I Am Legend - Will Smith is a Mensch

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

Heather and I took in the new Will Smith movie, "I am Legend," (trailer) what would be called these days a "re-imagining" of the book that was made into Charles Heston's unforgettable "Omega Man" (1971 trailer). A solid "B" movie, with a plus for what seems to be Smith's basic mensch-iness. There was a little making of video that I watched last night, which at least made him out to be a nice, thoughtful dude.

I used to really go in for these "last man on Earth" stories when I was a kid. I suppose I was struggling to find a sense of the heroic in what felt like a pretty bleak existence, so these tales really caught me. "Earth Abides" was one that my father had read as a kid, and turned me on to. Heather read a bit and said it was poorly written, but I remember it as at least giving some warmth.

So "I am Legend" tells the story of an Army colonel who is a virologist, living alone in Manhattan after a genetically altered cancer cure goes very very wrong. As far as he knows, all humans are dead, except for the "dark seekers." Apparently, 4% of the population turned into these methamphetamine accelerated, Peter Garrett (the singer from Midnight Oil) look alikes, who huddle in dark buildings during the day because their skin bubbles when exposed to UV rays, but come out at night to hunt. There were 1% of the population which were immune to the virus, but the 4% ate them. I suppose that's a kind of democracy.

But Smith was not one of them, and he's spending his time looking for a cure, or maybe antidote, to the virus. His only friend is Sam the dog, and some mannequins at his favorite video store. He's pretty lonely. But then a couple survivors arrive and he makes his life meaningful.

OK. The real star of the film is New York. How often has this city starred in films? It probably has a longer filmography than any actor, including Klaus Kinski, who was in over 200 films. Apparently he would work a day or two, and that was it because the directors could not stand to have him around any longer than that.

New York is a favorite city to destroy, but here it's not blown up, but rather it's handed back to nature. Streets have become rivers, Central Park is overgrown, there's grass growing in the streets, and all you hear is birds and the winds. Beautifully quiet.

But, as Roger Ebert said in his review, "The movie works well while it's running, although it raises questions that later only mutate in our minds" (link). You know, parenthetically, Ebert is almost always right in his reviews. If I want a nearly always spot-on take on a potential movie, he's a great guide. Or, well, at least for me. Our sensibilities seem to match up really well.

So, here are some of the mutations that formed in my mind after leaving the theater:

1) There are 1,611,581 people (according to the 2006 census) living in Manhattan, which means that 1,531,002 (rounding up) people died, 16,116 were immune, and 64,463 turned into "dark seekers." Why is there no sign of the 1.5 million dead people? If we say that the typical human weighs 160 pounds, then that's 240,000,000 pounds of flesh and bones. Where is it? If you say that the dark seekers ate it, did they only eat the dead bodies inside of buildings? And even the bones?

2) If the typical human body becomes inedible within, say, a month, and if that's what the dark seekers were using to stay alive, what have they been eating? They are not smart enough any longer to open tin cans, and there's no sign of stores being looted. So?

3) It's implied that the dark seeker's metabolisms are about 6 times as fast as humans (it takes six times the normal sedating dose to tranquilized a captive dark seeker). So, presumably that's at least six times the normal calories required for a human. Where are they getting all those calories?

4) You might say from the wildlife of the island--the first scene of denuded New York is of Smith hunting deer in the city--but if 64,000 cranked up super piranha were sweeping through each night, the already small population of deer (zoos I assume) would be gone in the first month. Manhattan is 13 miles long by 2 miles wide, which given how fast the dark seekers move, would probably take the 64,000 hairless hungers a brisk evening's jog to cover.

5) What does Neville (Smith's character) think he's going to do with a serum? My understanding is that human brains begin to cook past about 106 degrees F. The dark seekers have internal temperatures of about 200. Even if he did "cure" them, wouldn't they be so fried that they couldn't function as normal humans anymore?

6) How did the colony of survivors put up those huge cement walls around its village?

7) Why is the road through rural Vermont totally clear of debris after 3 years of being untended by humans?

8) Why did the government decided to seal off New York, when such a virus couldn't possibly be contained by such crude means?

So, the reason why I bring these points up is not to be snarky, because most sci-fi collapses on the verisimilitude front about as fast as rice paper exposed to water.

It's that there's such attention placed on the reality of a post-human urban environment, with details lavishly thought out and presented, that it makes the unbelievability of the actual happenings rather strange.

Anyway, a fun and sad movie with problems, but well executed as a set piece, and with some genuinely touching and scary scenes. Natch.

