Remember when Will Smith’s name in the center/top/left/whatever of your poster was enough to guarantee a hit? 2007 sure does.
Director Francis Lawrence has a way with the frayed melancholia of an apocalypse, and his star in I Am Legend has a kind of soul to embody it, and to rage against it. The film they’ve produced never actually ignites, but it attains a solid simmer for a good hour or so as lone-human-in-New-York Robert Neville desperately fends off encroaching demons both external and internal in this adaptation of Richard Matheson’s oft-filmed novel of the same name. Not a carbon-copy of prior adaptations of the book (it’s more like an embellished replica), the tone of I Am Legend is, for a while, corrupted pulp in the best way, with the emphasis on low-slung filmmaking kinetics and a refreshingly intimate performance radiating char-broiled humanity.
Things do go awry in a final sequence that overheats the tensile strength of the ominous early goings and transform the film into a inflated (and thus deflated) blockbuster-like-object, an unknowing host for special effects doomed to be absorbed by them. Main man Will Smith and his handler Lawrence (one presumes this project afforded him the clout to become the quasi-auteur behind the later Hunger Games films) do what they can do assuage the film’s failures though. And although blockbuster size is always skulking undertow, for a while I Am Legend is sufficient to doodle in the margins of the blockbuster format with compositional whimsy and unmoored fear taking center-stage over conventional thrills. Continue reading
Perhaps inevitably, The Conjuring 2 can’t exert the primal, pared potency of its immediate predecessor, although it certainly tries to: James Wan’s sequel to his original film is blissfully insular, wonderfully happy to simply exist without the burden of a franchise on its back. In practice, this eases the transition to the pulpy genre material, the bread and butter of director Wan’s craft, with the film resisting the urge to force itself through the fire-trial of self-legitimization through psychoanalytic babble or metaphoric shenanigans. It’s another “from the files of” ghostly haunted house yarn, plain and simple, one that doesn’t unpack box after box of added meaning as most films do when they are overconfident in their skills and try to take on the world. Although it doesn’t quite justify Wan’s A-list status and meteoric rise to artistic credibility after striking out last decade with Saw and Dead Silence, The Conjuring 2 is primarily pleased to serve its principal interests of satisfyingly lean, mean flair and virtuosity. 
The Shallows
The name “acid western” doesn’t quite do justice to Monte Hellman’s duo of sadly fatalistic fugues released in 1966, soon to become cult icons when their casts went on to fame and infamy, in some order. These two films have the bracing mystique of unidentified film-like objects without precedent or successor; even the most famous film in the acid sub-genre, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s four-years-later release El Topo, suggests the toxicity of these 1966 progenitors but not their distressed, cloudy desolation. If El Topo was a disobedient, hallucinatory nonsense-poem that eroded society’s expectations for the Western, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind are already themselves eroded. 
The early 1940s were the last gasp of the first wave of the classical Hollywood romantic screwball comedy, but why the genre sputtered out remains a conundrum. Perhaps the world was modifying itself too quickly for a genre where chaos was a principle to feel like casual entertainment rather than skewered reflection of the status quo. Or perhaps moods were more ambivalent about fancy free fun with the onset of global geopolitical turmoil. But then again, the arrival of the screwball in the ‘30s was massaged partially out of the national turmoil of the Depression to begin with, so the obvious answers only retype the question mark in boldface.
Steven Spielberg’s The BFG is a production remarkably lacking in ego or bombast, functioning primarily as a genuinely heartfelt palate cleanser for one of Hollywood’s specialists at masquerading grandness with a simulacrum of heart. Chronicling a burgeoning friendship between the titular Big Friendly Giant, played by Mark Rylance, and a young child Sophie (Ruby Barnhill), an orphan (because of course she is), Melissa Mathison’s screenplay dispels the necessity of grandeur and instead tucks us in with an intimate dream of pleasantly aimless friendship and camaraderie to keep the nightmares at bay. This is a reverie of a film, so lost in its own daydreams that it casually avoids demarcating a narrative for us, and although the title may suggest otherwise, the central appeal of Spielberg’s brew is that it is morsel-sized, in every respect. 
David Yates’ listless The Legend of Tarzan has the look, but not the spunk of a great pulp novel the likes of which Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of the character one hundred years ago, might have written. Biting off well more than it can possibly chew, the faux-artisanal nature of the design suggests a more thoughtful, or fun, production than this ultimately pretentious slog can handle. Thickly breaded in a historical revisionism that the film absolutely cannot withstand or rein in at all, the screenplay by Adam Cozard and Craig Brewer (Brewer’s previous films have embraced a pulpy flavor totally lacking in this film) is a misfire of egotistical proportions. 
They still make movies like this? I mean, jeez, even Edward Zwick – whose two-decade iron-fist rule over antiseptic, middlebrow prestige drama is currently on sabbatical – doesn’t seem to want to dish out this kind of blasé appease-everyone history-conscious cinema anymore. Never fear! Into the fray steps Gary Ross, another so-competent-it-hurts filmmaker with an impersonal aesthetic defined by a nonsense brand of faux-realism (wouldn’t want someone daring to imbue any sense of form or rhythm, especially the formal rhythm of genuine down-and-dirty messiness, into their precious history). After all, someone has to stand by as a vanguard for indifferent, domesticated middlebrow types looking for intelligent cinema but too afraid to actually challenge themselves. Their worries can be allayed; Free State of Jones is here to save the day. 
The Bourne Identity
Beneath the ostentatious, rat-a-tat action and state of the art technology underwire, Justin Lin’s newest Star Trek feature is a séance for an antiquarian spirit that dishes on not only the usefulness of seemingly past-its-prime technology but reminisces for and embodies a long-lost ethos in big-budget blockbuster cinema. In this case, it is the progenitor race of the Star Trek universe that is resurrected, with the aww-shucks nature of Gene Roddenberry’s original television show surprisingly at home in the casual riffing and interpersonal dynamics that girder Lin’s more casual, insular take on the material. The result is an exultant ode to camaraderie and ingenuity much closer to the spirit of democratic interpersonal imagination as an avenue for overcoming conflict and feeling out one’s own humanity that was the backbone of Star Trek in its original incarnation. 
The Long Take 