Who doesn't love pie? And more importantly, who doesn't love pie in the face? Well, as long as it's not YOUR face. (Though of course you can balance out the humiliation of being served -- so to speak -- with the knowledge that what you were being served was dessert goodness.)

The history of pie-fighting in movies is vast and varied, ranging from the simple to the sublime. Oh heck, who am I kidding? It's all just a messy, slapstick good time. Take a look at these famous movie pie fights, and then let us know: What's your favorite? Which ones did we miss? If you were to get hit in the face with a pie, what type would you prefer? And ... are you hungry yet?

As a longtime science fiction aficionado with a weakness for special effects, Francis Lawrence's I Am Legend is catnip to me. That doesn't mean I won't be watching with a critical eye, though. I've accumulated a long list of pet peeves about the way that "last man on earth" stories are told, both in print and on screen, and personal warning signs have already popped up just from watching the trailers for I Am Legend. I hope I'm proven wrong and that the film allays my concerns, carrying me away to another time and place, but I'll be on the lookout for some of the stupid things last men on earth do -- and don't do.

1. They Become Attached to Just One Pet

Uh oh, it looks like Will Smith only has one dog. That's never a good sign. He exercises with him, tells him to eat his vegetables, hunts with him, and bathes him. (Later he holds the dog's limp body in his arms; just before that, he screams "Nooooooo!!", sounding like Darth Vader, which may or may not be related to what happens to the dog.) Why do you think all those old ladies keep dozens of cats around? In case one of them dies! Now, I'm not saying Will Smith's dog dies in the movie -- I told you, I haven't seen it -- but if you're the last man on earth, you have to plan ahead. Even if your best dog friend doesn't get eaten by lions or murdered by mysterious creatures of the night, you might actually outlive your buddy, so always have multiple dogs hanging around just in case. (Don't fret too much; remember, All Dogs Go to Heaven.) Unless, of course, Will's canine pal is The Last Dog on Earth, which might be another movie entirely.

Every time I see an action movie with shaky, hand-held camerawork, I take a moment in my review to complain about it, but I never have the room to go into detail about why I hate it so much. Now that Michael Bay's Transformers (360 screens), Rob Zombie's Halloween (371 screens) and Brett Ratner's Rush Hour 3 (400 screens) have fallen into my humble lower domain, I'd like to discus it further.

The earliest example of shaky-cam I can remember comes in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964). Kubrick was known as filmmaker married to smooth, steady camerawork, using long takes, wide, deep compositions and slow, clean, traveling movements. So when he used the hand-held to emphasize the chaos of combat in Dr. Strangelove, it was an innovation. The scene has two important attributes: it's still recorded in long takes, so the viewer has a relatively good idea what's going on, but more importantly, in this particular scene, in this particular movie, it doesn't matter exactly what's going on. Only the larger concept of the fracas itself matters.

Today, just about every other Hollywood film uses shaky-cam, though European filmmakers generally prefer longer takes and less shaking. Since cameras get lighter and easier to use every year, it makes sense. With hand-held, it takes much less time to set up a shot. No more laying down track or mapping out every inch of camera movement. But hand-held has been quickly abused, and it's almost always used wrong. Bay's Transformers is a particularly heinous example. Each time a transformer switches from car to robot, Bay moves his camera right up to the action, as if it's taking place mere inches from our faces. Since the robots are several stories high, this is painfully disorienting. It's like trying to view the Empire State Building by waving a camera in front of a few bricks. Moreover, a filmmaker friend told me that, because the robots were created with CGI, Bay probably added his shaking camera after principal photography, with computers.

Zombie's Halloween should offer a pretty cut-and-dried case study. For dialogue sequences, Zombie keeps the camera fairly still, but when Michael Myers attacks, he begins jerking and lurching around. This does not emphasize the terror. It's more like riding a roller coaster and anticipating a ten-story drop before suddenly finding yourself thrown from the ride. Compare this to John Carpenter's masterful original, which was also filmed handheld, but via long, graceful, gliding Steadicam shots. Part of the problem with most shaky-cam work is that the director is forced to cut it together very quickly to hide the fact that very little is actually visible.

