You Make Me Feel So Loved...

WOW! You guys are sweeties. Big, fat, gay-sounding sweeties.
I've never felt so missed in all my days.

I did take a mini vacation to visit some friends. 90% of the trip ruled. Good times. About 10% of the trip sucked beyond belief. While I won't go into details, lets just say my wedding guest list just got shorter.

IN OTHER NEWS:

It's Jami's birthday today. She turned a mighty 28. She is old as mother nature herself.

For her B-day, besides lots of attention, a zombie movie and cake, Jami asked for one other thing; she thought we should get high.

It had been quite a long time for both of us and it sounded really fun.

So with highness and some burnt brain cells in our sights, we set out to find some pot. I have a neighbor in a band, as mentioned below in "The Shotgun Approach". As we all know, "in a band" is code for "guy who gets high or knows people who get high". OK, that may not be what that means, but it's certainly true.

As it turns out, our first guess was our best guess and we "scored". We went about our zombie-watching, irresponsible, drug-addled birthday celebration.

For the most part I enjoyed the pot. As some of you may or may not know, it gets you high and that feels good.

The downside was surprising. Even while high, LAND OF THE DEAD was really bad.

The movie had some really awkward war criticisms. Don't get me wrong, Romero's first two zombie films certainly had anti-corporate, anti-homogenization and other anti-messages at its core. This worked very well because zombies are a great metaphor for a consumer-based society. The middle of the road tends to like all the same stuff, dress the same way, and shop at the same stores because it's really convenient, not because they're mindless automatons.
But implying they're (read: us) mindless automatons is exactly the type of fruity artistic statement that filmmakers generally think is deep. But on the surface, we (read: nerds) just want to see zombies eat people, and desperate people on the run shooting zombies in the head. That's all that's necessary for a good zombie movie...or so I thought.

It turns out a good zombie movie also has to actually be about people getting eaten, or the threat of being eaten by zombies.
This movie was about class struggles, corporate fat cats that would run the post-zombie apocalypse city and dangerous rebels that always question authority and do the right thing.

Those things might be fine and dandy in, oh, I don't know...not a zombie movie.
I discovered that while subtextually a zombie movie can be about all sorts of societal quirks and guilt-ridden capitalist grimacing, at the end of the day you really just want to see undead heads explode in the wake of the protagonists trying to shoot thier way to freedom...and likely fail.

While this movie had some gore and some zombies chewin' people, its anti-war agenda (note; this was not subtext...it was an agenda) was so forced and clunky, it felt like somebody trying to use an episode of Friends to tell people about the dangers of landmines in North Africa. It just isn't the platform for that message.

Even worse, this message aside, the movie was still quite bad. Nothing made a lick of sense. If I sat down to imagine the post-zombie apocalypse holdout city, I would try to figure out what would make sense, and what I would need for the sake of good narrative and pacing.

In this movie, neither was a concern. For one, the cell phone infrastructure was unaffected by the zombie apocalypse. As was what's needed to support GPS technology.

In the other direction, bullets are a problem. On the realism side, one would imagine that conserving ammo would be crucial while on the other side, spraying lots of bullets into zombies is important for production values in a zombie movie. While they went with the slightly less attractive "spray lots of bullets" route (a choice I would make as well) the look and the technique of Romero's bullet ballet hasn't matured since the 70's. It was uninteresting. It had no dynamics, it didn't have energy, it was boring.
The remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD figured out how to make the drama before the shootings of zombies carry some weight. It had a sense of urgency and gave the audience the impression that the person would have certainly been eaten if they hadn't shot that zombie.
In LAND, there was no urgency. People clumbsily shot their guns like they've nevereven held a bb gun at zombies that weren't close enough to pose a threat.

THAT would be because if a zombie is close enough to you to pose a threat, it's already chewing on you. With only one or two exceptions, when a zombie is close enough to somebody to be scary, they're already a goner.

Finally, there were just too many plot, pacing, acting, script, and technical (within the movie technical, not filmically technical) problems for the fim to succeed.

Jami pointed out the most crucial missing element (which I hadn't noticed), a climax. When the movie ended she asked "why did it end there, and not just anywhere else?" She was very right...nothing really happened.

SPOILER!!! ZOMBIE MOVIE FORM BROKEN AND REVEALED BELOW!

There was a loose plan laid out in the first act to get away from the city. In the end of the movie, they drive away from the city. However, there was no coherent dramatic cusp to precede the driving away...it just eventually happened.

So even though zombie movies are in my not-so-famous "trio of must-see movie plots"*, this one was a real let-down.

*Mike's Trio of must-see Movie Plots:
I will see any movie, and I do mean any movie, which is essentially about one of these three things;
1) People in the past killing each other. (Usually sword and sandal epics, but can also be about historic "rebels", but westerns and mob movies also fall into this category)

2) People or things with weird powers or abilities blowing crap up. (This covers super-hero movies, alien movies, fantasy movies and GOOD kung-fu movies.)

3)Undead things eating people and getting shot in the head (otherwise known as zombie movies)

Obviously, Kung-Fu movies fulfill both 1 and 2, so they totally rule.