Margot at the Wedding: And if you thought your family was bad...

(Click here for the trailer.)

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

David and I took in "Margot at the Wedding" after a pretty good, but kinda-expensive-for-this-town Thai meal at Oshas. It was playing at the Embarcadero theater, which I'm guessing either is financed by a cinema sugar daddy/momma, or runs guns out of the back entrance, because with the wacky and oddball films they run, how do they possibly afford the rent at their location? But it's a nice theater, with good coffee and a nice, mature staff that never seemed to have had to read an employees manual--i.e., are not nice by design. (Going to the AMC 1000 on Van Ness is like being in my suburban mall haunts as a kid, with angst personified giving me my popcorn and coke.)

"Margot" reminds me a bit of the other film I saw in the theaters recently, "No Country for Old Men." Both are like slightly different hell realms. Both are visions of a life without Spirit, though "Country" is much more totalisistic in its vision. "Margot" doesn't say there isn't Spirit anywhere, it just focuses its lens in a way that excludes Spirit from the frame. Or even just a representative of sane human relationships.

"Margot" tells the story of two sisters coming back together after several years of estrangement, for the event of one of the sister's wedding. The details are not very important, nor the plot. It's the portrait of scathing dysfunction that's the real raison d'être, scathing not because it is writ so large or luridly, but because it is so unconscious and common.

Margot, the titular character played by Nicole Kidman, can't reflect on herself with any effectiveness; her sister says, "She can be a monster when she's angry." But it seems that she's angry all the time, and for her, that means attacking wherever it will hurt the other. She is brutal energy channeled through sophisticated means. She has gathered language and culture to her as a way to defend a fragile, scarred interior. Her way of creating a sense of safety and control in her life is to destabilize others. At the beginning of the film, she criticizes her son for not wearing his new glasses, and then at the end, when he puts them on to prepare for his solo bus ride away from his mother, she says, "They make your face look fat." Her persona is that of an aware, observing woman, but what she does and says is disjointed and fragmented, because her m.o. is not truth but defense. She says to her sister, "I'm a speaker of truth," while delivering a cruel verbal blow.

The other characters are not much more developed than her, though their personas are of relative sophisticates. Jack Black's character, the groom to be, is perhaps a bit more honest in his being "cognitively disheveled" (one of my favorite phrases from Ken Wilber), but really, they all are lost in the idea that their beliefs and thoughts are true and coherent. These are very lost people who are "very" lost because even their attempts at self-reflection can find nothing substantial to rest their gaze on.

They are not empty people here, just internally fractured, with "self-knowledge" which is created as works of fiction, not the result of self-inquiry. Margot doesn't know herself: she either holds concepts about herself ("I'm a speaker of truth") or touches on her own pain and pathology, but looks away so quickly, distorting her vision with self-disgust, that she can't learn from her seeing.

These are people who don't learn because they essentially cannot tolerate their own pain long enough to have it tell them about who they are. Jack Black's character says at the end of the film, as he's unraveling, "I ate the cake and I don't know why." There's a surface cohesion to these psyches which is belayed by their disjointed actions and words. Often communications will drop from each mouth to plunk in the mud at the others feet, without being picked up and understood. "I masturbated last night," says the son out of the blue, before getting on the bus to leave his mother. "You don't have to tell me things like that," says Margot, not stopping to understand or reflect on her son's confession, or maybe sharing.

These are damaged people in sophisticated personas, which makes them more toxic to each other than the merely ignorant. This is what mind-fucking is about, and it's often coming from people whose selves are broken and the fragments are being defended even more fiercely for the brokenness. Margot is a legion of lawyers charged with protecting a pile of shattered glass.

But like "Country," it's a particular hell, and it's a big mistake to view it as any coherent vision of life. "Margot" is what life looks like for a child stuck within their toxic family. There's no way out, there's no sane "other," there's no sanctuary of escape. Such a child does the best they can to survive and protect their Self from the literate and sophisticated desperation of their parents, trying to experience love despite its union with pain.

"Margot" has a claustrophobic pain which describes a particular type of family, not families as entities, or life as an experience. "Margot" has no one who sees it clearly; even Baumbaugh, the director, seems to be grasping for sanity simply by articulating the insane. But there's no sense of seeing these people, this hell realm, in perspective, in relationship to what is sane, grounded, and self-aware. There's no mature touchstone anywhere in the film, which is what makes it a partial vision, the depiction of a family made hellish because there's no "outside."

