The great italian cinema

about an awful movie....
The Movie Masochist: Lose ‘Seven Pounds,' keep sanity

By JAMES FRANKLIN

Forget for a moment that "Seven Pounds" is supposed to be entertainment simply because it's a movie. It utterly fails in that regard. It could, however, be seen as an act of public service.

First, let's address "Seven Pounds" as a movie, which is what its distributors choose to call it. The story - although this word may be dropped in favor of "what happens on screen" - follows a man (Will Smith) who feels terrible about something. We know this because the movie keeps jumping back to him sitting teary-eyed near the ocean. For much of the movie's two hours, he commits acts of generosity for no apparent reason with a sense of friendly intrusion that borders on creepy. He also has a deadly jellyfish in his motel room.

He strikes up a relationship with a woman (Rosario Dawson) whose life is threatened by a congenital heart defect. He intrudes into other people's lives, trying to fix them. Sometimes he loses his temper and runs down the street.

All of this comes together, to little effect, in the film's closing minutes. Audiences may rightly feel angry at this point because they've devoted two hours to a mess that's really a maudlin Hallmark Hall of Fame movie in disguise.

It's more generous, then, to consider "Seven Pounds" as an instrument of education and escape.

The reasons for this are as follows:

1. For anyone wondering what senility will be like, "Seven Pounds" offers a helpful preview. Jumping back and forth in time among numerous characters, the movie offers one inexplicable situation after another, each time leaving the audience wondering how they arrived there, who this person is and why this or that is important. Plus, just like real life, each situation is grindingly dull.

2. People who hate their jobs should also take note of "Seven Pounds." In the course of a miserable day, many people often feel they need naps just to survive until evening. "Seven Pounds" is a mostly quiet movie, with characters speaking in hushed tones to let the audience know this is a film of great sensitivity and import. That makes it ideal for naps, provided one can steal away from work and isn't daunted by paying $6-plus for the privilege of sitting in a dark room.

3. Aspiring screenwriters can also benefit from seeing "Seven Pounds" because it may boast one of the most incoherent scripts in movie history. It's an object lesson in how to quickly lead an audience into utter confusion with non-linear storytelling. Films such as "Pulp Fiction" and "Memento" successfully play slice-and-dice with time and tease the audience along the way. The ability to do this successfully is a rare gift. Given their ability to inflict great harm, screenwriters who want to attempt non-linear storytelling should be licensed in the same manner as doctors or pilots.

The word "incoherent," as mentioned above, best describes "Seven Pounds," but simply leaving it at that is unfair to its many other qualities. As a vocabulary challenge, it's possible to say more using only words that start with prefix "in." In addition to incoherent, apply inexplicable, inane, inept, inert, infuriating, insufferable, intolerable, inglorious, inferior, inexpedient, ineffective, inefficacious, ineloquent, inelegant, indefensible, indecipherable, incompetent, inaccessible, inadequate, insipid, intemperate and inutile.

Finally, add the word "infinite," which is how it feels to sit in a theater and watch "Seven Pounds" unfold on screen. Science and human experience suggest the perception of time is subjective, meaning "Seven Pounds" lasts anywhere from two hours to one week to one year, and so on to infinity. That means "Seven Pounds," in addition to being a bad movie, is a kind of temporal anomaly that can trap the unwary. It may be wise, then, to forget this movie's value as a public service. If, in the future, you should find yourself near a theater or TV screen on which "Seven Pounds" is playing, look away. Let science to deal with this problem.

Rated PG-13 for strong language and the chilling ability to distort the perception of time.

Four stars: Traumatic.

The rating system:

1 star: Lousy

2 stars: Horrible

3 stars: Painful

4 stars: Traumatic

The Movie Masochist is an emotionally wounded cinephile who lives in the United States. He watches bad movies so you don't have to.