For the record, The Lovely Bones was rubbish. Much of it was overwrought, flamboyant, and nonsensical.  While sitting in the theater, I noticed that about halfway through people began to talk. I took this to be a bad sign. The movie fails to involve you in the story, fails to capture the spirit of the book. In fact, the people I was with kept asking, “What was that movie about?” And I couldn’t explain it to them without giving away the whole book (which my friend had not yet finished). If you must experience this story, read the book. It is beautiful and painful in all the right places and won’t disappoint you like the movie will. I definitely wouldn’t give this one more than a D.

On the other hand, Thursday we went to go see The Book of Eli and were pleasantly surprised. After a conversation with a friend, I’ve come to the conclusion that apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic movies have never been very good, so the bar is set very low when a new one comes out.

Take a look at some of the ones we’ve experienced recently:

• 2012 – (garbage)
• The Day After Tomorrow (garbage)
• District 9 – Okay. Great premise, but the movie was a bit schizophrenic. Couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. Overall though, a god idea.
• Children of Men – Fine. A bit slow, and I’m not sure if I like Clive Owen as a leading man. He seems
• I Am Legend – Again, a great movie until the halfway point.
• Cloverfield – I didn’t have problems with this movie, but a lot of people did.

Anyway, these films have set the bar at a moderate height. I don’t think there has been an apocalyptic film that defines the genre, at least not yet. Exactly why this is might be the topic of my dissertation if I were to go back to school, so I won’t even begin to analyze it here.

So I had nothing to lose, waiting to see The Book of Eli this past week. We camped out a few hours before the movie and were some of the first in line for seats at the premiere. I had few expectations, and honestly I’m not a die hard fan of Denzel Washington, so I wasn’t hoping for a spectacular performance either.

I can say that the movie was passable, by the end. It had a straightforward plot–the man has something valuable to mankind, a copy of the King James Bible, long thought destroyed, and is making a journey to deliver it safely and along the way must avoid letting it fall into the hands of the bad people. I think a lot of apocalyptic movies fail because their plots are stupid, and this one seems pretty solid. All you have to do is fill in the blanks with some conflict and a bad guy (Gary Oldman), and you’ve got yourself a movie.

One of my biggest issues with his movie, however, was the fact that it reminded me so closely of Fallout 3.

I’m not even sure why I counted this as a negative. Maybe it’s because I keep praying that they’ll make a movie out of the Fallout series (maybe even the third one, which has a special place for me since it was situated in DC) so I can continue to live my other life in that world. I don’t know.

There were lots of things that reminded me of the Fallout series. The color of the land–grey, stricken with ash. The wanderer’s clothes. The setups, the highwaymen, the weapons. The ramshackle town Eli wanders into around the halfway point.  The trading. In fact, there were many places where I thought you could simply lift out frames from the movie and stick them into the game and nobody would know the difference. So what does that say about this movie?  I suppose that either one lifted things from the other, or that the collective vision of the impending apocalypse is really similar. That after the end comes and civilization collapses due to some kind of event, humans will exist in small, savage packs. The strong will subdue the weak, democracy in any form will no longer exist, altruism will only be an idea, and that the world will be gray and barren. Oh, and that people will probably eat one another to survive.

Anyway, I would give The Book of Eli a C- overall, but a B+ in terms of its place in the apocalyptic genre. Not a bad effort.

The past weekend really was a time to relax and recharge, made possible because of the fact that we had MLK Jr. Day off on Monday. I also look forward to these long weekends, although this is the last one we’ll get until May (so I’m thinking there will be a vacation scheduled for sometime between now and then?).

I did these things:

• Watched a lot of Buffy
• Played Dragon Age
• Did laundry
• Cleaned up my room a bit
• Wrote, a lot
• Saw a bunch of movies
• Played flute, probably for the first time in eight months
• Visited the aquarium and took lots of pictures
• Ate at Fat Matt’s

And that was all I needed to feel almost totally recharged. I shall have to schedule more weekends like this in the near future. The only thing missing was that I did not get to read as much as I would have liked. I can remedy that any night, though.

Categories : adventures, lists