I love zombies.

For the last few thousand years, every culture on the planet has, in some way, evolved it’s own myths about the walking dead. Some are evil. Some are harmless. Some are just mischievous. But they are always present in one fashion or another.

Perhaps the first appearance of zombies in mainstream culture was Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein (turns out the first “zombie” novel was written by a 19-year-old girl. Go figure). The long-pondered idea that dead tissue could be reanimated was immediately given an iconic visage as Victor Frankenstein’s abomination.

When it comes to Hollywood, our monsters can be traced back to four basic archetypal figures:
Dracula: what we wish we could be. Seductive, sophisticated, powerful, enigmatic, ethereal, immortal.
The Wolfman: what we try not to be. Animalistic, violent, brutal, primitive.
Frankenstein: the idea that science is more powerful than death. We can bring back those we’ve lost.
The Mummy: the idea that there are forces more powerful than both. Something could bring us back and make us do unspeakable things.

While most “intelligent” film buffs will immediately dismiss the zombie genre as the aborted brainchild of a fanboy cult, if you look at zombies in the above context you have to admit they are actually interwoven in the fabric of our collective psyche, and have been for centuries. That is one reason I love zombies. The other reason?

They’re just fucking cool.

Whether it’s one zombie stumbling around groaning for “brains”, or thousands chasing down Ving Rhames and Milla Jovovich, I never get tired of seeing dead guys bite the shit out of frightened apocalypse survivors.

Though White Zombie (1932) and King of the Zombies (1941) predated it by more than thirty years, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) reinvented the monster. Instead of one or two zombies created to do their master’s bidding, Romero created thousands overnight, and set them loose on humanity. The infectious nature of the zombie was born, and rules were established:

1. Zombies are dead.
2. If a zombie bites you, you will die.
3. If you die, you will turn into a zombie.
4. Zombies can only be killed by a head wound.
5. There is no cure for zombies.

It is easy to dismiss Romero’s films; truth be told, they are very low budget and at times campy. But you have to look deeper. Night of the Living Dead featured an African American main character saving a bunch of white folk which, in 1968, was unheard of. Civil rights gave way to a blatant assault on American consumerism in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, which takes place in a shopping mall. Day of the Dead, in 1985, took on many social issues, including the military, racism, and gender issues. You may have to look harder than you’d like for subtext in a zombie film, but trust me: it’s there.

Romero’s Zombie Dynasty spawned hundreds of imitators around the world. Lucio Fulci’s completely unrelated film Zombie was actually given the title “Zombie 2” to make it seem like a sequel, just to cash in on Dawn of the Dead’s success. 1994’s Cemetery Man was injected with so much artsy Italian fantasy and surrealism that it’s actually an amazing film. But it wasn’t until 28 Days Later… that new life was breathed into the zombie genre.

There is an ongoing debate amongst zombie fans whether or not Danny Boyle’s “fast zombies” were an affront to or a revitalization of the undead. Either way you lean, this film established a new rule when it came to making zombie films: You have to come original. The new mythos of a Rage Virus infecting humans in mere seconds as opposed to the longer zombification process of the 1970’s, and the zombies’ ability to sprint everywhere set the bar high for future filmmakers.

If you type the word “Zombie” into a Netflix search, you will come up with hundreds of results. ANYONE can make a zombie film. And virtually everyone has. But the ones that stand out are the films that think outside the box. Fido is a hilarious cultural parody about people keeping zombies as pets in an alternate 1950’s society. Shaun of the Dead is funny and freaky at the same time. Wasting Away is the first time the story is told from the zombies’ point of view. There are plenty of ingenious, inventive, and downright fun zombie films out there, but they all have one thing in common: they are different.

While writing my own zombie-esque screenplay and absorbing as many films as I could, I was extremely excited to see the first glimpse of the new AMC original series The Walking Dead.

“The First Zombie TV Show” is a huge achievement to put on a resume, and I was looking forward to the Halloween premiere. Then I found the pre-release copy online, and I immediately watched it.

Frank Darabont, you owe me an hour of my life back.

