The Fresh Prince of Legend

I left the theater with three letters in my head: W-T-F.

Here's the new idea to solve the third act dilemma: Don't have one. Just as the plot got problematized the movie was wrapped and handed to you like a Christmas gift as thoughtless as it was last-minute. Will Smith never uttered any catch phrases such as "don't make me put my foot up yo' zombie ass!" so I was wrong about that, and some credit is due, but in the instances where he doesn't get the luxury of having no other actors present (he is, after all, the last man on earth), his middle-aged pleas to be taken seriously are pretty pathetic. Let's see what else sucked...oh yeah, how about the cookie-cutter Gumby-looking zombie cartoons who all looked 100% identical? I know what happened, something like this. Director: "Well, I'm two thirds done, fellas. Now I need just $70M to do the last bit." Producers: "Are you kidding, that money is all gone. We used it in our hemmorage-assests-into-billboard-splashes-to-saturate-lowest-possible-
denominator-public-consciousness campaign!" Writers: "Well what little integrity we may have once had is long gone, so we could finish it up right now by shitting all over the original novel's intricate twist finale, which was way too much of a frown fest anyway. In the post-post 9/11 cinema, we need let America smile again, right? We'll have the rewrites for you in the morning."

Even brown-bagging this movie, I came out sober. And I resent that.

...

In the TV Realm, I'm deep into Heroes: Season 1. My first thought was "stooooopid" after I'd gotten through the first episode. We decided to give it a couple more and now I'm hooked. Good lord the writing/directing is bad, it's politically vapid, and totally escapist, but sucks, it's neat, and TV like this is a better alternative than opium, right?

My theory goes like this: some comic fans were so let down by the third X-Men movie that they decided to just reimagine the X-Men (yet again), therby keeping Bryan Singer's dream of X-perfection alive. I mean, it's hardly even concealed: Wolverine, Rogue, Sabertooth, Prof. X, the boy who cancels the mutant gene, The Human Torch and Invisible Woman (oops), Kitty Pride/Shadowcat, plus a few other bonuses from Back to the Future and The Incredibles - they're all there in different forms. Season 1 reads like an extended narrative of the first X-Men film's opening 30 minutes. It's just as dumb as Lost (and it has to be the same producers, right??? I mean the non-credits opening splash gimmick...), but it doesn't take itself quite so seriously, and we don't have to deal with the onion-peeling narration that never ends. In Heroes answers come quick. The question is: will they be able to keep it interesting after the first arc? I doubt it, but here's to the ride.