Thank You for Smoking

"Thank You for Smoking" leaves the kind of bitter taste in your mouth that cigarettes do. In its conception of the world everyone's either a sap or a douche bag. It's libertarianism taken to an extreme--a moral vacuum wherein nobody's to be trusted. Its depiction of lobbyists as insidious, amoral spinners is warranted--making them agents of big tobacco, to boot, is almost a cheap shot. And so is turning their opponent, a well-meaning Vermont senator (William H. Macy), into an impotent prig--by the film's end, he wants to digitally remove cigarettes from old movies and replace them with coffee mugs and candy canes. I suppose that counts as satire, but come on... It's more of a jab at Spielberg's flashlights-for-guns swap in his re-release of "E.T." than the liberal politicians whose views the filmmakers (and novelist Christopher Buckley)--ironically--see as arrogant. That today's general public would buy the B.S. that the spin doctor sells about cigarettes' "positive attributes" is something that I can't buy; the movie, however, takes it for granted that they would and do. Even though the film is clever and lively, it's also farfetched, manipulative and--politics aside--too damn smug. When I agreed with some of the points it made, it made me feel kind of like a douche bag, too.

I Am Legend

The Richard Matheson novel "I Am Legend" has been filmed twice before: with Vincent Price (at the height of his Roger Corman affiliation) and Charlton Heston (mid-way between "Planet of the Apes" and "Soylent Green") in the Will Smith role. It's hard to beat that pedigree. I wanted to see the new version in hopes that it would fulfill the camp quota that the earlier flicks must; to my surprise, the 2007 film is hardly campy at all--it's good in a good way.

One wouldn't think that such results would come from a movie directed by the maker of "Constantine" and pop music videos, Francis Lawrence, and Akiva Goldsman, the screenwriter of recent Ron Howard pictures. But, combined with the talents of a venerable sci-fi writer, the filmmakers balance schlock and safety so perfectly that those specters are hardly evident. What the film does have is a successful conflation of diverse sources: "Cast Away," zombie movies and "Children of Men."

The "Cast Away" element comes from it being a largely one-man show. It's Will Smith as the last man in post-Apocalyptic Manhattan, a virologist named Neville who spends his days fortifying himself against and trying to cure a wolf pack of subhuman zombies--victims of a pandemic caused by a cancer vaccine gone awry. His encounters with the "night-seekers," who--of course--are allergic to the sun, are wonderfully suspenseful. But they're all the better because you're so attached to Neville that the thought of losing him is terrifying. This, of course, would not be possible if Will Smith didn't give such a strong, endearing performance. He needs to hold up the movie and he does. To make his job easier, the story employs the old trick of giving him a loyal pooch, Sam. She's a relic of Neville's lost family (whose demise is revealed in flashbacks) and she's the only thing he has to hold on to, the only reason he has to not break down and reveal his utter desperation and underlying pessimism.

His character and our empathy for him drive the movie and Lawrence, surprisingly (but correctly), takes this for granted. The CG rendering of abandoned New York is remarkable, but, after the beginning, it's hardly dwelled on. We become unerringly accustomed to it like Neville has. In fact, the film opens with him hunting deer through Times Square--which is probably a wee bit too forested (it's only 2012, after all)--but the perversity of the situation is apparent. As much as Neville likes to pretend it's not, we learn more and more that the world we know is gone--and it's chilling. The acute isolation--and its effect on the psyche--is more "Twilight Zone" than horror movie. (Unsurprisingly, Matheson wrote several episodes of that show.)

Eventually, a few other stragglers--a Brazilian nun, Anna (Alice Braga), and a tight-lipped boy (Charlie Tahan)--show up and a horde of surprisingly resilient zombies break through Neville's defenses. It's a good, if perfunctory, action-film climax, but the traditional cat-and-mouse fun is mixed with a deep-seated fear for the heroes. When they get cornered, there really is no place else for them to go. The movie then makes a noble decision--an affirmation that Neville's work has been worthwhile. It's due to a last-minute contrivance, but it's a fair trade-off for the development of Neville's spiritual dilemma and his interplay with Anna.

"I Am Legend" is not without contrivances, genre conventions and storytelling deficiencies (it implies that the devolved zombies are evolving, but never follows up); however, overall, it's a remarkable piece of craftsmanship. Lawrence doesn't cheat you on any of the important elements of a science fiction-thriller: action, suspense, a thought-provoking sci-fi premise--and a compelling human element, to boot. It's not as inspired a movie as "Children of Men"--it's slicker--but it's an absorbing, effective piece of entertainment.

