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I spent the day watching movies from my DVD pile.
-Survival of the Dead, a Romero zombie flick. I like Romero, or rather, I respect his contribution to the horror genre as the godfather of the zombie flick, but his once-visionary perspective has become blurred and dulled by repetition. Night of the Living Dead and the original Dawn of the Dead were seminal works of the genre and scathing commentaries on the human zeitgeist of the moment, and Diary of the Dead, too, had flashes of brilliance and incisive criticism of the human condition in the wake of the technological revolution.
Survival of the Dead feels like someone dropped some zombies--and not very good ones--into those weighty, thudding Oscar grabs where ideas supplant action and nothing happens until the last ten minutes. The closing shot might as well have had Romero pirouetting across the scene with a cue card that read, "Intractable bipartisanship is bad no matter who's doing it!" Yes, George, we get it. He was subtle once, but he's jettisoned that in favor of scrawling ham-fisted messages all over his films.
-Death Race 2 was just dumb fun full of cars, explosions, boobs, cartoonish villains, and brawny men in various states of undress. Poor Sean Bean. When was the last time he survived one of his movies?
-Woman in Black had beautiful, lush, foreboding atmosphere and scenery, and Daniel Radcliffe acquitted himself admirably as a haggard, grieving widower dispatched to the spooky manse to sort through a dead client's papers. The backstory was muddled and painfully spare(and apparently bore little resemblance to the source material), and aside from Ciaran Hinds' wonderful, sympathetic Sam, the other characters were so much window dressing, with Sam's wife playing the role of unheeded herald of dire portents. It's an understated, self-contained, slow-boiling horror, and its effect is decidedly muted. It's a movie best viewed in a dark house on a rainy night.
-Survival of the Dead, a Romero zombie flick. I like Romero, or rather, I respect his contribution to the horror genre as the godfather of the zombie flick, but his once-visionary perspective has become blurred and dulled by repetition. Night of the Living Dead and the original Dawn of the Dead were seminal works of the genre and scathing commentaries on the human zeitgeist of the moment, and Diary of the Dead, too, had flashes of brilliance and incisive criticism of the human condition in the wake of the technological revolution.
Survival of the Dead feels like someone dropped some zombies--and not very good ones--into those weighty, thudding Oscar grabs where ideas supplant action and nothing happens until the last ten minutes. The closing shot might as well have had Romero pirouetting across the scene with a cue card that read, "Intractable bipartisanship is bad no matter who's doing it!" Yes, George, we get it. He was subtle once, but he's jettisoned that in favor of scrawling ham-fisted messages all over his films.
-Death Race 2 was just dumb fun full of cars, explosions, boobs, cartoonish villains, and brawny men in various states of undress. Poor Sean Bean. When was the last time he survived one of his movies?
-Woman in Black had beautiful, lush, foreboding atmosphere and scenery, and Daniel Radcliffe acquitted himself admirably as a haggard, grieving widower dispatched to the spooky manse to sort through a dead client's papers. The backstory was muddled and painfully spare(and apparently bore little resemblance to the source material), and aside from Ciaran Hinds' wonderful, sympathetic Sam, the other characters were so much window dressing, with Sam's wife playing the role of unheeded herald of dire portents. It's an understated, self-contained, slow-boiling horror, and its effect is decidedly muted. It's a movie best viewed in a dark house on a rainy night.
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