I kind of hated these kids, they’re following around this poor hunter guy that tells them like six times to leave him alone. And they keep spying on him because they think he hunted a bear without a license. A half an hour in they finally see what he’s really hunting and it’s a hilarious looking 3 headed troll. I thought it was great but I still almost turned it off because I figured okay, I get the joke, it’s exactly like all the other movies exactly like this except instead of an occasional ghostly apparition it’ll be an occasional funny troll guy.

Well I’m glad I kept going because although they should’ve cut that opening half hour down to 1-2 minutes of explanation it gets much better when they ditch that bullshit and the guy admits he’s a troll hunter for the Norwegian government.  We learn about the different types of trolls, the ways to trick them, the ways to kill them, the ways the government covers up their existence. There are all these rules about trolls, for example they can “smell the blood of a Christian man,” so the kids have to keep swearing to the hunter that they don’t believe in Jesus. And when they get a new camerawoman who’s a Muslim they’re not even sure if that works or not, it’s never come up before.

There’s a troll that hangs out under a bridge. There’s a PROJECT GRIZZLY-ish troll protection suit. Also it turns out that trolls are really, really stupid and that they like to piss all over everything.

It’s an absurd concept treated seriously. The hunter is very droll and casual about it all. The funny parts are well timed. There are some good character moments like after the first troll attack when the girl is just giggling gleefully about the idea that trolls really exist. Then later everybody gets uncomfortable when she’s losing it so much that she makes fun of the other people for believing in trolls.

The effects are excellent. The designs of the trolls are really cartoony, but then they make them look real. I believe it’s all digital, and they’re much bigger than guy-in-a-costume size. You see them a bunch, too. It’s not like they’re always on screen, but you see them quite a few times and sometimes for long stretches. For example the humans get stuck in a cave while some big-nosed fuckers are sleeping. Sure, alot of the scenes are written around what they could do for free (for example drive around pointing at electric towers and claiming that they’re really an electric fence to keep giant trolls contained) but it definitely gives you more to look at and enjoy than your standard fakumentary horror. I’m sure it’s probly a much lower budget than CLOVERFIELD, but it’s more comparable to that type of approach – an effects movie from the point of view of some kids with cameras, instead of (SPOILER FOR ABOUT 35 DIFFERENT MOVIES) some kids with cameras who see one very small glimpse of something at the end right before the tape ends.

Although I think TROLLHUNTER could’ve been finessed into something even stronger I do think it’s a very clever and entertaining movie that adds something unique into a worn out subgenre, and even does Norway proud by using mythology specific to their part of the world. It’s a pretty good movie.

I’m sure if they had finished their documentary about bear poaching it would’ve been pretty good too.

?

Anyway the movie has Joaquin in improvised scenes with his assistants, publicists and others as he finishes promoting his “last movie” and tries to get P. Diddy Combs to help him with his album. It’s the very definition of self indulgent

(self-in·dul·gent

[self-in-duhl-juhnt, self-]
–adjective
1. indulging one’s own desires, passions, whims, etc., esp. without restraint.
2. characterized by such indulgence.
3. the movie I’m Still Here, if that’s the one with Joaquin Phoenix. Or is that the remake of Let the Right One In? I can never remember.)

but it’s not self congratulatory. From the early scenes where he whines that “my entire artistic output has been fraudulent”, to the part where his friend gets pissed and shits on his bed while he’s sleeping in it, to the part where he has the limo pull over so he can cry about his music sucking and that he ruined his life, he’s always the buffoon. He gets fat (not sure how, they don’t show him eating a bunch of donuts or anything) and grows his hair and beard out so even when he’s wearing a suit and tie he looks like some sort of homeless Amish man or post-apocalyptic biker going to church. Even when they have shots of him smoking and slaving over a pad to write poetry you know you’re not supposed to think he’s cool.

His character in the movie is different from what I’d expect from the guy in WALK THE LINE and GLADIATOR and what not. He’s not an intense, brooding guy at all, he’s a dude, a guy who says “dude” all the time and giggles at stupid shit and likes to humiliate his friends by showing their dicks on camera. He has friends he pays as assistants so they’ll hang out with him, and they’re kind of the audience stand-ins here, looking confused and uncomfortable but trying to be supportive. They know what he’s doing is a bad idea, but they don’t want to be the one to interfere.

