Not A "Legend"

Saw "I Am Legend" last night. Mediocre. Charlton Heston's "The Omega Man" from 1971 is far superior.

"Legend" does some things well. Will Smith is always entertaining; yes, the FX are good, sometimes amazing, particularly the decayed New York City; and it is not nearly as violent or gruesome as it could have been. And while Smith finds himself in some cliched situations, the filmmakers thankfully avoided one big one that could have really killed the flick altogether (involves a spoiler, so I'll leave it at that.)

We never learn much about the zombies that stalk Smith, who exhibit some combination of human intelligence and animal savagery and teamwork. They are never developed as characters if you will, but rather come across as merely teaming hordes of video game bad guys -- which is of course what they are. (I expect there is/will be a game, and I expect the game zombies to come from the same bits and bytes.)

The focus is all on Smith's Mr. Neville -- his daily routine, his loneliness, his dog. (The dog has more personality than all the zombies put together. Is that because it's a real dog?) It reminded me of Tom Hanks, all alone in "Castaway," talking to his soccer ball Wilson.

Like so many movies they make nowadays, on the level of craft, "Legend" is light years beyond a cheesy relic like "Omega Man," but it has no magic. All the elements of a good movie are supposedly there, but the ingredients remain inert, and the experiment fails. (Well, this failure had a $76 million dollar opening, but you know what I mean.)

I take perverse pleasure in Hollywood continually proving that movie making, like other art forms, cannot be reduced to a paint-by-numbers formula.

Peter Jackson to Produce "The Hobbit"

Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, has signed on as executive producer for two movies based on "The Hobbit," J.R.R. Tolkien's prequel to the LOTR.

Jackson had been fighting the LOTR producers, New Line Cinema, over profits from the trilogy, but they've apparently kissed and made up. They're looking for a director for the "Hobbit."

The AP says "two "Hobbit" films are scheduled to be shot simultaneously, similar to how the three 'Lord of the Rings' films were made. Production is set to begin in 2009 with a released planned for 2010, with the sequel scheduled for a 2011 release."

Google's Knols

Google has announced a "new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge." Currently invitation-only, it sounds like a direct challenge to Wikipedia: "A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read."

With perhaps a key difference:

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.

Which in addition to all the "comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on" others can add, means that "a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads."

Can't wait to see this rolled out.

Independents and Illegals

Buried inside this Politico story on immigration politics and the GOP:

A late October study by senior Democratic strategists Stan Greenberg, Al Quinlan and James Carville found that for independents — roughly a third of voters — the “top issue underlying the discontent is ‘our borders’ having been ‘left unprotected and illegal immigration’ growing.”

The issue was cited by four in 10 independents, which was nearly double the rate at which independents referenced the war in Iraq.

Fast News Cycle

Wow, the election coverage sure is reaching a frantic pace. Mike Huckabee is now apologizing to Mitt Romney for something he hasn't even said yet. His comments on Mormonism in a New York Times Magazine interview won't actually appear until this Sunday, but why wait? So the Huck started backpedaling on Wednesday, which is a brilliant technique for staying ahead of the curve when you think about it: just start apologizing today for anything stupid you or may not say next week.

I also like how FoxNews.com asked Romney if "if he believed Huckabee was speaking in a coded language to evangelicals." "Coded language?" Look closely at what Huckabee said and see if you can spot the code:

"Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"

Stairway to Zep

Buzz Feed has a collection of reviews and video clips of the Led Zeppelin reunion gig.

The band sounds pretty good, but Robert Plant's live voice long ago lost all those high notes. Same for Jagger, but Plant had further to fall and can't carry the bottom end very well. Not to beat up on Plant -- every one of those classic rock singers pretty much blew out his live voice many, many tours ago.

The only exception I know of is Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. I've seen him sing live on several TV shows well into this decade and it appears that guy can still belt out anything he ever did on record. McCartney's voice was great at the Super Bowl a few years back, but the only one I've seen who can still really lean into the mic and just howl for a few measures is Tyler.

"The Screening of America"

Here is a delightfully snobby editorial from The New Republic about the widely reported decline in American's reading habits, and the parallel decline of serious book reviews in some quarters of journalism. Excerpts:

In some quarters, the enemies of the printed book pretend that they are merely trying to save the book from the print--"the last bastion of analog," as Jeff Bezos ominously told a reporter from Newsweek (prepare the gallows!); to save reading by digitalizing it.

I think it's quite possible that digitizing books for reading on hand-held gadgets may do for the book what the downloadable MP3 has done for the LP. (That is, render it increasingly obsolete as as an artistic medium and as a viable commodity).

In other quarters--in our quarter, in American journalism--a new anxiety about profits has combined with an old philistinism to produce a kind of informal national purge of book reviewers and book reviewing.

[...]

No, the e-book is not the end of civilization. If readers kindle to the Kindle, splendid: Any reading is better than no reading. Nothing valuable was ever preserved solely on Luddite grounds. The screening of America will inevitably come to include our encounters with serious prose, or what is rather comically described in our culture of speed as "long form." (Meanwhile the Internet is re-educating the planet for a largely audio-visual life in short form, but that is another vexation.) And yet it is neither sentimentality nor snobbery to insist that what we mean by the experience of reading may be singularly indebted to the printed book, to its physicality and its temporality.

[...]

In recent years, in-house book reviewing has been eliminated, abridged, or downgraded by the Atlanta Journal- Constitution, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Cleveland's Plain Dealer, The San Diego Union-Tribune--the list goes on. The same cannot be said about management's enthusiasm for, say, sports, or food. "Committing resources" is not least a philosophical exercise: A newspaper discloses its view of the world clearly by what it chooses to cover and not to cover, and with what degree of rigor and pride. When you deprive the coverage of books of adequate space and talent, you are declaring that books are not important, even if you and your wife belong to a book club and your Amazon account is a mile long.

[...]

[B]ook reviewing is not blogging, even if a lot of blogging is book reviewing. Not everybody who can boil an egg is a food critic and not everybody who can hit a softball is a sportswriter. There are, or there should be, intellectual qualifications for the task, because there are urgent things at stake--at least as long as the citizens of this country continue to agree that beliefs, and the methods by which they are formed, matter.

[...]

A newspaper--and a magazine: we ourselves have not been immune from these pressures--is a business, not a charity; and capitalists cannot be impugned for seeking profit. Yet there are properties that are not just properties, but also pillars of a culture and institutions of a society. To regard them simply as businesses is to misunderstand them. In the ownership of a newspaper, the hunger for gain must surely be diversified by a sensation of stewardship. There are many companies in America that are not implicated in the public values of American life, but media companies are not among them. That is the extra-economic burden that they bear, though in many cases they are plentifully compensated for these inconveniently lofty obligations. The responsible and lively and ambitious coverage of books may not be much of a revenue stream, but it is a formidable thought stream, and knowledge stream; and it should be an honor to preside over it. When a book review is done well, it transcends leisure. It inducts its reader into the enchanted circle of those who really live by their minds. It is a small but significant aid to genuine citizenship, to meaningful living.