Andrew’s Idea

I’m doing this because of Andrew. And also because it was a decent idea; we’ll see how it plays out. He suggested doing this to record thoughts and communicate about movies (or “film,” or “cinema” – for the pretentious). So I may as well get started by mentioning what I saw last night. It was “I Am Legend.” I figure, this is an excellent choice to start out with, because it’s exactly the kind of movie that embodies what this blog will hopefully NOT be about. By writing about it first, I will desperately want to write more entries in order to bury this embarrassment in the archives. That’s harsh. It wasn’t that bad. But as a wannabe-snob (self-trained, even), I want to have all of those offbeat, foreign “films” on here that make people go, “Whoa, I haven’t heard of that and can’t pronounce it. It’s probably good, but I could never have the patience to sit down and watch it.”

Anyhoo, I Am Legend. Haven’t seen Omega Men (Man?), but it’s supposedly pretty similar. Mr. Smith did his best to be as antisocial as anyone who hadn’t had contact with anyone but his girldog for three years or so. I think this was pretty formulaic. Nothing too surprising. Went for moments of stressful suspense, fairly effectively. At the risk of sounding cheap or kind of, I don’t know, overly 21st-century-entertain-me-or-I’m-outta-here, nothing really happened in the first 1/3 or so. The idea was to create the feeling of monotony in the character’s life. It’s the same thing every day. He’s super-established in his life and knows what to do. The flashback sequences serve a few purposes. (1) They let the viewers into the character’s head. (2) They give some background to the inquisitive as to how everything went down (the sewers). And (3), they gave you a break from the monotony of his solitary routine. Even with the flashbacks, however, I thought how little I would probably want to watch the movie again. It wasn’t so slow that it was uninteresting. But it was hollow enough that, once you found out what was going on, you wouldn’t want to watch it again because there would really be nothing else to see.

The rest of the movie went shockingly fast, then ended. Multiple groans were heard in the theater when the credits rolled; confused groans. You couldn’t help but chuckle at that. Some rather explicit christ-imagery in the movie, too. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill Where’s Jesus (that not-so-subtle spin on Where’s Waldo). There were a few allusions that you couldn’t miss. And then, if you missed them, there was overt dialogue to spell it out. Nothing profound, but it was at least a lot more coherent than “Signs,” that misguided parable of faith.

So that’s it for the first. As this thing prospers and climbs the peaks of blogging success, hopefully so also will my confidence in the project. Until then, you get sentence fragments, half-assed “reviews,” and an overall vibe of reluctance. At this point, no one actually knows that this thing exists, so it feels more like a dear diary thing than a blog. Not sure which is better.