I Am Legend (2007)

Warner Bros. packaged this DVD with The Book of Eli as a "double feature." I had never seen such a set before; the two movies are unrelated, not involving any of the same actors, the same director, or even the same production companies. They just came out a few years apart and center on a lone Black man in a post-apocalyptic America, each with someone claiming to have been guided by a mysterious, potentially divine voice toward a cause for hope. That's about where the similarity ends. IAL actually merits a horror classification.

A scientist (Emma Thompson) reengineers a virus to cure cancer. It appears to work beautifully at first but quickly mutates, killing 90% of the world's populations and turning 9% into "Darkseekers," who are like fast zombies with the appearance and light allergy of vampires. Colonel Robert Neville (Will Smith) volunteers to remain in a cut-off Manhattan as the only known uninfected human survivor, accompanied by his dog, Sam, as he hopes to find a way to give the Darkseekers his immunity before he succumbs to either them or insanity from isolation.

Triple Feature: Smallfoot (2018), Missing Link (2019), Abominable (2019)

When I realized that I could watch all three of these dueling movies on one flight, I couldn't resist. They all came out within a year of each other and are animated adventure comedies involving humans who discover that bigfeet of some sort not only exist but are hardly monsters. Now I would know my personal preference among them.

Pirate Radio (2009)

This is one of the few movies I saw because of a poster. It's not an especially well-done image, but it did get me curious. Even when I'd learned little more than the very different original homeland title, The Boat That Rocked, I wanted to give it a try. The facts that I didn't notice anyone talking about it and that it fared poorly at the box office made little difference to me.

In the late '60s, BBC Radio won't meet the demand for rock music, so a broad swath of the public turns to unlicensed stations playing from ships at sea. (So that's how both titles work!) The story follows the people at one station in particular, uncreatively dubbed "Radio Rock." They have their various episodes, but the main conflict concerns ongoing government efforts to shut them down.

The Remains of the Day (1993)

I have to reach pretty far back these days for an Academy Best Picture nominee that I haven't seen yet and might want to see, apart from some of the most recent. In truth, I didn't know much more than that about TRotD going in -- only that it was a rather esteemed drama starring Anthony Hopkins two years after his first turn as Hannibal Lecter. And Emma Thompson, accidentally in back-to-back reviews on this blog.

Had I noticed in advance that they play a butler and a maid in a mid-20th-century lord's manor, I would have thought hard before adding the DVD to my Netflix queue. Stories of old-time aristocrats, perhaps especially in Britain, threaten to bore me. A focus on their staff doesn't help much. Yeah, count me among the few non-fans of Downton Abbey. At least its predecessor Gosford Park has amusing moments, which I cannot say for TRotD.

Stranger Than Fiction (2006)

Right from the first minute of the preview -- establishing that one Harold Crick suddenly hears his life narrated by a novelist -- I got the impression that Will Ferrell was attempting what Jim Carrey did with The Truman Show and Bill Murray did with Groundhog Day: a sci-fi/fantasy comedy-drama just philosophically serious enough that we may finally consider the star something other than a full-time clown. I welcomed this prospect, as Ferrell's humor has always struck me as about half decent and half obnoxious. (Like some other comedians I could name, he fares better in voice roles.)

It turns out that STF doesn't spend much time trying to be funny. As absurd as the above, unexplained premise is -- not to mention the addition of an apparently sapient watch that goes on the fritz to affect Harold's actions -- the story quickly introduces some dark ways for his setup to suck. In particular, the narrator indicates that Harold is going to die very soon. From there, it's a question of whether to go quietly into that good night or struggle to find an escape. Yeah, he spends more time doing the latter.