I AM LEGEND ****
Director: Francis Lawrence
Running Time: 100 minutes
On general release from WednesdaySO THIS is how the world ends; with Will Smith and his dog playing Bob Marley records amid the ruins of New York? To be clear, it
is Smith, not the dog, who is spinning the discs. The part of Sam the dog (a German shepherd, played by an expressive hound called Abbey) is less demanding, being roughly analogous to that of Wilson the Volleyball in Cast Away. But while Wilson outperformed Tom Hanks on that ghastly desert island, Sam is happy to play Tonto to Smith's Lone Ranger. She doesn't say much, but you know that eventually jeopardy will intervene.
I Am Legend is the third attempt at Richard Matheson's 1954 sci-fi novel, in which a man battled vampires in late 1970s California. That became The Last Man On Earth in 1964, with Vincent Price doing the honours, and was revisited in 1973 in The Omega Man, a marvellous piece of schlock in which Charlton Heston found himself at war with a race of post-humans in 1970s sunglasses. Though not derived from the book, the 1959 episode of The Twilight Zone, 'Time Enough At Last', is another famous exploration of the theme, with Burgess Meredith (later the Penguin in Batman) left in the rubble of a ruined world with nothing to do but read books.
Of course, context is everything, and while previous attempts at the story have been viewed as products of the Cold War and McCarthyism, Smith's travails feel very different. True, the plague is caused by a viral cancer cure which goes wrong (introduced by the ominously named Dr Krippin, played by Emma Thompson), but by switching the setting of the story from Los Angeles to New York, Francis Lawrence encourages the viewer to consider external threats which are not medical. When you see the smashed ruins of the Brooklyn Bridge, it's unlikely that your first thoughts are going to be about bad medicine.
In fact, the bridge has been blown up in an attempt to isolate the virus which has swept through the world, killing almost everyone, but turning a sizeable minority into "dark-seekers" – ill-tempered zombie types with an aversion to ultra-violet light. This weakness is useful, because it means that Colonel Robert Neville (Smith) and his faithful mutt can act like characters in a video game: driving a red Mustang through the ruined canyons of New York City, hunting deer, watching lions and hitting golf balls from the deck of an abandoned aircraft carrier.
It is a life of routines. Smith talks to the dummies in the video store and watches recordings of old weather forecasts on TV. He plays his reggae records and enjoys lingering baths. (It's not clear where his electricity comes from, but who's counting?) At noon every day, he goes to a jetty to wait for survivors who never come, and at night he barricades the windows of his elegant townhouse and decamps to the basement to continue his search for a cure for the virus (from which he, luckily enough, is immune).
Another convenience is that his dreams tend to come in perfect flashbacks to his earlier life, showing the evacuation of his family, and the pleas of his wife to come with them. Neville, being a good soldier, refuses to quit Manhattan, saying: "This is Ground Zero." The sense of post 9/11 fatalism is underlined by the fact that those leaving the island are given iris-scans to determine their good health.
Cinematically, the first half hour owes much to Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, which made such dramatic use of an abandoned London. The desolate beauty of the wrecked New York is wonderfully realised, and Lawrence is smart enough to exploit the tension of the environment, delaying the entrance of the ghouls. After 60 minutes, I was infected with some of Col Neville's deluded hope and began to imagine a horror film which was brave enough to dispense with monsters altogether. Moments later, Smith was upside-down in an overturned 4x4 being eyeballed by a growling freak. And his bad day was about to get worse.
Playing solo for most of the film is demanding, but Smith manages it, travelling on charisma alone. This reliance on good humour does make his descent into a kind of anti-social madness harder to digest, but it also disguises the pessimism of the film, and allows for some pretty dark moments. Smith gets to say "There is no God", which is unusual behaviour for an all-American hero. And, though the existential bleakness of the film is threatened at the last moment by a tsunami of syrup, the overall effect is surprisingly grim. A serious piece of trash.
SULKY SKATERS ARE BOARD STUPIDPARANOID PARK ***
Director: Gus Van Sant
Running time: 88 minutes
On release from Wednesday at the Cameo, Edinburgh, and Cineworld, GlasgowTHERE will come a time – and perhaps it is already upon us – when Gus Van Sant's fixation with adolescence stops being fresh, or edgy, or urgent, and becomes merely creepy. This, the third part of a death trilogy (after Elephant and Last Days) centres on the guilty struggle endured by Alex (Gabe Nevins), a teenager whose attempts to insinuate himself into the hardcore skateboard fraternity of Portland, Oregon, lead to him becoming involved in the death of a railroad security guard.
