Month: December 2007

Just as I was heading out a big white box arrived with the best Oscar-season swag I’ve received in years…perhaps ever. A shoulder-strap saddlebag made of tanned leather (called “tribe leather” and sold by Roots) with a subtle branding on the backside of the No Country for Old Men logo…very cool. Thanks to the Miramaxers for this. An excellent thing to have and to hold from this day forth.

Outta here, second try…the highways paved and recovered from yesterday’s blizzard. I may file a few things from a Syracuse University Starbucks in the early evening.

I’ve watched a DVD screener of Rob Reiner‘s The Bucket List (Warner Bros., 12.25) three times over the last week and a half — once for my own reasons, and the other two times to show it to friends. Nobody liked it very much. A director friend called it “a lazy, complacent old man’s film.” That’s pretty close to my reaction. It’s a mild-mannered movie about dying from cancer — not awful or painful but nothing all that special.

Fox 411’s Roger Friedman recently called it the “downer movie of the year.” Not really — it just has tired blood.

I have to get back on the Mass Pike again and head for Syracuse, but allow me to impart two things before leaving. One, the above shot is an fair approximation of my own facial expression as I watched The Bucket List. And two, here’s the best line in the entire film — spoken by a bed-ridden Jack Nicholson to a bed-ridden Morgan Freeman right after Freeman’s “wife” has left their joint hospital room.

This five-minute Cloverfield clip is nothing new. I say enough with the tease clips. The movie opens in four and a half weeks — it’s time to start showing it. It just hit me that Cloverfield (Paramount, 1.18.08) would actually be a work of genius if they never show the beast. Let the 9.11 metaphor speak for itself and just go with the panic…the sounds, screams, explosions, etc. It could be phenomenal on this level.

Several I Am Legend video clips, available on Yahoo.com, present the case better than any review: the dozens upon dozens of images of an evacuated and wasted Manhattan, overgrown with weeds and tall grass and populated with wild deer and the occasional lion and littered with rotting cars and buses, are worth the price of admission in themselves.

I’m a fool for CG fakery when it’s this good, and each and every shot of post- apocalyptic desolation in this film — the pastoral still-life stuff, I mean — is as good as it gets these days. I believed it. I was there. Hats off to production designers David Lazan and Naomi Shohan, art directors William Ladd Skinner and Patricia Woodbridge and the various CG supervisors from Sony Picture Imageworks, New Deal Studios and CIS Hollywood.

In this respect I Am Legend is very nearly the equal of Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men, and that’s saying something.

It’s too bad that the biological movement stuff — especially the CG “deer” and the nocturnal ghouls — aren’t up to snuff. In fact, forget the ghouls entirely. They’re cartoon dreadful. One look at these fiends and you’re out of the movie and thinking about checking your e-mails. It’s hard to tell who did what, but the bad guys in this respect, apparently, are senior character animators Tom Bruno Jr. and Stephen A. Buckley.

Why didn’t director Francis Lawrence just hire a first-rate ghoul makeup team and go the Tom Savini route? The person responsible for the CG ghouls — the person who said “don’t hire actors” — is an idiot. He doesn’t understand the Werner Herzog rule that movies are worthless if they encourage you to be cynical about what you see. Anyone who knows anything about visual effects is going to mutter “bad CG” when the Legend ghouls appear. They aren’t in the least bit scary because they’re not in the least bit convincing.

CG animals are also a big problem these days. The only poor aspect of Beowulf were the CG horses. You can tell from the first Legend clip that the deer are way too hard-drivey. They move too fast, can’t really “see” them, don’t seem biological.

The live human aspect of I Am Legend — the “story” about scientist Will Smith and his dog (a German shepherd) roaming around Manhattan as he tries to solve the mutant problem from his home-base laboratory — isn’t a huge problem. I found it slightly better than passable. It doesn’t go off the rails until the final act, and Smith seems much less concerned than usual about the audience loving him this time. He’s just “there” and working it — focused on survival, not being stupid, dug in, unaffected.

His character, Dr. Robert Neville, is too rich for a guy who once worked for the government, but movies like this are always absurdly indifferent to monetary realities. Before Manhattan was evacuated due to a lethal virus (a lot like the one that ravaged England in 28 Days Later) Smith and his wife and daughter lived in a Washington Square townhouse that only guys with Sultan of Brunei-type incomes would be able to begin to afford in real life. On top of which Smith mentions a second home (“the farm”)…what is this?

