New Movies - I Am Legend & Sweeny Todd

Holy crap! I actually left the house and saw a couple of new movies in theaters!

***I Am Legend***

Last Christmas, Gemma gave me The Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, which is a mostly chronological survey of the most important zombie movies in the history of cinema. It's a decent book, except going through the history of zombie movies in a strictly chronological order makes for a couple of rather dull chapters between the White Zombie / I Walked With a Zombie era and the Night of the Living Dead-to-present-day era of zombie movies. It's also annoying in that it summarizes a lot of movies scene-by-scene, up to and including the ending - so the result is that if you've seen the movie, you're already familiar with it and skip a few paragraphs, or if you haven't, you skip a few paragraphs because you don't want the ending spoiled. However, the book has an excellent critical analysis of three of Lucio Fulci's "zombie trilogy" movies; Zombie, The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery. If you've already seen those movies, that chapter alone makes it worth the paper its printed on.

The reason I bring it up is because it discussed an earlier movie adaptation of Rich Matheson's I Am Legend called The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price. The way the Book of the Dead described it, The Last Man on Earth sounded like a very interesting movie, with Vincent Price as a scientist alone in a city surrounded by slow moving, zombie-esque vampires who were warded off by the traditional vampire banes like mirrors and garlic. The first half of this movie was great and basically showed Price's day-to-day routine as a hunter who goes out during the day to methodically search the town for sleeping vampires, kill them while they are weak and defenseless, and throw their bodies in a giant fire at a leftover town dump site. The second half of The Last Man on Earth got kind of wonky, and the ending was outright retarded and in many ways contradicted everything that was presented about the vampires in the first half. Overall I did not like this movie, but was curious as to whether or not the bad ending (in my opinion anyways) was straight from the book or not; so I put I Am Legend (the book) on my Christmas list and have it sitting next to my bed waiting to be opened. (I'm so glad I have the previous book cover and not the new one with Will Smith on it - not that I particularly dislike Will Smith, but I think that kind of shit just makes a book look like a cheap tie-in, like a Burger King toy or some shit.)


Anways - I Am Legend, the new movie starring Will Smith. First off, I like this one overall better than The Last Man on Earth. (There's also another movie based off the same novel, The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston, I haven't seen that one yet.) Will Smith's protagonist is a military scientist, so he's a lot more physically fit and a bit more handy with a gun. In this movie, Smith doesn't seem to hunt the "vampires" necessarily, but rather bumps into them from time to time while foraging for non-perishable food or trying to hunt deer in the streets of Manhattan. The vampires this time around are more akin to the zombies of 28 Days Later and the craptastic Dawn of the Dead remake. They're super fast, super strong, super jumpy, but can be taken down with a bullet or strangled to death. The only thing really "vampire" about them is that sunlight kills them.

Whereas the vampires in The Last Man on Earth could talk, and would often come around to the protagonists home at night to taunt him verbally, the vampires in I Am Legend do not speak and appear to have only an animal level of intelligence. The story arc of I Am Legend revolves around one of these vampires apparently having a spark of intelligence and beginning to "get back at" Will Smith for stealing a vampire from his pack for medical experiments. There is some controversy about the look of the vampires in I Am Legend, a lot of people think the vampires look "too CGI," but I really wasn't bothered by their appearance. Perhaps those of us who sat through that CGI-shitfest known as the Star Wars Prequels have had our sense of taste in such matters deadened a bit - I don't know.

Overall I Am Legend is a solid movie, and even though it is easy to draw comparisons between it and movies like 28 Days Later and Land of the Dead, it stands well on its own. The only thing I really hated about this movie is that at the end they introduce this "God has a plan for everything," bullshit out of nowhere. I've lived through almost 8 years of the "God has a plan for everything" presidency, I don't need that kind of bullshit seeping into my horror movies. C'mon Hollywood, I know you love your hookers and blow - Midwesterners would have seen this movie anyway without you pandering to their religious fantasies!

***Sweeny Todd***

Tim Burton can either be brilliant (Beetlejuice, Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands) or downright retarded (Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). Rotwang wrote on his blog that he got so annoyed at this movie that he walked out after twenty minutes, but it seems he did not like Edward Scissorhands and therefore suffers from erectile dysfunction.

