Some good eats. Some good laughs and a few gotchas.
Being asked by these characters to contemplate info-overload and the power of putting the unblinking eye on people was kinda silly. At one point there's a montage of real suffering, taken out of context and strung together in a flash to underscore the point that gobs of information isn't really the knowledge or power that CNN keeps assuring us they're delivering. A character asks in heavy tones if we are really saying anything to one another. Well... okay, no. Fine. I get it. It's been true for decades, but now it turns out that ordinary folks are as biased, trivial and myopic as the conglomerates who write history. Heavy. The problem here is that there is very urgent, very obvious information that needs to be conveyed to everyone in the Diary of the Dead world - "SHOOT THEM IN THE HEAD!" It seems to me that there would be thousands of YouTube howtos about taking on the lurchy pests rather than people pontificating on the information age. Shawn of the Dead for the YouTube/TMZ generation...
There a nice shot in the middle of the film where a woman has to shoot her boyfriend as soon as he goes undead. Unable to bring herself to shoot his corpse, she waits over his body until it stirs and he sits up. They're in the middle distance, in profile. She's standing a few feet back with a gun pointed at him. He sits straight up, looking up at her face. There's a pause. She executes him and he flies back down like a rag doll. From a distance, you can't really make out their faces. The zombie's absolute helplessly, childlike posture just overwhelmed me. For just a second it was like the movie stepped back from the CGI slapstick of smashing meatpuppet skulls and showed something genuinely pitiful. The movie explicitly harps on this point for the first hour that killing another person is a soul-annihilating thing. I was a little surprised to see the point made so well and so simply.
I've seen a bunch of these hand held films - this one did make me sick, though I admit I was way too close to the screen.
Being asked by these characters to contemplate info-overload and the power of putting the unblinking eye on people was kinda silly. At one point there's a montage of real suffering, taken out of context and strung together in a flash to underscore the point that gobs of information isn't really the knowledge or power that CNN keeps assuring us they're delivering. A character asks in heavy tones if we are really saying anything to one another. Well... okay, no. Fine. I get it. It's been true for decades, but now it turns out that ordinary folks are as biased, trivial and myopic as the conglomerates who write history. Heavy. The problem here is that there is very urgent, very obvious information that needs to be conveyed to everyone in the Diary of the Dead world - "SHOOT THEM IN THE HEAD!" It seems to me that there would be thousands of YouTube howtos about taking on the lurchy pests rather than people pontificating on the information age. Shawn of the Dead for the YouTube/TMZ generation...
There a nice shot in the middle of the film where a woman has to shoot her boyfriend as soon as he goes undead. Unable to bring herself to shoot his corpse, she waits over his body until it stirs and he sits up. They're in the middle distance, in profile. She's standing a few feet back with a gun pointed at him. He sits straight up, looking up at her face. There's a pause. She executes him and he flies back down like a rag doll. From a distance, you can't really make out their faces. The zombie's absolute helplessly, childlike posture just overwhelmed me. For just a second it was like the movie stepped back from the CGI slapstick of smashing meatpuppet skulls and showed something genuinely pitiful. The movie explicitly harps on this point for the first hour that killing another person is a soul-annihilating thing. I was a little surprised to see the point made so well and so simply.
I've seen a bunch of these hand held films - this one did make me sick, though I admit I was way too close to the screen.
Tell Your Friends