I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a critique of celebrities in general, or a self-critique, or what, but it portrays him as a guy who thinks he’s a great friend but is actually a bad one. He thinks he’s doing his buddy a favor by “throwing him some bread here and there” to hang out with him, even though that means taking him out of sober living to snort lines of coke in front of him and make fun of him for not joining in. And also repeatedly demanding that he make a snow angel until he does, and then laughing at the alleged poor quality of his snow angel.

It’s a little disturbing to see the drug stuff, considering he had a brother who was a celebrity that died so young of an overdose. But maybe that’s his point, maybe he really does that stuff and hates himself for it, I don’t really know. It’s hard to tell.

There is actually alot of stuff in here that I thought was mildy, dryly, not necessarily laugh-out-loud funny, but sort of amusing to me personally. Like in GET HIM TO THE GREEK Mr. Combs is the best part. Joaquin is funny as he pathetically goes to New York and then Miami just waiting for Diddy to have an opening to meet with him, then shows up too late and misses him, then shows up at his hotel room and doesn’t know what to say to him. Also, the awkwardness of not knowing what name to address him as. Diddy? Mr. Combs? And Diddy’s expressions as he listens to Joaquin’s demo are pretty great.

But come to think of it Diddy is still only the second best part. The best is actually when Edward James Olmos shares some wisdom about the two of them as drops of water on top of a mountain and maybe they have to evaporate to get closer to God. When he says it it sounds amazing and deep and it sounds like ridiculous gibberish later on when Joaquin does a terrible job of paraphrasing it to his friends and they have no clue what he’s talking about.

Also I liked when he told his entourage “this is not my night, this is our night. JP is all of us.” And when a scene of him on stage rapping at a club in Vegas cuts to him leaving as a young security guy (I think a real one) says supportively, “well, I liked it.”

Oh yes, about the rapping. He’s probly better than Bulworth. He has terrible anunciation and corny lyrics, no flow at all, no stage presence, and it’s hard to understand what he’s talking about, but at least he doesn’t adopt an accent or very much slang. And unlike BULWORTH you don’t have to hear that much of it. Since it’s supposed to be bad music they don’t make you sit and listen to it very much. Except when Diddy has to sit and listen to it (and then wave them to the next track). In a way you could say that the Joaquin character shows true respect to hip hop, because as terrible as he is at least he sees it as a form of expression and not a specific genre where he has to appropriate shit from other cultures or imitate phrases and themes that are popular with other rappers at the moment. When Diddy talks about hits Joaquin gets embarrassed and says he’s looking for “a place of pure exploration.”

Unfortunately I think the movie itself is pure exploration too, and not the kind of exploration where you end up finding a new island with a bunch of gold on it. They had this topic and style they wanted to mess around with it but it seems like they didn’t have their sights set on any specific target so they didn’t come very close to hitting one. It probly says a few things about celebrity entitlement and what not, but I’m not sure either I or the makers of I’M STILL HERE or especially the makers of NEVER LET ME GO know what it is.

The movie doesn’t make me think less of Phoenix. It does show a certain fearlessness and self awareness that’s respectable, and a facet of him as an actor that I definitely haven’t seen before. But it’s not a very good movie. I can’t in good conscience recommend it to anybody. But I guess if I did recommend it and they hated it I could pretend that I meant the Bob Dylan one with Heath Ledger, that’s supposed to be good.

I believe in something called Karaoke Syndrome. It’s something that many famous actors suffer from. Everybody dreams of being a rock star, even if they’re already a movie star, so they try to use their projects as excuses to get on stage and fuck around with a guitar or microphone. One famous victim of KS is Mike Meyers, whose characters in WAYNE’S WORLD, AUSTIN POWERS and THE LOVE GURU all had to be in bands. Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi also suffered from KS (did the Blues Brothers and bee people things on SNL even count as comedy?) but luckily they channeled it into one of the best comedies of all time.