The only other thing that irritated me is a last-act element which I’ll get yelled at for discussing, so forget it. Suffice that the most touching scene in the film is a death scene in which Smith’s character does a kind of Jack Kervorkian thing.

It appears that Smith, who’s only 39, is starting to go seriously gray. His closeups in this film show he’s got a major salt-and-pepper thing going on. He was a young- looking guy only three or four years ago. Now he looks like a buff 49 year-old.

This latest Boston blizzard video, taken about 90 minutes ago, is the best yet because the snowflakes are illuminated by streetlights…important visual distinction!

Blizzard burger, Harvard Ave. in Brookline — Thursday, 12.13.07, 8:15 pm

Read more

Now this is a Best Picture lineup I can totally live with! All hail the London Film Critics for coming up with a list that makes more sense than any I’ve seen this month — No Country For Old Men, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, There Will Be Blood, Zodiac and The Bourne Ultimatum.

Director of the Year noms are for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others), Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood ), Joel and Ethan Coen (No Country For Old Men), David Fincher (Zodiac) and Cristian Mungui (4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days)

The Attenborough Award for British Film of the Year nominees are Once, Control, Atonement, Russian Penis Movie and This Is England.

The British Actor of the Year nominees are Sam Riley (Control), James McAvoy (Atonement), Christian Bale (3:10 to Yuma), Jim Broadbent (And When Did You Last See Your Father) and Jonny Lee Miller (The Flying Scotsman).

It just goes on and on like that…great. I couldn’t find the original website or link so I had to link to MCN’s page.

A 12.13 e-mail sent to Directors Guild members by DGA president Michael Apted has conveyed frustration with the WGA strike and a feeling that fresh DGA attitudes in separate negotiations are what’s needed at this stage: “We have been waiting and watching [the WGA strike situation] for months. But now, with no end to the current impasse in sight, we find ourselves having to ask the hard question: is it now our turn to sit across from the AMPTP?

“We believe the answer to that question lies in one simple truth. We cannot abdicate our responsibility to all of you, the DGA membership. You expect us to fight for you. We promised you we would do just that. We believe that the preparation and determination [that the] DGA traditionally brings to the table, combined with our fresh perspective, is what’s needed to get the job done.

“The issue is not between the DGA and the WGA. Those who want to make that the fight will only strengthen our true adversaries. The real issue is how to ensure that we get the best and most equitable deal for DGA members.

“With this first and foremost in our minds, we have decided that the DGA must go forward with our own negotiations. In order to give the WGA and the AMPTP one last chance to get back to the table, we will not schedule our negotiations to begin until after the New Year, and then only if an appropriate basis for negotiations can be established.

“If it can, then the DGA will commence formal talks with the AMPTP in the hope that our bargaining strength and fresh perspective can help achieve a good and fair outcome for all concerned.”

A great little Thai commercial for Sylvania lightbulbs. I don’t care that’s been sitting on YouTube for seven and a half months. Whoever thought it up is a fan of Terry Gilliam, Salvador Dali and Guillermo del Toro.

The drive to Syracuse was abandoned 10 miles out of Boston on the Mass Pike. Total blizzard conditions, only the vaguest visibility beyond 200 yards, tens of trillions of snowflakes dropping each and every second, traffic moving 5 to 10 mph, some cars fishtailing and spinning out. Big snowstorms means big spectacle and everything stops or slows to a crawl — all systems are suddenly on hold and everyone’s on a kind of vacation. It took me almost two hours to make it back to Brookline…a great adventure!

Somewhere in Brookline — Thursday, 12.13.07, 2:15 pm

Here’s a 51-second video taken on the way back to town on the Mass Pike, and here’s a 35-second video taken on Aspinwall Street in Brookline. It’s a shame that my Canon A540 isn’t good enough to capture the snowflakes. They’re the whole show. Without them snaps are just a gray haze and the old snow-blanket effect.

Beacon Street, west of Harvard Ave. — Thursday, 12.13.07, 2:35 pm

I have to pick up a rental car and then drive five hours through a snowstorm to Syracuse, where Jett took his final exam this morning. Highway snowstorm photos will be posted later this evening.