Robert Neville days....

Enhance 224 to 176



Warning: There maybe spoilers if you haven't seen I Am Legend, or read I Am Legend, or seen Blade Runner or read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or read books or seen films, or basically were wandering around with cotton buds tapped to your eyes dribbling and not watching what films were at the cinemas and what books were in the book shops.



If I was to invent something to drive me crazy it would be Bladerunner coming out on dvd and I Am Legend being in cinemas at the same time there is not closer fictions for loneliness than this.

It’s a common theme of my life, and my work.

They’ve never a made a close adaptation of I am Legend, jesus, it’s an amazing book. I made jokes in my stand up about how Will Smith in the movie doesn’t want to ride the vampires, like he's been on his own for three years, we see no scenes of him wanking and even when he has a 19-year-old vampire strapped down and she's sedated and breathing heavily no action, Charlton Heston would have tapped that, in the parlance of our times....he's fucked monkeys I'd seen it in a documentary....

It’s all in the book at night, when Neville looks through his peep hole and the female vampires are taunting him. Can you imagine, sexy taunting vampire ladies, when you haven't have the ride for three years, I can, and he's the last person on earth, and it doesn't matter what he does...a novel about the last man on earth that can fuck and kill anyone he wants from 1954? I don't think they'd have Will Smith running around riding slow goth ladies and staking anyone in the heart who says different...

meanwhile his ex-best-friend Bud Cortman is banging on the door shouting ‘come out Neville’ while Neville stays inside and drinks whiskey and smokes. Thats the bit that kills me in the book, it's not the crazy vampires, it's that they can talk you wouldn't mind killing faceless monsters for three years but if they were banging planks against your door every night shouting in a crazy zombie voice for you to come out evry night? When would you crack? like if you'd been alone for three years and someone goes 'come out?!' what to the pub? beyond the blood sucking bit, you'd want to, there's someone out there that wants to talk to you least...

It’s fucking amazing,

A couple of days ago I had awful time, what I refer to Robert Neville Days, before Christmas for about a month and a half I had been working every day, at kitchen work and teaching, knowing that my dad was very ill. Robert Neville Days for me, and since then, mean that you want to stay in your room and not deal with anything in the outside world (be it outside you door, or Internet connection) because they are vampires and you are waiting for morning so you can wander around and kill them all, in the parlance of Neville, the bastards.

You feel like explaining to anyone who can be at all interested to ask that science fiction isn't some wanky laugh, orm silver space ship, it's that the loneliness of somthing like I Am Legend (the book, not the film with the wanky christian/village shite tagged on) or Bladerunner is the ultimate in loneliness, and loneliness and alienation and awfulness are as much science fiction to most that read it as zap guns and green ladies are as those who don't.

These fictions to speak to people like me (and maybe you), you can have your bibles or P.S. I Love Yous or whatever stories get you throught the night it doesn't matter these are amazing stories for the lonely, the melodrama for the teenage boy.

To be the last man on earth?
To be hunting and killing what you might be and what you might fall in love it...?

beat that Jesus...

you fecker
that'll teach you not to let me wank....

I am Legend

Was looking up stuff on I Am Legend and check it out above ! The first adaptation of Richard Matheson's 1954 Novel is public domain.

The Last Man On Earth (1964)

Although it may seem cheesy on first look, this is haunting in parts, especially Morgan's workman like and resigned day-by-day genocide, in the new movie, we getting the feeling that Neville is methodically working through each city block to find survivors but in this version it is more explicit that Neville is making sure all the infected are dead with the ensuign detriment to his mental health. The perverse enjoyment of being the last man on earth and having free reign on all of earth's art and technology is present in all, with the payoff of loneliness is the core of the story of myself and manya geek no doubt, of surrounding yourself with books, movies and music.

The Omega Man (1971)

Part of what I call Heston's "I saved the past, now I'm going to save the future you damn dirty cinema goers" (along with Planet of the Apes (1968) and Soylent Green (1973) ) Heston's Neville gets his monstrousity across a bit but he can't really express the loneliness and paranoia...the PHONEs aren't RINGing. My favorite bit is when he watches Woodstock over and over again and goes 'best GODdammn movie ever'. Like I was buying the existence of modern vampires okay, but the idea that he watches Woodstock every day stretches credulity. This sees a contiuation of a quasi-subplot of Heston movies: having a love interest that's a racial or exotic other, althought Rosalind Cash in the Omega Man give him more of a challenege than the scantily clad and mute Nova (Linda Harrison) in Planet of the Apes.

Get your lips off of me you damn dirty ape!...

ladies , the way Heston (and come to think of it Mel Gibson) like 'em:

scantily clad, in a cage, can't speak.

I don't think Heston every really wanted to leave the planet of the apes, you can shoot what you like and all the women who are intelligent look like monkeys and all the ones who can't speak are beautiful. If Heston had revived a 19 year old scantily clad vampire yoke and it was all heavy breathing and tied to a bed and almost cured, you'd know he'd be on top of it quicker than on a beach strewn with a hundred Statues of Liberty.

I Am Legend (2007)

Which brings us to the great I Am Legend. As in keeping with Hollywood's 'Sexzel Washington Paradox' good male black characters never get to have sex cf Denzel in the Bone Collector or The Siege but bad black characters get to ride all round them cf Training Day. There's also the paradox of this type of Richard Matheson or Philip K. Dick fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, paranoid, ambiguous characters, which Hollywood has trouble making into action movie leads.

Smith does a great job of expressing the loneliness and paranoia but there is less of the implication of the Neville character actually being a monster to the 'still living' faction of humanity that he is slowly destroying day by day, absent from the current adaptation, which reduces some of the dramtic core of the book. It's great to see decent science fiction with a darker edge on the screen though.