Day: December 6, 2007

I didn’t have to see I Am Legend (Warner Bros., 12.14) to presume that serious problems would pop through. The guiding hand of director Francis Lawrence (who gave us the loathsome Constantine after directing music videos for Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez and Janet Jackson) told me almost everything I needed to know months ago. Add Will Smith‘s almost-deranged-need-to-charm-and- be-loved impulse, which pops up in every film he makes (even The Pursuit of Happyness), and the badness, to me, was all but assured.

And now the first-hand dings from people who’ve actually seen it are coming in. The first was from Red Carpet District‘s Kris Tapley, writing this morning that he “mingled with Anne Thompson long enough to exchange unpleasant opinions on I Am Legend” at last night’s Sweeney Todd premiere.

The second air-rifle pellet came from Coming Soon‘s Edward Douglas: “After much-better variations on the apocalyptic premise like Children of Men and 28 Days Later, I Am Legend seems like little more than retread. Combining the poor choice of Will Smith in the lead role with some of the worst CG work since Van Helsing, this dog makes the recent The Invasion come across like a masterpiece.”

I didn’t use the term “pellet” thoughtlessly. I Am Legend has a rhinoceros hide as far as critical barbs will be concerned. The want-to-see is through the roof, the movie will pull down tens of millions on opening weekend, the public hass no taste, nothing matters, etc.

It turns out there’s one decent DVD store in the Boston area after all — the Video Underground in Jamaica Plain, which is somewhere south of Brookline Village. Open 1 to 11 pm daily, and specializing in independent, cult, foreign, classic and locally made titles. Presumably staffed with knowledgable cineaste types like Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary used to be when they worked at Video Archives.

But that’s all she wrote in this area, and I’m in still grappling with the shock of realizing that if the communal DVD experience is all but obliterated in Boston, it must be pretty much finished nationwide except for the existence of those very few specialty DVD stores serving big-city elites.

What a wonderfully corporate Orwellian world we’re living in! No more going outside to stores where you can view and hold DVDs in your hands before buying them, and perhaps even discuss their merits and demerits with the guy at the counter. No more tasting or savoring life’s rough and tumble at all, really. Instead you go online and order a digital semblance of that rough and tumble, and two or three days later it arrives in your mailbox and you pop it into your DVD or X-Box or PS3 player, and you sit there on your couch, vegging out and munching out on sour cream and onion-flavored Ruffles. (My personal favorite…sorry.)

I’ve been noticing these grotesque life forms — products of an indoor, online-based, sedentary existence — walking down Newbury Street over the last couple of days. Kids with a simian aura, obviously unrefined attitudes, squealing with laughter at each other’s jokes, sounding like Sopranos extras, reeking of cigarettes or pot and carrying around massive loads of whale blubber. Give me a city and a lifestyle that keeps me away from these animals….these harbingers of cultural death. If the ghosts of Honore de Balzac or William Makepeace Thackeray were to run into these kids they’d reach for their muskets and start shooting.

I made the mistake of going to a Best Buy last night in hopes of finding the Ford at Fox collection among the new releases. Forget it. I asked a kid working there if it was at least in the Best Buy database and possibly available at some other store. “What’s this DVD again?” he asked. “Ford at Fox,” I said. “Movies made by John Ford…you know, one of the great all-time directors. An old-time guy.” He didn’t have a wisp of a clue what I was talking about. You don’t have to be a John Ford scholar but to have never heard the words “John” and “Ford” spoken in sequence ….good God.

Here’s a 7.9.06 Boston Globe piece by John Swansburg about the death of the local video store. “It’s a greater loss than you might think,” the subhead reads. No, no…I get it, I get it!

In response to yesterday’s Sweeney Todd episode at Leows Boston Common plex, HE reader Wrecktum remarked that “the biggest travesty” affecting the poor-projection-standards problem in the nation’s theatres “is that audiences never care. They’ll sit through a movie with green scratches on all reels, digital sound dropping out every few minutes, the image hanging half off the screen…bad splices, bad dirt, bad everything. And they don’t seem to mind.”

N.Y.’s Rivoli theatre, early in the run of John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, which opened on 1.25.40

Sheep-like behavior is indeed the root of it. If only 10% of moviegoers had my attitude (i.e., politely but firmly pointing out problems if they exist), projection would be improved all around because squeaky wheels always get the grease. The underlying factor is that most moviegoers don’t seem to even notice when projection standards are poor (largely because they’ve never seen films projected the right way, as they are in studio screening rooms and theaters like L.A.’s Arclight), and of these 99.9% would rather suffer in silence than speak up. As they are in politics, American moviegoers are largely docile and vegetable.