Caught in his Own Maze

It is a dangerous place for the innocent, this world of ours. This is the underlying statement that Prisoners delivers. The movie is a tense crime thriller by Quebec filmmaker Denis Villeneuve that, despite the help the director gets from the cinematographer and the actors, doesn’t quite feel like a final cut, although it’s a good try.

Villeneuve is an auteur in his own right, having received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film for Incendies in 2010.  But to help him concoct the suspenseful detective crime movie that Prisoners is he has the help of cinematographer Roger A. Deakins, who is a veteran producing amazing work, as can be attested by the 10 nominations he has received from the Academy in such remarkable cinematography as seen in No Country for Old Men or Skyfall.  But maybe it’s the script by Aaron Guzikowski (Contraband) that makes the film seem like a rough cut. The film is about the battle between good and evil, but with some added reflections about childhood trauma, rash judgments, and the extremes people can be driven to under certain circumstances, in this case, the kidnapping of two young girls. The main plot includes a number of other minor sub plots –the drunken priest, the traumatized pedophile, the son of an alcoholic warden; the lunatic hippies- so it ends up throwing in everything but the kitchen sink, and then tries to piece everything together. Simpler might have been better here, or at least more believable.

The actors in the movie are kind of a mixed bag. On the one hand you have the wonderful talent of Viola Davis, Terrance Howard, Melissa Leo and Paul Dano, but they are totally underplayed in the movie, given minor roles and very contained (while doing a good job anyway). Then there are the actors known more in commercial films, like Hugh Jackman, the Wolverine, and Jake Gyllenhaal, who already played the detective in a serial killer movie in Zodiac. These two actors are put to the challenge of being the characters that ground the movie, and actually do a surprisingly good job; more Gyllenhaal than Jackman. So, a lot of talent kind of put to waste, but a role that certainly will help Gyllenhaal’s career.

Villeneuve and Deakins create a somber atmosphere and give the movie the pace and rhythm that build up the suspense well, but the story has enough holes to make it implausible and the slow moving pace doesn’t accelerate enough when it should, so at times you start feeling impatient and frustrated, rather than captivated. It almost seems that Villeneuve gets lost in the faulty script and in trying to take himself too seriously. In trying to direct a film of Mystic River and Silence of the Lambs caliber --and Prisoners does seem to have some elements of both-- Villeneuve, to use a pun, seems to have fallen prisoner to his own pretentiousness.

Prisoners and Mystic River

The Dream Lives On

“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

August 28, 2013 commemorated the 50^th anniversary of a turning point in the history of the United States, the “March for Jobs and Freedom”, a triumphant day when thousands embraced the path of peace and brotherhood that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed about.

The fight for freedom, respect, a decent livelihood and, overall, the fight against the inhuman scourge of racism is one that has been captured on film over decades. It seems fitting that in the year that the United States celebrates the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington to end segregation there are two very good films that address the tragedy that is racism, its past and its persistence: Fruitvale Station, which we have already commented in this blog (see post A Day in the Life), and Lee Daniel’s The Butler, written about in more brevity in the Fresh Cuts section of this blog. Both of these films will undoubtedly come up during movie award season, deservedly so, and should take home at least one Academy Award each. A third film worth mentioning that came out earlier in the year is Brian Helgeland’s 42 about Jackie Robinson’s struggle against racism.

Forest Whitaker and David Oyelowo in The Butler

I have, of course, other favorites that I would like to remember on this occasion. Films about the wound that was slavery and segregation in the United States, the struggle for equality; films that move us, which appeal to our basic humanity and that make us reflect on the absurdity of the color of a person’s skin determining their fate. It took years for black directors to gain control in films, but this art has now gained brilliant auteurs like Spike Lee, Antoine Fuqua, Lee Daniels, Ryan Coogler, Denzel Washington, to mention a few, and incredible actors like Denzel Washington, Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier, Forest Whitaker, Angela Basset, Whoopi Goldberg, Viola Davis, Morgan Freeman, Octavia Spencer, and so many others.

Sidney Poitier is a favorite of mine among the ground breakers. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner took on the issue of racism (interracial marriage) back in 1967, and Poitier amazed alongside Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn in that film. That said, this actor truly reaches into our soul with his incredible acting and brings us some of the experience of black Americans in the sixties in Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (also 1967) about an African American police detective who is asked to investigate a murder in a racially hostile southern town and, before that, in Daniel Petrie’s  A Raisin in the Sun (1961) , about the struggling urban Younger family.

Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, In the Heat of the Night

Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) dealt with the issue of racism in the segregated south and the whole parody of “justice” in the judicial system there.  The film took Harper Lee’s great novel to the screen and presented a white lawyer, Atticus Finch, played by the amazing Gregory Peck, who looks to guide his children away from discrimination as he defends a black man, Tom Robinson, played in a sobering manner by Breck Peters, against an undeserved rape charge. The film is powerful and probably has helped guide many other court room dramas on the violence or racism, whether delivered by men in white sheets or in black robes, as one Pulitzer author put it (A Time To Kill and Ghosts of Mississippi come to mind).

Gregory Peck and Breck Peters in To Kill a Mockingbird

Alan Parker, despite being a British director, captured the essence of the white supremacy mentality and how it permeated every institution in the south  in  Mississippi Burning (1988) about the FBI investigation into the real-life murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. This was, in great part, due to the amazing acting in the movie. Mississippi Burning earned a number of Academy Award nominations, including best picture, directing, editing, actor (Gene Hackman), actress in a supporting role (Frances McDormand).  We clearly see the Mississippi that Dr. King described, in his I Have a Dream speech, as a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression.

Willem Dafoe in Mississippi Burning

Probably no African American director has brought the complexity of the struggle against racism and the black experience to the screen as well as Spike Lee.  There are many Spike Lee “joints” worth mentioning, but I will chose my two favorites on the topic: Do the Right Thing (1989), which takes place on a street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn where racism and bigotry explode and where Dr. King and Malcolm X are presented as polarized options, and Malcolm X (1992), with the amazing Denzel Washington playing the lead role.

I could write a whole blog on Denzel Washington (and maybe I will someday), but for now I want to mention him not only as an actor (of Glory, Training Day or Flight stature), but as a director. The Great Debaters (2007), the film directed by Denzel Washington, is most certainly a film to add to the ones mentioned. This is a film, like Malcolm X or 42, based on a true story. This time that of Melvin B. Tolson, a professor at Wiley College Texas who, in 1935, led a group of students to challenge Harvard in the national championship. It is an inspiring and moving film told in very unadorned film language.

Denzel Washington as Malcolm X

Of course there are more. A lot of them deal with slavery, segregation, the fight for civil rights and racial discrimination in the past. It is sad to say, however, that movies like Fruitvale Station continue to be needed in our present to denounce the sinister face of racism and how it is far from gone. As President Obama stated in his speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, 50 years after Dr. King stood  there:

“But we would dishonor those heroes as well to suggest that the work of this nation is somehow complete. The arc of the moral universe may bend towards justice, but it doesn't bend on its own. To secure the gains this country has made requires constant vigilance, not complacency. Whether by challenging those who erect new barriers to the vote, or ensuring that the scales of justice work equally for all, and the criminal justice system is not simply a pipeline from underfunded schools to overcrowded jails, it requires vigilance.

And we'll suffer the occasional setback. But we will win these fights. This country has changed too much. People of goodwill, regardless of party, are too plentiful for those with ill will to change history's currents.”

 

 

 

A Day in the Life

There are moments during the film Fruitvale Station in which you just want to sob out loud. The movie brings forth incredibly strong emotions because of how, using the day in the life of a black man, it is able to get to the heart of the inhumanity and infamy that is racism.

We are presented with the last day of the year and the life of Oscar Grant III, the 22 year old black man that was racially profiled and then shot by the police. Oscar the youth, the son, the father, the friend, the boyfriend, died on New Year’s Day 2009 for no other reason than for being black. Director Ryan Coogler, in his first feature film and in a wonderful collaboration with Michael B. Jordan, the star of the film, shows us a totally recognizable reality. The movie shines in its direction and acting, with a cast that, besides the admirable performance by Michael B. Jordan, includes the wonderful Octavia Spencer and amazing young Melonie Diaz.

