The Screengrab : i am legend

Trailer Review: The Road

Paul Clark — Fri, 22 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT

One of the problems with big-budget post-apocalyptic movies is that most audiences are down with downbeat storylines, preferring to watch movies that make them feel good and don’t remind them of the world’s troubles. Consequently, most movies set in a dystopian future tend to be action-oriented, to make the stories’ hard truths more palatable by adding plenty of chase scenes and shootouts. The most troubling thing about this trailer for The Road is that the Weinsteins look to be selling just that kind of movie when the story doesn’t really call for it. Sure, this approach might get a few more asses in the seats, but the I Am Legend crowd might grow uneasy with the despair and desperation that the story- or at least the original novel by Cormac McCarthy- traffics in, and might feel ripped off. Another really hamfisted tactic this trailer uses is the liberal use of Charlize Theron, who by all rights should be barely in the movie itself, but is portrayed as more or less a co-lead with Viggo Mortensen. Still, I have faith in this movie’s potential- even if Harvey Scissorhands gets his choppers on this one, McCarthy, Mortensen and director John Hillcoat bring enough talent to the party that it should at least be interesting. More interesting than the trailer, anyway.

For God So Loved the Human Race That He Brought Keanu Reeves Out of Mothballs...

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Benjamin A. Plotinsky thinks he's picked up on some recent tendencies in science fiction. " There is a young man, different from other young men. Ancient prophecies foretell his coming, and he performs miraculous feats. Eventually, confronted by his enemies, he must sacrifice his own life—an act that saves mankind from calamity—but in a mystery as great as that of his origin, he is reborn, to preside in glory over a world redeemed. Tell this story to one of the world’s 2 billion Christians, and he’ll recognize it instantly. Tell it to a science-fiction and fantasy fan, and he’ll ask why you’re making minor alterations to the plot of The Matrix or Superman Returns."

The evidence is pretty much right there on the surface, and not just in such moments as the one early in The Matrix where someone tells a not-yet enlightened Keanu Reeves, “You’re my savior, man, my own personal Jesus Christ,” or the later one where Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus tells Reeve's Neo, “Like everyone else, you were born into bondage.” Morpheus also tells Neo, “When the Matrix was first built, there was a man born inside who had the ability to change whatever he wanted, to remake the Matrix as he saw fit. It was he who freed the first of us, taught us the truth. . . . After he died, the Oracle prophesied his return—that his coming would hail the destruction of the Matrix, end the war, bring freedom to our people.” As Plotinsky notes, "We don’t know [whether Neo is the One] until near the movie’s end, when a comrade-in-arms betrays Neo and Morpheus. Neo chooses to save Morpheus’s life by surrendering his own. The machines kill him—but then he mysteriously returns to life and obliterates his enemies, to the grand accompaniment of trumpets and a choir...It takes no great perception to recognize how closely this plot tracks the basic Christian narrative, though it conflates the Passion with the End Days, adding the betrayal of a Judas to a messianic Second Coming."

As for "Bryan Singer’s underrated Superman Returns (2006) sought to answer an age-old question: Does humanity need gods? Lex Luthor, Superman’s eternal nemesis, answers early on. After Luthor compares himself to Prometheus, an accomplice retorts: 'Sounds great, Lex, but you’re not a god.' 'Gods are selfish beings who fly around in little red capes and don’t share their power with mankind,' Luthor snarls. He’s in agreement with Lois Lane, who has won a Pulitzer for an op-ed titled 'Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman.'" When Superman returns, he proves both his archenemy and his old flame (and mother of his son) wrong: he selflessly saves the world, after which he "remains in a coma until his son...restores him to life. He leaves his hospital room empty until a nurse discovers it, just as Mary and Mary Magdalene find Jesus’s empty tomb."

It may be possible to nod appreciatively at all this and still have doubts about whether sci-fi stories are automatically enriched if they mirror religious mythologies. The Christ story parallels underlying the Matrix trilogy definitely got heavier and more explicit as the movies crashed into their second and third installments, and whether this is coincidental or not, there are plenty of people who think that the movies themselves also got progressively worse. There may be even more people who would argue that any position that depends on including the terms "underrated" and "Superman Returns" in the same sentence has to be a non-starter. To his credit, Plotinsky readily acknowledges that when, "As the world knows to its sorrow, [George] Lucas revived the Star Wars franchise in 1999 with The Phantom Menace," any inclination to downplay the religious-mystical aspects of the earlier films, or treat them playfully, were long gone, and the movies suffered because of it: "...where the original movie never deified Luke, The Phantom Menace describes Anakin—the future Darth Vader, Luke’s father—in terms so messianic as to make Neo blush, repeatedly calling him 'the Chosen One.' The source of the term is in Luke—the Evangelist, that is—where Jewish leaders say of the soon-to-be-crucified Jesus: 'Let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!' The movie is fuzzy about who exactly has done the choosing, however—a failure doubtless rooted in Lucas’s carelessness with plots."