Bruce did not channel his into the best anything, but it looks like he was having fun at least. I know that’s faint praise, but that’s the best you can really do with this thing. Even the cover of the video has a quote that says, “It gives hope to every kid with a broom handle for a mic and a full length mirror in his bedroom.” I hope that was meant as a compliment, but I’d have to see the context.

THE RETURN OF BRUNO special is an extension of the liner notes for the album, which pretend “Bruno” is a major figure in the history of American music. The special is hosted by Dick Clark in the form of a “Rock Legends” show focusing on the story of Bruno Radolini (Bruce), the most legendary singer of legendary singers who inspired every celebrity that they could get to do a fake interview for the special. So Wolfman Jack claims Bruno gave him his nickname, Grace Slick says he had the best set at Woodstock, Ringo Starr says he turned the Beatles psychedelic, etc. etc. You got Paul Stanley, Brian Wilson, the Gibb brothers, others. Some guy on the IMDb says it’s “The rock parody Spinal Tap wishes it were,” but unfortunately there’s nothing that comes across as jokes exactly, just a fake alternate history. I guess it’s kind of funny to see Bruce in fake Woodstock footage. Kind of.

Supposedly Bruno was real rebellious and eccentric and created various trends in popular music. You know the drill. They got Dick Clark there so they do a fake American Bandstand appearance, then they got Don Cornelius doing a show (not Soul Train) where he performs “Under the Boardwalk” with the Temptations. They talk about some incredible album he recorded but then the masters were destroyed in a fire. Same thing happened to all my best books.

But after a chunk of this fakumentary stuff it cuts to modern day Bruce in blue jeans, black t-shirt and white tennis shoes jumping around on stage at a House of Blues type club, playing harmonica and singing and doing his best Mick Jagger moves. He’s pretty good at harmonica and the band is very slick and professional, but let’s just say this is not the sort of music I would ever want to listen to. This is the type of music made by white people who are worshipful of old blues singers and shit but don’t have an ounce of soul in their bodies. I mean even back then you couldn’t get a horn section to sound much whiter than these guys.

I was happy when Bruce changed into the white pants, labcoat and sunglasses. Then it seemed like he was trying to put on a show more than just hanging out. To be fair, he’s not just standing motionless on stage, he’s trying to keep people interested. And it’s true, Bruce does kind of look like a kid singing into a broom handle. He’s not a great singer but he sure knows how to run around and jump and stuff. And there were many people in the front happy to get a high five from the guy from Moonlighting.

I guess the best part is the end credits, when Bruce is hanging out backstage riffing about how and why he created Gumby and Pokey. When you see him talking at this point you realize it’s the only part where he got to really act, the rest of the time he was just singing and posing in different period costumes.

THE RETURN OF BRUNO is from the director of DOUBLE DRAGON and Michael Jackson’s “Liberian Girl” video and the writer of NEIL DIAMOND: HELLO AGAIN. Mysteriously it has a logo at the end for “Hudson Hawk Productions,” even though this was 4 years before that movie. I guess while he was doing this little in-joke pet project he must’ve already been cooking up the next one.

[ratings]

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Holy shit, the door opened (SPOILER)

Well, no surprise here. I’m on record as being done with this “scary home video” fakumentary subgenre, and I think it’s not worth doing unless you can come up with a new gimmick to add on top of that gimmick, like CLOVERFIELD did by doing a found video Godzilla movie. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY doesn’t have much to distinguish it from BLAIR WITCH PROJECT or [REC] other than it’s even lower rent, taking place entirely in one normal house with only 2 cast members for 98% of the running time. I didn’t check the credits but if more than 4 people worked on this then somebody wasn’t pulling their weight.

It’s pretty much what you expect in a movie like this, same old shit but cheaper than ever. They do forgo with one part of the formula I laid out in my [REC] review: they don’t start out pretending it’s a birthday video or a school project about agriculture. They say the girlfriend has been seeing this demonic something or other since she was a little kid, now some weird things have been happening in their new house so the boyfriend bought a camera and started filming everything, including them sleeping. (But not having sex. That type of fakumentary is too easy.) Anyway that’s nice, it cuts to the chase.

