I Am Legend

I Am Legend You can’t possibly have missed the marketing for this one. They have been pushing it for a year now. Based on the old sci-fi classic of the same name, Will Smith plays Robert Neville, the last man on earth. The story has been changed and updated to resonate with contemporary society. In this new version (another one came out in 1971—Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston) a major breakthrough having to do with genetically engineered Measles virus has apparently cured cancer. This of course goes bad and kills 90% of the world’s population. 90% of the survivors develop symptoms similar to mega-rabies and kill and eat almost all of the immune. These infected survivors cannot abide ultra-violet light which keeps them in the dark until sundown. Neville (Smith) is one of the few remaining immune. He is an Army Colonel and a genius researcher trying to find a way to stop and reverse the virus. He and a German Shepherd are all that remain of humans (and dogs) in New York, and as far as he knows, the world. (Canines can’t get the airborne strain of the virus, but are susceptible to the physical contact variety, and that’s all I will say about that). The dog is wonderful and should get nominated for best supporting actor. Neville lives a life dedicated to order, organization and constancy, never giving up on his single-minded attempt to cure the infected. His life is solitary but full, as he divides his days into distinct chores, radioing each day in the hopes of finding other survivors, hunting, farming, working in his lab, replenishing supplies, and keeping track of where the infected congregate during the day. It has to be a daunting task to be in every scene of a movie with virtually all the dialog, but Smith is excellent in this picture, showing us new depth and range. The back-story comes to us via flashbacks which work well and are nicely timed. Which means other people are in the film but not for long, until the very end. It’s a good story, and a sensitive look into the mind of a man fighting loneliness and despondency, as well as his own demons and fear of insanity. The special effects are up to snuff, with grand views of a deserted New York City being overrun by nature. The infected creatures are scary but a little uneven in their abilities to reason. Their strength is superhuman of course, but they are killable. And despite the fact that they are technically still alive, they exhibit all the major characteristics of Zombies, which makes the movie that much better. The ending is bittersweet, reminding us of the vagaries of life, the need for sacrifice and the joy of survival. It is rated PG-13. There is no sex, no skin, no cursing. The violence is momentarily intense, but not gratuitous, and not overly graphic. I liked it a lot and recommend it to the action-adventure, blockbuster fan. All you Will Smith fans will enjoy the scene where he is working out and displays a totally ripped physique. He is starting to show a touch of gray around the temples these days and I liked that he didn’t dye it out. Unless the gray was makeup. All in all, a great treat that lived up to its hype and long-awaited release.

