I got two films to talk about today.

Hancock
You've probably heard all you need to hear about this film, so I'll keep this short.  Whenever I watch a 'hero' film from America, I end up thinking about how it relates to American foreign policy.  I can't help it, to me heroes embody America's self perception and I felt Hancock falls squarely into this category.  Hancock - the super-powerful hero, the only one of his kind.  He's well meaning but the responsibility of the world resting on his shoulders for 80 years (he doesn't age) has taken its toll.  He's ceased caring about what people think of him.  He's beligerent and rude to the people he helps to they end up hating him.  The only person who has faith in him are an idealist and his young son.  This premise perfectly sums up the direction US politics on the international stage has taken recently.  For the first half of the film anyway.  I expected the film to be about atonement and overcoming odds.  I expected Hancock to discover something about living in prison, about why he does the things he does and who he should do it for.  But half way through the film, it appears to me that the script-writers abandoned this rather didactic theme and opted for a super-hero adventure involving chases, tight suits and half-hearted attempts at 'explaining it all'.  I liked this film but I felt it backed away from the real issues it made at the beginning, the love-triangle and personal history felt inserted and irrelevant.  The novel it was based upon was a much darker affair - about a superhero who decides to seduce a woman and destroy a marriage.  The studio didn't have to go all the way with this idea, but more 'edge' would have been nice.
I'ma give this a 6/10 cos I like Will Smith, the SFX were good, and for the first half of the film, I thought this was gonna be a belter.

The Mist
The Spider, It Came from Outer Space, The Day the Earth Stood Still.  These are classic drive-in B-movie horror films of the 50's that The Mist tries to replicate.  I liked those films, but I didn't like this one.  Where Hancock fails to deliver, The Mist attempts to in a very cack-handed and overly deliberate way.  The situation, the suspense and the whole structure of the film was well within the confines of the B-Movie conventions.  That i don't have a problem with.  The problem I have is with the characters.  I had been told that the character development and reactions in this film were excellent, but I felt they were terrible.  There were really only two types of characters; idiots and clever-dicks.  The idiots (the majority) were irredeemably idiotic.  Like sheep they all get scared together, start to believe the doomsaying of a clearly insane woman and after only two days revert to savage tribalism.  Meanwhile we have the clever-dicks - people who quite transparently seem to represent the intelligensia of America - the Democrats.  These people are level headed, rational, tolerant and sympathetic.  None of their decisions are fool-hardy or reactionary.  They can understand with crystal clear perception exactly the politics of the situation, but remain stoically aloof until pushed to the limit.
This film I felt was preachy and not in a good way.  Unlikely dialogue was overloaded with 'subliminal' messages about how we percieve the world and what people are like.  It had the subtlety of a sixth former's political poetry class.  I wish it hadn't done that.  It was a decent attempt at 50s style horror (possibly explaining why I didn't find it scary in the slightest), but the dialogue was shocking.  And once I started trying to ignore the dialogue, I found that the music was also dire.  Cheesy, cliched crescendos of frantic non-language specific choristers and thundering kettle drums.  The music seems to have been made just using samples filed under 'generic suspense music'.  Left this film feeling slightly irritated.