Frank Darabont is, in my opinion, a completely overrated writer/director who wasn’t getting any love doing bullshit films like A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 or The Fly II, so he decided to build a niche adapting Stephen King novels. I will admit, The Shawshank Redemption was a great film. But word of mouth has been overhyping it for sixteen years now, and in that time Darabont has given us films like The Green Mile (weak) and The Mist (super weak). So I’m kicking myself for being surprised that The Walking Dead (for which Darabont is creator, writer, and pilot director) is nothing but cliche, derivative, lazy filmmaking at it’s worst.

The opening sequence is great: The main character, a Sheriff’s Deputy in the Atlanta area, happens upon a deserted “parking lot” in search of gas. Crazy shit ensues. We then step back in time (we’re not told how long). After getting shot by some as-yet-unrelated motorists, our “hero” wakes up in the hospital (28 Days Later, Resident Evil) to find he’s the only one alive in a two mile radius. Armed with a hospital gown, a book of matches, and what I’m pretty sure is a woman’s bicycle (damn resourceful police), he stumbles around a generic zombie wasteland. For half of the next ninety minutes, it’s cliche after cliche after cliche. This is really as good as it gets.

The uncompromising and realistic violence is, if nothing else, commendable. However, two-dimensional characters, out of place emotional moments, questionable makeup, nonsensical details, ill-fitting music, and a tepid lead actor snowball into the lingering feeling that Darabont and his crew really thought they could survive on the bland, 50-year-old zombie mythos (or perhaps a wing and a prayer?) we’ve all come to yawn over.

Zombie fans are living in an age when Zombieland is actually the biggest “mainstream” zombie title to date. When Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide is a bestseller. When multiple cities across the US are holding massive, record-setting Zombie Walks. The undead masses have taken the barely literate masses by storm, and they are no longer relegated to film nerds and people with sideburns. Why is it, then, that so many people try to capitalize on this craze, but refuse to bring anything new to the table? The First Zombie TV Show Ever, and they couldn’t even get out of bed and write a fucking story. For shame, AMC. For shame.

I will be watching the actual premiere in two weeks, and I will be following the show for at least a few episodes. But I can already tell you that the necessary innovativeness is seriously lacking. The charm of Mad Men, the intrigue of Rubicon, and the intensity of Breaking Bad are nowhere to be seen…

…and it breaks my fucking heart.

REQUIRED ZOMBIE VIEWING

Dead Snow
Wasting Away
Shaun of the Dead
Dawn of the Dead
28 Days Later…
Zombie Strippers
Cemetery Man
[Rec] & [Rec2]
The Horde
Fido
Evil Dead Trilogy
The George A. Romero Zombie Dynaasty
Planet Terror
Zombieland

As soon as I get off my lazy ass and finish my list, I’ll have my article about Hollywood remakes up for you. But in the meantime, I had to express my dismay and frustration now that the sick-ass international trailer for Let Me In has dropped.

Let the Right One In, for those of you who don’t know, is a Swedish vampire film that pushed the limits of the genre and changed the way most of us see vampires. It’s not just a vamp film, it’s a really good film, with great direction, cinematography, and music. With its story of a childlike vampire befriending a young loner in her new apartment complex, it weaves suspense, discomfort, and heartfelt empathy with artful violence to create an amazing achievement in filmmaking. This film came out in its native Sweden in early 2008 at local festivals. It didn’t even get it’s international wide release, including Sweden, until October of that year. Think about that. It hasn’t even been two solid years since the original came out, and we already have a trailer for the remake popping up on Youtube.

Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t see anything intrinsically wrong with remakes. It’s been going on for decades longer than any of us actually realize. But lately, Hollywood is stepping the remake game up. Brothers was a fantastic Danish film in 2004. It took U.S. studios all of four years to fuck it up with Tobey Maguire, whose paramilitary training apparently included shrill, feminine shrieks and retard strength. In three years, Frank Oz’s quirky 2007 comedy Death at a Funeral was remade with an all African-American cast, beating Chris Rock’s ten joke library into the ground and setting the civil rights movement back 40 years. Even as I write this, David Fincher is in the process of remaking Sweden’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which is still in theaters here, and the second film in the trilogy doesn’t come out until later this month!

