I don't go to the movie theater very much anymore. I've just gotten too busy with other forms of entertainment (books/tv/comics/games). I used to rent the latest DVDs on Netflix, but I let that go as I just could not keep up with that. Now I wait to watch a lot of movies when they come out on HBO, Showtime, etc., one year later.
Most of the time when I do watch a movie, I can't get past the first 30 minutes and wind up deleting it from the DVR. Take the Bourne Ultimatum. This series has been a huge blockbuster franchise, but I just cannot get into it at all. This movie seems like an endless, repetitive loop:
- Matt Damon walking or running around a European city, trying to get data about his past.
- CIA directors looking for Bourne in their high tech command center.
- Matt Damon punching out stupid spies.
- CIA directors yelling at each other because they cannot capture Matt Damon.
I just can't get into it. Photography is fabulous and those locations are super. Scott Glen is good, so is Joan Allen. But it just seems like a bunch of dumb idiots doing squat. I preferred Casino Royale, even if you think that is apples vs oranges.
I was hoping I Am Legend would provide some mindless fun for a couple of hours. My first impression was good. Loved the scenes of deserted Manhattan, with Army vehicles left in the road and deer running around all over the place. Hunting deer in Manhattan while driving a car seems like fun, if you did that with Sarah Palin it would be even more fun. I knew that dog was a goner from the first scene.
I really didn't understand while Will Smith's Neville was stuck in Manhattan, unless he's so crazy and suicidal he wants to stay there. Anna appears to leave pretty quickly at the end. Not only that, she finds a group of non-infected survivors! Sheesh, and now there is a rumor about a prequel to I Am Legend. I think that would be a very boring and anti-climatic movie.
I quickly lost interest in I Am Legend. One problem was the monsters, which looked too CGI and lacked any kind of personality. I kept comparing this movie back to The Omega Man. Yeah, that wasn't a faithful adaptation either, but I'll always remember the great Anthony Zerbe as Matthias, the leader of the flesh-eating psychopathic zombies. There was a great adversarial relationship between Zerbe and Charlton Heston, who played Neville. And The Omega Man had Heston bedding down with a black sister (Rosalind Cash) right before Neville died at the end. That was progressive back in 1971, man! Nuff said.