In my book, Ratner's crimes are a good deal worse. Ratner had the opportunity to direct Jackie Chan in his first big Hollywood-financed film. Chan is an exceptionally skilled martial artist. He choreographs his stunts and moves at lightning speed and razor precision. He has even established an emotional logic for his stunts, and he's a fairly good director himself, having made more films in Hong Kong than Ratner has here. Chan's method, and indeed the method of most Hong Kong filmmakers, is to choreograph the action first, then film it clearly without getting the camera in the way. Instead, in all three Rush Hour films, Ratner shakes the camera around and butchers everything Chan does. Nearly every martial arts star working in Hollywood has suffered the same problem, while -- ironically -- the talented Hong Kong directors, who know how to photograph action, have ended up making "B" movies with Jean-Claude Van Damme.

When we humans walk down the street, our heads and eyes bob up and down. But our brains automatically adjust so that our vision remains constant and smooth. If you're walking along a sidewalk and your gaze fixes on a car parked at the end of the block, the car does not jerk up and down. So when a filmmaker runs through the forest carrying the camera and filming the running movement, he's not actually capturing the feel of running. He's capturing chaos. The idea of making a movie is to get into the audience's heads. So by filming smoothly and cutting when necessary -- like the blinking of an eye -- the action should be closer to what everyone can relate to. Brad Bird's Ratatouille (393 screens) offers an excellent example of this. When his rat hero Remy explores the kitchen of the restaurant, Bird's "camera" swoops around the room at top speed, but it never loses the concept of the room. We're always aware of the room and our place in it.

That's the key: space. Even though Paul Greengrass's The Bourne Ultimatum is filmed entirely with shaky-cam, the space is always clear. The old-time Hollywood action directors like Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh understood this instinctively. Let the audience see. Most of today's "action" directors, I suspect, very simply don't understand action, so they use the shaky-cam as a way to hide their ineptitude. The lack of action and choreography is covered up in the sludge of fast film and fast editing. What's even more perplexing is that nobody ever seems to notice or complain. (One of the most poorly made movies of all time, Gladiator, actually won a Best Picture Oscar.) Audiences are apparently used to shoddy work and wouldn't know good work if it bit them. We deserve better than what we're getting. All it takes is a taste of the good stuff before the bitterness of the bad stuff comes out.

I'm a sucker for creative, non-fancy fandom. In January, I shared a clip to Star Wars' Battle of Yavin done entirely with hands. Now I've got something of the non-motion variety. There is an art exhibit making the rounds that recreates scenes from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The kicker -- it's done with household objects. Now, I'm not talking about taking them and making mini replicas by morphing them. Instead, this is a collection of images very similar to actual scenes, but within the constraints of the materials used. It's kind of like the hands -- they can't be perfect replicas, but the idea and mood are down pat.

The exhibition comes from Kristan Horton, a visual artist hailing from Canada. For two and a half years, the only video he had in his studio was Dr. Strangelove, and he watched it over 700 times. Why he didn't go and pick up any other video is beyond me. Heck, I love Heathers and have probably seen it 100 times, but that's over 15 years! The collection of images starts with the classic Columbia logo with the torch-bearing woman, which is shown with its recreation -- one that uses a bottle and what appears to be an old trophy bottom, some tape and some plastic or tissue. Beyond that, a plane is recreated with silverware, a remote control becomes a computer panel and an old dictionary becomes a bed. You can see some of the images here, and the exhibit is currently housed in Toronto, at York University, before it moves to Vancouver's Contemporary Art Gallery this July.

A thoughtful reader pointed out to us that yesterday was Stanley Kubrick's birthday -- he would have been 78 had he not died in 1999 -- and I couldn't let the occasion pass without an image from one of his movies. At first, I thought I should remember one of the lesser-known films, something that many people haven't seen, like Paths of Glory or Barry Lyndon. Barry Lyndon has some gorgeous images, as does A Clockwork Orange. But ultimately I decided to go with one of the most iconic images from a Kubrick film, the one that most of us would recognize instantly, the one that reminds you that you haven't seen Dr. Strangelove in awhile and ought to rent it again soon.

I don't need to explain the context of the above image, although it reminds me how much I enjoyed Slim Pickens as Major Kong. Rumor has it that Peter Sellers was supposed to take that role too, but was unable to do so. As much as I enjoy Sellers, I'm not sure he'd be quite as convincing a Texan as Pickens in this dark comedy. If you don't know anything about the above image, get to a video store immediately and rent Dr. Strangelove. And don't forget to wish Kubrick a (late, but sincere) happy birthday.

[Thanks to Asim for the tip.]