Michael B. Jordan in Fruitvale Station

We are witness to the everyday relationships of a young man struggling. But director and actors go beyond that and put forth a story that leads us to a greater understanding of the odds faced by black males in the United States today. In the length of a movie and the day it portrays, we can appreciate what a young black man in America faces because of racism.  It’s not news to anyone that cares, but the statistics behind what the Children’s Defense Fund calls “The Cradle to Prison Pipeline” are staggering; they are the story behind many Oscar Grants, young men of color with the odds stacked against them:

·         Black babies are more than twice as likely as white babies to die before their first birthday;

·         Black children are over three times as likely to be poor (38.8 percent) as White children (12.5

 Percent) nationally;

·         Although Black students comprised only 18 percent of students in public schools in 2009,they represented:

o    40 percent of all students who experienced corporal punishment;

o   35 percent of all students who received one out-of-school suspension;

o   46 percent of all students who received multiple out-of-school suspensions;

o   39 percent of all students expelled;

·         As of September 2012 one in four Black young adults ages 16 to 24 was unemployed;

·         1 in 3 black boys are at risk of imprisonment during their lifetime;

·         Black males age 18 and over in 2008 represented only five percent of the total college student population, but 36 percent of the total prison population

·         Forty-three percent of all children and youth killed by firearms in 2009 were Black.

·         Black males ages 15 to 19 were more than eight times as likely as White males

in the same age group to be killed in a firearm homicide in 2009.*

These are the statistics that are hidden in each scene of the film, made so much more poignant because we are seeing and hearing the relationships and the struggles, instead of just reading numbers on a page. That is the wonder of this film. The shooting of Trayvon Martin and the ignominy of his death only three years after the shooting of Oscar Grant only makes this film more important. We all need to sob at the injustice of a life lost to bigotry and racism. We need to cry out, as this film does so noiselessly.

(*These statistics and more can be found in the Children’s Defense Fund Report and campaign homepage: http://www.childrensdefense.org/programs-campaigns/cradle-to-prison-pipeline/#sthash.HKPVMIRx.dpuf)

Lingering Darkness



The dictatorship that came to power in Chile via a coup d’état led by General Augusto Pinochet  on September 11, 1973 is probably one of the most known Latin American dictatorships, though sadly it was far from the only one. Its notoriety is not surprising, given that it was one of the most repressive, with tens of thousands of Chileans "disappeared," tortured and killed, and an estimated 200,000 forced into exile; it was also one of the longest lasting (1973 to 1990); and, what is more, one that had an impact on the military and economic policies in the region for many years to come.  What is surprising is that so few movies have been made about it.  No, the most recent film about the Chilean dictatorship joins a short list of feature films, to which No’s director, Pablo Larraín, has contributed three movies.

The first noteworthy feature film about the coup came rather quickly in 1975, Il pleut sur Santiago  (Rain Over Santiago), a French – Bulgarian drama by Chilean director Helvio Soto staring French greats  Jean Louis Trintignant, Annie Girardot, Bibi Andersson,  and more. The movie’s focus was on the events leading up to the election and overthrow of Salvador Allende, the socialist who became the President of Chile, and on the conspiracies that took place to bring about an end to his rule and his life.

Jean Louis Trintignant in Rain Over Santiago

 There was a Russian–Danish film Noch nad Chili (Night Over Chile), also by a Chilean director, Sebastian Alarcon, in 1977, which didn’t draw too much international attention; and then, in 1982 came Missing, to date probably the best film made about those first months of the dictatorship.

Missing was directed by Konstantinos Gavras, better known as Costa-Gavras, a truly great Greek director (Z, State of Siege, Amen). It presents the events through the narration of the real life story of Charles Horman, an American journalist who was one of the people disappeared by the dictatorship, presumably one of the 40,000 that were held in the Stadium in Santiago after the coup. The remarkable actor Jack Lemmon plays Ed Horman, a conservative businessman from New York who arrives in Santiago to seek out his missing son. Alongside Lemmon, the wonderful actor Sissy Spacek plays Beth, the missing journalist’s wife.

Jack Lemmon in Missing

 Missing won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Costa-Gavras, and Jack Lemmon won the Best Actor award. At the Academy Awards Costa-Gavras won the Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium Oscar, and both Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek were nominated in the Best Actor and Best Actress categories.

Now there is Pablo Larraín’s No which has already also won the top prize in the Directors’ Fortnight section at the Cannes Film Festival and was presented to compete in the Foreign Film category at the Academy Awards. No, however, lacks the emotional strength, powerful direction and acting of Missing, but it also lacks depth.