For a while of course they goof around and don’t take it seriously, but then SPOOOOOOOOOOOOKY shit happens, for example a door opens on its own (SPOILER), there is a noise, etc. Mostly the second one. Then obviously the girl gets mad that he’s taping and there’s about seven or eight scenes about them bickering about it. You know, for drama, tension, etc. Very compelling stuff. Why are you filming this? And then But I want to film this. Like that. I mean obviously you can imagine all the drama they could wring out of a conflict like that. Cinematic dynamite.

But I gotta admit the movie works at times, and it’s for a simple reason: nobody likes them things that go bump in the night. You’re asleep, you hear some loud noise from your living room, that shit gets your heart beating no matter who you are, no matter what it is. Don’t matter if it’s a demon or a crackhead, you gotta go get a baseball bat or something, and therefore it’s a gotta-go-get-a-baseball-bat-or-something adrenaline rush.

There’s no inventiveness here at all, just an understanding of that basic fear, a knowledge that it’s scary to be woken up by a loud growl or thud from your living room. Although the actors weren’t left out in the woods like in BLAIR WITCH this is basically the same approach to scaring the audience: hold on quiet nothingness long enough to create tension, then show normal people freaking out at an unexplained spooky noise. In fact, they also keep doing a thing where the girl stands still as if in a trance, I think it’s a lift from the famous standing-in-the-corner final image of BLAIR WITCH.

It’s short and paced well enough that I was able to stick with it, but unfortunately it’s all leading to nothing, no pay off, just another variation on the ol’ oh no it’s coming toward the camera/tape ends nobody knows what happened ending.

[REC] was much more impressive filmmaking, way more complex scenes, more atmosphere I guess. But to be frankly honest PARANORMAL ACTIVITY worked better on me, it got me once or twice in a primal place. Still, it bugs me that because this made alot of money out of nothing some of my movie web writing colleagues treat it like more than a quickly forgotten one-off novelty. Man, do you really think this thing has a shelf life? Or that anybody is gonna care about the sequel by the time it comes out? Is there some reason to believe this director will be making movies of note in the future? The BLAIR WITCH guys were the kings of Variety Headlineland for a while too, but it took them seven, eight years to direct again, now they just do a line of DTV horror that most people never heard of. Did you guys even know they made other movies? I bet most of you didn’t. And those guys knew how to use film, they used that found footage idea when it seemed pretty new, they had a unique idea about how to get the performances out of their non-actors. So there was at least a little evidence there. Here, this guy could be a genius, but then so could any one of you who haven’t made a movie, there’s really nothing to go on here.

THE EVIL DEAD scared teenagers too, but there was no question Sam Raimi would be making more great movies after that. It’s all there on screen. It has, like, cinematography and shit. Sets. Props. Movie stuff. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY is an idea, THE EVIL DEAD is a bullet packed with movie technique and shot right through your face. You know there’s gotta be more of that in the clip. In fact, as PARANORMAL ACTIVITY talked about a demon following the girl I pictured the demon following Alison Lohman in DRAG ME TO HELL. And I thought damn, I should be watching DRAG ME TO HELL. That’s a movie where a demon follows a girl around.

I guess I was buying groceries or something when everybody decided the found footage thing isn’t just a tired gimmick, but actually a whole new form of storytelling with endless possibilities for self expression. Well fine then, that’s not what I would’ve voted for, but if that’s the decision I gotta ask where does it go from here? Sorry The Little Guy, but I think it’s worn out its welcome as a tool for making movies on a shoe-string, I think the way to make it more interesting is to have it seem like a real video but all kinds of crazy FX shit is happening (like CLOVERFIELD). I mean we can keep trying for more minimalism, but the only way we can go smaller than PARANORMAL ACTIVITY is if it’s one guy making it by himself in his bedroom. After that it’s just a competition to see which guy has the smallest bedroom and then they’ll start having lower resolution cameras until somebody makes a movie that’s just 80 minutes of one black pixel.

