This column, OPINION IN A HAYSTACK, will have a very lax format. In fact, one could say my format is that I have no single format. I shall review movies not on the basis of them being released, but on the basis of how much I feel I have something viable to say that needs to be said. Also, I have many ideas in mind for columns looking back at the films of yesteryears in different ways. I promise to always explain what I’m doing beforehand, or during hand, or post-hand…some form of hand-explanation will always take place. This first column will be called 2008: A Retrospective. I need to say a few things about some movies that came out before this chance to let out steam. Yes, I do realize that most of these movies came out in 2007 (thus negating the comedy of the title) but let’s run with it and be best friends, ok? The following reviews/rants are written with the assumption that you’ve seen the movies already, which you most likely have considering they’ve been out for a while. If you haven’t, please be aware of a ***SPOILER WARNING*** for the following movies: I Am Legend, Juno, Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead.

I didn’t hate 28 Days Later. Everything technical about it was beyond cool. The only reason it garnered ill will from the horror crowd was the “fast-moving zombies” stigma. However, once we all calmed down and realized that they weren’t zombies, just sick living people filled with uncontrollable rage, then the entire legacy we thought it was stepping on suddenly disappeared and it could be viewed as something more than an exercise in pissing on George Romero’s genius. The remake of Dawn of the Dead made by Zach “300” Snyder had the gull to actually be good, while also introducing the world to reanimated corpses that could run, which showered blue piss all over Romero. Why blue piss? Because while it was sacrilege, it was still kind of fun to partake in and watch. If only they could have just changed the title to Mall of the Dead, or Zombiefest! A namesake that would disassociate it with the Dead Trilogy would have been nice.

This leads me to I Am Legend. This movie introduces us to Hollywood’s next bat-shit crazy legion of zombie-esque-former-humans known as dark-seekers. You know why they’re called that: because no one knows what to call them. They are vampires, well maybe zombies, or they could be zompires, or perhaps vombies. How about we just name they after what they like? Darkness. They seek it. How does that sound, Board Room of Studio Heads? Anyway, I truly loved 75% of I Am Legend. I have never read Richard Matheson’s book mind you, nor seen either the Vincent Price or Chuck Heston versions of the movie, so my critiques are solely based on two viewings of the new Fresh Prince classic (I apologize, the joke of calling Will Smith the Fresh Prince is almost as worn as calling Keanu Reeves “Ted”).

The majority of the movie was completely awesome, namely the first hour and change. Will Smith’s castaway performance was a new step in the megastar’s career, coupled with the fact that he had a very psychological relationship with his sidekick, who happened to be a dog. Francis Lawrence, the director who brought us the “it could have been much worse” Constantine, really knew how play to play up Smith’s strengths, and build the tension. I am talking particularly about the scene in which Sam, the dog, runs into a building after a stray deer and, turns out, it’s filled with dark-seekers. In 2007, that is pretty much the best you’re going to get for an intense moment. I even loved the whole bit where Robert Neville, Smith’s character, was talking to mannequins he had set up in the video store. The movie even made my stone cold heart pump blood and forced me to hold back tears when Sam was dying in Neville’s arms. I even, somehow miraculously, didn’t feel the need to complain that the dark-seekers were all CGI-ed to hell, which for me is rare. Then they had to bring in the woman and the boy. I should have known that the movie was going to have a Sisyphus-dilemma in terms of quality, and the woman and her son were most certainly a thousand-ton boulder (look it up). Do people really need a happy convenient ending this badly these days?

Actually, that question can be answered with another 2007 film, this one more of a financial flop…Frank Darabont’s The Mist, which had an ending so gloriously depressing that people in my theater actually yelled out how much the movie sucked only because of that fact alone. Introducing the woman and her little “angelic” piss-ant sucked all of the unique marrow out of the great “last man on the planet” storyline that they were elegantly following. We didn’t need the human race to be saved. We didn’t need some convoluted message about God working His magic through butterflies, and we most certainly didn’t need to take away the true meaning of the title. Upon doing limited research on why exactly the book is called I Am Legend, I found out that Robert Neville is not a “legend” among the humans for being a savior. His self made title is in fact because he is a legend among the vampires (in the novel they are straight up vamps apparently) for being their destroyer, an evil menace that lurks in the daylight and hunts their kind. Since the dark-seeking-vampire-zombies are now the majority populace on the planet, they create a civilized society between them, and Neville is the enemy of their new way of life.