Plotinsky makes a case that religious themes, which he also detects in The Terminator, E.T., and I Am Legend, jumped to the front of sci-fi creators' minds as the Cold War receded and geopolitics, which had once fueled the Star Trek series, became too confusing and gray for easy metaphorical consumption. Certainly it was a bleak day for the Star Trek franchise when Earthlings and Klingons learned to just get along. Incidentally, if there's anything to all this, might it not be true that The Terminator, with its save-the-unborn-savior plot and its very-'80s nuclear-terror tremors, is a key transitional work, about a messiah coming to save us from the bomb? (I just thought I'd drop that in here; I'm sure not trying to suggest that Plotinsky's article needed to be any longer.) In any case, we may have already seen things start to shift back: the recently completed Battlestar Galactica series invoked God and gods and religious prophecy left and right, but in the context of an allegory about 9/11 and the development of post-9/11 morality. Will the new Star Trek movie mark a full return to the thrilling days of intergalactic secular warfare involving aliens with growly accents and exotic facial hair? As the old Vulcan proverb says...

2009: First Quarter Wrap-Up

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:00:00 GMT

So, Watchmen didn’t exactly bomb, nor was it exactly a hit. With a 65% critical Tomato-Meter rating, it was neither a fiasco nor a critic’s darling, and for all its sex and violence, the onscreen content was far less controversial than all the legal maneuvering involved with getting it to screens in the first place.

In other words, the first big film of the year was a lot like the rest of 2009’s films to date: nothing to really get all het up about one way or the other...with two notable exceptions, courtesy of last month’s SXSW festival: the obnoxiously onanistic My Suicide is already a lock for my year-end Worst of 2009 list, while the documentary Best Worst Movie could easily find a spot in my year-end Top Ten, thanks to its winning cast and (mostly) cheery depiction of the pleasures and pitfalls of filmmaking (as well as the mysterious alchemy that transforms a terrible film like Troll 2 into a beloved cult classic).

As for the rest of the first quarter highs: the inventive visuals of Coraline, the good-natured mumblecore bromance of SXSW’s Humpday and the laid-back ‘80s nostalgia of Greg “Superbad” Mottola’s Adventureland were all perfectly enjoyable experiences nevertheless unlikely to chart much higher than Honorable Mention come December (unless 2009 winds up being a truly uninspired film year from here on out...unlikely, considering that our current Year of the Ox is already outpacing last year’s Rat: i.e., by April 2008, I’d seen exactly one memorable film (Full Battle Rattle) and a whole lot of Hamburger Helper (Penelope, Cloverfield, 21 and Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day).

Other 2009 offerings unlikely to be more than pleasant hazy memories by December include SXSW fare like Beeswax, The Slammin’ Salmon, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle and the Richard Linklater sneak preview Me & Orson Welles, along with Sunshine Cleaning, Monsters vs. Aliens and I Love You, Man...films that, like most everything else I’ve seen this year, seem like Xeroxes of Xeroxes of originals I liked a lot more.

I dunno...maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe I’ve seen too many films by this point, and I’m getting cranky and hard to please, and even if a new Pulp Fiction premiered next month, I’d be too jaded to appreciate it...or maybe it's just that nobody’s released anything truly special, gripping, hilarious, original and/or mind-blowing in a while. (But then again, I haven’t seen Fast & Furious yet, so that could all change in a day or two!)

Long-range forecasts indicate a continuing trend of pleasant but disposable cinema moving forward into the second quarter of 2009, although I have cautiously high hopes for Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, Star Trek, Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, Land of the Lost and even HBO’s biopic Grey Gardens, starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as Big & Little Edie of Maysles Brothers fame (which may not be a movie in theaters...but, hey, Angels in America was my favorite movie of 2003 on the small or big screen, so who knows?).

Plus, I just saw the following trailer for the new Sam Mendes film, Away We Go, starring the potentially appealing duo of John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, which could be goddamn charming or still yet more indie-mumbly grist for the mill...see you in June for the Second Quarter report!

Related Stories:
2008: First Quarter Wrap-Up
Screengrab Presents: The Top Ten Movies Of 2008
Screengrab 2009 Preview: Andrew Osborne’s Picks

Trailer Review: Seven Pounds

Paul Clark — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This has to be more complex than it looks, right? Because from the looks of this trailer, this is going to be a movie about a workaholic who suddenly decides to help seven people, for reasons known only to himself. But there must be a catch, I’m guessing- maybe he’s mortally ill or has recently had a life-changing brush with death that’s caused him to see the light. Part of me hopes that maybe his sudden altruism springs from him being mentally ill. But somehow, I doubt it. Will Smith is a fine actor, and is constantly getting better. But I actually prefer him in his recent genre films like Hancock and I Am Legend, in which a blockbuster template affords him the chance to show his darker side. This, on the other hand, is looking a lot like feel-good claptrap, which might appeal to the folks in the Academy but I believe actually limits Smith as an actor by keeping him intent on being lovable and sympathetic. A shame, really.