I don’t know man, it’s not the worst ever, I can see why it would be a hit at the slumber party. I’ll give it credit for being semi-entertaining, but I prefer movies. This is a video.

…

See also:

[REC

Cloverfield

[ratings]

If you’re not familiar with it, [REC] is the ‘07 Spanish horror picture already remade in the U.S. as QUARANTINE. It’s a fakumentary/found footage one like BLAIR WITCH, CLOVERFIELD, THE OFFICE, etc. The premise is that a TV hostess and her cameraman are doing a story on firefighters when they respond to a building where a deadly 28 DAYS LATER type infection (zombies except in name) breaks out. They get trapped in the building and document the mayhem because the people have a right to know or whatever.

It must’ve been inspired by that documentary crew that happened to be following some of the firefighters responding to the World Trade Center on 9-11. But I’m kind of glad that the protagonist just does some fluff show instead of us having to watch a serious journalist or documentarian being preachy. Her show is “While You Were Asleep,” so she’s showing what these firefighters do at night. For the American remake they should’ve had it star Dave Attell.

It’s all well executed. Acting is good, feels pretty real, horror shit escalates, cool looking thing at the end. So I’m not arguing against it. I guess this approach just doesn’t work on me anymore, so let’s try to figure out why.

After so many of these fake video movies you start to see that there’s a formula, or at least the gimmick of pretending it’s a real video forces it into a formula because you feel you have to explain the same things every time. You have the opening where you explain why they’re originally filming (documentary about urban legend, student horror film, video for friend who’s leaving) and everything is normal, they do non-horror shit for a while (interview locals, put on mummy costumes, hang out at a party) but the the shit hits the fan (weird sounds and objects left at camp site, Statue of Liberty decapitated, zombie apocalypse). Then they have to explain why they’re still filming (”Someone has to know what happened here!”). Usually somebody (annoyed friend, pushy soldier) tries to get them to turn off the camera, so they say that it’s off but it’s still on, heh heh, sneaky. At some point the camera does stop or mess up (end of tape, battery dead, accidentally bumped button) so the story can skip over some time. Toward the end they learn more information about what’s going on (in this one it’s that old classic The Wall of Newspaper Clippings) and then they come face to face with the big danger and the tape ends before you find out what happened. Spoooooooky.

Just once let’s see one where everything is resolved on camera. “As you can see we killed all the zombies. Tune in next week when we’ll visit a bottling plant!”

Of course, I’m not against formula in horror, in fact I recently reviewed a slasher movie that I said could’ve benefited from being more formulaic. But I think there’s a difference between slasher formula and this. In a good slasher it’s a nice smooth vehicle to carry you along. Sometimes you can forget it, but it’s in your subconscious so when the movie deviates from the usual path it’s a nice surprise, it tricked you. With a fakumentary I can’t stop thinking about the mechanics. Like when a little girl plays with the camera I know it’s a way to include a conversation they wouldn’t have intentionally recorded. The little girl wouldn’t play with the camera in a normal movie, because it’s a scene put in only to justify the existence of another scene. In a non-fakumentary you don’t think about the cameras, you subliminally accept them as your eyes or your window into this world. With a fakumentary the formula is not just the story structure but also the excuse for the camerawork, a constant reminder that it’s all fake.

I also have a problem that I’m constantly distracted by the realism, judging would she really say it like that, would he really do that with the camera there, would he really care about filming at this point, etc. It’s supposed to make it feel more realistic but to me it can have the opposite effect because I can accept more stylization if it’s not pretending to be real footage. [REC] does fairly good on that score (way better than DIARY OF THE DEAD, that’s for sure) but it’s still a drawback to this type of storytelling for me.

Instead of reality it ends up feeling like some kind of a performance, like “hey, check out this Youtube video where they set up all this stuff to happen in one shot.” Clever, well done, but for me (and apparently only me) it’s distracting and I just don’t find it scary anymore. The novelty has worn off. You gotta put a bigger gimmick in there to make it wortwhile, like CLOVERFIELD was a Godzilla type movie done in that style, I can get with that. DISTRICT 9 was a very original story that could’ve worked without that presentation but also used it to make some satirical points about the media and racism. This one doesn’t seem new enough to me. Just more zombies or demons.