This movie, visually, is beautiful (Rotwang hates Burton's dreary goth set designs and cinematography, but he wears pink ties, so there's always the chance that his brain interprets color differently than the rest of us), the plot is awesome, the acting is great - but there's a big fat elephant sitting in the room here - it's a fucking musical. And not even a fun Danny Elfman Nightmare Before Christmas/Corpse Bride musical, not the kind of musical where the characters mostly talk, then burst into song every once in a while. This is a full on adaptation of the 1979 Stephen Sondheim "serious musical theatre" version of Sweeny Todd.

Sondheim is in the tradition of Guilbert and Sullivan and Rodgers and Hammerstein-type musical theatre, the kind that sees itself as the heir to opera. I went to school for music for six years, and got exposed to this kind of stuff, including Sondheim songs and I got to say...

It's

All

So

Gay!

Sorry to use "gay" as a negative descriptor, but, seriously, the only people who like this shit are gay men who love musical theatre and the overweight, mustached hags that love gay men. The music is blander than oatmeal, the lyrics are cliche and the vocal lines are jagged with wide leaps in this perverse attempt to be "new," but they just annoy most normal people. And I like atonalism, but you just can't put atonal song melodies, usually butchered even by the best singers, on top of stock, cliche orchestral arrangements and call it "jazz-influenced."

Musical theatre overall also has this tendency to be too long for no fucking reason. Oh wait, there is a reason, and that's because operas were written to be long, and musical theatre is the runty nephew of opera that's constantly coming by and saying, "Me too! Me too!" In the heyday of opera, people who went to operas wanted to be there all night long to hoot and holler and drink and gamble and solicit prostitutes, etc. etc. etc... they had nothing better to do at home, so they wanted to make a night of it. Their audiences wanted long, drawn out musical numbers that went nowhere and had little if anything to do with the plot. Now we have busy lives and while we all love a good diversion, we don't like it when things drag. Just because something is long doesn't mean it has to drag, and just because something drags doesn't necessarily mean it's long. This is not some horrible crippling of our attention spans due to T.V. or anything, it's Just. Modern. Life. It's different now than it was in the 18th century, and I wouldn't give up any of it because I like wiping my ass and showering and cleanliness overall, thank you very much.

There are operas that have survived hundreds of years and will survive hundreds more. The essential problem of really all contemporary "art music," but especially of musical theatre, is that it is so sure of its place in history - but it will be forgotten in a generation or two. No one likes this shit - and it's not for any lack of intelligence or taste on anyone's part - it's Just. Plain. Bad. - from conception to execution. Only *certain* people, with *certain* predilections for what *should be* "good art" buy into this kind of crap. And they're all either stupid, or just being ironic.

Anyways, Sweeny Todd, if you can ignore the music, is actually a great film, with great atmosphere, great acting and wonderful, wonderful violence. Alan Rickman is brilliant as the villain, Johnny Depp manges to be a few notches above brilliant as the murderous protagonist and I actually like Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett, and I only mention that because it seems people think she's the new Lisa Marie, Burton's former girlfriend who really did come off as a talentless hanger on - but I liked HBC is this and I liked her Fight Club, so I have no idea where all the hate is coming from, but I didn't bother sitting through Planet of the Apes.

As I mentioned in my rant above musical theatre likes to drag on, and according to the reviewer at Fangoria, this movie version actually cut out a fair amount of the original version's song numbers and shit, and it's still over two hours long! But really, most of the pacing is pretty decent, except for one extraneous scene where Mrs. Lovett sings about and imagines living in a house by the sea with Sweeny Todd - yeah I understand they're probably trying to portray her motivation for hanging around the guy, but it's just so drawn out and out of place and unnecessary. I can only imagine that the full musical theatre version of it is full of that kind of shit for hours and hours on end.

Overall, if I were crass enough to give movies letter grades, I'd have to do something like this:

Sweeny Todd Music: F
Sweeny Todd everything else: A

which would mathematically work out to a C, but I would give this movie a solid B if I had no other choice, but since I do I would say, see it if you can ignore shitty music sung well for over two hours, but if that kind of thing is deal breaker for you, then don't.

Oh and Rotwang mentioned that he thought HBC couldn't sing, but really, all of Sondheim's vocal lines for women sound like that in my experience, so whatever.