2008: First Quarter Wrap-Up

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

It’s not that I didn’t see this coming.

By my reckoning, 2007 was a pretty solid year for movies, so I suspected 2008 would bring a cyclical downturn in cinematic quality (accompanied by a distinctly fishy, low-tide smell wafting from our nation’s multiplexes). And, yes, I know we’re in the Horse Latitudes of the movie-going year, before the summer blockbusters and the fall Oscar contenders...but, seriously, has anyone seen anything really good yet?

By this time last year, I’d already seen four of the movies that wound up on my 2007 Top Ten list: the fine, Oscar-neglected Zodiac, a sneak preview of Knocked Up at the South-By-Southwest Film Festival, along with two outstanding documentaries, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and the lesser-known but equally awesome roller derby-umentary Hell On Wheels.

Even the first quarter cheese I saw last year was pretty entertaining: the silly sexploitation of Black Snake Moan, the gay-panic-at-the-disco iconography of 300, and the A.D.D. chaos of Smoking Aces, a fake Guy Richie movie I enjoyed at least as much Snatch.

So far, at the quarter-mile mark of 2008, the only truly Top 10-caliber flick I've seen is Full Battle Rattle, a SXSW Special Jury award-winning documentary (reviewed here by Mr. Von Doviak on March 17) about a simulated Iraqi province in California’s Mojave desert, populated by Iraqi-American citizens and U.S. Army “insurgents” in a full-immersion training scenario where soldiers practice both their combat and diplomacy skills before heading off to the real war in Iraq.

As for the rest of the year-to-date...feh. Cloverfield had moments, but no characters. Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, Penelope and 21 were all pleasantly unobjectionable but instantly forgettable, and I Am Legend’s deserted Manhattan streets were compelling until the director filled them with boring video game ghoulies.

But, hey, maybe things are looking up for 2008...only three more shopping days ‘til Zombie Strippers!

DVD Digest for April 8, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a cracked fantasy favorite finally gets the DVD it deserves, and DVD lovers can finally order their milkshakes to go.

For most moviegoers, the big news this week is the arrival of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest masterpiece There Will Be Blood in DVD. But while that's cause for celebration, be warned- as with Sweeney Todd last week, Paramount is releasing the film in two separate versions, a bare-bones single-disc release and a two-disc set featuring some deleted scenes and a number of featurettes about the making of, and history behind, the film. Normally, I'd be skeptical about the relatively slim pickings even on the two-disc set, but Anderson's recent DVD releases haven't contained too much in the way of commentaries and the like, so this was to be expected from him. Besides, it's not like you're NOT going to buy There Will Be Blood- it's awesome enough to stand on its own merits without all the snazzy bells and whistles.

But no less noteworthy is the release of a new version of Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Munchausen, a notorious flop in its day, has since become something of a cult favorite, and it's good to see Sony finally giving it a good DVD treatment. Naturally, there's a Terry Gilliam commentary track, which should be reason enough to buy the DVD, considering that Gilliam's commentaries are never better than when he's talking about films that were mishandled by their distributors. The two-disc set also includes the three-part documentary "The Madness and Misadventures of Munchausen," as well as storyboard sequences that supposedly feature "all-new vocal performances by Terry Gilliam and Chris McKeown." Dare I hope Gilliam drew the storyboards in Pythonimation style?

In other classics coming to DVD news, Fox is continuing the celebration of Bette Davis with a six-disc Bette Davis Centenary Celebration Collection that includes a new two-disc version of All About Eve along with bare-bones discs of The Nanny, The Virgin Queen, Phone Call From a Stranger, and the gothic-horror classic Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Other than that, not much to write about in the classics department, unless of course the Blu-Ray release of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The 6th Day blows your hair back. In which case don't let me stop you.

More recent titles being released on DVD this week include John C. Reilly in the musical biopic spoof Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the family fantasy The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (Sony, also Blu-Ray), Robert Redford's star-studded Iraq War dud Lions For Lambs (MGM), and the Leonardo DiCaprio-produced and -narrated tree-hugger documentary The 11th Hour (Warner).

Finally, David Huddleston's checking in again this week, this time to offer his condolences to Warner's HD-DVD release of I Am Legend. You know, Huddleston's condolences might make me feel bad for Will Smith's character in the film, except I'm guessing he'd be grateful for the company.

DVD Digest for March 18, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a memorable trio of new Criterions shares a release date with three of the most critically lambasted films of 2007. Who will prevail?