That’s another thing, I don’t really understand or buy this zombie virus/demonic possession combo. I guess I was no longer mentally invested enough to really pay attention by the time they got to all the explanatory newspaper clippings. It kind of seems like one of those video games or viral promotions where you gotta piece together a bunch of clues to figure out the backstory. I guess it’s pretty cool to do it that way, if I really gave a shit what was happening by that point I would’ve expended the effort to understand it.

The thing is, if it was the same story told in the traditional way I don’t think I would want to watch it, and since my interest in the method of storytelling has worn off there’s nothing left. I’m not against gimmicks, but this gimmick is not enough for me.

The thing at the end looked cool though.

Sorry everybody. Didn’t mean to let you down.

[ratings]

I saw George Romero’s new movie DIARY OF THE DEAD. It’s basically “NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD meets BLAIR WITCH PROJECT” or “CLOVERFIELD with zombies” or “CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST – cannibal + zombies but not ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST.” It’s not a sequel to the living dead movies but kind of a do-over with the zombie plague beginning in the present day and depicted in documentary form. Some film students are working on a crappy mummy movie (come on George, this is 2008, only Rob Cohen makes mummy movies) when they start hearing news about the dead coming back to life, and their director is compelled to keep filming. We’re told at the beginning of the movie that his footage was edited by another character along with clips they downloaded from youtube, some news and security cam footage. Also she admits that she added music. And, I’m afraid, she narrates it.

I feel bad saying this but since nobody is reading this and it’s only a diary I will come out and say it: this movie isn’t very good. I enjoyed watching it and will list many of the good things about it right here on these pages, in the interest of balance. And in case Harry reads this because he got real mad at Quint for not liking it and I pretty much agree with everything in Quint’s review. But in my deepest, most personal secret opinion this is a failed experiment for old George.

This is Romero back doing low budget independent movies, but it looks real nice. Especially in the parts that show the larger world outside of the documentary, the clips from the news and youtube where there is total chaos going on, cars crashing into each other, zombies hanging on nooses from freeway overpasses, and various madness. In NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD the characters were constantly trying to listen to news reports to get some kind of information about what’s going on. In DIARY we see news reports (sometimes edited to hide the truth), we hear talk radio, CBs, all kinds of communication. All those different fuzzy broadcasts add a realistic texture to the movie and I think Romero is right that if something like this were to happen now (God forbid, because I bet it would be a huge pain the ass) the young people would in fact be the ones spreading information about what’s going on. Because they have all their god damn cell phones and little handheld video games and all that stupid shit they always play with, and they spell worse than me because they write in some kind of moronic gibberish from writing on phones and they also wear their pants too tight now and wear those white belts and they look almost as stupid as their older brothers did wearing those giant clown pants.

In CLOVERFIELD you had to kind of accept that they would keep filming for some reason, in this one it’s actually a major theme and a point of contention for the characters. The other characters kind of think this guy is crazy, even an asshole, for having to tape everything. They get mad and sarcastically offer to re-enact things that happened off camera because “it didn’t really happen if it was off camera, did it?” In one scene they’re exploring a dangerous zombified hospital and he stays behind because his battery is dead and he needs to plug into the wall. Dude, that’s when you know you have a problem.

So for Romero the documentary format is not just a gimmick, he’s trying to say something. And I like that. The problem is that there is no subtlety involved. This movie is corny and preachy even for Romero. In his best movies he’s willing to let the points come across in the story, in this one he has somebody narrating them, and that’s just hard to take. The last shot of the movie is a really disturbing and powerful image, and if it was left to speak for itself I think people would be able to find a good interpretation of it. Instead we hear this character narrating about her disappointment in humanity, making a point that is earned in the other Dead movies, but not in this one. And even if he wasn’t hammering it too hard, any movie that has somebody repeatedly narrating about “bloggers” and “uploading” and even “hackers” is gonna make me squirm.

