‘GET SMART’ - In ‘Get Smart,’ would you believe Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart bouncing down a stairway in a vintage Sunbeam Alpine like the one Don Adams drove in the original 1960s TV show? Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.
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"Get Smart" gets some things right, but unfortunately it doesn’t get Smart right.
Written by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember, and based on the classic 60s TV series created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, "Get Smart" features the intrepid agents of Control, led by Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell), fighting the evil forces of Kaos as the latter attempt to hold the US hostage with nuclear blackmail..com.
Sometimes filmmakers don’t know how to end a movie, so they shoot two endings and show them in test screenings to see which one works for audiences. Director Francis Lawrence did this for the recent "I Am Legend", finally choosing one ending over the other. Since the movie made over $255 million in the US alone, Lawrence probably feels he made the right choice commercially.
But did he make the right choice aesthetically? Courtesy of this week’s DVD release of "I Am Legend", we’ll be able to judge for ourselves, since the Two-Disc Special Edition not only contains the original ending, but the alternate ending that didn’t make it past test screenings.
Based on the 1954 Richard Matheson novel of the same name, "I Am Legend" tells the tale of Dr. Robert Neville (played by Will Smith), the last survivor of a man-made plague that has destroyed all human life on earth. I say human life because whoever the plague hasn’t killed outright has mutated into murderous, vampire-like creatures.
Most movies tend to spoon-feed audiences, telling them what to think, how to feel and exactly what is going on at all times (think of any of this summer’s blockbusters and you’ll know what I mean). Even the so-called "twists" these movies deliver are fairly predictable and thus hardly seem like twists at all.
Since "Saturday Night Live" first hit the airwaves way back in 1975, numerous alumni from the show have made the leap from Boob Tube to Big Screen, with results ranging from the utterly hilarious "Animal House" in 1978 to the utterly dreadful "The Ladies Man" in 2000. The new comedy starring SNL alumnus Andy Samberg, "Hot Rod," falls somewhere in between.
It’s been 12 years since the last "Die Hard" movie, but though Bruce Willis, once again playing the wisecracking New York cop John McClane, remains a fit and physically agile action hero at 52 (with able help from his stunt double, of course), the rest of the franchise hasn’t aged quite so well.