The Eagles: Long Road Out of Eden

I flew over to Wal Mart a couple weeks ago to get the new Eagles release, Long Road out of Eden. It’s a double CD and the radio was saying Wal Mart was pricing it at $11.88, which was true, but I found out later the Eagles signed an exclusive contract to let Wal Mart sell the first 3 million copies at that reduced price. I believe it was an attempt to sell as many of them as possible before the pirate copies became too prolific. The boys in the band are my age (pushing 60) and sound pretty old school when it comes to intellectual property and copyright laws—as am I. My son and I have had some passionate and fascinating debates on those very issues and I find the generation gap to be radical in this area. My position is simple: Intellectual property is sacrosanct and should be vigorously protected. Artists of any medium need that protection in order to earn a living and to maintain the integrity of their work. Grah, my son, takes the opposite view. He tells me I’m hopelessly caught in my own past (which is true), and that today sharing music, print material, almost anything, is a common, accepted method of doing things. He insists the recording companies and publishing houses are going to have to radically change the way they do business so as to reflect the new solid-state and digital age. He is as honest as the day is long, but tells me he is consciously engaging in civil disobedience by sharing everything with everybody, in order to force the government and the private sector to get off their butts and solve the problems—which he sees as challenges and opportunity.
But that’s not why I called you here today. I wanted to review the Eagles CD, even though I haven’t quite heard it all yet. (There’s a reason for that, which I will get to.) Let’s spend a moment in Mr. Peabody’s Way Back Machine. The last studio album the Eagles made was The Long Run, and that was 28 years ago. Most artists would be so forgotten by now, they’d have already been buried, dead or not. But somewhere in that nearly thirty year hiatus, they got back together, went on the famous Hell Freezes Over tour, and released a CD and DVD of it—kind of a best of. That grossed (according to 60 Minutes) a quarter of a billion dollars, which got them thinking along the lines of “hey, maybe there’s still some milk left in this cash cow.” And they decided that any new project had to be a studio piece, of new material. Woo-Hoo!
So my brother and I go fishing on his birthday, November 11, which is an annual thing for us, and I mention I have the new Eagles CD with me, and since he is the second biggest Eagles fan in the known universe, he got out the kit and put the first CD on. It’s about 5:30 in the morning, the sky is glowing with pre-dawn light, the freeway is nearly empty, and Newell has a killer stereo in his Yukon. So we sit there listening, lost in the bliss, until the last song is finished, and I suggest, naturally enough, that he put on the second disc.
“I think we’d better listen to this one again,” he tells me. I’m driving, what can I do? (He always makes me drive.) So we listen again. And again. And again. I’m lovin’ it, he’s lovin’ it, and then he plays the last song again, right after we’d just heard it. It’s called Waiting in the Weeds. As it begins with this sweet mandolin, or possibly tenor guitar, Newell says “this is the one.” Meaning, this is the song, the best one on the album, the best on since Hotel California or The Last Resort. I know this is what he’s saying because we’re brothers and because musically, that’s the way we both think. Weeds stands out. He plays the disc a dozen more times, over and over, and every time it gets better, we hear a little more, find some new thematic nuance, figure out some metaphor or oblique reference. Which is why we listen a hundred times to new stuff. If we like it. Because, you know, we never listened to say, Smells Like Teen Spirit at all, because we didn’t like it.
Eventually we stop and decide to fish, although we could have easily just sat there all day, listening to that song and talking about it. Next best thing; we fished streams all day and talked about it, while playing dirty tricks on each other in order to win the coveted Masters Cup in the International Free-Style Trout Fishing Exposition. But that’s another story. Great day by the way, we caught about 20 apiece—including some lunkers—and put them all back.
Then we get back into the Yukon and I’m thinking surely he’s going to play disc 2 now. But he says “I don’t think I’m quite done with this one yet, and don’t call me Shirley.” So he plays the whole disc again and again and—well, you get the picture. By the time we get back to Vegas, we’ve heard disc 1 at least 30 times, and Weeds at least fifty. Yep, that’s definitely the one. And I’ve been playing that song again and again at home, following with the lyrics in the little booklet thingy, playing it for Nita, for my daughters (for whom this has been a way of life), everyone going nuts over this powerful, beautiful, surprising song. Anyway, disc 1 is awesome, as good as anything they’ve ever done, (with the possible exception of Hotel California) and Weeds is a masterpiece. I still haven’t heard 2 all the way through yet so I’ll have to get back to you on that.
(Some of you of course will be scratching your heads, wondering why I’m bothering to even mention the Eagles, or wondering who they are, maybe some third-party political party, or a social organization, or some new addition to the Boy Scouts, or even a misspelled Snoopy fan club. If you fit into any of those categories, please take a step forward. You guys in the front are all philistines. Barbarians. Unworthy of the air we breathe and the lives you are currently squandering.)
These old pros sound better than ever. The arrangements are mature yet bold, taking us to unexpected places, both melodic and harmonic, blending voices with absolute perfection and tone. It is full of songs about remorse and the bitter aftertaste of lost love. There is a scathing indictment of our consumer society and what some believe to be our nation’s recent Imperialistic machinations. The first song, No More Walks in the Woods is adapted from a poem and is mostly a-capella with very tight, four-part harmony. It is beautiful, poignant and achingly sad, as it mourns the loss of our pristine landscapes. The guys know how to turn a phrase, paint a picture, set a mood, and go for the jugular (think of Get Over It). But Waiting in the Weeds is a song apart. On a par with the best they’ve ever done and as good as Henley’s The Last Resort or his solo Über-Lied, Talking to the Moon. Listen to it fifty times on a really good stereo or with headphones, and you’ll see what I mean. Unless you’re a philistine.