No presents Chile in 1988, when the dictator had been in power for 15 years, and revisits the moment in Chile’s history when 56 percent of the country voted “No” in a plebiscite to oust Pinochet from power.  The film’s focus is on the ad campaign that helped persuade Chileans to cast their ballots against Pinochet. The film uses archival footage and fictionalized characters, being an adaptation of a play written by Antonio Skarmeta, a Chilean novelist whose work was also the basis for the Italian movie Il Postino. Gael Garcia Bernal, the Mexican actor, plays the central character, the son of an exile and a modern ad man who gets persuaded to make TV commercials for the "No" campaign.

The film has been criticized in Chile for not including the broader context of the “No” campaign and the tremendous and massive grassroots effort to register 92 percent of the electorate, which is what made the electoral results possible.  This is no minor flaw. The film is overall well done and entertaining, with the archival footage (Betacam) blending in very well with the film, which was purposefully filmed using old video equipment. This makes the movie feel like the period it depicts (at least technically), but otherwise and because it does not consider the broader context, it doesn’t quite resonate as being real. It ends up lacking the complexity of this moment in Chile's history.  It was an oversight not to include all the effort displayed by thousands of Chileans to make voting possible so that the ad campaign could contribute to the success of the "No";  also not present in the film is the complex negotiation among the political parties that came together for the campaign –these party leaders are mostly portrayed as naïve and caricature-like folk with  old fashioned views in the movie. Why the director chose to go the simple route we'll probably never know, but it certainly detracts from the movie as a whole.



Gael Garcia Bernal as the modern ad man in No

In any case, it is still a movie worth seeing. No has become part of an unintentional trilogy by Pablo Larraín, in as much as it is one of three films that take place during the Pinochet dictatorship. Larrain’s debut film Tony Manero (2008), although dealing with a serial killer obsessed with John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever, takes place during the height of the dictatorship. Post Mortem (2010) takes place during the last days of President Allende’s presidency and is about an employee at a morgue’s recording office who falls for a dancer who disappears.  In all three films, the main characters feel that the political situation surrounding them is not going to affect them directly, but they end up immersed in the terror and repression of the dictatorship anyway.

Larraín has indirectly spoken to why he’s chosen to make films about this period in his country’s history.  Despite the time that has elapsed, the dictatorship is, for so many, a lingering darkness; in one of his interviews (NPR) Larraín states: "He [Pinochet] died without ever stepping in the courthouse, and [as] a millionaire. So it's quite sad, because we never really achieved justice. And most of the people who actually killed and tortured others in my country, they are still walking on the street. That is why this issue, the whole human-rights violation issue, is still ... an open wound."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Wrong Brother

Unless you live in a big city that has many art house theatres, summer is a time of angst and waiting for cinephiles in smaller towns; waiting for the good, foreign movies to come out on DVD or waiting for the more serious fall movies from the studios to hit the theatres. Summer is the time when the movie industry makes money and rolls out the, for the most part, loud and uncreative blockbusters. For every Frances Ha there are ten action blockbusters like Star Trek, Fast and Furious, Man of Steel, White House Down, World War Z or The Lone Ranger.

I’ve skipped many of this summer’s blockbusters, but I feel motivated to write about one, albeit shortly, The Lone Ranger. It’s not that I believe this film qualifies as anything but an action blockbuster (an extremely expensive one at that), but because I’m rather baffled at how bad the reviews from the movie critics have been, how they have lapidated  this film more than any of the other ones mentioned above; in my opinion, unfairly so. 

Peter Traverse from Rolling Stone Magazine wrote: Unfortunately, this two-and-a-half hour obstacle course of cinematic horse turds resists redemption even from Depp. The Guardian’s said: The Lone Ranger staggers drunkenly from antic comedy to soulful solemnity to bloody horror without ever quite settling, or deciding what it is. And other critics are pretty much in the same tenor.  It could be the blockbuster phenomena per se, as Ethan Coen has said: Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

I love to see Johnny Depp, so I most certainly had The Lone Ranger on my "to see" list, even if it was directed and produced by the Pirates of the Caribbean series team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinski.  I was not let down. I most certainly think Depp is worth seeing in this movie. He is compared to Buster Keaton by more than one review, and it's true he is funny in many scenes, but he's still incomparably Johnny Depp in make up, with his incredible facial expressions and eye language.

