Dawn of the Dead (2004)

I've yet to see a bad zombie movie. The formula works every time, no matter how *ahem* brainlessly executed. The same is not true of our other classic movie monsters. I find vampires to be tedious unless German or lesbian...or hunted by Corey Feldman. Werewolves stopped being fun once prosthetics were replaced by CGI. But the steadfast zombie endures.

I propose that the zombie flick is a boy's equivalent to the romantic comedy. As long as there is a Meet Cute, a series of screwy mishaps and a happy reunion, the sugar and spice inside your date will be somehow affirmed. Likewise, as long as society is upturned by a hungry horde of mindless living dead, survivors band together with improvised weapons and the body count is high, my snips and snails rejoice.

The 2004 remake of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) meets the minimum requirements, plus such added bonuses as a Johnny Cash theme song, gratuitous celebrity-lookalike-zombie sniping, and a zombie baby. One of my favorite aspects of the zombie movie is the way human bodies tend to come apart as easily as chicken wings. Like when that guy gets quartered in Planet Terror. Always funny.


Addendum: I refer exclusively to the modern zombie apocalypse movie, of course. Zombie movies predating the original Night of the Living Dead (1968) are to be considered a separate breed, dealing primarily with Haitian voodoo and featuring a small number of obedient "zombi" servants. The very first is Bela Lugosi's White Zombie (1932), the best is Val Lewton's I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and the most spectacularly bad is Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959).

Ebert Island

Roger has provided a list of "10 conversations between directors he'd enjoy hearing if stranded with them on a desert island". I quote from the Variety article.

Buster Keaton & Charles Chaplin: Whose treatment of sentimentality will weather better?

Alfred Hitchcock & Gus Van Sant: On the necessity of Van Sant's shot-by-shot remake of "Psycho," especially in light of his explanation to Ebert at the 1999 Calcutta Film Festival: "I did it so no one else would have to."

Federico Fellini & Ingmar Bergman: Why did they briefly agree to collaborate on a film project? What exactly did they think they shared in common?

Robert Altman & Jonathan Demme: What's the best way to keep all the characters alive in a film about a large group?

Martin Scorsese & Michael Powell: On the filming of romantic obsession.

Orson Welles & John Cassavetes: On the problems besetting an untamed genius in Hollywood.

Sidney Lumet & Charlie Kaufman: On working with Philip Seymour Hoffman.

F.W. Murnau & Werner Herzog: After Nosferatu's name was changed to Dracula, what went wrong?

Woody Allen & David Mamet: On directing one's own dialogue.

John Ford & Oliver Stone: On patriotism.

I've got one of my own to add...

Quentin Tarantino & Howard Hawks: On the impulse toward both trashy entertainment and fine art.

There Will Be Boredom

Good lord, what is up with this year's Best Picture nominees? They're no fucking fun. Slumdog Millionaire is vapid garbage, Benjamin Buttons is a lifeless bore, The Reader is a tenuous tract, and Milk is cautiously optimistic. Does anyone at the Academy have any living guts? The most vigorous entry, and best of the bunch, is Frost/Nixon: A docudrama about an interview with the boogeyman.

Remember last year? Virile! We had precocious teen pregnancy, a shotgun with a silencer, and bowling for blood.

The best film of 2008 is obvious: WALL-E.
Jury prize for The Wrestler.

Milk

Gus Van Sant is wise enough to keep this one clean of his avant-garde fingerprints, knowing that his responsibility is to present the facts of the gay civil rights movement with clarity and sobriety. The only indicator of Van Sant's involvement is the surety of direction and overall quality of the product. Much of the credit should go to the screenwriter, Dustin Lance Black, whose screenplay (written on spec) distills and gracefully relates the parallel stories of Harvey Milk, the Castro District of San Francisco, and the national campaign for gay rights in the 1970s.

Social conservatives should take note that the controversial issues of thirty years ago (e.g. the right of homosexuals to hold jobs, teach school, rent & own real estate) are in the democratic society of today a matter of course. This is called progress, and the next generation will see the right to gay marriage as a matter of course.

Revolutionary Road

The big scenes are all there &mdash the purple-faced fights, the dinner party that threatens to unravel, the adultery sex &mdash but the connective tissue is missing. Sam Mendes is too much in love with his actors, too insistent on their (admittedly great) performance moments; meanwhile he is remiss in his duties as director. He neglects to support Kate and Leo by fleshing out the suburban hell they supposedly inhabit. The stars are so often framed tightly, to enhance their sense of claustrophobia, that we never get a clear idea of why they are feeling trapped in the first place; we aren't shown just what exactly is so boring and intolerable about the suburban commuter+housewife lifestyle. The screenplay also does too little to establish the freewheeling days of their youth for which they yearn, so we can't share their sense of loss. I think Mendes is failing to own up to a secret: These characters were mediocre people to begin with, and they blame suburbia because they're terrified to admit it. That's the untold story here. Starstruck Mendes chickened out on the opportunity to make a better movie by making Mr. and Mrs. My-Heart-Will-Go-On less likeable.