Not to say I didn't like it. I did like the film, quite a bit. And I felt empathy for the people. I just wouldn't want them anywhere near me.

3:10 to Yuma - 3:10 to Horse Shit

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

On Monday, midday, I thought I'd treat myself to what in my family was termed a "funkie." That would be the movie you'd turn on on weekend afternoons, in the midst of the heat, that would usually be a gun opera or involve oversized lizards.

So my choice what a neuvo Western called "3:10 to Yuma," starring Russel Crowe and Christian Bale as the antagonist and protagonist, the charming sociopath and the frumpy one and one-half legged ex-Massachusetts militia man turned Arizona cow farmer. And then there's Ben Foster, the young actor who keeps getting case as quasi-psychotic weirdos or psychopaths, a la the boyfriend in Six Feet Under, or the creepy criminal in Bruce Willis' hostage movie, who burns himself to death at the denouement. And some miscellaneous bad guys, my favorite of which being the silent sharpshooter Mexican.

The thing I really didn't like about the film was not the improbabilities--why was the stage coach robbery so badly planned. I mean, they're running behind a coach loaded up with a backward-facing Gatling gun. Well, and for that matter, why doesn't that early machine gun hit more of them? It isn't that Ben Wade (Crowe) stays inexplicably in town after "taking" the comely frontier town bar wench (could they really have been that attractive and worked in a bar for long). It was the faux psychology. The last time I'd seen such a psychologically shallow film parading itself as something deep was Clint Eastwood's "The Unforgiven." That one won some award. Apparently there's a prize for most self-deluded.

I mean, how hard is it to make a Western? The template is already there, either in Eastwood's early films of the great operas of Sergio Leonne ("Once Upon a Time in the West" is about as good as it gets). You take archetypally exaggerated characters, pit them against each other in archetypally charged situations, and bring them to an archetypally loaded climax and conclusion. You don't need to fuss around with real motivation, with complexity of psychology and relationship. Unless you do, and then you have GOT to get it right.

If you're going to tell a story of human psyches, for God's sake, know what you're talking about. Don't get your information from other shallow movies that are pretending to be deep. Or maybe being as deep as they can, because they've never looked inside for their source material.

3:10 to Yuma was, I guess, as story of fathers and sons and redemption. In Wilberian terms, it's the story of the "red," self centered, ego-centric level of development maturing into an "blue," family/village-centric level of development, the story of the transition from the social form of the strong man to that of the strong law. Ok, fair enough. Deadwood, David Milch and HBO's fantastic ballad of civilization, did it for three years. It's a great subject, rich and deep.

Except for in this film. Just as in "The Unforgiven," human motivation is presented with the form of depth--yes, fathers and sons have complex relationships, and sons have to choose their idealized figures and then come to grips with their real world men; darkness must be struggled with and brought to the light, socially, interpersonally, and intrapsychically--but it doesn't actually have the substance. It's like someone quoting Shakespeare, and at first it seems they are taking those pieces that are meaningful, yet pretty soon you realize they are spouting those parts that they believe are deep, because of what they've heard or read. But not what they have felt.

That's this film: callow, un-heart felt, bleak in its confused morality, shallow in its understanding of human nature and minds. Blah.

John from Cincinatti: I'm in love

Below is a comment I left on a television review blog (link), when I was hunting around for information on HBO's new David Milch show, John From Cincinatti. I think it's about the best thing I've seen on TV, the most unapologetically and mature vision of the problems and potentials of moderns as spiritual beings. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

"I guess it doesn't surprise me how few people here liked the show--it's wierd, unpredictable, a surf version of magic realism. But me, I've fallen head over heels in love. Literally, I was in tears at the end of the second episode, which probably is an idiosyncratic reaction, but there it was.

The extras on the HBO on demand that we have had the actor playing John describing his character as taking in the toxicity of the characters around him and giving back what they are really saying, without the suffering. And Milch talks about responding to what he feels are the extremely desperate times. So I think what I was responding to how Milch and this show are taking these people, this dysfunctional community on the edge of disaster, drawing off the poisons and presenting them with an odd purity. Everyone here (much more so than Deadwood) is accepted and loved for who they are. This is John's perspective on his new family; he doesn't overlook their faults, rather, he sees them as insubstantial in the face of the numinous within them.

In the third episode, after John and Kai return from their "boneing", they stand before the human zoo outside the Yost's house and he again says, "See God, Kai," meaning that here it is, right in front of us. We are It and we keep missing it until someone like John comes along and points it out. I've met monks like John and they'll shake you to the core with the way they reflect back to you who you really are at depth. And it's not just shit and pain.