DVD of the Week: In the past decade, the suburban-dysfunction genre has had a lot to answer for, not least the seemingly endless string of glib American Beauty clones full of easy laughs and cheap stabs at profundity. But The Ice Storm shouldn't be held accountable for this- an uncommonly sensitive take on similar material, Ang Lee's adaptation of Rick Moody's novel ventures into uncomfortable corners of the bourgeois lifestyle without softening them with irony. Lee's film also boasted a cast that if anything is more impressive now than it was then, given the subsequent careers of then-newcomers Tobey Maguire and Katie Holmes, as well as former child stars Elijah Wood and Christina Ricci. Criterion's new two-disc set features commentary from Lee and writer/producer James Schamus, interviews with Moody and many of the film's stars, and much more, plus it promises to make Frederick Elmes' cold, wet cinematography look particularly gorgeous. It's the perfect opportunity to revisit a film that warrants a second look.

Also this week, Criterion brings us two films that are new to DVD, Alberto Lattuada's Mafioso and Hiroshi Teshigahara's documentary Antonio Gaudi. Not having seen either of these films I can't pass judgment on them, but I'm glad Criterion has seen fit to give them the best treatment possible, particularly Teshigahara's film, the latest effort on their part to celebrate his often-overlooked career.

Recent releases coming to DVD include: Joe Wright's Oscar-nominated Atonement (Universal), the kid-friendly princess comedy Enchanted (Disney, also Blu-Ray), the surprisingly good I Am Legend (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Fox's failed attempt at a Potter-like franchise The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, and the aforementioned trio of critically-drubbed films, Love in the Time of Cholera (New Line), Revolver (Sony), and Southland Tales.

New TV on DVD includes Volume 1 of the 2007 reboot of The Bionic Woman (Universal) and Season 8 of Married... with Children (Sony). That's a strange juxtaposition of flashy action and soundstage-bound low comedy, but then when it comes to television, you can't have one without the other.

Also of note is MGM's trio of new DVD editions of baseball-themed movies to get viewers geared up for Opening Day: Bull Durham, Eight Men Out, and Pride of the Yankees. Indeed, these new editions appear to be geared more toward baseball fans than movie lovers, as they're chock full of baseball-themed extras, particularly the Curt Schilling-heavy Pride of the Yankees platter.

Finally, we bring you yet another edition of the ever popular Huddleston Corner. This week, we're offering shout-outs to two new HD-DVD releases, Atonement (Universal) and Justice League: The New Frontier (Warner). However, Mr. Huddleston would like to inform you that he doesn't know how many more condolences he has left in him, and he hopes that the bums companies who are still stuck on HD-DVD will get their acts together soon.

I Am Legend With a Smile

John Constantine — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 17:40:00 GMT

Well, only kind of. This alternate ending, an inevitable bonus feature on some version of I Am Legend’s home release, leaked onto the internet yesterday. It’s markedly sunnier than the original despite being equally sentimental. Will Smith’s Robert Neville, instead of sacrificing himself to blow up the sticky, CG zompires, realizes that the lead zompire isn’t crazy evil, he just wants his vambie girlfriend back. It doesn’t redeem the movie’s lackluster fourth quarter but it does provide a far more satisfying conclusion to Will Smith’s fantastic performance. Hit the jump for the “What If” satisfactions.

What did you think of I Am Legend? Personally, I thought it was pretty swell.

Academy Awards Also-Rans

Phil Nugent — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Now that the Academy Award nominations have been announced, we can all buckle up and wait to find out who the lucky non-winners are. Don't get us wrong: an Oscar win has a lot to recommend it. It bestows upon the recipient not just bragging rights but a new, higher pay ceiling and, if he doesn't screw it up the way Kevin Spacey did, a privileged glow and a long-term shot at juicier roles. But as anyone who's spent ten minutes reading about Cary Grant or Alfred Hitchcock knows, there's nothing that sets a major Hollywood figure apart like never having won an Oscar — that is, a real Oscar, and none of that special lifetime career achievement bullshit. Then, every time someone writes a profile of you, they can set aside a moment to tear their hair out over the fact that you never got the big prize — and everyone, including the people who'd never given it a second's thought before, will automatically do you the honor of agreeing that, yes, it is a shocking thing now that you mention it. In recent years, the sudden realization that Paul Newman and Martin Scorsese, to name two examples, had never won Oscars set off palpitations in the entertainment media, and cries went out urging the Academy to do the right thing, to make sure that they did not go to their graves un-Oscared, even if it meant honoring, by association, such lesser works as The Color of Money and The Departed. It's hard not to feel that, by finally joining what sometimes seems to be the majority, these men lost a little something that had previously set them apart from the likes of Red Buttons, Cliff Robertson, Roberto Begnini. One would think that Scorsese, with his ravenous enthusiasm for obscure and neglected filmmakers whose posthumous reputations glow with the luster one associates with misunderstood genius, would get this as much as anyone, but the lure of the little gold statuette is a powerful one. Let's take a moment to honor some of the people who will have to content themselves with asking Marty how it feels to hold one.