A more complete movie on the subject, also starring Winslet as a displaced mother alienated from her own maternity, is Little Children (2006). Director Todd Field correctly allows suburbia to breath, giving its quiet menace space to dwell.

Four Rooms

I'm thinking, Tim Roth's performance has the rubber limbs of Jerry Lewis and the nervous particularity of Peter Sellers, and it's way over the top and giddy-funny. And then Tarantino shows up onscreen and actually makes a speech about Jerry Lewis. !? Perhaps there are limits to what Tarantino's Midas Touch can turn to cool.

[Quietly inserts Jerry Lewis movies into queue]

Roth alone holds together the first two shabby vignettes. The third, directed by Robert Rodriguez, is a perfect and uproarious short film worthy of comparison to a tightly-scripted Chuck Jones classic. I want to excise that segment and put it alongside A Christmas Story and A Charlie Brown Christmas as mandatory family holiday viewing. Except it's totally unsuitable for children.

Tarantino directs the final vignette, and his trademark storytelling (his best strength) is on display: Circle and meander a bit, speechifying about some pet bit of pop culture, then grab you by the brain stem and start steadily piling on the delicious intrigue, speechify some more, and sure as hell pay off big time.

Schmucks With Underwoods

The Spring 2009 Hard Boiled Cinema film series celebrates the screenwriters who crafted the screwball comedy of the 1930s. View the schedule and details at the official website:

hardboiledcinema.com

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

I'm curious as to why anyone would care about this story. The point, it would seem to me, of a story about a person aging backward ought to be some kind of insight on life. So what insight is offered here? It is really, really funny to see an old-timey feller get struck by lightning seven times. But you already knew that. Otherwise, there is absolutely nothing to lend poignancy to Benjamin's unremarkable life.

As with another of this year's grossly overrated Best Picture nominees, Slumdog Millionaire, this movie features a character with no character who loves a girl for no reason. You don't have to buy into this crap.

If you've forgotten what real romance feels like, see WALL-E again. The writers and animators at Pixar actually do the legwork to make those little friggin robots worth caring about.

The Foot Fist Way

The Hollywood rules for shooting comedy stipulate that scenes must be brightly lit and the camera work must be invisible (smooth, mounted shots). Deviate from these rules by using a more documentary style, with handheld cameras and cold natural lighting, and things get...squirmier.

They might also get funnier. For instance, take a comedy screenplay featuring a clueless blowhard, something suitable to be made into a standard Will Ferrell vehicle, but instead have the actors play it straight and shoot it like a low-budget documentary. Now it's funny because the joke is on the audience...watch most of them wince, cringe, and walk out. Anyone left still cracking up is your friend.

Danny McBride — whom you remember from bit parts in Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express last summer — takes over the Ferrell role but has the balls to play the miserable prick as a real guy, never reaching for laughs. I hear he even pulled an Andy Kaufman stunt, appearing on Conan in character to perform a botched Taekwondo demo and abuse the other guests...someone please track this clip down.

This is the first film from director Jody Hill, who also co-wrote with McBride. Let's hope Hill doesn't lose his perverse anti-comic sensibility as he moves on to more commerical projects; slated for release in April is Observe and Report starring Seth Rogen and [heart flutters] the effervescent Anna Faris.

Waltz with Bashir

Whenever you're going to the movies and can't decide what to see, go with the animated foreign film you've never heard of. The artwork will be interesting and unexpected, the reductionist quality of the drawings will give the story universal appeal, and you will learn something new.

Gandhi

This movie swept the Academy Awards in 1983. You know what else came out that year? Oh, just a little something called E.-fuckin'-T. Yeah, you heard me right. Gandhi is not a better movie than E.T. In fact, Gandhi wasn't even a better person than E.T. Sure they look and dress the same, and they were both vegetarians and pinball wizards, but let's consider their advice. Gandhi said turn the other cheek, a stupid and confusing philosophy that got his ass shot and led to nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan. Way to go, jerk. Maybe he should've fasted just a little harder. In contrast the muppet made it simple: Be good. And call your mother. The result? The science lab frogs were set free, Elliott got to kiss the girl, and the frogs sought no retribution. And then he made bikes fly. So fuck you, Gandhi.

Gran Torino

Ever'body, ever'were will say Clint Eastwood is the biggest yeller belly in the West.