(You know, even in real documentaries I prefer no narration. More than anything this movie proves that film schools should teach about the Maysles Brothers in the first semester in case zombie holocaust breaks out before they get to that shit.)

Here’s an example of the kind of thing that bothered me. There’s a scene late in the movie where, by weird coincidence, the scene we saw them filming for their mummy movie is sort of re-enacted. Only this time the mummy is a real zombie chasing the same girl for real. You think a ha, clever, until the girl actually says something like “This is just like in your stupid mummy movie!” Come on George. I guess you’re making this for the brain damaged cell phone generation, but what about me? Can you make a version where I don’t have to be talked down to like that?

Also, these characters don’t look like real people, they look like movie characters. One is a blonde model type with cleavage, which is intentional because she’s the star of their movie. (wow, bout time somebody stuck it to the blond bimbos who starred in horror movies 25 years ago. Way to hit ‘em where it hurts, George.) But the others don’t look like regular people either and the documentary format just emphasizes their phoniness. They’re mostly college students but for variety they happen to have their professor with them, and he’s a ridiculously cliched prick whose character is mostly just that he has an accent (to show he’s a snob) and that he swigs from a flask all the time (because he feels guilty for not teaching them about the Maysles Brothers). Fortunately later he gets a bow and arrow so he mostly shuts up and shoots arrows, then all the sudden he seems more worthwhile. Bows and arrows have made a comeback between THE HOST, RAMBO and this. Way to go bows and arrows, it’s been a long time coming.

The sad thing is that there are some much more interesting characters in the movie, they just don’t appear for very long. I don’t want to go into too much specifics because somebody might steal my diary and read it and the movie would be spoiled and they would deserve it for reading my private review of this movie however I believe the Lord would ask that I still not give it away. Leviticus, page 3, lower right corner. So I will just say that there is an Amish character who is great, but only appears in the movie briefly. And one of the best parts of the movie is when they come across some “looters” who have a great set-up in a warehouse, a much more organized operation than we’ve seen in previous Dead movies. Their leader has a strong presence and you kind of wish you could just follow them and find out what happens to them instead of the college kids.

I’m not sure how other people will react to this movie. I have been called a moron more than once for liking LAND OF THE DEAD. So if my standards are low for liking that one, and this new one didn’t cut it, it must be pretty bad, right? On the other hand I’ve seen so many rave reviews and many of them mentioned that thank God it was way better than LAND OF THE DEAD. So your mileage may vary. Some restrictions apply.

To try to figure out the score here I went back and watched LAND again. I guess now that I’ve seen it a few times and now that it’s not a fresh bite of Romero zombies after a decades long drought it’s easier to see the flaws. On DVD the digital stuff is way more noticeable than it was on that first viewing, and with the stylized landscapes they show sometimes it just has a less raw, more artificial look than the others in the series. And as funny as Dennis Hopper is in parts of it, he is clearly Dennis Hopper. It feels more like a Hollywood movie than the other ones do. And one thing that really stuck out more than it used to for me was how many of the themes have to be underlined by the characters in the dialogue.

I think the problem there stems back to DAWN OF THE DEAD. Romero thought the line about why the zombies came to the mall was too obvious. (I think it’s fine.) He recently told the Fangoria horror magazine that he thought “I may have hammered the point home too obviously” so in trying to make up for that in DAY OF THE DEAD “I went the other way and was too subtle with my themes of paranoia and mistrust.” So I guess now he’s swinging the other way and making these movies less subtle than ever. Just to be safe.

To me it was a much bigger problem in DIARY. It’s bad enough when the dialogue is too obvious but when the person is actually narrating, directly talking to the audience, it goes into corniness overdrive.

And LAND added so many new details to the world. The organized crews of soldiers going out scavenging. The use of fireworks to distract the zombies (something that works literally and as symbolism). The rich people who’ve been able to be so sheltered they just scream when zombies show up. And I know alot of people hate it, but I like that Romero actually moved forward with the story of the zombies. He didn’t just repeat himself, he added this element of the zombies beginning to learn even more than they did in DAY OF THE DEAD. Learning not to be distracted by the pretty lights in the air, instead following the pretty lights on the Fiddler’s Green tower. Some of them are real characters with their own subplot. Okay, I could do without Tom Savini doing fight moves in his zombie cameo, but most of it works for me.