BEST ACTOR: Except for Johnny Depp and Viggo Mortensen, all the nominees here are already lost souls, with Oscars already stashed in the broom closet. Still, George Clooney and Tommy Lee Jones have only won for Best Supporting Actor in the past, so I'm sure it would feel a little special if they were able to corral one for being top banana. (Jones's nomination is also notable for being the only direct evidence included in the list of nominations that there was something this past year called "movies about the Iraq war.") Notable among the missing: Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey, Jr. of Zodiac, two very fine performances that could just as easily have been shoehorned into the Supporting Actor category, but which had the misfortune to have been included in a movie that really took it on the chin for having been released early in the year. (The Academy has traditionally favored movies that were released late in the year and so were fresh in the minds of voters, a tradition that the development of home video has done surprisingly little to reverse.) The Academy did reach back to movies released in the first half of 2007 in order to bestow a Best Actress nomination on Julie Christie for her work in Away from Her, but Gordon Pinsent, who had to carry that picture, and whose performance was equally fine, was slighted, which may have something to do with the fact that no Academy voters have fond memories of having used a picture of him torn from the pages of Vogue to help them get through puberty thirty years ago. Similarly, Will Smith's performance in I Am Legend, a movie that he was obliged to keep alive single-handedly for long stretches, was in its way every bit as impressive a feat of movie-star acting as Clooney's glamorously world-weary turn in Michael Clayton, but he was in a movie about fighting rabid vampires, whereas Clooney was in one about reaching deep down into the pit of one's soul and learning to say no to the forces of evil, represented by a bunch of lawyers who could easily be taken for rabid vampires if you squint.

BEST ACTRESS: It's really no surprise that one of the most remarkable performances seen this year, that of Molly Shannon in Year of the Dog, isn't here: the movie was, again, released a very long time ago, it wasn't a hit, and in the ranks of people remembered for having been on Saturday Night Live, Shannon is probably closer to Chris Farley's side of the scale than Bill Murray's in the public mind. That could change if she gives many more performances like this one, but God knows where she's going to find the roles. It's a bit more surprising that Angelina Jolie's A Mighty Heart has sunk without a trace; it's not the best performance of the year, nor is it Jolie's best performance, but in a year that, as usual, was not overflowing with instances of women being given the chance to strut their stuff in big, juicy parts, you might think that Jolie's lending whatever muscle she has a movie star to telling the story of Daniel Pearl's widow would get her a token nod. Maybe all the factors that it had going against it — released in the summer, box-office failure, heavy subject matter, plus the mixed feelings that so many people seem to have about Jolie (is she a star, or a tabloid freak?) created a kind of perfect storm. Ashley Judd's wild-eyed, insane sexy mama in the off-Broadway sort-of-horror picture Bug was something to see. I don't know if the studio even bothered to send out screener copies to Academy voters, though if they were on the fence about it, I'd have chipped in for the cost of the postage, just so I could fantasize about how many of them would end up calling in priests to exorcise their DVD players.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Chris Cooper punted two good shots the Academy's way, first with his creepy performance as treasonous spook Robert Hanssen in Breach, then with an excellent demonstration of the character actor functioning as secret star in the big action flick The Kingdom, but the Academy passed on both. Steve Zahn was amazing and heartbreaking as a doomed P.O.W. in Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn; he didn't get nominated either, but just last week he was amazing again, effortlessly channeling Robert Duvall as the young Gus McCrae in the Lonesome Dove prequel, so maybe the Emmys will make it up to him later. Jeff Daniels' straight-talking blind man in The Lookout deserved more attention than it got, and Clarence Williams III made a solid meal of about two (uncredited) scenes as Bumpy Johnson in American Gangster. (Ruby Dee did get nominated for Best Supporting Actress for playing Denzel Washington's mother in that movie. Her performance isn't nearly as rich as Williams', but she's certainly due for a little attention, and maybe the Academy figured, regarding her and Williams, that it was either one or the other.) The funny thing is that the category is padded out with people — Casey Affleck, Javier Bardem — who got enough screen time in their movies to qualify as lead actors. Bardem's Supporting Actor status feels like it's rigged to make it easier for him to claim the award, though I'd look for a late surge to form behind Hal Holbrook after people realize that he's not only nominated but actually still alive and capable of being cheered by a win.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: I don't get the universal consensus that Cate Blanchett was a supporting actress in I'm Not There. I guess that, again, it comes down to amount of screen time, but nobody else in that movie had any more screen time than she did; certainly nobody else put theirs to as good a use. I probably wouldn't mind so much except that, by shoving her into this category for her phenomenal performance, it feels as if the Academy is shafting Amy Ryan, nominated for a hair-raisingly skanky performance as a bad mother for the ages in Gone Baby Gone, and Tilda Swinton, whose completely reprehensible and yet completely understandable corporate villain gave Michael Clayton a surprising amount of its soul. A little tinkering might have left room for Marisa Tomei, who in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead made Philip Seymour Hoffman's faithless wife convincingly empty and slow-witted and shallow in her dissatisfaction with her existence, yet still made her seem very much worth screwing up your life over. This would have also been the place to honor little Nina Kervel-Bey, who made one of the year's most remarkable debuts in the French film Blame It on Fidel. She's actually the star of the movie, but from Tatum O'Neal to Abigail Breslin, the Academy has traditionally shoved little girls into the Best Supporting Actress category, as if "supporting" were synonymous with "short." Appearances to the contrary, Ellen Page turns twenty-one next month, so her nomination in the Best Actress category (for Juno) does not break this trend. It would have been nice, though, if Page's co-star Jennifer Garner could have been sandwiched in here. In The Kingdom, Garner is still trying to prove herself as an action heroine, with mixed results, but she gave the performance of her career so far in Juno — a carefully nuanced performance and a brave one, one that depended for its (and the movie's) full effectiveness on the actress's willingness to slowly open up to the audience and reveal what's on the inside of a woman who has the shell of a frosty yuppie robot.