The last thing Blondie needed to do was remind us that he is the meanest God-Damn Son of a Bitch to ever sport a poncho, gnash a cigar, level a .44 Magnum, or sit on a porch with a cooler full of Pabst. But he did it anyway, probably because he is a mean goddamn sonofabitch. In the comic book series Preacher, the story of a war between angels and demons played out on the picturesque American landscape (the bloodline of Christ residing in an inbred bayou hellhole, atomic bombs dropped on Monument Valley, showdown with God at the Alamo...that sort of thing), Clint is the model for a character known as the Saint of Killers, a supernatural avatar of vengeance with a gravestone voice and rattlesnake eyes who stares down the devil himself. In Gran Torino he is slightly more badass.

Hello From the Radio Wasteland!

The Pacific Northwest has been producing the best rock and roll of the past decade. I'm not talking alternative or metal or indie/arty/fusion or anything at all you're hearing on the radio. I mean the sounds of pre-punk garage kicked up to the pulse of '77 — bands that remember the dirty-deadly roadhouse stomp of the Stooges, the V8 lovemaking of T.Rex, the anthemic power pop of Cheap Trick, the 60s pop fetish of Joey Ramone, and the rollicking just like a-ringin' a bell exuberance of Johnny Thunders. The healthy music scene in the Portland and Seattle areas is home to a family of such bands, and I'd like the rest of the country to turn off the Fall Out Boy and pay attention. Here are a few whose names have passed by word of mouth over the continental divide and all the way across the prairie to my ears.

The Riffs are staunchly retro street punks, with meat-and-potatoes Steve Jones-ey guitar work and fatigued gang vocals chronicling heroin life amidst urban blight. They put it simply:

Seventy-seven told the truth
So I don't care what's new with you

The Exploding Hearts released a stunning debut record of glue-sniffing power pop that should've earned them national attention...but no*. Members of these two groups joined up to form The Nice Boys, dropping the safety pin brattiness in favor of a dreamy tribute to the (mostly British) glam-power-pop rock of yesteryear.

And then there is the drunken dancehall apocalypse called Murder City Devils. Six kids started in the mosh pits worshiping Iggy and from there built, as if guided by dark providence, an epic and literary vision of gothic Americana. It is tempting to say that the Devils picked up where the Dead Boys left off, having tightened the menace and howl of Detroit garage rock with a punk's intensity of purpose — certainly the Dead Boys hinted at the doom-laden industrial sprawl of the rust belt that the Devils would incorporate into the mythic Murder City — but the similarities are probably superficial. The Devils are an original creation; Spencer's tortured cries and Leslie's funereal keyboard lines are tattooed on my heart.

Which brings me to The Whore Moans. The de facto successors to the Murder City Devils, the Moans are schizophrenic whereas the Devils were singleminded. Not to say the Moans lack identity — rather they embrace the schizophrenia to brilliant effect, using the dual vocals and violent instability in tone and pitch to build tension around their nervous/excited musical adventures. On their sophomore release, Hello From the Radio Wasteland!, the boys venture unpredictably away from Murder City, bouncing out the gates in Richard Hell mania, announcing their own teenage searching-for-a-melody anthem, dipping into vintage grunge (time for a revival? No?), diving full bore-hardcore into a roaring maelstrom sea shanty, and then melting a punk's leathery heart by quoting the Ronettes. Tune in.


* In 2003 the Exploding Hearts were headed to California to sign a recording contract and play their first major tour. Old Scratch met them halfway. On July 20 their van rolled on Interstate 5 and the singer and bassist and drummer were ejected and killed. The boys were 23, 20, 21. The surviving member was urged by friends to form The Nice Boys as a way to cope and carry on.

Doubt

Some months ago I'm sitting happily in a theater with perhaps a small Cherry Coke or nothing at all and enjoying the trailers when this comes on. Meryl Streep giving the stink eye to Philip Seymour Hoffman, she dressed as a nun and he a priest. They appear to be hamming it up, exchanging wild pronouncements in the arch fashion of Merlin dueling Madame Mim. I wait for a cell phone to ring on the soundtrack so that Meryl can pause and scold the audience for not silencing our electronic devices. Then I realize this is a real trailer for a real movie. Yes, our two master thespians costumed for a grade school pageant and pitched in rhetorical battle. It's so ludicrous that if it weren't great it wouldn't exist at all.

It takes religion to make a person this insufferably unreasonable and rigid. There's one in every movie, often on the PTA (see Field of Dreams, Donnie Darko) but usually relegated to the role of minor antagonist or mere nuisance. Sister Aloysius Beauvier takes center stage for once, and I was grateful for the opportunity to subject such a shrew to full scrutiny, to lay bare the contemptible rot beneath her self-righteous veneer, because we all know such people and they are the true villains in our lives.

