films

Here's my post from a few years ago on The Last Man on Earth, the definitive movie so far based on Richard Matheson's novella I Am Legend.
Don't bother with that Will Smith timewaster--it's a dumbed-down, Hollywoodized version of the story. Some of the early atmosphere is poignant and makes you think it's going to be a credible update of Matheson's tale of unrequited grief and political obliviousness but then it turns to ultra-fast CGI zombies hurling themselves at the camera.
The zombies change from smart to dumb and back again with the scenery.
It's another case of coked-up tinseltown screenwriters not telling a coherent story and wrapping it up with feelgood cliches (Akiva Goldsman may not actually be coked up but certainly writes like he is, having previously jabbered out the empty voids Lost in Space, Batman & Robin, and I, Robot).
Why can't the current adapters trust Matheson? Just go on autopilot and let him tell the story. He's a whiz at spinning yarns--he wouldn't end the story with "the hero sacrificing himself so that a theretofore unknown colony of survivors could go on."
He'd have a gut-wrenching sociopolitical twist, or something.

Dug this out of the amazon reader reviews because I always liked it; I think "a customer" was changed from something funnier:

monkeys, maniacs, mutants, and creepy crawlies by the ton, March 8, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Phenomena (1984) (Ws Rmst) (VHS Tape)
What more could you want from a horror movie? A pretty schoolgirl who commands armies of insects, a knife wielding serial killer, a deformed boy kept chained to a wall in the attic, a vengeful helper monkey with a razor blade, Donald Pleasance, delirious camerawork, blindingly gorgeous cinematography, pulsating music, characters who behave strangely for no particular reason, lots of pockets of glowing blue light (see where X-Files got some of their aesthetic ideas), surreally graphic violence, beautiful scenery, it's all right here. Sure, it's not Dario Argento's best work, but it's his most eccentric. Besides, why not watch a real horror film instead of Scream?

I've been using "characters who behave strangely for no reason" to describe Argento's films since I first read this.

Good review on Open Left of the movie The Mist. Saw it yesterday and found it a compelling and creepy blend of John Carpenter's Thing and Arthur Miller's Crucible.

To those who love the Stephen King novella on which the movie is based, yes, Mrs. Carmody still gets hit in the chest with a can of peas but she has taken on special significance as a character in the Bush era. One critic of the movie says "What scares me? Cancer. Osama bin Laden. Teenagers. But not a giant land octopus." Well, what scares me is a fundamentalist Christian in the White House appointing zombie end-timers to scores of government posts. The movie presents a twin abyss: the Lovecraftian horror of unexplained, utterly malevolent forces and the dark human tendency to listen to people with voices in their heads when things get frightening.

An interesting interchange occurs in the back of the alien-besieged supermarket after the land octopus and other critters have struck: a small group of characters confess to each other they have no faith in human nature, and believe that everyone else in the store will eventually succumb to the non-stop persuasions of a Christian millennialist who sees the aliens as harbingers of the apocalypse. This is increasingly plausible: millions of Americans believe they will be levitated into space when Jesus returns, and we have seen Biblical zealots (some phony, some not) reach the highest levels of government power in the last decade--Tom Delay, anyone?--with a special boost from a particularly mind-boggling mass crime.

By the end of the movie only a handful of people remain who have some belief in rational, empirical, Enlightenment-style principles. They are literally embattled, surrounded by knife-wielding religious converts. The creepy crawlies delivering face bloating stings and bursting out of chests and such could be taken literally, but one could also see them as an occult double of our political culture, an increasingly ugly world where torture is official policy and statesmen must swear fealty to an invisible, omniscient God or be tarred as "anti-family."

Air Force One, 1997 (Harrison Ford as US President dukes it out with post-Soviet commie hardliners on presidential plane)
fiction/reality compare and contrast

Prescient line spoken by Russian communist (a scenery-eating Gary Oldman): "You who murdered a hundred thousand Iraqis to save a nickel on a gallon of gas are going to lecture me on the rules of war? Well DON'T."

Secretary of Defense: "We don't negotiate with terrorists."
Except when selling them arms to finance revolutions in other countries.

President stays on plane to help his family and colleagues instead of bailing out in "escape pod."
President keeps flying west after attacks on Washington and NY are over.

Secretary of Defense and Vice President clash over whether President is incapacitated and must be overruled.
Secretary of Defense and Vice President run goverment.

Air Force One is hijacked by Russian commandos spraying machine gun fire.
Four US planes hijacked by jihadis with box cutters (or at least no guns so far as we know).

President is a pilot who flew helicopter missions in Vietnam.
President skipped out on the latter part of his air national guard service during Vietnam era.

President personally flies jet to the ground and safety after routing hijackers.
President fails to stop hijacking and rides shotgun for photo op aircraft carrier landing.

The movie 8 BIT received some excellent press for its recent screening in Winnipeg; please go read the reviews over at the vertexList blog. All the writers caught the spirit of the film and two out of three even liked the "brainiac art theory."