I always try to see Shyamalan films in the theater because, well, I respect him for sticking to his particular thing, even if it sometimes (recently, often) doesn’t work. And I just like a parable. Signs and Unbreakable are my two favorite Shyamalan films. Anyway, Ebert liked this one. And the New York Times didn’t completely dismiss it. Alas, this just didn’t hold together. I liked what the New Yorker said though, about what it really needed was Val Lewton to come along and fix ‘er up.

Trying too hard. The recursive revisiting of scenes is the sort of thing I usually find really interesting but it was pointless here. The entire thing was full of superfluous ornament and forced gravity. They should have had David Mamet come in with a black magic marker and carefully black out every line of the entire script.

Fabulous.

Boy, having not heard about it ahead of time, I was pretty bummed at the end of the movie.

A widescreen stinker in true 1970 form, complete w/ lovemaking in fields of flowers, footprints in the sand, bad generator and horse metaphors, a grossly overblown and incongruous score, wildly inaccurate costumes in polyester, a terrible mostly non-Irish cast butchering the brogue all over the gorgeous on-location scenery of the Dingle peninsula, and an utterly confused message maybe having something to do with war, courage, something? As soon as that parasol went over the cliffs of Mohr only to be retrieved by a retarded man (looking entirely too much like a leprechaun) in a skiff I knew I was in for trouble.

Woe is me. Why do I keep going to these movies? Between this, Lars and the Real Girl, Darjeeling Limited, and that infernal Little Miss Sunshine, my head is about to explode with the self conscious oh-so-cutesy faux misfit-ness of it all. Talk about a fantasyland of suspended maturation. Don’t get me wrong- Juno made me chuckle and smile, I tapped my feet a little with the soundtrack, and I was genuinely impressed by the young star’s performance. Overall, “eh.”

I’m not sure reading this added anything to my experience of the books. O’brian’s handwriting was too hard to read to get anything out of that, and the story was pretty sketchy. Still, I suppose it provided some denouement to the experience overall. Reading the Patrick O’Brian books was a wonderful thing to do, and I look forwarding to reading them again in my lifetime.

I have my husband’s permission to marry Steve Martin.

Spectacular. When I read the book I stated that it was my least favorite of Cormac McCarthy’s, but that it might make a great movie. The Coen brothers certainly make a great movie. I think it might be impossible to decide who is more responsible for how great a film this is, McCarthy for the source, or the Coen brothers for their handling of it. This is a rare case where I think the film makes it an even better story than the author did. The sheriff (detective stand-in) is even more helpless and ineffective in the movie than he was in the book. This is aided by the fact that the Coen brothers dispense of the puzzle of how the victims are being killed almost immediately, by showing us. So the detective isn’t really working on any real world mystery at all other than insurmountable question of evil. The evil and violence is so perfectly treated. The “bad guy” shows up on screen and without doing anything he fills you with true dull dread, and the knowing that he won’t go away. In the novel I got too caught up in Moss and his dilemma, and when he died midway I was left without a connection to the story. In the movie, however, I completely engaged with the Sheriff, and could see more of the indictment of Moss that is there in both versions.

I’m not a stickler for film adaptations keeping completely true to the book, but in this case I think it was very odd that they chose to keep the title I Am Legend, after the short story, when the moral of the movie version is pretty much the exact opposite of the one in the book. The whole point of him saying “I am Legend” in the book is because he finally realizes as a human he is now obsolete, that he has become some legendary thing of fanciful past. In the film the humans prevail instead, surviving largely due to their moral superiority, the military, god, and some lady and child who show up out of nowhere. I’m surprised Will Smith wasn’t resurrected after his crucifixion. The title I Am Legend is retained for no apparent reason other than to provide a bizarre and weak connection to Bob Marley. Yes, Bob Marley. All that said, the first three quarters of the film were very entertaining.