Are we really getting so lazy that we can’t even wait ten years to make a film again? Lately, Hollywood even has enough ADD to reboot American franchises that are only a few years old. If you’re going to remake something, why doesn’t anyone try old school stuff? Would it be so bad to actually see another good Shakespeare film adaptation? Takashi Miike opened the Spaghetti-Western vault, let’s run with it! Rainer Werner Fassbinder put out 8 million films in twenty years, are you telling me there’s nothing in there we can use?

Many times, the problem with remakes is they deviate so much from the original in favor of making “their own” (haha) film, we end up with a steaming pile of Americanized bullshit; an unfortunate commentary on our culture. But the buzz around the interwebs today is that Let Me In appears (as far as the trailer is concerned) to be an extremely faithful retelling of the original, but without the subtitles. But without the subtitles???? So we’re excited about this immediate and unnecessary remake because we’re illiterate? To me, it’s infinitely worse that the remake is so faithful to the source material. You know what’s really similar to the original? The fucking original, which is still in the New Releases section at Hollywood Video. Who was it that walked out of Let the Right One In and said, “The only thing that movie is missing is English.” We don’t want to read subtitles, and no one likes shitty dubbing, so instead we spend another ten dollars to see a movie we just saw in 2009.

This has nothing to do with the talent of anyone involved in the new film, and everything to do with me being a pissed off purist. It’s one thing to see a film and not know it’s a remake until months later, and the original was from Bulgaria in 1981. But we know these films just came out, and we see the new one anyway, effectively encouraging lazy, unoriginal filmmaking.

We never stop to realize that no one in the Czech Republic is clamoring for the film rights to Avatar. The Hurt Locker will not show up as an all-singing, all-dancing remake in Mumbai next year. Not only does this say something unsettling about today’s culture to me, but it reinforces the idea that the country with the least amount of narrative history has to immediately and unabashedly sack and pillage other countries for the film industry to put asses in the seats at the local cineplex. Do I blame them?

No, I blame us. Hollywood doesn’t tell us what to like, it panders to us, and then convinces us we need more. We’re the ones who, despite giving Let the Right One In and many other recent foreign successes rave reviews, are shelling out more money to see America’s Red-Headed birth defect of a stepchild…

…and it breaks my fucking heart.

I woke up this morning intending to finish up our Film Festival videos and doing some actual work. But upon seeing that Eminem had dropped a new single, I felt like I should at least mention it.

Generally speaking, I am an Em fan. I love his verses on Jay-Z’s Renegade, Biggie’s Dead Wrong, Obie Trice’s We All Die Someday, and many, many others. He is one of the greatest mixtape artists of all time. His 2000 release, The Marshall Mathers LP is a Hip Hop classic. He was never afraid to say what he felt and he expressed those feelings with such anger, sincerity and beauty. He had all the tools to become a great MC.

Unfortunately, Em always held himself back by catering to the MTV-addicted teenagers that, on the strength of My Name Is, essentially made his career. Embracing pop-culture references, gay jokes and random fart noises he became a rap parody. And by mocking himself and his craft, Eminem never reached that legendary status he so desperately craved. Granted, he became uber-successful and made millions. But to authentic Hip Hop heads, he fell short of the promise he flashed throughout his career.

I, for one, was eagerly anticipating his latest album. I was hoping for a record less like previous singles and more like his mixtape work—less play, more passion. But sadly, I was wrong.

We Made You is yet another joke from a comedian past his prime. It’s just not funny anymore. It’s tired and played out. Clowning pop stars, name dropping and that ridiculous accent, we’ve heard it all before—ten years ago. If we want to hear a song about Sarah Palin, we’ll listen to a mindless country song about the women of “Real America.”

Hopefully, this track is just an aberration and not representative of Relapse as a whole. Maybe it’s just one last song for the demographic that “made him.” But it just feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. They made him into this caricature and now that’s all he is.

You can check out the song for yourself at the bottom of the post or watch the video here. And please tell if I’m crazy. But, it feels like Eminem is the biggest waste of talent in Hip Hop today and it breaks my fucking heart.

by The Great White Gypsy

People are sheep.