The Wrestler

On the subject of popular 80s metal I protest too much. The first magic trick Aronofsky performs is to unveil my primitive impulse toward Sweet Child o' Mine. In the hands of a savvy director, DJ, or jukebox hero Slash's opening licks can be the Queen of Diamonds, activating subliminal instructions to take shots and scream. The second trick is even more...insidious. Somewhere between the washed-up pay phone by the overpass and the derelict ballroom on the boardwalk I began to feel a certain (shudder) fondness for New Jersey. What foul sorcery is this!?

The sleight of hand here is that the audience can be fooled into loving anything that either represents or is loved by a character they love. Transitivity. (You never would have given serious thought to a White Russian if not for the Dude.) So all the preceding brouhaha is just to make way for a new addition to our pantheon of beloved characters: Randy "The Ram" Robinson. A generation raised on 8-bit is bound to cheer for a battered mutt who still plays his own NES game.

The Ram is descended from a prestigious line of movie musclemen, each a type of hulking and preening animal who thoughtlessly mistreats the girl in his care but may nevertheless earn our sympathy for being dimly aware of his self-destructive nature and narrow future. This lineage can be traced to the boxer Jake La Motta from Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980), the carnival strong man Zampanò from Fellini's La Strada (1954), and the prizefighter Battling Burrows from Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919). I expect to see Son of Ram in theaters around 2040.

...

Susan — Hey! What're you watching? ...Only You? That's another Marisa Tomei movie, and you've seen that one too. What, do you have a thing for her?

George — Yeah, yeah. I have a thing for Marisa Tomei. Like she would ever go out with a short, stocky, bald man. Like that's her type. Huh. She's an Oscar winner. Besides, I don't even know her. It's not like anyone's trying to fix us up. Who, who would try and fix me up with Marisa Tomei?

Susan — What are you talking about?

Yes Man

How unfortunate that this movie...this shitty movie...is my one and only experience at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. The most famous of all movie palaces. You know, the place with the hand prints in the cement. The place where Star Wars premiered. A room so beautiful and a sound and picture experience so exquisite that it almost...almost...made Yes Man seem good.

I assure you nothing else was playing this week.

The Fountain

Aronofsky attempts to remind us of the fundamental questions of science fiction, arguing that we've lost sight of the philosophical and humanistic efforts of the ABC's (Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke) in an era of cheap CGI when all is spectacle. He's partly right — plenty of good science fiction still exists but is overshadowed by popular entertainments mass produced under the banner of sci-fi. A handy rule of thumb is that if afterward you're mostly thinking about the babe in the bodysuit it wasn't real science fiction. Nevertheless The Fountain doesn't work as anything more than an extended tone poem, but I salute the ambition and daring. WALL-E is more successful.

The Last Detail

Ebert speaks with hushed excitement about the young Jack Nicholson, awed and envious of this "male sprite". The forces of old and their systems of oppression are always trying to keep Jack down, and we root for him. The poignancy is that he usually loses, this being the 70s and all. George Hanson is snuffed in his sleep in a random act of ignorance. Bobby Dupea disappears from a highway gas station, never heard from again. Jake Gittes turns back in defeat on the septic streets of Chinatown. Randle Patrick McMurphy goes out drooling. And Sergeant Major "Bad Ass" Buddusky is perhaps the saddest figure of them all, resigned to his middling place in the chain of command. He speculates that the dopey sailor he's escorting to military prison will be better off under authoritarian rule where life is simpler...this is an inadvertant apology for his own choice to be a lifer in the Navy. At the end despite the injustice Buddusky has witnessed at the hands of the powers-that-be we know he will return to Norfolk and be found where we first met him, drunk in the barracks and bitchy, putting up only a little fight.

Hot Fuzz

Forget it, Nicholas. It's Sandford.

That's the kind of subterranean movie reference that puts writer/director Edgar Wright in the same league as Quentin Tarantino. The in-jokes and homages don't just drop one by one into the plot as with most pop culture obsessed writing (e.g. Kevin Smith). Instead the movie lore forms the very matrix out of which the plot grows...You stop counting the notes and listen to the music: An old fella from the village claims to have been an extra in Straw Dogs and before long somebody gets a bear trap to the head.

The Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy written by Wright and Simon Pegg consists of three genre-roasting Brit comedies — Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and the forthcoming The World's End — strung together by Cornetto ice cream cones and ropes of red corn syrup. The television series Spaced appears to be the predecessor to this trilogy...it just got bumped up the queue. Wright would have to be included on an international version of the list below, and in fact he has already joined forces with Tarantino: Wright directed DON'T, the best of the Grindhouse fake trailers.

I'm still laughing about the fact that the senior citizens call their neighborhood watch N.W.A.