DVD - The Pursuit of Happyness

Last years "feel good" holiday film, The Pursuit of Happyness, stars Will Smith as Chris Gardner, a man who is down on his luck, when his medical salesman job takes a dive, because no one wants to buy what he's selling. When his rough times don't seem to clear up, his wife/girlfriend (we're never really told which she is, though we do know he's the mother of his child), leaves for New York, leaving Chris with very little money, and a young child to take care of (played by Smith's real son, Jaden Smith).

Gardner is forced to move out of his apartment, and into a seedy hotel, because he is taking an unpaid internship with Dean Witter, to try and turn around his life. He uses his occasional sales of an X-Ray machine (that no one seems to be particularly interested in) to subsidize his life. But, when he runs out of machines to sell, almost two full months before his internship is over, his hand to mouth lifestyle is put in jeopardy. He even spends a night, with his son and all of his earthly possessions in a BART terminal bathroom, because he has nowhere else to stay. But Gardner's steely resolve keeps him moving ahead. he's at the bottom of the barrel, and he knows there's no lower to sink. He HAS to make this work, or he and his son are dead.

The Pursuit of Happyness is a true story, and, while I'm sure some of it has been slightly modified for drama, it is still an amazing story to witness. Will Smith is fantastic as a man at the end of his rope, trying to provide for his son, and keep his life together, all while trying to stay one step ahead of complete destitution. He really makes you feel the frustration of dealing with the crap that the world constantly piles on him, and, at times, I even found myself cheering him on when he would catch a break.

Smith has done a lot of stinkers lately. In fact, Ali and I Am Legend are, probably, the only two things he's done in a long time that I enjoyed. But Happyness is definitely joining that list. It's one of those "stand up and cheer" films, which are VERY difficult to do well.

DVD - Resident Evil: Extinction

Okay, a little background on why I'm writing this. I saw the original Resident Evil on DVD, many years ago, and I liked it. I thought it was a fairly well made zombie movie that had me creeping and crawling. The gigantic mutant dog thing, at the end, lost it a little bit for me, but everything up to that point was pretty good. Then, they made Resident Evil:Apocalypse, which totally blew. I mean, what were they thinking when they made this movie? I don't care about the behind the scenes bad guys, or the dude who gets infected in the first movie, only to become a mutant killing machine for this one. I care about ZOMBIES. That's why I'm there. So, when I saw the first trailers for Extinction, the thought that immediately popped into my mind was - "Well, your stuck now. You've already watched the first two, so suck it up and put in the 90 minutes. Maybe they will have learned from their mistakes."

Well, I would say the filmmakers learned from the mistakes they made with Apocalypse, but, maybe they learned a little too well. It seemed like they took all of the mistakes made in Apocalypse, and just did the polar opposite of them, in turn creating more mistakes, but with lesser consequence. Extinction is a film that is riddled with bad choices by the filmmakers, but, none of these bad choices particularly make it a bad film, just INCREDIBLY mediocre. One of those films where, when it's over, you walk away empty handed, which is better than walking away feeling cheated, but definitely not as good as feeling you watched something truly amazing.

Extinction continues to follow Alice (reprised, yet again, by Milla Jovovich. Hey, what else is she doing these days?), only now, it is several years after the events of Apocalypse, and the T-virus has devastated the entire world. We meet Alice as she manuevers her way through a desert wasteland, Road Warrior style, looking for gas and supplies from whatever she can scrounge. After a series of early mishaps, she stumbles across a convoy, which includes her old buddies L.J. and Carlos (reprised, respectively, by Mike Epps and Oded Fehr. Hey, what else are they doing these days?). The convoy is under the leadership of Claire Redfield (Ali Larter, of Heroe's fame), and is pushing across the desert towards the coast. Alice reveals a journal she found to Carlos and Claire. Inside it is information about an infection free area in Alaska, which they decide to go to. Two problems - the convoy is almost out of gas and food (and being in Nevada, those two things are going to become pretty important if their going to make it to Alaska), and Two - Alice's old arch nemesis Dr. Isaacs is still after her, because he believes her blood holds the cure for infection. The convoy decides to try for gas and food in Vegas, but what they don't know is that Dr. Isaac's is tracking them, and waiting for them there with a few surprises up his sleeve.

Like I've said before, this movie was not particularly good, and it wasn't particularly bad either. At a lean and mean 90 minutes, the action goes so fast, I was actually very surprised when it was over. I assumed there would be more story to it. Milla Jovovich is in pure bad ass form as Alice, and, like I hinted at before, this movie owes a deep debt of gratitude to The Road Warrior. I almost expected Mad Max to pop up somewhere in the film, or at least a more overt reference to him (if the entire film wasn't an overt enough reference). The judgement? If your a Resident Evil fan, or, if your like me and you've already put your time in on the first two, even though they had their ups and downs, this film is worth your ninety minutes, just so you can say that you saw all three. If you're a casual watcher, wait until it comes on cable or something and watch it that way. I guarantee you that whatever content they edit out, is not going to save the movie from it's own lacklusterness.