Archive for October, 2009
Where the Wild Things Are is a Unique Visit to a Children’s Classic That Defies Classification.
Over the last couple of years, the soap opera that lead to the final release of Where the Wild Things Are has caused a lot of people like me, who love film, to instinctually take the side of Spike Jonze and bemoan the evil Warner Bros. studio for keeping his vision down. Maybe I’m not quite as anti-studio as some, but I did have to ask in the middle of the sordid, probably over-inflated stories that what the heck Warner thought they were going to get when they hired Jonze? If they didn’t want his vision of the material, why hire him? Well, assuming there was some truth to the alleged “war” between Warner and Jonze, I don’t think I could take either side very well after seeing it.
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Paranormal Activity: Honey, Put the Camera Down
Paranormal Activity is something of a rarity in the horror world these days. When most films just offer up deformed inbred mutants torturing Midwestern teenagers to death and calls it good, Paranormal Activity actually tries to scare you. It plays on those fears we all have, of waking up to a strange noise in the middle of the night, and lying there, heart hammering, wondering, What the hell is in my house? It bypasses the “torture porn” approach of most modern horror films and actually sets out to create a mood and an atmosphere of fear.
And it does a pretty good job of it.
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Zombieland: I Thought the Apocalypse Would Be More Fun Than This
Let me get the nitpick out of the way up front: Zombies do not run. There. I said it. They don’t run. They shamble. They stagger. They lurch. But they do not run. They’re reanimated corpses without the brain power or muscle tone to do anything more athletic than slowly come at you with the single-minded purpose of turning you into a casserole. To be fair, the zombies in Zombieland are not reanimated dead (or at least not all of them; some of them might be; kind of fuzzy on that) but are instead infected with some form of Mad Cow Disease. So I guess it’s okay that they run. But they’re not zombies.
Okay, nitpick over. On to the movie.
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Zombieland: Too Much Fun to be a Horror Film
I admit it. I was sucked in completely by the trailers for Zombieland just like virtually every other male who’s even remotely in my demographic group. Heading at warp speed toward middle-age, though, I immediately temper any expectations I have when I see a trailer that looks that funny and hip. Ultimately, the last conscious thought I had as I walked into the theater with my kid was “no matter how good or funny this might end up being, it’s not going to touch ‘Shaun of the Dead.’” Now I know whether I was right or not.
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