Saw a couple of movies over the weekend, and I’m going to review them in order.
Zombieland
What can I say? Unless you’re just too squeamish for zombie movies, this one is a must-see. Sure, it’s ripping off Shaun of the Dead, but Shaun of the Dead was hardly an original idea, either. Comedy horror films have been with us for a long time. The key to making a good one is not skimping on either the jokes or the action, and Zombieland has plenty of both.
Zombie movies must make one of two choices: will the zombies win or humanity? That is, are we facing a zombie apocalypse or can the problem be contained? Shaun went the route of the first Night of the Living Dead, where the last scenes imply that humanity was able to rally and kill off the zombie menace. But Zombieland is sending up the apocalypse movies, such as the other Living Dead films and most notably, 28 Days Later. Like 28 Days Later, these zombies can run and are rage-a-holics, and they are also not dead, but victims of a virus that wipes out most of humanity. It also borrows heavily from the concept of the Zombie Survival Guide, in that the hero and narrator has a bunch of rules of survival that are pretty fucking hilarious. (#1: Cardio.) For zombie fans, there are some funny innovations to geek out over, such as their brilliant plan to hide out in Beverly Hills. I wish I’d thought of that and sold a screenplay. A lot of houses in Beverly Hills are practically fortresses, and they’re well-spaced and well-stocked. I won’t give any more away, but that’s just one example of how clever this movie is.
This movie has a little love story in it, and the narrator has Nice Guy® tendencies (that are offset by the fact that the writing is so funny that you’re too busy laughing to be annoyed), and the scenes focusing on that feel like a drag. But that’s mostly because they rob Woody Harrelson of screen time to kill zombies. Admit it; that’s the selling point of the movie, and it delivers on what the trailer promised. Zombies are killed in entertaining and hilarious ways. They don’t even try to make Harrelson’s character realistic. He’s a lean, mean, zombie-killing machine of epic proportions. The other characters hold their own—-it’s always a relief when zombie movies realize that female survivors would have to be as quick with a firearm as male survivors, and this movie not only has two women who can shoot zombies, but one is 12—-but Harrelson is cartoonishly awesome.
Don’t watch if you’re easily squicked out or could never find apocalyptic scenarios funny. The zombie grossness is all front-loaded and then it moves more into action and less into scenes of zombies yanking tendons with their teeth, but you’re still going to see some of that. But for everyone else, this movie is a welcome, inventive comedy.
Whip It
I hesitated to see this film, because I thought that it would sanitize, in order, Austin and roller derby, but I liked the cast so much I gave it a chance. I’m really glad I did, and am saddened to see that the reviews are middling, and in exactly the way you’d expect when the screenwriter, director, and most of the lead actors are all female—-no one wants to be seen as being easy on director Drew Barrymore because she’s a girl, so they overcompensate and hold her to a standard way higher than a male director of her talent would be held. Indeed, I saw a lot of reviews that obsessed over Barrymore’s pedestrian directing in a way that’s unusual for reviewers to obsess over directing in genre films. It wasn’t Oscar-winning or anything, but it wasn’t distracting, and that’s as much as I want when the script is as good as this one. When looking at the reviews, remember that women often have to be twice as good to be taken half as seriously, and revise your expectations accordingly. Certainly, the gender ratio in the audience showed that the coveted demographic of males 18-45 were not interested in giving this movie a chance. Not that there were no men there, but they were no more than a quarter of the audience—-and that’s for a movie that takes place in the city I watched it in!