The death is more due to carelessness than malevolence, but Alex – already a model of taciturnity – reacts by retreating into himself. Van Sant, as is his custom, plays fast and loose with dramatic convention, wallowing in blankness where a more conventional director would attempt to apply dramatic tension. Rather than depict the alienation and disengagement of teenage lives, he tries to make the audience experience it: a bold strategy, as the primary sensation in depicting disaffection is boredom.
This leads to dialogue such as this exchange between Alex and a girl. Girl: "Why are you lying on the driveway?" Alex: "Because." Or this un-Shakespearian explanation of the lad's dilemma: "There's like different levels of stuff, and something happened to me."
At its core, the story (based on a novel by Blake Nelson) hardly differs from the template of a teenage exploitation movie with its knotty social problems – divorcing parents, a heartless world – except that Van Sant adds a veneer of nihilism and, like, loads of inarticulacy. Ambition is too much effort for this kid: "What I really wanted was to go skate with the hardcore freaks at Paranoid Park," is one of Alex's few coherent statements.
The naturalism is enhanced by the use of non-actors, apparently recruited from MySpace, and Nevins does well in a part that requires nuanced moping. His girlfriend Jennifer (Taylor Momsen) seems to have parachuted in from Clueless, and it's no surprise that Alex is nonplussed when, after much anxious negotiation, they have sex. Immediately, she is boasting on the phone: "Yeah. Like we totally did it." They break up immediately.
The cinematography, by Christopher Doyle (the Wong Kar-wai collaborator who also worked on Van Sant's shot-by-shot reconstruction of Psycho) is less bashful, whether it is capturing the sun glinting through blades of grass, or viewing sex through the hair of the participants. The skateboarding sequences are rendered in groovy Super 8.
Doyle and Van Sant seem to be aiming for the quality of a dream, but structurally, Alex's obsessive recall of the events isn't all that far removed from a more conventional crime vehicle such as CSI, in which the drama is constructed from parts which are constantly being reshaped. It isn't CSI, of course, because Van Sant doesn't do moral judgments or neat solutions. He makes pictures in which people sulk prettily because they don't fit into the world, and in so doing, he makes the world a sulkier place.
FLYING HIGH WITH NO STRINGS ATTACHEDTHE KITE RUNNER ****
Director: Marc Forster
Running time: 122 minutes
On general release from WednesdayTHIS is an adaptation of an international bestseller by Khaled Hosseini which is reported to have sold eight million copies: a lot for a story about boyhood friendships in Afghanistan. Why so popular? Well, the story puts a human face on a contemporary tragedy and – as the film Babel recently did – applies balm to the problem by stressing our common humanity. It is storytelling as Calamine lotion.
The tale begins with a telephone call. Amir (Khalid Abdalla) is in San Francisco, opening the first box of his about-to-be published novel, when a voice from the past calls to say: "There is a way to make things good again."
He abandons his book tour and his cosy American life to return to Pakistan, and from there to Afghanistan, and the action jumps back to his boyhood.
Most likely, the boyhood story is the one Amir has told in his novel. It takes place in Kabul in 1978. The Soviets have not yet invaded. Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi) and his friend Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada) entertain themselves by going to the cinema to see The Magnificent Seven for the umpteenth time, parroting the dialogue and imagining that Charles Bronson is Iranian, because in the dubbed version of the film he speaks Farsi with an Iranian accent. Boyhood rivalries are fought out harmlessly with kites.
Amir's father (Homayoun Ershadi), a rich benefactor to the orphans of Kabul, mutters darkly that "the mullahs want to rule our souls and the communists say we don't have any".
Hassan is bullied because he belongs to the minority Hazara population. And when Amir witnesses a brutal act of persecution but does nothing, his guilt begins to poison their friendship.
Forster coaxes brilliant performances from the children, to the extent that the film's later sequences feel flat by comparison. And some of the symmetries of the story – the symbolic use of kites and catapults – undermine the emotional rawness of the more powerful scenes.
But for all that it is sentimental, Kite Runner is also bold. Most of the dialogue is in Dari, with occasional switches to English, and David Benioff (who wrote 25th Hour) effectively condenses the novel into three sections. The most chilling of these is the journey of the adult Amir into Taliban-ruled Afghanistan as he searches for Hassan's son.
The dereliction of war-damaged Kabul (filmed in western China) is in stark contrast to the scenes when the city was "the pearl of central Asia". The dread and terror of Taliban rule is delivered in an understated way.
Essentially, it is Atonement in Afghanistan. And, despite the absence of Keira Knightley in a bathing suit (tricky under Sharia law), Hosseini's book makes the better film.
The full article contains 1802 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