BEST DIRECTOR: The fun in this category has usually been in thinking about how it feels to be the one director who wasn't nominated even though his movie was nominated as Best Picture. However he may laugh it off in public, you know that the message he thinks he's getting is, "And last but not least, nominated for Best Picture in spite of having been directed by..." This year it is the director of Atonement, the esteemed young filmmaker what's-his-name, who has to wonder if everybody thinks the actors built the sets while he was in the bathroom and came up with their blocking while he was at lunch. Suffice to say that Julian Schnabel, the director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, fills out the category just fine, though it might be even finer if, say, Jason Reitman had somehow been overlooked in favor of Zodiac's David Fincher. Another surprisingly plausible contender might have been Ben Affleck, who sure did a hell of a lot better job behind the camera on Gone Baby Gone than he's ever done in front of it. Affleck may not have the face of a director — that's a compliment, Ben — but I'm in favor of anything that encourages him to stay back there.

Fincher's Musical, The Canon of Thor, and Justice on the Rocks

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 21:10:00 GMT

Oh, comic book movie news. Will we ever get enough of you? No, apparently we will not.

In an interview with MTV's Movie News, Zodiac director and Oscar hopeful David Fincher teases us with a few comic-related projects he's tinkering with: he's attached to helm the film adaptation of inexhaustible comic book scribe Brian Michael Bendis' graphic novel Torso, he's kicking around the idea of doing an adaptation of another graphic novel called The Killer, and he's allegedly in talks to produce another animated film based on the artsy/smutty fantasy comics rag Heavy Metal, because we all remember how well it worked out the last time someone did that. The most intriguing bit of info that Fincher drops, though, is that he wants to do a Broadway musical based on Fight Club: "I always saw it as a comedy," he says. "Then everybody would look at me like a leper."

Chicago's Daily Herald, in a talk with South Side native and I am Legend screenwriter Mark Protosevich, reveals the unsurprising news that comic books and junk culture made him the man he is today. Protosevich's next big project, after he gets back from his strike-imposed inadvertent vacation, will be the silver screen debut of Marvel Comics' The Mighty Thor, who he somewhat confusedly describes in Biblical terms: "It's the story of an Old Testament god who becomes a New Testament God", he says. I'm the first to admit that my mind would wander a bit in Sunday School (blame it on comic books), but I'm pretty sure Thor doesn't appear in the version of the Bible they had us reading.

Finally, comic geeks and movie nerds alike were excited some months ago at the announcement that Babe/Mad Max director George Miller would be the man behind the camera for an upcoming big-screen version of the Justice League of America comic. The JLA is a universally beloved superhero team, and the news that a movie based on their exploits would be directed by someone who possesses actual filmmaking talent was welcomed across the board. Unfortunately, as IESB reports, the project is beginning to look as if it will never see the light of day. A combination of factors -- competing franchises, the writer's strike, Miller's commitment (against the studio's wishes) to use a cast of unknowns, a mushy script, and the usual budgetary issues — may lead to the whole thing being scrapped. Which may or may not be a bad thing: when the buzzword surrounding your project is "mediocre", sometimes not even Superman can save the day.

