The bodies get warmer

Warm-Bodies-kThis was pretty delightful. Great soundtrack, too.

This winter, two of my students are writing research papers on why zombies are such a popular topic in media culture. And what they’ve taught me is that, while horror trends come and go for all sorts of reasons, zombies stories, with their mindless mobs chasing lone survivors, tend to reference cultural anxieties about pending invasions; for much of second half of the 20th century, it was about the Cold War, and since then it’s been about the fear of some mixture of globalism and out-of-control viruses. Even when the zombie story is very well done – the remake of Dawn of the Dead, or 28 Days Later, or The Walking Dead – dread and hopelessness are so central to that plot that I become unnerved. So badly, in fact, that I walked out of Dawn of the Dead and stopping watch The Walking Dead after the first season. But hope and love are the central themes in the zombie romance Warm Bodies, and that is why I liked it so much. Continue…

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I had a sad

jeremy-renner-gemma-arterton-hansel-gretel-witch-huntersIt’s like they didn’t even try.

I used to love to write bad reviews. Back in the late 90s, when I was lucky enough to review movies for Newsweek.com, I was actually only lucky to get the stuff none of the real critics would bother with: crappy teen comedies, really weird foreign films, and second and third-rate action movies. Every week I would figure out new ways to trash them; I was thrilled when someone said, “Ted’s review is scathing.” One of my proudest moments was when Yahoo! News published a story about the wretched reviews of Battlefield Earth and quoted mine in the introduction and conclusion of the article.

Now, as I approach 40, I find very little pleasure in that sort of negativity, even in those nearly pyrotechnic slams that some critics (like The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane or The Austin Chronicle’s Marc Savlov) specialize in. Either it’s the antidepressants, an overload of empathy, or just simple maturity, but I don’t really want to participate in the blood sporting free-for-all that occurs whenever Lindsey Lohan or Michael Bay make a movie. Now, instead of seeing a bad movie and giddily imagining how I can shred it in print, I get sad. Continue…

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Schwarzenegger can’t say “Last”

last-stand-arnold2It could’ve been worse.

When I was a teen-ager, I found great joy in Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. And even then, I was a budding movie critic, so I knew, more or less, that my joy was not based in some aesthetic appreciation of his acting, or the films surrounding him, or even in the often great special effects that would accompany those movies. Even then, I recognized that much of the appreciation of Schwarzenegger was in his ridiculousness: his affectless line delivery, his steroidal body, his morally absolute characters, and his thick Austrian accent that never changed over decades in America. Continue…

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Rat-a-tat-tat

Gangster-squad

This one just pissed me off.

People complained that free blacks were given short shrift in Lincoln, that the Canadians had more involvement in the escape from Iran that depicted in Argo, that Alfred wasn’t as cartoonish as he was shown in Hitchcock, and torture was over-emphasized in Zero Dark Thirty. But so far, there hasn’t been too much buzz about the how Gangster Squad is about as historically accurate as Inglorious Basterds, the moviein which American troops are the ones who kill Hitler and Goebbels. (They committed suicide.) But Gangster Squad is still able to say it was “inspired by a true story” about an elite group of LA cops tackling gangster Mickey Cohen. Continue…

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Zero Dark Thirty is a shark

ZERO-articleLargeI almost wish I hadn’t seen it.

Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s masterful movie about the manhunt for Osama Bin Laden, arrived in San Diego’s theaters on January 4 with more baggage than any film in recent memory. It was shown to critics in the beginning of December and they went on to give it award after award. Then various pundits and politicians saw it, and many of them claimed to be appalled by what they claimed was the film’s support for torture. Many of them were appalled, in fact, long before the saw it. Because political pundits have a great deal more power to define the national conversation than film critics do, many people had stark opinions, both political and aesthetic, about the film cemented into their brains by the time general audiences were allowed to see it, first in New York and Los Angeles, and now everywhere else. Continue…

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