Transformers

Here it is summer again and the blockbusters are coming out. This is Michael Bey’s newest effort, produced by Bey and Steven Spielberg, and is based on the Saturday morning cartoon about the nefarious Megatron, and the benevolent (but tough) Optimus Prime.
This is not, however, a cartoon. Remember when we were kids (or when I was . . .) and those wonderful monster movies were coming out of Japan? Godzilla and Rodan, Mothra and the Mysterions? We loved those movies, largely because of an ability we had as kids, and of which we have retained little or nothing as adults, which allowed us to extrapolate what we saw and heard, and expand it into what we wanted to see and hear. We watched monsters on visible strings, monsters which were obviously actors in poorly made costumes, live actors with no ability to act whatsoever, bad production quality, the worst models and miniatures in history (most of the military hardware was literally toys purchased retail) and special effects so bad even ten-year olds weren’t fooled. But that was enough. Our imaginations took over and transformed what was on the screen into what we wished to see and through some kind of inner eye, we did see it. We were able to transcend the primitive attempts and turn them into hearts desires. A start was all we needed. The recent Godzilla is a perfect example.
Now, a few directors understand that technology is catching up to imagination. A few. People like Bey and Peter Jackson.
Transformers is the movie kids saw when they watched the cartoons. It is wonderful. The plot (with the proviso that we accept technologically advanced, sentient robots) is extremely well thought-out. The characters are believable and, more to the point, likable; people we can root for, without their being reduced to being caricatures. The side stories are perfect, the romance is kept at its proper level for this kind of movie, and everyone turns in a great performance. John Turturro and John Voight are especially good.
The movie manages to maintain a high level of suspense, with a sense of realism I wasn’t expecting, i.e. a very real, serious emergency with adults reacting just as seriously, and behaving intelligently for the most part, while it gives us moments to breath with humor that is so well timed and placed it is absolutely seamless.
Making the main characters teen-agers was brilliant. Not only does it increase our empathy, but it will draw lots more people to the theaters. Kids like movies about themselves.
But the star of the show is it’s special effects. Perfect, seamless CGI—and lot’s of it. The Transformers and brilliant, “grown-up” versions of their cartoon predecessors. They have emotions, they give us comical moments as they try to interact with humans, and they make us want them to succeed against the bad guys (evil Transformers led by Megatron).
It is edge-of-your-seat fun from beginning to end. I believe it will be too intense for little kids, say under eight or so, but other than that almost anyone can go and find something to like. Not that it matters, but the two female leads (neither of which I’ve seen before) are drop-dead gorgeous. The Army captain is, I have it on good authority, smokin’ as well.
The movie is rated PG-13. There isn’t a cussword in sight, no sexual innuendo at all, much less sex scenes (although there is some romantic innuendo—remember, it’s teenagers), no graphic up-close, personal violence and no gore or blood at all. There is lots of the other kind of violence—the explosive, action-dense, mayhem kind—and no death, other than the bad Robots. A few humans might be presumed to die but only peripherally and at a distance. I highly recommend it to people of all ages. It is as good an action-adventure movie as I have ever seen, and a very pleasant surprise.

Stardust

I’m bummed. I just finished this review and it disappeared. I hate it when I do something and have no idea what it was.Okay. This is another movie in the Fantasy genre, which is in its ascendancy right now. There are at least half-a-dozen more coming out or in production, including the next in the Narnia series, Prince Caspian.Starring Charlie Cox, Clare Danes, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Robert De Niro, with a small role by Peter O’toole, and narrated by Ian McKellen (Who I thought was O’Toole all the way through the movie.)This one takes place in England, near a small village called Wall. It is called that because there is an old stone wall separating this world from another, called Stormhold. Our hero, Tristan, vows to go over the wall (which is never done) to retrieve a fallen star and bring it back to a girl who does not love him, but is willing to marry him if he impresses her. Pretty straightforward, right? But, as tales such as this often do, things go from bad to worse. Several other people are trying to get to the fallen star as well. The star, of course, is Clare Danes. In Stormhold, stars turn into beautiful young women when the fall to earth. They head back to Wall but fall into lots of adventures, encounters, troubles, challenges and mysterious situations, mostly as a result of Michelle Pfeiffer, who, along with her two sisters, is a very naughty witch. They hope to capture the star and cut her heart out so they can be young again, and based on the make-up, it’s been a really long time since they were even middle-aged.Five princes are also looking for the star, but they keep killing each other off because they dad (O’Toole, the king) is dying. It’s a family tradition. At some point the star-crossed lovers (pretty good, huh?) run into Robert De Niro, a pirate captain, and his cutthroat crew. De Niro is both more and less than he seems, and helps the kids on their way. His character, the captain, is done to perfection. It’s worth the price of admission (discounted of course) to see De Niro do his thing. Very unexpected, but that’s all I’ll say about that. Needless to say, the entire mess is sorted out two minutes before the credits roll, and the young lovers are saved, marry and have thirty-six kids. (Not really).This is not a great movie, but it is a good movie. It is rated PG and had nothing objectionable in it (rating wise). Nita really liked it and I enjoyed it as well.

