I was looking forward to the movie, I Am Legend, that is coming to Morris in the next month or so, but the first review I’ve seen is not promising. I’ve read the book and the previous film adaptations; the original I Am Legend by Richard Matheson is a classic with an excellent twist, raising the troubling question of just who the monster is. The first movie, The Last Man on Earth, with Vincent Price is also good, and sticks to the story fairly faithfully.

The one most people have seen, The Omega Man, is awful. It throws away the ending of the story with its disturbing attempt to make people think and instead makes the protagonist a self-sacrificing hero who saves humanity … and the ending, with Charlton Heston bleeding and dying with his arms flung wide in the standard position of dying messiahs everywhere, was a self-parody of seriousness that had audiences laughing when I saw it — it turned the whole movie into a low-rent Christian allegory.

The new movie with Will Smith looked promising. The ads have all focused on the post-apocalyptic desolation of the protagonist’s situation, and since they restored Matheson’s original title (which was actually highly relevant to the ending), there was hope that it might actually be worth seeing.

Unfortunately, it’s more Omega Man than Last Man on Earth (that link contains many spoilers, beware). Worse, the Christian allegory has been expanded to consume all, and it’s set up as a conflict between evil science that creates plagues that destroy humanity vs. vague mystical prophecies and the salvation of mankind through faith.

Ugh. This is a disappointment. I’ll probably go see it anyway because I trundle through almost every movie that comes to Morris, but I expect to start gagging halfway through it now … at least it’s always good to go into a movie with low expectations. Alas, the high production values I’m seeing in the trailers probably means I won’t even get a laugh out of the ending — it takes monumental cheesiness, as The Omega Man had, to redeem a bad movie with at least a little amusement.

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It takes the conservative ideologues at NRO to add that special frisson of stupidity to the reviews.

Shhhh. The end of I Am Legend is religious. And the beginning of the movie is anti-science. The military is a force for good, too. Shhhh. Our little secret. And what must be surprising to those on the Left, a movie that’s anti-science, religious and pro-military earned close to $80 million over the weekend. It is frustrating that none of the pre-release hype focused on the conservative aspects of the film, however.

Yay! It’s a plus that the movie is religious, pro-military, and anti-science! And for that extra dollop of idiocy, the guy brags about how a religious, pro-military, and anti-science movie can bring in the big bucks, and then notes that that agenda was never mentioned in the advertising. Duh.

My daughter works at our small town movie theater, and she’s got the inside scoop: apparently the locals are boycotting The Golden Compass. Attendance is down, almost the only people going are university students, the owner has had calls from people in the community complaining about the movie. Darn. I guess the theater should have booked Mel Gibson’s Passion again — that thing hung around forever here, and had loads of people showing up every night.

Ah, rural America.

Here’s an interesting take on The Golden Compass: it’s a Protestant movie. I can see that.

I suspect that many reviews of this movie are going to begin with some variant of the sentiment, “I was disappointed.” This one is no exception. It’s just not a very good movie; it’s one that packed in lots of miscellaneous detail from the book it is based on, but thereby threw away the core of the story … and it shows. It’s a movie that races along inventively, but futilely, leaving you wondering at the end what the point of all the rushing about of armies of strange characters was all about.

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Here’s what CNN says about The Golden Compass:

Culture: A star-studded, big-budget fantasy film released for Christmastime features religion as the villain. Hollywood is collaborating with a militant atheist British children’s book author to indoctrinate children.

Gregg Easterbrook (you already know to expect drooling idiocy) babbles without comprehension. Bill Donohue, of course, thinks it is a plot to corrupt children.

Get real. This movie isn’t going to convert anyone to atheism. It’s a fantasy story. It’s got witches and talking bears in it. It’s going to generate about as many new atheists as Tolkien’s Middle Earth trilogy generated converts to worship of Eru and the Ainur. It has the nicely appreciated sop to secular interest that the author is an atheist who has no respect for Christian mythology, but this is not a propaganda film — it’s entertainment. If your child’s beliefs can be shattered by a CGI polar bear on a movie screen, you’ve got bigger problems than this one film.

I’m going to go see The Golden Compass this weekend. If it’s a philosophical tract rather than an adventure story, I’m not going to enjoy it much.

And those of you who are upset that religion is one of the villains in this movie — get used to it. Religion is a villain in real life, too.

The lesson is that you should never, ever give a network executive control of your fate.

Those kinds of macabre twists would be Futurama’s undoing. Fox was expecting something familiar, The Simpsons in space. Executives certainly were not prepared for the bizarre contours of Groening and Cohen’s brave new world. “The network’s attitude quickly went from tremendous excitement to great fear,” Groening says. “They were very troubled by the suicide booth. They didn’t like the ‘All-Tentacle Massage’ parlor.”

How can you not like the ‘All-Tentacle Massage’ parlor? Obviously, Groening and Co. should have just sent the execs a two hour preview clip of HypnoToad, and gone ahead and done whatever they wanted.

At least the good news is that Futurama is coming back for one more year.

Here’s a fun little toy from the Science Museum — use a little physics and logic to bounce a ball into a target. Don’t show it to the kids or they’ll take the computer away from you!

(via Unhindered by Talent)