Friday, June 28, 2013

World War Z: Stop Before It Kills Again!

Thanks to everyone who encouraged me to continue with my blog. I had not expected to be so busy, as I enjoyed writing reviews. Unfortunately, I haven't posted (except for the occasional Facebook entry) for five months. I will resume by re-posting some Facebook comments on films and plays.

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I saw World War Z yesterday. With his long hair parted in the middle and his scruffy face, Brad Pitt looks like himself in 1993, but 20 years older. In other words, Brad Pitt has become Baby Jane Hudson. He's still hot, though. He's battling to find the cure for the zombie epidemic that's ruining the planet, and most of the movie features really fast moving, spastic extras in dead makeup doing bad things to everyone else. Because the filmmakers want to make the point that zombies now outnumber the human beings, there are a lot of CGI-fueled long shots of zombies moving around cities like ants. (I love how CGI can make any live-action movie look like a cartoon all of a sudden.) These zombies are like the zombies in 28 Days Later and I Am Legend, the movie and the original 1950s novel, in which Richard Matheson invented the modern-day undead genre: they sprint, leaving the shuffling to the other monsters. Ironically, the flick's "action-packed" moments often take a back seat to the real drama: will Brad Pitt's cell phone battery die before he can talk to his wife? Now, if Ms. Jolie played the spouse, it might be a conflict worth the ticket price, but it's not. It''s some pale blond nothing with two brats who can't stop reminding us, "I'm SCARED!" (You don't say!) 

While I sat through this motion picture, I kept thinking: I've been through two car accidents. I don't need to feel what it's like to be in a third car accident. I really don't care about the zombie vs. human battle. I'm more interested in knowing how people maintain civilization as it crumbles around them. Fortunately, there's AMC-TV's The Walking Dead, and, even better, the DVDs of the brilliant George Romero films Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead.

It's funny about this zombie phenomenon. In the 1990s the aliens were the monsters, until the immigration reform crisis made us all painfully aware of the danger of referring to human beings as aliens. Now the zombies are the monsters. They're the "all purpose hated minority." Because they're (un) dead, it's okay to dehumanize and loathe them and not be considered racist, sexist, xenophobic or homophobic. Horror movies are best when the "us" vs. "them" boundary gets blurred, when who's predator and who's prey gets mixed up, when audiences are forced to face their own prejudices and learn something. Matheson and Romero did it best.

I'm sure the book of World War Z is pleasing to its fans; a few of them have informed me that it is much better than the movie. I hope it sells a lot of copies. In the meantime I await Brad Pitt's new, and hopefully improved, haircut.

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