Turns out, you already know Jack

jack-the-giant-killer-04During the first third of so of Jack the Giant Slayer, among the battalion who accompany Jack on the quest to rescue the princess and kill some giants is one particularly handsome, rather strapping bald-headed knight who has a couple of lines before meeting his demise. While I was reading through the IMDb page for the film, I saw his picture, discovered the actor is named Mingus Johnston, and his character is named Bald. This, in a microcosm, is what wrong with Jack the Giant Slayer: it’s as obvious as its fairy tale source and as creative as, well, naming the one bald character “Bald.” With a budget of $195 million, I would think producer and director Bryan Singer would have been able to afford an original idea. Continue…

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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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