Resident Evil: Extinction

The good news is, there’s a sequel! This was number three and there will be a number four. You can’t have too many zombies. Obviously this is another in the Resident Evil series, starring Mila Jovovich, who reprises her role as Alice, the strange, enigmatic, survivor of research-gone-horribly-wrong at the Umbrella Corporation, a multi-national conglomerate of genetic researchers, who, based on their track record, are really zombie manufacturers. Her blood is the key to a vaccine needed to save the human race from the walking, eating, dead. This time, the virus has spread and the whole world is a vast wasteland, with a few human survivors and lots and lots of gnarly dead people vying for what little living flesh is left. It takes place mostly in daylight, which is a departure from the genre formula, and it works. Alice falls in with a caravan of survivors, a motley crew of adults and children, traveling in several vehicles, (Hummer II, Army Duce and a half, school bus, television van and a tanker truck,) radically retrofitted for safety in the new world. They are led by a woman named Claire, played by Ali Larter (the girl who suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder and kills people by tearing them to pieces in “Heroes”). Her right hand man is Oded Fehr, the actor who played that cool tattooed guy who led the Feydahin in The Mummy. An evil scientist (working for Umbrella) played by Lain Glen, is looking for Alice—he needs her blood to make an army of domesticatable, virus-infected zombies so he can rule the world. Guess what happens to him . . . . .?There is the requisite killing and gore and slow-motion effects, cool fight sequences and bloody death. Alice is a killing machine—it’s what she was engineered for. Now, thirty or forty years ago, this would have been the goriest movie ever made and would have been banned, I’m sure. Today, it barely rates an R and I am forced to say that, by today’s standards, this one is pretty tame, mainstream even. (What slippery slope?). Were we to need a rationalization, we would remind the audience that almost everybody who is killed is already dead, and pretty damned evil as well. For the genre, I thought it was great. It delivered everything I wanted it to. Jovovich is stupendous—she has really taken Alice for her own. And this time, she is developing some interesting psionic powers as well. It has a few moments that actually startled me, which is rare. Really, there were autonomic reactions involving several millimeters of motion, more than once. It’s brutal, relentless, and, let’s be serious, pointless. I put it up there in my top twenty of Classic Not-Very-Good-Movies that I like. A lot of it takes place in a deserted, dune-covered Las Vegas (you’ll be able to recognize the road to Lake Mead that cuts through Sunrise Mountain). This movie is, by way of reminder, based on a computer video game. I’ve never played it. I hate video games. But my son assures me that Resident Evil is above average. Which, to me, is kind of like saying that among cancers, rectal is above average. Was that over the line? Let me know . . .Anyway, I liked it mucho-a-lot. Can’t wait for the next one. I’m not even going to tell Nita I saw it. Even that would frighten her. You will hate it. Don’t go. By the way, did you like that word, Feydahin? I made it up.

Freddy and Fredericka

Good evening to you all,I have appeared in your in box in order to recommend a novel, which I have just finished.The title is Freddy and Fredericka, and the author is Mark Helprin, who had become, over the years, one of a handful of writers in my personal pantheon. I will not review the book. Helprin is so gifted and skilled a writer that subjects and genres become unimportant. Each word, each sentence, is a delight, a profound experience.Some of you have read A Winters Tale, also by Helprin, which until now, was the best love story I have ever read. And so much more. Freddy and Fredericka may surpass even that one, although it is a completely different kind of story and style. It is, in turns, humorous, hilarious, bittersweet, poignant, profound, insightful and transcendent. This book, and those like it, are the reason God let us invent writing. These are what is meant by the line "seek ye out of the best books". While not religious, it is profoundly spiritual. At times it is farcical, Pythonesque. Pay close attention to the names. I don't know what you like to read. It doesn't matter--this is better. It is available in large format (6x9) paperback from Pemguin Press. Pick it up, read it. Let me know how you liked it and why, or why not. If you do not, I will tactfully explain where you went wrong.Janice, Aub, Jess, this is an absolute must. Maxine . . . . . . .I have no idea :)>
Feel free to use the library. Yes, its that good.