Juno

Only one week into 2008 and "Juno" is up for several awards, among them a Golden Globe nomination for Best Picture (Musical or Comedy) and Screenplay. The only award it deserves is one that doesn't exist: Phoniest Movie of 2007. The script, by Diablo Cody, is almost as horrendous as its writer's pen name: none of its characters are remotely believable; they're just quirkiness personified. It's an unholy marriage of the worst of indie-film snarkiness, "Family Guy"-paced reference slinging and treacle.

The first act seems to be a solipsism centered around sixteen-year-old Juno MacGruff (Ellen Page, whose character's very name is quirky nonsense); she gets knocked up by Paul (Michael Cera) and decides to give her baby up to an older couple (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman). When she meets the surrogate parents, she's a fount of bizarre, insensitive comments, mostly aimed at Garner's consummate yuppie, but they might as well have been directed at Margaret Dumont from an old Marx Brothers movie (although the lines would have been far wittier in that); miraculously, Garner doesn't hear or react to a word of Juno's "zany" antics. Even worse, Bateman is an erstwhile grunge rocker, which gives Juno an opportunity to list all of the cool music she listens to such as Patti Smith and The Stooges. It's nothing but the filmmakers dropping names in order to pick up some free hipster credibility; the whole movie is artificially cool, but truly, deeply square.

(The music that's actually in the movie is folky and somnolent. It reminds me of something Roger Ebert mentioned in his thirtieth anniversary review of "The Graduate": the Simon and Garfunkle soundtrack in that film is "safe"--better suited, therefore, for lackadaisical Benjamin than femme infidel Mrs. Robinson.)

Ironically, the square, "poignant" moments were probably those I liked best, but even the most authentic scene was screwed up by the director, Jason Reitman. Garner is touching Juno's baby-swollen gut and talking to her future child, but the scene is set in the middle of a shopping mall. You'd think someone would think it strange to see a thirty-five-year-old woman groping a pregnant sixteen-year-old's stomach.

And Juno, the "offbeat" teenager who loves hard music, is as saintly square as the teens on Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel; she's less punk than puck. The angel's only "sin" is having a single sexual encounter with a boy she loves--the big-hearted school dork. (Cera, as the dork, is one of the strong points of the movie. His lines aren't any better written than Page's, but his sweet, effeminized delivery of them makes the dialogue--if not more believable--more affecting.) Otherwise, she's in a perfectly loving relationship with supportive father and step-mother; off-handed jokes are made about drugs and alcohol, but these things don't seem to physically exist in this universe. Movies with subject matter like this one's are often applauded for being more "realistic" than your average "Can't Hardly Wait" or "Drive Me Crazy," but, despite the pregnancy, I don't think I've ever seen kids (or adults) as well-adjusted as these. This might as well be a "very special episode" of "Father Knows Best."

"Juno" is mildly funny--in a Vaudeville, eye-roller type of way--but it scant deserves any of the laudatory talk it's garnered. James Berardinelli calls it "the kind of the film where a viewer almost needs to look for a reason to dislike it for it not to work." Well, I didn't have to look too far to realize how sloppily plotted this was: key moments of the stories come quickly, illogically and without build-up. For instance, there's no mention of how Juno is treated as the girl-who-got-pregnant at her high school until it's suddenly a big deal (and even then, we see no real evidence of it). Also, Bateman, the likable ex-rocker, turns pedophile douche bag awfully quick; he becomes so low that there's no indication that he plans to even help out with raising the baby after divorcing Garner at the end.

And while my beef with Juno's (and everyone else's) so-called wisecracks may be personal preference, Ellen Page's performance is hardly internalized; she's okay with timing, but all the movie does is have her blab on and on--not as a self-defense mechanism, but bad writing. (In the actress' defense, Juno's dilemma is treated as nothing more important than the usual lovelorn teen-movie girl problems--she wonders if it's really possible for two people to be happy together forever.) Juno acts more sophisticated than she is, but not in the way real girls her age do; she delivers self-conscious lines that make it sound like she's a wizened sixty-year-old living it up in a sixteen-year-old's body. (Juno's friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby) seemed more like a real girl of that age and was often funnier to me than the title character.)

I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewers were right and this went on to be the next "Little Miss Sunshine," which despite its sitcom family foibles, had some genuine characters in original situations--and saved its contrivances for the end. "Knocked Up," which, like "Juno," was categorized as "realistic" and "hip," may have actually been; it was easy-going and playful and didn't have to mention the nineteen-seventies punk scene for audience approval. "Juno" pretends to be cooler and funnier than it really is; it's more like a real teenager than any featured in the movie.