Seven Pounds

[cinemabon]

End of the year movies are usually reserved for the Oscar contenders, and this year is no exception. Those films that highlight an actors career are often released in Los Angeles with the least time left on the ticking clock (a week is the minimum to qualify).

**********warning: key plot points discussed and revealed*****

Will Smith has produced a tear jerker movie based on a compilation of real life people that seek out redemption after committing terrible things to other people. They can giving away their money, home, possession or even their body parts to the needy to compensate for their injury to others. This is "Seven Pounds" in a nut shell, and there it is, the ending of the movie is revealed. However, this is far from "Citizen Kane." By the time you reach this place in "Seven Pounds", you've literally been dragged through hell.

Will Smith is a widower, having lost his wife in a car accident. He begins to give away all of his possessions, the surest sign of someone intent on suicide resulting from depression. In his case, he seeks out the most needy, and hence performs little acts to redeem his self-sacrifice. The only problem is one of artifice. Things happen with so much contrivance, we begin to find it all a little too difficult to believe.

When Smith miraculously fixes a machine with which he could have absolutely no knowledge, he lost me. As to the love interest having the same rare blood type, that particular tidbit no longer interested me as his motivation to suddenly end it all. He tries to tie up too many loose ends to this disjointed film that runs several story lines in parallel... too much information often leads to confusion. The first thing my wife and son asked me: "What did you think it meant?" If I have to explain a film to everyone around me then in my mind at least, the filmmaker failed to tell the story.

The film is very sad. There is no joy in any scene. For having caused so many needless deaths as a result of his careless driving, Smith's character is about as morose as a person could be. His long drawn faces cast carelessly about each scene begin to weigh so heavily that we loose sight of their purpose. His performance is too weighed, too depressive, too drawn to be believed.

When the heroine waltzes up to one of his organ recipients at the end and gazes into his 'eyes', the other fellow conveniently and instantly knows who she is and why she is there. I wanted to laugh, not cry. "Seven Pounds" started out as a film with very good intentions in a season all about giving to the needy. Instead, Smith has crafted a film in which the nature is so depressive, no one could enjoy the holiday season after seeing it.

This vehicle does not strengthen Smith's career, it lessens it. Pass on this one.

[tabuno]

First off, I'm surprise that the esteemed cinemabon who has provided many informative and thoughtful posts would create a separate thread on this movie that chris knipp has already created and thus introduced some inconvience on this board having to juggle between two different threads. Hopefully I assume cinemabon just overlooked chris knipps' valuable commentary.

As for cinemabon's comments, I would recommend seeing this movie for the reasons I've already posted earlier on chris knipps' thread at

http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2428

By the end of this movie I was moved by Wil Smith's character having experienced his struggle and torment as well as the happiness and inspiration that he provided to others in this morality tale.

I enjoyed Wil Smith's character even more because his character bordered on mental illness, an over-reaction to guilt and who likely needed counseling which oftentimes people do not seek making this movie all the more realistic. Wil Smith's character and his obsession for redemption as a former aeronautic engineer came through with his fixing the ancient printing press, demonstrating his obvious skill and talent he had and that consistently and aptly contributed to revealing the depth of his on-screen character not detracting from it.

His obsession and methodical approach to planning continued to be consistently applied to his "manipulative" approach to planning his steps as a scientist thus bringing to the screen a fascinating presentation of a convoluated technical plan and its successful implementation. It was fabulous to see the part where one of his feats of helping another was to require one of his beneficiaries to maintain his secret so that nobody else knew what he had done, typical of a person whose esteem had been destroyed.

This was a fun, emotionally edgy, and dramatic exploration of a man who sought to redeem himself for his past action that led to tragedy, an action, that for many of us is typical of something most of us have also done perhaps often everyday but fortunately having avoided disaster. Wil Smith's character could have been any one of us, but we were just lucky to have rolled a different pair of dice. This is one man's way of dealing with what too often occurs in real life, a way that I found particularly rewarding during this Holiday Season.

[cinemabon]

Chris must have posted much earlier. My apologies to Chris. I checked the list and did not see it.

I would not recommend this film.

[tabuno]

How about six days earlier? Chris Knipp posted his thread on 12/19/08. So if you're wrong about the date of Knipp's post, is there any possibility you could be wrong about your recommendation? [just joking].

[Johann]

Will Smith will always be "the Fresh Prince" to me.
I like him as a guy, as a normal, cool guy, but I just can't take him seriously as an actor.
Can't. Can't. Can't.
He'll always be a "performer" to me, not a thespian.
It's just variations of the same whenever he plays a role, Ali being the sole exception. He really stepped up on that one, but he had to.
No better way to look like a complete fool than to mess up an iconic role of a 20th/21st century Hero.
He brought it for Mann's film and definitely deserved the Oscar nom. (I won't say he deserved the totem but he came very very close).