THAT IS BEYOND BAD ASS!

Why wasn’t that on the screen? How come the scene after Sam dies wasn’t Robert Neville suiting up Rambo-style and going out to become the legend that he truly, and foundationally, was meant to be. He should have become the hunter, the dark menace lurking in the daylight, all his hatred and loss poured into hunting down the seekers and making them pay for a lost world. Instead the exact opposite happens; he gets stupid, drives his car into a pole, and then conveniently gets saved by a 100 lb. chick during an attack of at least twenty of these extremely fast, extremely savage seekers and saves humanity and all the happy little babies of the world. The last fourth of this film proves to me that they really have forgotten what makes a classic, or an iconic hero, these days. At least Frank Darabont has the balls to try.

How do you go about becoming a filmmaker when everybody looks at you and says “Hey, didn’t your dad direct Ghostbusters?” The answer is simple: Make good movies. I really do think that Jason Reitman does exactly that, he makes goods movies that are completely different from the type his pop used to make. Thank You For Smoking was pretty genius, and Juno, while not nearly as biting, isn’t without its positives. I enjoyed it for what it was, not really understanding where all this Oscar business came from, and besides the teen dialogue being so unique it almost seems forced, I only really have one major problem with the movie. Before I tell you that problem, I want to make it clear I am not part of the Juno-backlash which I read about on several websites, or the Juno-backlash-backlash, which apparently can exist. I honestly don’t think the movie isn’t worth all this fuss. Severely hating it or unreasonably loving it seems like overkill either way.

The main meat (or is it beef? Hmm?) I have with the film is who the true “villain” of the piece is. My significant other says it’s obviously Jason Bateman’s character, her reasons being that his character wanted to be with Juno sexually, thus making him a pedophile, and making all other arguments null and void. I can see where she is coming from, but don’t agree at all. I can honestly say that while watching the movie, I felt as though Jennifer Garner was the villain and Bateman was the victim, Juno’s story arc aside. I did not even really think that Bateman wanted to sleep with Juno entirely.

I’ll explain.

Garner’s character (I can’t remember their names) was a mentally distressed and misguided person. All her banal goals, personality traits, and home furnishing/cleaning habits were basically the enemy of creative thought and the very definition of denial. She wanted a baby simply because that was put into her mind as what it is she’s supposed to want, what it is she’s supposed to do. She had no unique thoughts of her own and frankly, the mere act of her talking disgusted me. The way I saw it, she was everything wrong with the planet, not to mention her husband’s life. He, on the other hand, was still a person free of mind who had the ability to venture outside the American suburban nightmare. He thought as an individual and admitted to himself that he didn’t want to live a cookie cutter life raising an annoying miniature human because Norman Rockwell said so.

Along came Juno, this new person in his completely boring cut-off-from-the-world existence with his bland wife, and she sparked the fight inside of him to remember all the reasons why he used to love life and how much his wife’s Clorox prison is the very enemy of all the creative things he used to make and absorb. Juno wasn’t a sexual conquest; she was a street lamp hovering over a once darkened road sign toward a life that didn’t involve living in a house adorned with Ikea’s best selections and Oprah ideology. Sure, some sexual thoughts will come to pass when your are dealing with someone that gets you as much as Juno obviously did, especially when she is your only escape from a nightmarish relationship with a cerebrally stunted automaton like Garner’s character. In my opinion, he was the hero by leaving the marriage and the house before things got any worse and a child was brought into the mix. People are flawed, we make mistakes, his mistake was getting married and he corrected it as best he could. As to whether or not he would have gotten intimate with Juno, I agree that he would have, but it wasn’t because he was cruising the streets for barley legal poon, it was because she just happened to be the only person in his life that he could talk to anymore without having to edit his thoughts or silence his dreams.