Overall, The Lone Ranger is a movie made to entertain, with no pretentions beyond that. It does, however, end up doing a little more than that and, I believe, it is thanks to Johnny Depp. In particular, the film finally flips the whole “cowboys & Indians” genre on its head, making this film, with a mostly preposterous script, actually more historically accurate than most others in this genre as it relates to what happened to Native Americans. As one of the reviews accurately stated, the Indians are the ones railroaded by the railroad. It is their land that is taken, their lives lost. And Tonto, who has been the lone ranger’s sidekick forever, is in this version the central narrator and character of the film, very well played by Johnny Depp, despite not having completely let go of the “me-Tonto-you-pale-face” stereotype.

In an interview to Rolling Stone Magazine (where, curiously, and very unlike Traverse, the writer calls the movie “impressively subversive, painting the United States Cavalry as the bad guys and the Comanche as the doomed heroes, with Arnie Hammer’s Lone Ranger essentially a sidekick to Tonto”), Johnny Depp says: “I wanted to maybe give some hope to kids on the reservations, they’re living without running water and seeing problems with drugs and booze. But I wanted to be able to show these kids ‘F…that! You’re still warriors, man’”. Depp, by the way, has Native American blood, on his mother’s side.

Johnny Depp with members of the Comanche Nation

Too bad that this kind of action movie, the one that actually depicts an episode of the colossal discrimination/extermination suffered by Native Americans, is the kind that “flops” at the box office. Verbinski, in the same interview on The Lone Ranger, was hoping to do some more damage from the inside, in terms of shaking people up with respect to the plight of Native Americans, taking it to a summer blockbuster. I guess this is one reflection audiences in the United States don't really want to see.

 

Coping with Plan B

It is fun to see a movie that is enjoyably simple and quite straightforward in its narrative, yet holds enough layers in story and characters that there are many ways to read it. Frances Ha, directed by Noah Baumbach with a screenplay by Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, the movie’s main star, is one of those movies. It is a pleasure to watch and even more fun to write about.

The basic story is as simple and as old as the dream-catcher city in which it develops: a young woman follows her dreams of becoming an artist to New York, establishes relationships with other young dreamers, but is surely enough confronted with the reality of life... or its statistics, like how few of the millions who aspire to be artists actually make it.

Lucky for us, both Baumbach and Gerwig are among those few.

The layers are there from the start. To begin with this is a comedy, not a drama, though it plays as both throughout the film. Frances Halliday, the character played by Gerwig, comes from what seems to be a secure and happy enough rambler-house middle class back in California. She’s gone to college in the east and there has met the person with whom she develops the strongest relationship of the film, her friend Sophie, a writer aspiring to become an editor, and someone from a higher income class than Frances. We catch them in New York at the beginning of the film, both in their late twenties, slowly coming off their college high, paving the way to their brilliant futures, or so they hope.  Frances apprentices for a dance company but doesn’t really have the talent to be a great dancer, but she’s happy because she and Sophie “are the same person”.  We, the spectators, know right from the beginning that they are not, thanks to the great and very subtle acting by Gerwig and Mickey Sumner, who plays Sophie.

Mickey Sumner and Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha

Theirs is no ordinary friendship, or at least this is what Frances thinks. And Frances is no ordinary person, or rather, she is ordinary in the sense that she is like all of us, all who are not part of an elite in the world. She’s like us in our youth, people with bigger dreams than possibilities; people who believe that relationships can be that self-less, strong and wonderful; that everyone is (or should be) the same in terms of opportunities to succeed.

We are taken through the diminishing of Frances’s and Sophie’s dreams, each for very different reasons.  But the freshness in this story, besides the comedic perspective and Gerwig’s acting, is how Frances copes with the changes in her circumstances (and addresses).  There is a scene in the film where Frances does this rather slap-stick fall while running to get cash from an ATM; she picks herself up and keeps running. It's without a doubt a metaphor. Curiously enough, it seems that Frances, the one who isn’t from the elite, is the one who is able to keep 'running', and this makes everything fit. I won’t go much further into the story, not because it would give anything away but because there really isn’t anything extraordinary about what happens; so like life.

 Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg) has not really directed an original with Frances Ha since he does quite some borrowing. The film is in black and white and of course Woody Allen’s Manhattan comes to mind, because this is New York and many of Frances’s friends are elitist hipsters with apartments in Tribeca, Paris or cute $4,000 “holes” in Manhattan itself, living a sort of existential or quarter-life crisis.The coloring works because it focuses on the people (Frances) more than the city, through Sam Levy’s good camera work. The score borrows from Georges Delerue’s King of Hearts, and so on. Yet, again, Gerwig’s roller coaster acting through almost every emotion possible makes it its own movie, as does the more up to date dialogue.