His movies just have zero juice for me.
I didn't buy his role in The Pursuit of Happyness, despite all the raves he got.
To me it was like what Henry Rollins said about Mick Jagger singing "A Rock and a Hard Place", singing about the poor: It was like watching Satan weep for the homeless- a great acting job.
A multi, multi millionaire playing the role of someone struggling.
A better actor could make me believe it.
But Will Smith? No frickin' way. Sorry Will, you're not that good.
I just can't give it up for that kind of schmaltzy tugging at heartstrings. I know to you it looked like an acting coup for your career, a total win-win situation, hell you even put your son in there for extra "emotional resonance" but to me it's a complete joke.
If I see Will Smith in one more manipulative role, I'm gonna lose it. He tries way too hard for my taste.
And his talking down to Charlize Theron before she starred in Hancock (This will be different for you, Charlize) really pissed me off. She's an Oscar winner and a REAL actor.
Will Smith will never be a real actor to me. NEVER.
He's a performer. Period.
He'll always be the Fresh Prince to me and that's ironclad.
I don't think there is any role that he could play that would knock me sideways with surprise at his acting chops.
In Men in Black he was the Fresh Prince in a suit. In Independence Day he was The Fresh Prince in a flightsuit.
In every movie he's been in he was the Fresh Prince.
Can't get around it, can't look past it.
When I saw the giant poster for Seven Pounds hanging at Dundas square I just thought to myself: They're marketing this movie with just his fucking face? Wow. I guess that's what you get when the man puts butts into seats. I have to admit he's a box-office champion.
But the real fact is his films aren't really worth all that much.
They have the depth of a child's inflatable swimming pool.

Thumbs up for Seven Pounds?
Hell no.
as Henry Rollins says: I GIVE THAT SHIT THE FINGER!

[cinemabon]

To Tabuno: touche. However, in this instance, I believe Johann hit it closer to the mark. Smith comes across in a manipulative way.

To Chris: Again, I apologize. I'm heading off to have my eyes checked. If there is someway to merge these two posts together under your heading, by all means, go for it.

[tabuno]

Unless one is talking about a documentary, most any other movie by design is about manipulation. Drama, action, comedy, thrillers, horrors, Westerns, romances have at their basis the expression of stimuli that is designed to evoke, to move, to manipulate the audience's emotions, intellect, feelings, thoughts to new, different experiences. The argument that Seven Pounds is "manipulative" shouldn't in anyway be considered detractive against the movie. In order to be successful, the movie in my mind should evoke some manipulation of our thoughts and feelings. If a movie fails to do so, then I believe that movie has failed to successfully accomplish one of its most important criteria for being a good movie.

[cinemabon]

Would you also call propoganda manipulation? When a politician stands in front of the national flag, do you believe they do so as a matter of coincidence? Overt manipulation is very different than inference. Beating someone over the head with a sledgehammer is very different from subtly by symbolism.

At some point in this film, I simply had to say, "Oh, please!" The coincidences seemed to pile up too high, too conveniently... the worst case being the printing press. This wasn't some simple machine. This was an extremely rare German-made machine whose parts no longer existed. They would need to be manufactured... forged! She looked for years to have it repaired. He walks in with a simple tool box and fixes it in a matter of hours... not weeks or even days, but over night... refreshed, and ready for his big surprise the next day! With one kidney? With one lung? Give me a break! I hate being manipulated to cry on cue.

[tabuno]

This movie was a nice consistent package with a meaningful message. Wil Smith's character was, if memory serves me correctly, an aeronautical engineer and supposedly a really good one. Fixing a antique machine didn't seem to be beyond belief here. His ability to repair machines was consistent with the plot that only heightened the drama of this brilliant man who was so creative and perhaps a genius, was able to craft a plan (not again beyond belief), to certainly manipulate events. What you perceived as coincidences, I perceived as normal events that intersect, I've had a number myself, more and more as I grow older that even threaten to break down my agnostic beliefs.

The movie wasn't about manipulation so much as covert invisibility. Reality TV does this all the time, but in this movie, it was about a person doing something behind the scenes unbeknownst to other people (not for profit or tv ratings). What Wil Smith's character did was design a plan, one that cast a big net, but most of do this all the time. We live our life trying to influence, sometimes directly, sometimes with stealth. This movie isn't anything more than a dramatization of what people do in real life, except in the movie's case, it was based on emotional guilt, trauma, and a brilliant man capable of many things, including what occurred in this movie.

In order to discover truth, the grand experiment, sometimes the test rabbits must be unaware. This is what Wil Smith's character set out to accomplish in order to distill the truth, the deserving. This movie was inspirational to me, something that there is too little of in the movie industry nowadays. I related to this movie because I've felt many of the same tendencies, feelings, ideas, desires the Wil Smith portrayed, but never acted on them to the extent that Wil Smith's character was able to. I experienced the movie from Wil Smith's character and suffered the same emotional pain, ethical dilemmas and decisions and Wil Smith hit really close to home in terms of his performance. It wasn't manipulative, it was pretty well darn the truth.

[cinemabon]

fine... however, I am far from alone in my criticism.... here is the New York Times, among many others, that loath this film:

http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/movies/19seve.html?partner=Rotten%20Tomatoes&ei=5083