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Slower than a gun

We watched "Dawn of the Dead" on DVD this weekend. The zombie genre is already pretty much chewed up, but I found this to be an enjoyable movie. For starters, the computer-generated special effects of all kinds of video-game inspired mayhem and destruction were so excellent that you couldn't tell that they were computer graphics, except that since they couldn't possibly have been mady any other way, they had to be CGI. On the other hand, I was a bit disappointed that there was no demon girl zombie who leads the horde of zombie like the ads had promised. I hope that the coming-up "Snakes on the Plane" has one evil snake who would be the leader of all snakes, and then there could be one really big and fat snake who is more laid-back and a bit of a doofus. Perhaps there could even be a scene at the end of the movie where this big snake has swallowed some whiny and nerdy passenger who has been nothing but an annoyance for Samuel Jackson's character the whole time, and Samuel would just smirk and give a thumbs-up to the snake who would also smile contently and then perhaps burp, thus making the surviving passengers burst out in a friendly laugh together.

But back to the topic at hand. A second disappointment in this movie was that the female lead Sarah Polley didn't do any tits-out at any point, which also went against of what I had read about this movie. But even so, I have never seen all those Canadian and indie movies that Sarah has previously been in, but she has this lovely girl-next-door type of presence that makes her a delight to watch. Now, if she could just get some good role in some movie that people would actually go see, her career would be set.

One thing that I have always wondered in all zombie movies is how come the zombies have to eat human flesh, and no other type of food whatsoever is even remotely acceptable to them. That doesn't sound like a winning strategy to me. Since the zombies also don't seem to drink water, they would dehydrate in a few days, as in "28 Days Later". If the zombies were running loose while I was safely holed up in a mall where there is plenty of pretty much everything available, I think that I would just wait it out for a few days or weeks instead of trying to make a run for it because a mall is just so boring, man. But hey, that's just me.

A second source of puzzlement for me in basically all zombie movies is how quickly the small band of survivors, who were supposed to be an assortment of ordinary people, usually turn out to be expert martial artists who are adept in use of all types of slicing, dicing and shooting weapons. Now, I don't really know anything about guns so please correct me if I am mistaken here, but think that even a trained Navy SEAL would find it difficult to keep making head shots with his pistol while running. Another thing that puzzled me in this particular zombie movie was a mall that apparently had no escalators but in which all movement between floors was done in an elevator. That doesn't sound like an efficient solution, especially during the crowded shopping days before Christmas.

Third, if I was a gun shop owner and an expert marksman with virtually unlimited ammo and a sniper rifle at my disposal, and I was sitting safely at the rooftop of my gun shop while the zombie horde just sleepwalks around the building and is totally indifferent to my picking them off one by one, I think that I would just keep shooting a lot instead of playing silly games. Eventually, the horde would have to thin out.

Another movie that we watched recently was "The Interpreter", a movie so immensely predictable and formulaic that when we first saw the poster for this movie last year without having heard or read anything about the movie itself, we pretty much deduced the premise, the plot and all major events of the movie on the spot, as any remotely intelligent person should be able to do. But this didn't really matter, since Nicole Kidman is so pleasing to the eye that she could be doing pretty much anything at all in a movie and I would still watch it.

It is undeniable from her previous movies such as "The Others", "Birthday Girl" and "The Human Stain" that Nicole is not just a pretty face but a superbly skilled actress who can be trained to play almost any nationality or persona whatsoever. For this reason, I was a bit puzzled that I couldn't really tell what I was supposed to understand about Nicole's character in The Interpreter. Or for that matter, which one of the opposing factions of Africans I was supposed to root for. Of course, it was predictable that the older white guy would turn out to be evil for no discernible reason, since you can't really have a movie where only black guys are villains, for heaven's sake.

3 comments

Ilkka: "since you can't really have a movie where only black guys are villains, for heaven's sake."

Go see Black Hawk Down...

The zombies in 28 Days Later didn't dehydrate right away. It's only at the very end that we seem them all dying off - of thirst or hunger, it's not made clear - and that's evidently some weeks after the end of the main action in the manor house.

Peter
Iron Rails & Iron Weights

A very young Sarah Polley was in Gilliam's Adventures of Baron Munchausen. She was quite good in it--a pre-teen who could hold her own onscreen next to Erik Idle and John Neville. Pity she's wasted in a lot of tedious indie crap.

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