Diary of the Dead review

We real zombie fans don’t apologize. We like flesh eating, just ‘cuz. Only the lame blush at torn-off limbs and heave at intestines hitting the floor. We zombie fans are simple people with simple needs, give us some blood and guts and we’re happy. But George Romero’s latest and weakest zombie film, Diary of the Dead, isn’t for us real zombie fans.

Diary takes place during that original night of the living dead, but before the dawn, when corpses have just started coming back to life and when the necessity of head shots isn’t yet common knowledge. At the center of this chapter is a group of university film students trying to drive home safely from a midnight shoot in the forest. When they can’t avoid the undead, they drive through them. Jason (Joshua Close) feels compelled to film their entire ordeal, as his friends die one by one, and the story unfolds from the point of view of his digital camcorder.

Even before the first frame hits the screen, the film fails, breaking the first rule of good zombie moviemaking: keep the characters confined to one place, be it darkened theatre, shopping mall, or abandoned house. A single zombie—slow, dumb, and vulnerable—isn’t really scary. The threat of being gradually swarmed is.

Diary, though, is essentially a road movie, all the kids piled into a Winnebago. Gone, then, is any sense of claustrophobia and looming dread. Instead of the fear of what’s going to get us, we get let’s hope nothing is there when we arrive. It’s an ignorant bliss, and we experience a threat that’s far off, not immediate. Diary, as a result, is just plain not scary. Watching Shaun of the Dead, a comedy at heart, on the other hand, is a much more stressful experience because, simply, the last two acts unfold exclusively in a boarded-up pub.

Being un-scary isn’t unforgivable. Being didactic though, is something else. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is his best in part because of its sharp social commentary, mindless zombies equals mindless shoppers. However, it’s a subtle, embedded commentary among the gore, not the bombastic message of Diary, the look-at-me meditation on new media and the compulsion to record and upload.

As Joshua points his camera and shoots, he says, “If we’re not recording it, it’s not happening.” And says. And says again, just in case anyone in the audience might have missed it. And says. Joshua is so unbelievably enamored with making his record, that, instead of helping which he easily can, he films as one of his friends is being chased and almost chomped.

Diary uses a unique convention to further flog it’s message: we are actually watching the final, edited product of the kids’ record of the disaster. The documentary form arises out of the need to film, to upload the real story, the story not told by CNN and Fox News.

But this too-clever turn isn’t enough to deny the fact that the fake documentary film convention never actually really works. Comedic mockumentaries can work, not dramatic. Like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, the artificiality stares us in the face, even points at itself. It’s impossible to believe a cast of less than perfect actors speaking directly into a camera, directly to us for that matter. It’s no fun watching them flail through extended periods of realism, with no cuts in which to hide. Other films let us forget there are actors, let us lose ourselves and make-believe. In films like this, though, the more we remember.

Zombies are the best because, more than any other movie monsters, they lend themselves to good allegory. They’re basically human, give or take a faculty or two. They can be used to show how much we like to shop or how much we like to abuse the Other. We are them, they are us. But that’s in metaphor only. Romero must have worked with them too long and forgotten. Might explain why he made such a simplistic, didactic movie: though us real zombie fans are simple, we’re far from fucking brain dead.

Birthdays

for getting drunk and forgetting mortality. Im not one of those, at least right now, who can stay in for a quiet night and sip tea. plus, i really like drinking.

oscar picks:

best picture: i like Michael Clayton better than "No Country" and "There Will be Blood" which was a bit uneven, dramatically. and we should all know, without watching them, that atonement and juno should have no chance

best director: coens. intense and sparse. and the performances they get from their actors... awesome.

actor: clooney for being a really good, sad everyman

actress: julie christie for being beautiful and sad.

supporting actress: i'm torn between tilda swinton and amy ryan. should i go with tilda as the stressed out, not quite evil exec, or with ryan as the most trashy white trash. im going to cop out and go with a tie.

supporting actor: javier bardem. that motherfucker is scary.

Badass Canadian films?

Everyone's been bigging up "Juno" and "Away from Her" this year. There was "Eastern Promises" too, though the only Canadian link there is Cronenberg. Then there's been the recent wave of apparently really good CBC series such as "The Border" and "JPOD",; I say apparently because I haven't seen them. Even Ed Brubaker praised the realism and depth of "The Border" so I'll need to check them out eventually.

But, undoubtedly, the greatest piece of Canadian film/tv are the Workplace Safety Insurance Board ads. Basically, each ad wars people about workplace safety by depicting a horrific accident. They are so well-made, with budget for each 30-second piece probably rivaling the budget for the last 40 years of Air Farce. And they are fucking dark. The best one showing a chef getting scalded by a pot of boiling grease and flashing her messed up, red, chipping skin for like half a second. Badass.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1Z8xxWhh5k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUu0lVN6Nhw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5kiz7GhJt0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf_LWq88H5I

stuff

slate has a good article about the experience of watching 2 girls 1 cup reaction videos. its one of those ones with videos embedded, so its short on text. still it's a pretty good read and cuts through the hundreds of 1 cup vids to the five best:

http://www.slate.com/id/2182833/nav/tap3/

i was also thinking about writing an article about heath ledger being one of the first actors to die just as the marketing machine for a big budget film was just starting. slate did something about how the marketing will be different now that hes dead. slate is fucking awesome:

http://www.slate.com/id/2183273/nav/tap3/

i watched gone, baby gone today. who would have thought that ben affleck is actually good at something. and who would have thought casey could be a pretty badass, dashing leading man. i think its a better movie than clint eastwood's mystic river which was also based on a dennis lehane novel. oh, and michelle monaghan is pretty hot. her and shana hiatt are my two celeb crushes right now.