I really believe that what JfC is presenting is a truer vision of life than what is typically presented in art, certainly in television. Not in the magic stuff happening in physical ways, but metaphorically, we're missing the magic ALL THE TIME. I.e., think about your capacity to read this post and then follow its roots. What do you actually know about the brains ability to code and decode? How does it actually happen? Given that the other planets in this solar system are as far as we can tell blobs of minerals, think about the crazy magic of your ability to read.

That's what I think JfC is getting at, that we're missing the magic of common life, settling for a dumbed down version, an obsessive picking at our own scabs. It's doing it in an outrageous, inflated way, but the point is true, and the vision is actually real.

So, my two cents."

Requiem for a Dream - Night Sweats of the Bourgeois

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

Last weekend I watched Requiem for a Dream, having gotten on a kick with Darren Aronofsky's work (which includes Pi, and The Fountain), and whoa, boy, was it a punchy film. In the past, this is a film I would have sneered at for being what I might have termed, "conveniently bleak," for being... tragedy. I still have little use for that form of art, as most of the time you get a thin cypher for author's own particular pain, but written large and definitive. The dark adolescent drama still makes me sigh.

But this movie was different. It struck me as a pretty true depiction or representation of the hell state, in this case in the form of addiction to heroine. Aronovsky and Selby (the writer of the novel and co-screen writer) gives us the image, but without saying that that's all there is in the world, that all endeavors turn to shit and all dreams lead to the flames. These are four particular stories that are given, four inflections of the same hell, but there are others in the film who are not either in or heading for that place. Nor does it seal the characters up in their suffering, denying them of some eventual redemption or salvation. It simply takes us from the anteroom of hell to its deep interiors, and leaves us there. Ok, I can accept that. And having had some experiences of feeling utterly trapped, I can feel the truthfulness of the depictions.

The next morning, though, I realized that it wasn't a film to watch right before going to bed. I woke with a screeching anxiety and sense of despair that didn't match up to anything going on in my life. After meditating for several hours, I think I understood what about the film crawled under my skin and opened up an abscess.

I grew up in a pretty conventional household, lower and then middle middle class, tutored by my family and environs (the term "community" is much too strong for my suburban neighborhoods) in a certain imago of the world, that with its sixties overtones and colorings, was basically the classic bourgeois lens. Money and wealth were not ostensibly the uber-goals, but under the surface they were what defined safety and security. The neighborhoods we lived in were generally solid middle class, older track houses generally owned by your standard workers or small business owners. Money as status was not obvious; everyone was more or less at the same level economically, and outward appearances were not really stressed.

But there seemed to be a chronic underlying anxiety about money, in my family and in my neighborhoods. Our family was scraping-by-poor at the beginning, as my parents were beginning to establish themselves in their work, and later became more financially stable. But there were little in the way of safety nets, either from other family or socially. We would never have starved, but with the whole extended family living at the same level, there was not a sense of being able to fall back in any substantive way on other family members. The stress, from what I remember, was intense at times, both because there was real financial struggle, and because of how my parents were trained up to think about money.

I can remember my father going from job to job, either getting fired or quitting, till landing a position with a pest control company (where he still works). He and mom would fight about it, in the back room behind a closed but thin door, so we knew as kids that the ground under us was not stable. We also, in family stories, and in the popular media we were exposed to, taught about what was below us, what pit it was possible to fall into if we did not work hard enough or strayed too far out of the mainstream. The bums down on K St., the hookers on T St., the druggies and gangsters somewhere down in then unvisited depths of South Sacramento, all were object lessons in what happens to you if you fall. From relatively civilized to living with the animals, fighting for bones and carrion.

Waking up the morning after Requiem was waking up into a terror of regression, what seems to me to be the night sweats of the bourgeois. Requiem follows the descent of four mostly middle class people as their social relationships and financial status crumble. Under the stress of addiction and impoverishment (the three addicts), and loneliness and despair (the mother), their families atomize and their access to resources dries up. They become gaping mouths without the ability to feed themselves. They become powerless and helpless, falling on the tender mercies of the state, which in the bourgeois mind, is good for the underclass, and appropriate punishment for the failings that their poverty demonstrates. But for the middle class, having climbed out of that fetid state, regression back to it is utter hell, truly terrifying, the funneling of anxieties around loss of a tenuous power, and recognition that the animal skills that are transmuted in being civilized, are no longer available when you lose your wings and fall back to the jungle floor.

That was a rough morning.