To be very clear, I’m not saying I am for him having sex with a teenager, I am just saying that his reasons for having the attraction are not the normal sick-minded variety we would usually be dealing with. He didn’t do it, he left like he should have, and it’s not illegal to think about it. I guess making the semi-offer for her to come to his new place might be pushing it, but still, it never happened. I didn’t want them to have sex. If you want a clearer picture of this type of story, check out Ted Demme’s Beautiful Girls, it covers almost the same territory, just replace Juno with a really young Queen Amidala.

I missed out on the theatrical run of The Blair Witch Project. About a year later I borrowed the VHS (VHS…never forget) from a friend and watched it in the middle of the day when the sun was shining, bright and beautiful. I was scared absolutely shitless, like to the point of not wanting to move. The only explanation as to why I could have had this reaction, to a movie that most of my friends said they laughed at, was that back in the olden days (a.k.a. the 90s) I was a very avid camper and was used to hearing far off sounds in the woods during the wee morning hours. Take that and couple it with the fact that the only movies that truly scare the living piss out of me are the ones that allude to a far off danger that I can barely see, a la Jaws or those scenes in the Exorcist when they are downstairs just listening to the possessed girl screaming. Other then that, I’m pretty hard to scare with special effects and jump cuts, but make it cerebral and I will melt into a puddle of wussy stew. I still to this day don’t know if I like The Blair Witch Project. All I know is that three hippies getting lost in the woods with video cameras is apparently my vision of hell. Yeah, I was surprised too.

Two movies of recent theatrical run have proved to me that is was not the style of Blair Witch that scared me; it was the execution through and through. The two movies of which I speak are, of course, Cloverfield and George Romero’s Diary of the Dead. I just have a few things to say about Matt Reeves’s (or J.J. “why am I popular at all?” Abrams’s) Cloverfield. There was not a single character in the entirety of the “found footage” that I didn’t loathe. They were all WB rejects that looked as though Dawson’s Creek vomited into a loft apartment and reformed pretty faces from the chunks, and then dredged their personalities from the goopy-stomach-acid-residue in between said chunks. Rob, our main character and supposed hero, was like a shining bright beacon calling out to all college stereotypes to run to the theater and get a taste of what their successful post-college life of being trendy would be like if Godzilla suddenly interrupted their photo shoots and text-messages. Am I a bitter old man? Dam straight I am. Excuse me if I sit there and see an amazing concept, amazingly executed, with amazing effects only to have to deal with characters that deserved an apocalypse happening to them two decades or more ago when they were all traveling up the urethra with a cell-phone tightly hugged by their sperm tale.

I mean seriously, can we get a Kurt Russell, a Bruce Willis, or a Clint Eastwood type in there? Hell, I would even settle for a Steven Seagal type, just so long as I don’t have to deal with moronic trendy youngins that deserve death right off the bat. Look, I have nothing against new, young talent, it’s just I have a very difficult time digesting what passes for actors and especially leading men/leading characters in today’s Hollywood. Get a real hero, and please for the love of God, get one that gives at least two shits about his friends and companions and doesn’t act like those with him on his journey are meaningless hunks of monster-chow compared to his true love that is almost 98% certainly dead and not awaiting his daring rescue. Rob was almost indifferent to Hud’s (the camera guy) safety, and if he gave a shit about any of the others, I wouldn’t have noticed. The whole plot of the movie was an exercise in complete selfish stupidity and was more then I could handle. Everything else about it was fucking great, I didn’t even have a problem (as an amateur videographer myself) with the camera being almost unbreakable. My only complaint is with the awful characters that I hated, and the fact that they all died still didn’t convince me the movie had merit, their very existence being on the screen just made all the bitter hatred fly out. Next time get Kurt Russell to kick some monster ass, instead of Dawson slip-n-sliding down the streets over his tears of true love while generic bug monsters eat all his friends.