Since DIARY is skipping back to the beginning, there’s not as much progress. It’s mostly just variations on what Romero’s done before, and not shown in much detail. I loved seeing how organized the guys in the warehouse were, but whenever something like that comes up the story just gives you a glimpse and then moves on.

Maybe part of the problem is that I don’t really want to see the beginning again. How many fucking beginnings do we need? He began it perfectly in 1968. One of the reasons DAWN and DAY are so great is because they begin and end in that world of chaos. There’s no status quo at the beginning or the end.

But also when you just look at the basic elements of the movie I don’t think it delivers the way the best Romero movies do. For example, I don’t like the main characters very much. I don’t even hate them like I do Rhodes in DAY OF THE DEAD. They’re pretty forgettable. Except for the Amish dude. And every flaw in their characters or every fake thing they do is amplified by the “diary” gimmick. For example, the scene where the computer expert (you will recognize him, because he has glasses) types a few keys in a lap top to tap into the security cameras so they can get some alternate angles for their documentary – that shit would be laughable in LAND OF THE DEAD, but it’s double-laughable when it’s shot like a documentary and your brain is trying to play along with the idea of it being reality. I’m not even sure what Romero is trying to pull here exactly because he even said in that Fangoria article that he wasn’t trying for realism. “My style is arch and theatrical, where BLAIR WITCH went for ultra-realism. I’m trying to maintain the artifice and make potent comments about the observer–while still supplying lots of nasty zombie stuff.” Okay, sounds good. I don’t get it though.

You know what? Here’s what it is. If you watch NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, DAWN OF THE DEAD or DAY OF THE DEAD, you don’t even have to get any meaning out of them. They are still some of the most kickass horror movies you’ve ever seen. And then behind all the mechanics of surviving disaster, of creative ghoul mayhem and spectacular special effects, there are all these interesting things being communicated about human nature and about the world and what not. If you’re interested.

In this movie you get a fun horror movie, but not as kickass as those other three by any stretch of the imagination. And covering some pretty similar territory. And then you get the commentary too, but it’s poking through the horror movie surface in about ten or fifteen different spots, reaching out trying to nudge you. So the balance is completely off. And some of it’s material that has been covered in alot of other movies and that I kind of would rather not hear about anymore, especially in the form of a fake student film. Even if there are zombies.

In fact, I must admit, I’m even kind of sick of hearing about zombies. Yes, they are great. Shut the fuck up about them, nerds. Let’s keep it a silent thing, never said out loud. Don’t ever talk to me about zombie this and zombie that. Just look at me, nod, I will nod back. Everything is understood. Also, Romero should be the only one allowed to make zombie movies for the next ten years. Otherwise we’re on a moratorium here fellas. Thank you for your cooperation.

So those are some pretty fundamental problems that some people won’t be able to get past. I mean, if you had a problem with LAND OF THE DEAD I can’t see being more forgiving of this. But if you did like LAND OF THE DEAD like I did I think this is at least worth checking out, if you can lower your expectations. There is plenty of good zombie fun, lots of clever zombie mutilations and some cool new twists on how people deal with them. There are a few too many digital head shots for my tastes (I want real fake blood) but for the most part the effects are good, the zombies look cool and really do seem inhuman. That’s is one thing Romero will never forget how to do. The guy works well with ghouls.

I hate to say it diary. Romero is one of my favorite directors. I’m so glad that he’s making independent movies again, and zombie movies. But the truth is, I enjoyed it, but I don’t think it’s very good. And I really wanted it to be good. I think people are yearning to be blown away by a new Romero masterpiece. BUT DO WE REALLY DESERVE ONE?

well, gotta go record myself reading this on my cell cam so I can upload it on youtube for all the bloggers and hackers to download for their blogs

–Vern

Originally published at Aint-It-Cool-News: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/35521

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