Legend Be He

With Mrs. Nat’s TV and the wee one off visiting the in-laws (my in-laws, not theirs, to be clear), and with little else to do on a Christmas day, I headed off to go see the movies. Walked there, in fact; no reason not, and besides my gym is closed so I won’t be getting my usual daily workout,
I walked there, which actually proved quiet a good set-up for this post-holocaust picture.. walking by the empty, uninhabited shopping mall between here and there felt much like walking through a deserted city… which is what I Am Legend depicts. And that’s where its greatest strengths lie – the empty New York falling into decay is done beautifully, to the degree that it leaves me feeling that there is no visual that the modern movie cannot depict, so long as enough money is thrown at the screen. Will Smith does a good job as the lone actor in much of the film, letting the psychological effect of lone survivorhood slowly build in the viewers mind. In a way, it leaves one wishing that the zombiesque aspects of Richard Matheson’s story could have been stripped away, and just given more time to just life in the empty city… or maybe that’s me trying to push something I’m working on (news to come) onto something I’ve seen.
And then I head home and have to get some work done, signing royalty checks (actually a favorite activity here), so I reach into the pile of cheap VHS tapes I picked up at some point to have things to watch during dead times like these holiday/writer’s strike days. Somewhere in Time, a time-travelly romance starring Christopher Reeve that I don’t think I’d seen since the late 1970s. And as it starts up, I see that it’s based on a Richard Matheson story (in this case, he adapted it into a screenplay himself.)
So I’m having a very Richard Matheson Christmas…