There, I said it.  Now, one on one, most people show some level of common sense and understanding.  I cannot even separate myself from this accusation, as I am part of the masses, and display the standard sheep-like tendencies from time to time.  However, it’s all about the shepherd; your leader defines you as a sheep.  Some people are actually lemmings in sheep’s clothing.  Some are donkeys.  And some, unfortunately, are overturned turtles in disguise.  These are the people that gravitate towards the self-help section of Barnes and Noble.

Last year, after I had just gone through a particularly painful breakup, my best friend wanted to make me feel better.  “Here, I got you something,” he said, and handed me a copy of The Art of Seduction.  For those of you who have never seen this book, it is a Sun Tzu-style battle plan for getting women.  I’m sure the author was serious in writing it, but my friend gave it to me as a joke, and that is how it was received.  Yes, I read a few excerpts here and there, but for novelty purposes; it is bullshit.

A couple months ago, I was in Washington for a friend’s wedding.  The night of the bachelor party, several of us had to crash at a friend’s house.  He is a strange, crazy, possibly retarded guy who thinks he is the shit, which is why we were all out until 6am and no one got laid.  In the morning, fighting a J-box hangover, I wandered into this guy’s “office”.  Similar to the rest of his apartment, it was barely furnished (I thought he’d just moved in, turned out he’d been there for a year).  A large desk supporting a small laptop, a rack of DVD’s, and a bookshelf was all the room contained.  On this bookshelf, there were two books.  One of them was a Donald Trump book on how to be a millionaire.  The other?  The Art of Seduction.

Ow…my heart.

The term “Self-Help Book” is, to me, semantically infuriating.  I’m not talking about informational books, like “Wine for Dummies”, or How-To books by Bob Villa.  I’m talking about those books that teach you how to reach your full potential, how to earn $200,000 a year, how to pick up chicks, how to communicate with yourself in the ether using a drinking straw, a paper clip, and a rubber band.

Let’s talk English for a second.  Self-Help implies that you help yourself.  You improve yourself.  If you make a mean comment about yourself, you are self-deprecating.  If someone else makes a mean comment about you, it’s an insult.  If you cut your thigh with a razorblade, it’s self-mutilation.  If someone else does it…it’s just rude.  So why is it referred to as “self-help” when you are reading about someone else’s life, having someone else tell you what to do to be successful and happy?

People are sheep.

They have no accountability, no direction, they always need someone to follow, someone’s direction.  You want to know how to make a shitload of money?  Go to college, get a Masters, and do your fucking best at your job.  Write a book, paint something, write a song, make a film, invest in the stock market.  Patent a fucking snuggie.  If you can’t do any of these things, chances are there is neither a lot of money, nor any Tooty-fucking-Fruity in your fucking future.  If you’re not happy, ask yourself why, don’t ask someone else unless they have a framed diploma and a post-modern couch in their office.  Do you really think these are benevolent books?  90% of these authors want to tell you just enough to keep you buying their books, because, check this out:  The people telling you how to make money are making money by writing books about how to make money.  Get it?  Donald Trump is not going to give you a surefire way to become a millionaire.  Not only does he have no understandable motive for this, but don’t you think if any Joe-Six-pack with fourteen dollars and ninety-five cents plus tax in his pocket could be a millionaire that easily, they would?  If Chatty Kathy at the coffee shop was capable of predicting the future and tapping into the universe, why is she sitting at a coffee shop at 3pm on a fucking Wednesday?  Because reading her self-help book at home doesn’t prove to anyone that she’s becoming a person; now she’s a sheep and a hipster.

Call me a cranky elitist, call me a prick, but this really does make me sad.  This is a society that has killed God and resurrected him in the form of Iphones and reality TV.  Modern man has disconnected and attempted to form a complete social structure within himself; the hero archetype is all but dead.  People are supposed to think that they are powerful, that they have only to tap into their potential to be successful, to listen to themselves for happiness.  But we can’t handle it, we have to have someone to tell us what to do, or we wander around the planet with no ambition, no direction.  People put their noses up at organized religion, claiming that God is a parental figure they don’t need; they are in charge of their lives.  They make the decisions.  Then, they make the decision to walk into Borders, and when they walk out, they carry under their arm the advice of someone they’ve never met, about things they didn’t know they cared about…

…and it breaks my fucking heart.