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jontreliving
Reviews
I Am Legend (2007)
If you loved the book, this movie will make you very, very angry
It never fails to amaze me how terrified Hollywood studios seem to be of deviating from clichés.
"I Am Legend" by Richard Matheson, the inspiration for a lot of successful horror writers and movie directors (Stephen King and George A. Romero among them), was written in 1954 and could reasonably claim to have set the bar for all post apocalyptic fiction. It was brilliantly realised, and is, for the record, one of my all time favourite books, not least for the amazing revelation at the ending which defines in one shocking and horrifying moment the real truth of the protagonists existence.
53 years after this book was published, they made this movie. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
I had fears that this movie would parallel "I Robot", which was another hammy Will Smith movie that twisted the great story or stories it was based on into predictable Hollywood pap. Sadly, my fears were not to be assuaged.
However, while "I Robot" took a number of Asimov concepts, and made them less than the sum of its parts, "I Am Legend" is a hack job, plain and simple. I criticise this film entirely on the fact that its creators had the sheer chutzpah to borrow the same title from that classic novel, and then alter the storyline out of all recognition. They evidently did not realise why the book was called "I Am Legend" in the first place.
It is a worrying trend, I think, that movie and TV producers think they can use expensive imagery to distract their audiences from pathetic and predictable cliché, when their original source material could have made their movie so much more brave and better. Do they think we are all idiots? Because if that is the case, then my feeling about them is most certainly mutual.
For the record, I like Will Smith in some of his roles (Enemy of the State), but I really wish he would stop accepting roles in movies which shamelessly bowdlerise the original material. Especially material which is very close to my heart. 0/10.
Lancelot du Lac (1974)
85 minutes I will never get back. I mourn them.
I watched this film as part of a degree module on Arthurian legend in my final year of university. Looking back, I now know this is the sort of film made only to torture students of literature and film.
Seven years on, I still remember with clarity the iron force of will I had to bring to bear to sit through the full length.
Having studied Brecht, I know that entertainment need not always be entertaining. Sometimes, Brecht told us, theatre must and can be used as an instrument of social commentary, and employed his famous 'alienation effect' to remove the popcorn munching bourgeois from their comfort zones. Even so, with Brechtian theatre one is moved by emotions other than pleasure, such as anger or a desire to correct a perceived injustice.
What did I take away from this movie, other than a sense of soul-deadening boredom, and a sense of valuable time forever lost? At first, nothing. Nothing at all. It was not only a bad film, it was my first ever experience of anti-cinema, an exercise of such profound arrogance and pomposity as to numb the senses. I felt utterly unmoved in every way. Emotionally. Intellectually. Spiritually.
The anger came later. I was angry that more than a single frame of celluloid had been wasted in the creation of the unpolished lincoln log that is "Lancelot du Lac".
Bresson has done for cinema what L Ron Hubbard's earlier pulp novels did for science fiction (which were at best, embarrassingly amateurish nonsense), yet like Hubbard, he has inexplicably been deified by a small but influential group of people who are under the bizarre impression that he actually had something valuable to contribute to the 'zeitgeist'.
But nonetheless, I still think it should be shown in film schools. Why? I paraphrase a very useful piece of pop wisdom. "Nothing is completely useless. It can always serve as a bad example."