Slowly recovering from the Dickens Fair slog...A Weekend Too Far! Blissful quiet Sol and Victus week with Michelle...And then:

Interrupted vacation for two days work for this week and next. Grey bleh day.

Watched a depressing not-great, not really even a good movie before going to bed (what was I thinking?). "I Am Legend."

Samantha the Dog was the only great performance, everyone else slogged through it (or was bad Computer Graphic (CG) performances).

"Children Of Men" I watched it around this same time last year, that was really dark and dystopian as "IAL"...But it was an amazing film in that it was so well crafted and pure in its unflinching look a the End of Days. There were long sequences of amazing performance, brilliant cinematography and seamless editing. I came out of the experience with the "Now THAT was a movie!" high. I'd experienced artistry, true craftsmanship.

"This Quiet Earth," a similarly bleak tale of maybe the last man alive (takes place in New Zealand after a US Navy experiment gone horribly wrong..,Netflix it today!), was also sooooo much better than the Will Smith channeling Tom-Hanks-castaway-beachball-crazy-dudeness. Looking for Mr. Oscar next year? Ain't gonna happen dude. Irritating would-be-sly references to "Omega Man" fall flat and merely suggest product placement gone seriously awry (Today Show repeats played repeatedly as entertainment? Shrek? Sheesh!))

And the creatures of "I Am Legend"? Bad CG. Should have used people in makeup. Directors are trying to do too much with CG, just looks fake and silly. There's a reason that many shots in Lord of the Rings used puppets and models instead of all CG shots, blended reality makes the CG that much easier to accept.
There's no excuse for bad CG anymore, the technology is there, but the best use it only when necessary.

Movie also seemed a bit awkwardly edited, that there is about 15 minutes to a 1/2 hour of essential scenes missing, edited down to make it safe to squeeze in that extra showing or two at the theatre to maximize the first weekend haul before the word gets out on how lackluster a movie this is.

Then I crawl out of bed this morning, limp on off to work, arrive, fire up the browsers and find out about the horrible assassination of Ms. Bhutto news. Pakistan with nuclear weaponry. What a living nightmare to start out 2008.

(note: at work during lunch we started comparing Sci Fi movies using the Highlander II benchmark of total incredible crapitudinality. Example: XMEN 3, 7/8ths of a Highland II ranking. Spiderman 3, 7 /12ths to 8/12ths Highlander II rank. I Am Legend? 2/10ths a Highlander II. We also discussed the special reverse property Highland II has of corrupting and diminishing in the viewer's eyes of any previous films of a series (or closely related films). Highlander II contaminated the fond memories of the first film, making it suspect in our minds. XMEN 3 certainly had that Highlander II effect, totally destroying much of what was viewed as good in the first two movies, thus the 7/8ths a Highlander II. Ghostrider? Don't even get me started!).