Middle America All About the Pregnant Teenagers

Phil Nugent — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

While a couple of big, violent films with outsized, misanthropic central characters battle it out for the title of Movie of the Year, a waddling, smart-mouthed teenager is on her way to sleeper blockbuster status. Yes, Juno is a big, big hit, and given the way they do things in Hollywood, it's hard to say for sure just how shocked the studio is, though they are having the grace to admit to being pleasantly surprised. In The Los Angeles Times, John Horn writes that "On Monday and Tuesday night, Juno was the No. 1 film in the nation — beating out National Treasure: Book of Secrets and I Am Legend, even though the Fox Searchlight film is playing on slightly more than half as many theaters as those Disney and Warner Bros. blockbusters. This Friday, in its sixth weekend of a quickly building national release. . . Juno will be appearing in about 600 more locations than a week ago, bringing it to a total of about 2,500 locations. Regardless of whether it wins in what will be a close fight for No. 1 over the weekend, Juno within a few days will pass the Oscar-winning Sideways as the top Fox Searchlight release ever." What's striking about this is how much its success has had to do with ticket sales in places like Rice Like, Wisconsin, and Columbus, Nebraska; outside of New York and L.A., bookers found that they couldn't draw a crowd to Sideways if they were offering a Dream Date with Paul Giamatti. (Juno has also been cleaning up in Ellen Page's native Halifax, where moviegoers turned out in force to celebrate the local girl's making good.) The movie is doing great word of mouth business that crosses generational and demographic lines; as for its ability to cater to all comers, including families, Brad Bills of Independent Film Services says"Thank God it's a PG-13." The movie's appeal to people in the heartland may end up setting off a fresh round of arguments about just what it says about this past year's string of movies about likable people who reject abortion as an option, but right now, the one clear thing about it has best been expressed, with charming indelicacy, by Fox Searchlight distribution head Stephen Gilula: "Now it is playing to the mainstream. It's not an art film anymore."

Comic Book Legends

Phil Nugent — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

An inside joke tucked into the futuristic Times Square setting of I Am Legend has some fanboys excitedly dreaming aloud (or at least on-line). As Future Will Smith duck walks through the talk grass hoping to bring down one of the free-range deer that are now plentiful in the ruins of Manhattan, a billboard overhead emblazoned with a combination Batman-Superman logo can be seen, with a promised release date of May, 2010. A sneaky piece of viral marketing for the ultimate comics-to-movies crossover wet dream? Sadly, as Michael Moran reports, it's "just a sight gag from producer Akiva Goldsman, who was at one involved in the Superman/Batman movie project which has been stuck in development hell for some years now." Moran points out that "particularly observant I Am Legend audiences can also spot a fleeting glimpse of the Alex Ross-illustrated poster for an imaginary Green Lantern DVD as Will Smith passes a video shop window." Unfortunately, this too is but a long-cherished fantasy that shows no signs of being realized anytime in the immediate future. As anyone who's ever covered the industry can tell you, Development Hell makes the Phantom Zone look like a revolving door.

Morning Deal Report: Honest to Blog, Juno Gives Birth to Large Profits

Peter Smith — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 16:50:00 GMT

Juno continues overwriting its way into America's heart — it made as much as I Am Legend this weekend, weirdly enough. To quote Variety, "I liked the movie, but it seemed to me Juno talked [less like a pregnant teenager, and] more like a 30-year-old ex-stripper trying to make a name for herself as a screenwriter." Hey, that's just how the Facebook generation talks, homeskillet!

Michael Showalter will direct Night of the Living Dorks, a German-horror-comedy remake described as "Revenge of the Nerds meets Shaun of the Dead." Given that Shaun of the Dead was already George Romero meeting John Cusack (or someone). . .

Marlon Wayans is Ripcord in the new G.I. Joe. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is also circling, weirdly enough. Maybe he'll play Serpentor. Where's that Cheat Commandos movie I'm waiting for?

Location, Location, Location: Times Square

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

When we think of New Year's Eve, we think of short-lived resolutions, ill-advised groping and hangovers that would cripple King Kong. But we also think of the lighted, bejeweled ball dropping in Times Square as an increasingly withered Dick Clark counts down the seconds until the new year's arrival. So on this final day of 2007, we can think of no better way to kick off a new recurring feature dedicated to notable locations and their portrayal on film than with Times Square. Here are a few of our favorite movie moments set - though not necessarily shot - in that ever-evolving hub of humanity.

The bygone glamour of the '30s and '40s is evoked in Radio Days (1987), Woody Allen's most nostalgic work, which concludes on a nightclub rooftop overlooking Times Square on New Year's Eve, 1944. It's a set - certainly one of the most beguiling ones in the Allen filmography, all colorful neon signs and cigarette billboards blowing smoke as snow begins to fall. This era's Times Square is recreated in another spectacular set - albeit for a less wistful moment - in Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of King Kong, as the ape escapes his "Eighth Wonder of the World" display on Broadway and goes on a rampage:

The square's later incarnation as a seedy pit of sin provides the backdrop for two counterculture classics. In Midnight Cowboy (1969), country boy Joe Buck has a rude awakening when his dreams of the high life as a top-dollar New York hustler are dashed in the Square's filthy hotels and run-down porno theaters. For Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), the Square is no less than hell on earth; his late-night cruise through rain-slicked streets oozing steam and bad vibes remains the iconic image of Times Square from this period.

The latest version of Times Square is often described as "Disneyfied," and it is indeed a cleaned-up, corporate intersection of Gap stores and ESPN Zones. It does retain the outsized billboards and extravagant neon of decades past, however, and as this clip from the otherwise regrettable Vanilla Sky (2001) shows, it still has potential for creepiness:

The Square is used to similar effect as a deserted wasteland in I Am Legend, although this Times Square of the near future, crumbling and overgrown with weeds, is entirely computer generated. Still, we have the feeling Travis Bickle would approve.