I believe there probably are different interpretations to Frances and her hipster friends. Some might find her annoying and extremely naïve; others fresh and sweet; some even truly “undateable”; which only proves, in any case,  that the movie has layers. In my read of the movie, the underdog (all of us) finds a way to cope with plan B and, in the end, has the last laugh.

 

 

 

Killing the Dead all Over Again

As far as zombie movies go, World War Z is a good watch. I must now confess that this is a sentence I never thought I’d write in this blog, given that zombie movies aren’t something I’m prone to watch. The horror movie genre is not at the top of my list of preferred genres and the zombie movie sub-genre tends to be at the bottom of that short one. This week, however, thanks to my daughters and to my favorite movie critics, I actually saw two zombie films: Warm Bodies and World War Z.

World War Z, directed by Marc Forster, is in the vein of Danny Boyle’s 28 days Later or Francis Lawrence’s I am Legend, where the suspense and action supersedes the gore and bad makeup of many zombie movies; hence, they are fun to watch. The plot has its similarities to those movies as well, in particular in constituting a caution against meddling and altering viral and bacterial genomes, something it seems we humans are increasingly prone to do.

Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later

In 28 Days Later, a mysterious virus called “Rage”, which stemmed from chimpanzees being used for medical research, spreads to humans  in the UK and basically turns most everyone but a handful of survivors into rabid zombies.  In I am Legend, a genetically-engineered variant of the measles virus is created as a cure for cancer, but mutates into a lethal strain killing almost everyone or turning others into vampire-zombie-like predators.  In World War Z no explanation as to the origin of the virus is given, although many “clues” are spread throughout, linking it to rabies, animal flus and genetic experimentation; this time the virus spreads faster than the Rage virus –about 12 seconds- and the zombies transmit it by biting their victims. Oh, and it is also world-wide.

Will Smith in I am Legend

In the American movies, World War Z and I am Legend, the hero who works towards finding a “cure” is endowed with very particular survival skills. Will Smith is Lieutenant Colonel Robert Neville in I am Legend, a military virologist and apparently the last survivor in New York City. Brad Pitt is Gerry Lane in World War Z, a former United Nations employee involved in high risk missions. Both are family men and predisposed to martyrdom. In 28 Days Later, the heroes are refreshingly women, though Jim, played by Dark Knight’s Scarecrow Cillian Murphy, the lone survivor rescued, is still the central figure in the movie.

Brad Pitt and Will Smith - Family Men with a mission

I think this is why I enjoyed Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies all the more. This is a zombie movie with a twist: it is a romantic comedy.  There are human-flesh-eating zombies, there are still a bunch of military guys determined to shoot at zombies (I never get that: if they are dead, how is shooting bullets at zombies going to make a difference? You’d think an amphibious rifle or flamethrowers would be more effective at slowing them down), but the zombies in this movie have a comedic voice over by actor Nicholas Hoult which really brings them to life (pun intended). What’s more, Warm Bodies is actually a sort of zombie Romeo and Juliet (“R” and “Julie” in the movie), with a balcony sequence and all! As corny as it sounds, it is love that “warms” the zombies and starts their hearts beating again. It is caring human beings and not guns that actually “exhume” the world; it is tearing down the walls built to keep the zombies out that serves to create a new world; if only the Israeli’s in World War Z had known that!

Teresa Palmer and Nicholas Hoult in Warm Bodies

Maybe Warm Bodies is part of a shift in young audience’s attitude and attraction towards the undead, also present in the Twilight vampire series. Throughout the years, because of the fear of our own mortality, the stories about those who refused to die were cautionary ones, ones of terror, in fact, of the monsters and creatures that refuse death becoming predatory vampires and zombies; like scientific tinkering with mortality that gave rise to Frankenstein or such monsters. This fascination has led good directors and actors into the horror movie genre, producing great films, which I hope to write more about in this blog.

Zombies and monsters aren’t what they used to be, it seems.  And that’s a good thing too.  Again I am in gratitude to my young daughter who had me see Warm Bodies, and who actually took me to see the monster movie that I most enjoyed this week: Disney’s Monsters University!

Mike Wizowski (Billy Crystal) in Monsters University