Legendarily Bad, maybe. That's about it.

The day our SD friends arrived, The Girl got off of work early and we made it out to see I Am Legend, a Sci-Fi flick starring Will Smith and – well, a dog, and that’s about it.

Now as far as the performances go, it wasn’t too bad on Will Smith’s part, nor the dog’s part, either. But my feelings are rather mixed about the movie. I felt like it had some good potential to make a point somewhere. It had some philosophy to tackle, and for a long time I thought there was a possibility that it might actually take on this challenge.

It’s hard to talk about the movie without spoiling it. Let me say that I thought it would go one direction, but instead it went the cheap hollywood route, which was disappointing. What I found amusing myself was that the direction I felt the movie should go, turns out the original book it was based off of does go. So why not just follow that? Oh, because we need a happy ending, right? Or at least some heroic one.

But I can even overlook that. People like heroes, so I can forgive them for that faux pas. But, I cannot overlook their reliance on crappy, crappy CGI animation. And it’s not that I have something against CGI directly, it’s that I hate it when the people making the film think that we can’t tell it’s not remotely real. There’s no suspension of disbelief, you know exactly when the things you see are not happening. And it really spoils the feel of the movie. I mean, it would’ve been better had they just avoided that all together, and instead just not showed anything, as that would have build suspense in place of the chuckles that their crappy CGI scenes created.

15 years has gone by, and Jurassic Park is still the measuring stick by which special effects movies are judged. Well, that & The Matrix (10 years), of course, both which succeed beautifully.

How come 10-15 years has gone by, yet it seems that most special effects have marched into the past and absurdity, rather than into the future? How the hell can we let hollywood know that their effects are not fooling anyone anymore? I know: I’ll blog about it. How’s that? LISTEN UP, HOLLYWOOD SPECIAL EFFECTS WIZARDS: YOUR CRAPPY CGI ISN’T FOOLING ANYONE. IF YOU CAN’T GET IT TO WORK WITH CRAPPY CGI, MAYBE YOU SHOULD PULL A DIFFERENT TRICK OUT OF YOUR WIZARD’S HAT, HUH?



However, there’s hope on the horizon
There’s a movie that I would have hoped would have come out in time to see with my friends while they were here. Cloverfield looks to be an exciting movie, from the previews I’ve seen of it. Watching it evoked emotions of Lost, that show on ABC that I love to watch. You can kinda feel a similarity. Turns out that it’s directed by the same guy, so I guess that explains the gritty sort of feel the movie has.

And special effects? They look convincing. Like, from the previews, it would appear that the wizards behind this flick have marched forward with the 10-15 years, instead of backwards like the I Am Legend folks. So convincing, in fact, that initially, I missed a big mistake in one scene. At one point, the head of the statue of liberty is thrown down a city street. It cascades off a building, causing an explosion.

I haven’t figured out why hollywood likes explosions so much that they put them where they wouldn’t otherwise be. The head is inert metal. The building is NOT a ticking time bomb. I don’t think there’d be an explosion on impact. In fact, using a sour day in the USA’s history, I have seen fuel-filled planes fly into buildings at high speed and have less an explosion. And they were flying bombs, you know?

But, the point is that the effects looks convincing enough that you can almost miss that mistake. Until of course, someone like me comes along and points it out.

But really: go and see this movie. And then buy/rent the first 3 seasons of Lost. And enjoy.



“We also like to lie about religion & politics, too”
This morning, I wake and check the front internet pages for news. I see… a story about a little 6 year-old girl that had initially won an all-expenses paid trip to see Hannah Montana in concert. That is, until it was discovered that the essay that was submitted was a complete lie, at which point she was pulled out of the contest.

It went something like this: “My daddy died in Iraq defending freedom for me & mommy this year. I only wish we could see a Hannah Montana concert to ease the pain.”

Except of course, that it was a fabrication. And while it’s sad that a 6 year-old was told “give me that back,” it’s rather obvious that a 6 year-old had help creating this uber-republican drama piece, right? So the question, “where’s the parents” I guess could be answered with “taking republican lessons” or maybe “learning to lie, cheat, & steal to get ahead.”

Setting the example; this is what I like to see in parenting.

Peace.

Tags: Entertainment, Technology