God Damn Us All to Hell, Every One!

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 16:30:00 GMT

In I Am Legend, Will Smith zips around a depopulated Manhattan in a sports car, with his trusty German shepherd in the seat next to him; if he takes a curve too fast and the pooch soils the upholstery, he can always pick up another one. Smith also high in the tall grass that, intended, has sprouted up in Times Square and hunts deer with the Virgin Megastore in the background. He doesn't have any scenes with the Statue of Liberty, but as Sewell Chan points out in The New York Times, apocalyptic fantasies centered in New York City often go straight for the lady in the harbor. Charlton Heston had a hissy-fit when he encountered her remains at the end of Planet of the Apes; her torch sticking out of the waterline was the last visible trace of a submerged New York in Steven Spielberg's A.I.; and the promotional artwork for the forthcoming Cloverfield uses a smoking, ravaged statue to indicate what horrors may await audiences when that viral-marketed behemoth finally lumbers into theaters.

New York is hardly the only place on the American landscape that has been obliterated onscreen to audience-pleasing effect. The whole point of the 1974 disaster hit Earthquake was, in the words of Pauline Kael, about "seeing L.A. get it." And though Chan includes the 1996 Independence Day in his roll call, noting that it's a film in which "Giant alien spaceships hover over, and then destroy, New York and other major world cities", the fact is that the one thing everybody probably remembers from that picture is the image of the White House exploding. (Even people who didn't see that movie may well still remember it from its once ever-present trailer.) But you know New Yorkers. Chan quotes the architectural historian Max Page as writing, “The best thing for New York might be the sight of King Kong tramping through the streets of Manhattan on his way to a fateful appointment at the top of the Empire State Building. For if there is one thing that symbolizes New York’s pre-eminence, it is that so many still want to imagine the city’s end.” But Chan isn't just convinced that this is all about the city; he also thinks it's "tasteless" to indulge in this sort of thing after 9-11. An alternate hypothesis might be that it's actually a sign of health that moviemakers and audiences may be ready to indulge in this kind of scary fantasy again; that they've moved on. Luckily, he was able to reel Ed Koch in for a sound bite. “'They want to see our skyscrapers destroyed because they are envious of them,' Mr. Koch said in a phone interview. Asked whom he was referring to, he said, '"They" is the rest of the country.'” Maybe the monsters and aliens keep attacking New York because they're trying to make friends with us by taking out Ed Koch.

I Am Legend Too

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

I Am Legend broke all box office records for December, taking in over $77 million over the weekend. For those of you who are too busy finishing up your Christmas shopping to wait in lines that stretch around the block, we present an alternative that can be enjoyed on your own schedule in the comfort of your home: The Omega Man. Based on the same 1954 Richard Matheson novel as the Will Smith blockbuster, this 1971 sci-fi extravaganza stars Charlton Heston as plague survivor Robert Neville. Seemingly the last human resident of Los Angeles, Neville fills his days with one-sided chess games and repeated screenings of Woodstock. At night, however, albino mutants emerge from the underground, wielding torches and firing arrows at our hero. But as the trailer narrator intones, “the last man on earth always carries an automatic weapon. Of course he does – and you can have it when you pry it from his cold, dead hands. The special effects may not be as impressive as in the current version, but can anything in I Am Legend match the paranoid intensity of this “ringing phones” sequence? We think not.

Today in the Nerve Film Lounge: I Am Legend, Youth Without Youth, Look, The Kite Runner, Funny Face

Peter Smith — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

I Am Legend: "Smith is excellent as a man at the very brink of sanity, but Manhattan is the other star of I Am Legend."

Youth Without Youth: "Abandon hope, all ye who enter this picture seeking narrative coherence. But if you're in the mood for a visually stunning, batshit-loco jaunt into Eastern European mysticism, you could do considerably worse."

The Kite Runner: "It's hard not to be moved by Hosseini's epic, devastating tale of ruined friendships and a destroyed country."

Look: "Generally, one feels less a sympathy for the spied-upon than a sense that these people should be watched carefully at all times. This actually makes for a pretty entertaining hundred minutes, but as far as thematic resonance, it's a bust."

Funny Face: "There's never been a more appropriate movie to co-opt for a fashion ad than Funny Face — it's the cinematic equivalent of flipping through Vogue."

Video of the Day: Richard Matheson is Legend

Peter Smith — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

I Am Legend opens this Friday; the Will Smith vehicle is the third adaptation of the famous science-fiction story by Richard Matheson. No stranger to Hollywood, Matheson has been working in television and cinema since he got his first job as a writer with The Twilight Zone. In this interview, he discusses his long career, his relationship with everyone from Rod Serling to Roger Corman, and the astonishing feat — which not even Stephen King can match — of having every single one of his novels adapted into a film. — Leonard Pierce