As long as there are social codes that prevent us from behaving the way we'd truly like (for me, a cross between Larry David and Louis XVI) there will be fantasy about the breakdown of society. Vanishing on 7th Street is another tale of how people will react when, suddenly and inexplicably, they are one of the last people alive on Earth.
Hayden Christensen, a morning news anchor, awakens to find that nearly everyone in town has been raptured away, leaving just their clothes. He hunts for survivors, finding them at a blues bar on the wrong side of the tracks. As the group tries to figure out what the heck is going on, mysterious shadows emerge and suck people who aren't illuminated into a netherworld of darkness.
Now hear this. We're officially at the point where we can, strike that, we must, stop inflating our estimation of films simply because they were made on a low budget. The dazzling special effects that can be created on prosumer computers shines a greater light, I feel, on the elements of a film that should be divorced from fiscal concerns: sharp writing and good acting. Put bluntly, John Cassavetes didn't need no Adobe After Effects.
To be fair, Casavettes never tried his hand at "genre films," and that's a world indie filmmaker Brad Anderson has been making a bit of noise in for some time. His newest, Vanishing on 7th Street, is a tiny little film with the thinnest of "what ifs?" and keeps its fingers crossed that it'll work based on tone.
Individual sequences in Vanishing on 7th Street do tap into nightmarish dread; Anderson knows where to stick the camera. On a visceral level, Vo7S is a success. The problems come when people open their mouths. Not only is the dialogue absurd (yeah, lots of kids shout "I exist!" to life-draining spectres that may've killed their parents) but the acting is about what you'd find in a high school play.
There's one easy way to keep people from criticizing a Hayden Christensen performance, and that's to cast him opposite John Leguizamo.
I don't know exactly when it happened, but at some point along the way, Leguizamo became one of the worst actors working in Hollywood. In Vo7S, his tortured genius with clipped-speech rivals his work as the tortured genius with clipped-speech in the masterpiece Gamer.
When the film is pure action - pure video game - it isn't bad. But when the characters are trying to make sense of their predicament (you know, when there's a story going on) it falls way, way flat. It is now, in retrospect, that I realize just how dopey the whole exercise is - not only the "oh, so that's why!" explanation of how certain people survived the instigating apocalypse, but the falseness of the sets, the relationships, the kill scenes. In short, this movie stinks, and will soon "vanish" from your memory.
Below, an example of how, sometimes, when you get out of a screening, before you've had a time to think about what you just saw, you'll be kinder to a film than you should.
