while drinking booze and breaking a lot of laws. All in the name of “fun.”

Blah blah blah. I don’t want to write the rest of this review. There’s a few funny bits, but mostly it’s an annoying film. Sadly, the few funny bits were spaced just so that I thought something might change this film from the Superbad turd it was into something fun. A fun turd, perhaps. It didn’t. Shite!

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford [2007]

Director: Andrew Dominik
Actor: Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Rockwell, Sam Shepard, Paul Schneider, Jeremy Renner, Michael Parks

When Eva told me that this film was good, well-acted, yet long, and could’ve used a few more tits and explosions, I got a little worried. Usually I don’t put too much stock in reviews by others, and I’d rather see it for myself, but when Eva doesn’t want to take the time for an artsy movie then I start to worry a bit. She’s usually the one that wants to see the most pointless of arthouse movies, you know, the Gus van Sant’s of the arthouse flicks. ;)

Anyway, the film was very long, nearly three hours worth, but it didn’t bore me for a moment. The acting is top-fucking-notch, and I think the pace of the movie kind of explains the dreary, desolate existence of that period. It differs quite a bit from the average, Hollywood, action-packed, Michael Bay-type-movies that have been (dis)gracing the screen lately, and there were a few people in the theatre who walked out, but fuck ’em. I was reminded of the time Eva and I went to see Brother, a Takeshi Kitano film. The movie has a Japanese pace, which is different from the Hollywood pace, and oftentimes rather slow. Scenes in which nothing directly important to the story usually frustrate most western viewers, but I love them. It sets the mood and atmosphere really well. A good example of a Hollywood movie that does that is Alien. Hardly any music, no dialogue, and sometimes not even movement. If the movie is good, then I can’t get enough of scenes like that.

Jesse (Pitt) and Frank (Shephard) James are the much feared James brothers, and head the James-gang. The “gang” has fallen apart, some dead, some incarcerated. They now roam from one state and county to the next, hiring local outlaws and rubes to help with their jobs. Frank and Jesse are no longer on real speaking terms, but they work together anyway. Frank is sour-faced and quiet, and Jesse is amicable and popular among the hired help. Frank has no family, and has no connections to the area apart from Jesse, and decides to leave for Chicago. Jesse does have a family, so stays in the area and continues his string of robberies, mostly banks, post offices and trains.

He picks up some local guys for the last job he pulls off with his brother, amongst which are Robert (Affleck) and Charley (Rockwell) Ford, two wannabe outlaws who want to become part of the James-gang. Charley is a likable fellow, though not very smart, but his brother Robert is an intelligent man, though socially very awkward. His fascination with Jesse is obsessive and disconcerting, and while he’s a good help, Jesse is wary of him.

Jesse, without the presence of his older brother who seemed to be the worrier of the two before he left, becomes more and more paranoid. The price on his head is getting higher and higher, and the necessity of hiring outside help because there’s not much of his original gang left, drives him to distrust these people. He sleeps less, behaves erratic, and becomes deeply depressed, and is prone to violence. People fear and respect him because of his legendary status, and act awkward around him because of the potential for violence and the need to impress him. In that awkwardness he spots deceit, and he starts killing some of them. Throughout all of that, Robert is still trying to catch his favour, but is quickly disillusioned and decides to collaborate with the police to bring Jesse down.

Casey Affleck is fantastic in this film. The awkwardness of his character is creepy yet endearing. Pitt is alright, but doesn’t outshine Affleck’s performance, and even Rockwell manages to make his mark on the film, even though he doesn’t get too much opportunity to do so. A good film, but make sure you’ve been to the bathroom and got enough to drink, because you’re in for a long stretch. :)