{"id":78,"date":"2007-12-14T19:11:00","date_gmt":"2007-12-15T03:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=78"},"modified":"2007-12-14T19:11:00","modified_gmt":"2007-12-15T03:11:00","slug":"afterimages-of-i-am-legend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=78","title":{"rendered":"AfterImages of I Am Legend"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Praiseworthy Things:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Opens with the Best Bitter Irony Jump Cut <i>evar<\/i>.<\/li>\n<li>Will Smith&#8217;s spot-on performance as a repressed, guilt-ridden failed-saviour-in-denial ratcheting inexorably towards catastrophic meltdown.<\/li>\n<li>Nature Takes Back Manhattan (and glad to see some decent soul opened the cages at the Brooklyn Zoo before devolving).<\/li>\n<li>Sam the Dog.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><i style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Eh<\/i><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">-worthy Things:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>You&#8217;d think a military epidemiologist would know enough to give experimental antivirals more than five minutes to work before writing them off as ineffective.<\/li>\n<li>the hysterical-vampirism shtick of Matheson&#8217;s novel has been replaced with a clone of the Rage virus from <i>28 (Insert Unit of Time Here) Later<\/i>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Craptacular Things:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the gratuitous and idiotic sop to the biblethumper demographic in the closing minutes of the film.  (Granted, in these enlightened times when people <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2007\/US\/12\/12\/subway.attack\/index.html\">get the shit kicked out of them<\/a> for wishing people &#8220;Happy Hannukah&#8221;, or <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/pharyngula\/2007\/11\/the_real_scoop_on_the_texas_sc.php\">forced to resign<\/a> from school boards for mentioning evolution \u2014 or <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/pharyngula\/2007\/12\/another_reason_to_avoid_debati.php\">killed<\/a> for actually <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">advocating<\/span> it \u2014 probably the only way you can get away with an athiest protag is if he learns the error of his ways before the final curtain.  Pity.)  (On second thought, 15\/12\/07: that isn&#8217;t necessarily true. Witness the  unflattering view of Christian behaviour &mdash; hell, of <i>human<\/i> behaviour &mdash; in &#8220;The Mist&#8221;, which also has one of the most admirably and unrepentantly downbeat endings I&#8217;ve ever seen in a Christmas release.  Almost makes up for &#8220;Cujo&#8221;.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Bottom line, though:  not bad.  Not bad at all.  Although I do wish Neville had worked up the nerve to have sex with the mannequin in the video store&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Praiseworthy Things: Opens with the Best Bitter Irony Jump Cut evar. Will Smith&#8217;s spot-on performance as a repressed, guilt-ridden failed-saviour-in-denial ratcheting inexorably towards catastrophic meltdown. Nature Takes Back Manhattan (and glad to see some decent soul opened the cages at the Brooklyn Zoo before devolving). Sam the Dog. Eh-worthy Things: You&#8217;d think a military epidemiologist [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ink-on-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}