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Under discussion:

I Am Legend  (2007)

Alvin and the Chipmunks  (2007)

Will Smith walks the streets alone, the last of an almost-extinct breed. This sounds like the synopsis of Smith’s new movie, I Am Legend, but it is also relevant to the actor’s status in Hollywood these days. Often called our generation’s James Stewart, Will Smith is almost the last real movie star standing, a rare actor who can still be depended to bring moviegoers to theaters, no matter what the movie. The only other male movie star with such old fashioned movie star distinction is Tom Hanks. But is it problematic to put so much weight on one person? Is it true that we will watch Smith in literally anything? I know it’s true for me; I’d probably sit through Alvin and the Chipmunks this weekend if it starred Will Smith instead of Jason Lee. And a lot of others would probably do the same.

Regardless of what the critics think of it (and so far they seem to be mixed), I Am Legend is going to be a huge hit. That is pretty much a guarantee — so much so that Smith has acquired this dual role as both a savior of Earth in and a savior of Hollywood with many of the action movies in which he appears. This holiday season, according to a Reuters article, box office is down 7% from last year, and of course Smith is looked to for rescue.

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Under discussion:

New York, New York  (1977)

• “There are all these people who are like a non-people living here in caravans, 15 to a house in parts of England. Completely under the radar, completely unprotected. Like Dickensian England, it???s all here. These people are working for Sainsbury???s, Tesco???s and ASDA, [they] all pretend they don???t know it???s going on. And the government pretends it doesn???t know it???s going on. They???ve designed everything so that those people can be used to keep the cost of living low. There like this sub-human race and I realized that this is really widespread.” From RCRD LBL’s “exclusive interview” with Nick Broomfield, whose narrative feature Ghosts just came out on DVD in the UK.
• Coen Brothers blogathon alert: “Seeing as the Coen Brothers and their new movie haven’t gotten enough blogosphere attention, we here decided we would talk about the Coen Brothers and what their new movie has done to and in their body of work.” The show goes down Friday the 21st at Vinyl is Heavy.
• “At the moment, it looks like a good chunk of my annual top-ten will be dominated by Westerns and Musicals,” writes Filmbrain. “Go figure.” I totally agree with him on Michael Clayton, which I finally saw on Monday and which is such a disappointment–if there was an award for the Best Final Reel Totally Undeserved By The 90 Minutes That Precede It, this one would win in a landslide.
• Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York is, according to Nathan Rabin, “unmistakably a coke movie. It has coke???s jittery, paranoid rhythms: the maddeningly repetitive circular conversations, the pummeling emotional intensity, the screaming matches, and ragged, overreaching ambition. It???s the kind of movie that shows up at your doorstep at four in the morning looking bleary-eyed and desperate and angrily demands $400 for something it doesn???t feel comfortable talking about.”

If Southland Tales is to survive its Cannes drubbing and crap box office to become the cult classic that it has the potential to be, it will be thanks to two primary factors: in-depth, after-the-fact considerations of the film’s power to seduce even those who want to resist its sloppiness and vulgarity, like this one from Steven Shaviro; and the Justin Timberlake musical number at the center of the film, which is the target of much of Shaviro’s swoon.

Shaviro’s certainly not alone in this–virtually everyone I’ve talked to who finds themselves unable to entirely dismiss Southland Tales talks of that scene, set to “All These Things That I’ve Done” by The Killers. I’ve thought that it was the final image of the scene that really did it for me–Timberlake’s facial expression when the hallucination starts to fade is maybe the only truly felt moment of acting in a film that’s otherwise pretty much about bad acting–but Shaviro nails something about the whole cocoon of it:

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