My wife and I had a date last night: dinner at Karma’s Café, then a movie, I Am Legend, which we both enjoyed, although there were few minor plot holes. Not enough to ruin our enjoyment of the film, but enough that we both noticed them when we discussed it afterwards.

When it comes to films adapted from books, I’m not one of those people who has a hissy whenever the movie deviates from the source material. I’ve heard so many people piss and moan about how The Lord of the Rings was ruined for them because some minor character wasn’t included in the film version, or because something wasn’t realized the way they always pictured it in the book. Boo-freakin-hoo.

I’m pretty good at treating the movie and the book as separate entities — especially since it’s usually a given that the book is better than the movie, anyway (not always, but usually).

All that aside, I was pretty happy with the changes made in this version, which was actually the third time Richard Matheson’s novel has been filmed. The setting of the novel is the west coast, whereas the movie takes place on the east coast, in New York City. In the novel, Neville spends his days hunting vampires, staking them, and tossing the bodies in a giant pit on the edge of town. In the movie, Neville drives around hunting deer, renting movies, sort of looking for the vampires — which aren’t really like vampires, but rather the “fast” zombies seen in films like 28 Days Later — but mostly spending his time working on a cure.

My only real problem with the film were the vamps themselves — or “dark seekers,” as they are called (blah, I didn’t like that name). I thought it was a bad choice to render them almost entirely in CG. It really didn’t make sense to me, seeing as how this was a big budget Will Smith movie. You’d think the studio could afford to either a) use traditional make-up effects on real actors, which would have looked a thousand times more real, or b) shelled out a bit more money and done the CG better, because I’ve seen humans rendered in CG that looked a lot more real than these vamps, which looked like something out of a video game. Even the vampire dogs. The undead mutts in Resident Evil looked a helluva lot more real than these pups, which were entirely CG. The only thing I can think of is that the studio had the money, but they didn’t have the time. So the CG had to be produced on the fly. Again, it’s not a huge issue, since you don’t see the vamps too much in the film, but I was expecting a bit more.

Next up: Cloverfield (which, incidentally, I keep calling Cloverleaf, and makes me wonder if the mystery monster isn’t some giant pissed-off tuna)

In other news, I finally used my new laserjet printer the other day. To print off a story that had just been rejected, no less. I had to buy a new printer last week because my old didn’t work with the new computer (thanks a pantload, Vista).

The really big news of the day is that I’m finally starting work on my first novel. I’m not going to give away too many details of what it’s about, not even what it’s called — not yet, anyway. First thing is to go through all the notes I’ve taken for the past year or two and get organized. Then I can truly begin.

I’ve got a pot of Tim Horton’s coffee and my Winamp stocked with about 80 Tragically Hip tunes. I’m ready to go.