It’s always good to see REAL zombies on the screen. Slow, deceased, re-animated zombies in the hands of the master himself George A. Romero is statistically a good thing. Now ironically enough, the first movie discussed in this column was I Am Legend, and I have heard several fans and critics alike, even Richard Matheson himself, claim that it’s possible Romero aped the whole idea of Night Of The Living Dead from the novel/Vincent Price film. I have no knowledge of whether or not that is true, especially considering that one is vampires and the other is zombies, but for our purposes here let’s consider Romero to be undisputed king and creator of our rotting brethren. Having seen the Dead Trilogy several times in my life, especially the original Dawn Of The Dead and the great Tom Savini (better known as Sex Machine) remake of Night Of The Living Dead, I have to say that I fear Romero may be losing his touch, or perhaps my expectations for a master are too high.

Diary Of The Dead, as stated above, is another in the new line of “found footage” movies. However, it was in development and in George’s mind way before Cloverfield was a twinkle in Abram’s eye. In the past week I have been describing Diary as “Cloverfield with zombies” which is a disservice that I apologize for, for in truth Cloverfield is “Diary Of The Dead with Godzilla.” In no way is this movie a case of Romero selling out, In fact, it is him doing what he has always done, which is use zombies to their full potential and give up some serious social satire, something that the Dawn remake was sorely lacking (sadly not for the general public). This time around, instead of targeting consumerism, Romero sets his sites heavily on the, what’s the word…Blogosphere? The new world of interconnectivity and the common person’s newfound ability to control and give information that would normally be fully handled and possibly twisted by the government.

There is also a strong message about camera worship and the walls put up between the cameraman and his “cast of characters” a.k.a. the real world. These are great topics to cover no doubt, I guess my only complaint is, and it’s a small one, is how heavy handed they are. The movie is “shot” by a film student. In fact, the zombie uprising takes place during the shooting of a B-horror movie about a mummy, which births a “dead things movie slow” conversation. The footage has music and is edited to be more compelling. This is because, unlike Cloverfield, we are seeing the found footage in post production made by the surviving students at the end of the movie who give their editing up as an excuse to make the actual movie (the one we’re watching) better. Once again, very heavy handed. The entirety of the movie feels like Romero rubbing ideas in your face, even the short, but funny, conversation I mentioned above on why dead things wouldn’t move fast seems like him saying “Hey, zombies are slow, I should know, I made the first movie!!!”

None of this makes the movie unwatchable or bad, mind you, just perhaps trying to hard. As for the zombies themselves, it’s simply another one of the exact same scenarios as featured in the Dead Trilogy, zombies wake up and all hell breaks loose. They only exist to drive the story and characters forward, which isn’t a bad thing at all. I would say that many a great film, book, or play use the villain or monster for that very purpose instead of cheap Transformers-esque thrills that insult an audience. All the cast here is comprised of unknowns, none of them are great, none of them are awful, mostly they are forgettable and sadly generic, sort of living zombies themselves, I guess. There were times that the movie kind of meanders, and the only real things I remember are the bouts of dialogue that critique the Blogosphere (I’ve used that twice now, is that even an official word?) and how it can change the world, especially in a time of crisis.

Those of you who want gore, Diary has got it. It even has a few new interesting zombie kills (the acid dissolving away the head stands out for me.) The one thing you can always count on is Romero delivering humor and inventive kills. My favorite part of the whole movie was the drunkard of a teacher that gets caught up with the cavalcade of college film students. He might be a painful, old, grizzled drunk cliché, but hell the guy knew how to make grizzled depression work. All in all, Romero has made a pretty sturdy movie with only one or two wobbly legs, but he gets full props for a scene involving an elderly mute Amish man. Sadly, he dies quickly, but his time on screen is more precious then David Letterman’s cameo in Cabin Boy. Yes, you read that last sentence right. That’s my opinion… deal with it.

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