The Burden of Zombie Dreams

Zombie Ishtar lives!

And better yet: Zombie Ishtar, aka World War Z, is great. It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s hardly the disaster that the Vanity Fair article, the one that drew comparisons to Warren Beatty’s Moroccan mess Ishtar, seemed to suggest. I will say this, though, about the troubled production: I would love to a see a Burden of Dreams-style behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of this movie. Something tells me more work went into making this presentable than we’ll ever realize.

The film stars Brad Pitt as Gerry, a husband and father of two who’s caught up in a global zombie invasion. Before you start rolling your eyes and huffing out “Ughh, another zombie movie,” World War Z takes a different approach. First of all, Gerry is some kind United Nations panic guru. When bad shit goes down, he’s the boots on the ground to make sure people are evacuated, protected, fed, clothed and otherwise safe. So when an advanced rabies disease starts sweeping through Newark, N.J., and everywhere else, Gerry knows exactly what to do: he walks up to the first abandoned RV he finds — the one that might have starter trouble and some bald tires — so he can ferry his family out of the city. Oh, the RV has no acceleration and the turning radius of tramp steamer … oops. In all fairness, Gerry never needed an RV in the Congo or that time in Pakistan or when that dam burst Thailand, so we can cut him some slack.

I’m being hard on poor Gerry, although I’m not sure if it’s because he picks bad zombie-proof cars or his name is in direct violation of that quasi-secret Hollywood pact that specifies “always Jerry, never Gerry.” The thing is, Gerry is a gnarly dude. He’s cool under pressure, he knows all the angles of government diplomacy, he can handle a gun and he can perceive important details in the chaos. In one scene he counts in his head the number of seconds it takes a bitten man to “turn,” zombie parlance for “register with the Zombie Party of America.” (It’s 12 seconds, by the way.) In another scene, Gerry witnesses a wee human child get swept up, but never bitten, in the zombie wave.

What does it all mean? Well, leave it to Gerry, who saves his family and then hops on a military plane to jet around the world to investigate the earth’s single largest crime scene. He starts in South Korea, where some soldiers found a doctor with a strange disease. Gerry is walked ominously into a room filled with ash and burnt corpses, some of them still wriggling. “Mother Nature is a serial killer,” someone says. He gathers leads and heads off to Israel, which has braved the zombie swarm remarkably well behind 80-foot walls built during the Biblical ages. An Israeli agent launches into a Jewish history lesson about why Jews were destined to overcome the zombie horde, and then they’re overcome by the zombie horde in a spectacular wave of undead that act more like army ants than humans.

I appreciate that Gerry is smart enough and calm enough to work his way through problems without being a blubbery mess. I think AMC’s Walking Dead, a once great but slowly failing zombie drama, needs a Gerry character to spirit the cast away from Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes character and all his hopeless inner turmoil. If I hear him say “for the good of the group” one more time I might lose it. To contrast Grimes’ wrecked psyche, look at a stupendously awesome sequence in Z: When an airplane’s entire economy class is zombified mid-flight, Gerry makes a carry-on suitcase fort between economy and first class. Ever so slowly, the wall goes up and up as quiet as possible to not alert the feeding frenzy in the rear of the plane. It’s a terrifically thrilling sequence and it ends with Gerry making a hasty, but necessary decision involving a hand grenade. Walking Dead would have labored with these split-second decisions for entire episodes, but here’s Gerry detonating hand grenades in commercial airliners.

Pitt’s Gerry has a number of other remarkably simple, but entirely unique, scenes that will add further footnotes to the zombie encyclopedia. Once after getting zombie blood dripped on his face, he stands on the edge of a tall building counting to twelve to see if he’ll turn. In another scene, he has a Pepsi at the worst time to have a Pepsi; the audacity of his beverage craving is almost worth the product placement. He chops off arms, injects himself with random vials of Ebola and typhoid, and gives butterfly kisses to a lipless zombie. Best of all, the character is framed within a zombie detective thriller, which gives it another original edge.

Much of the movie is spent looking for Patient Zero, that first poor chump who was gorging himself on infected tapir meat and contracted the zombie plague. And this is where much of the plot falls to pieces. Gerry jets around the world looking for Zero, and just when I thought he was getting close — and just when the mystery had relentlessly consumed me — the film switches gears. It’s all Patient Zero, Patient Zero, Patient Zero … hey, let’s find a cure. Now, the cure is interesting, especially how it is applied, but I wanted to finished that Patient Zero thread out. Instead, World War Z cut it completely. So when the end of the film rolls around, everything seems a little rushed, as if frantically ending the movie with open plot holes was better than the original ending, which was apparently a plot-killing mess. Again, though, I would love to see the other versions of this movie, to know if this Patient Zero plot was ever resolved. By the way, this movie is based on Max Brooks’ popular novel, which also had a limp, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ending.

Another frustration are Gerry’s children, who are so incompetent — even by dumb movie-children standards — that they seemed to be thrown into the movie to serve as some kind of new birth control device. “Look at what unprotected sex will do to you!” the movie screamed at you every time one of the little twerps ignored every instinct to survive. One kid won’t crawl out of a car that’s being swarmed by zombies, so there Gerry kneels coaxing her out. Any other dad would break her arms prying her out; better than having a zombie daughter, right? The other one just screams in empty hallways, which alerts every Zeke (that’s what they call the zombies sometimes) along the eastern seaboard. The wife isn’t much better: she knows he’s in the field, possibly around zombies, so she decides to cold call him on his satellite phone with its ringer apparently plugged into wall of Van Halen amplifiers.

I guess these minor complaints all touch on a similar theme: the audience of a zombie movie will always and forever know more about zombies than anyone in the actual movie. We learned about zombies from Walking Dead, George Romero, Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later and Dead Alive; the characters of zombie movies don’t have that same education.

In any case, I enjoyed World War Z despite its obvious faults. Stay tuned for that director’s cut. It’s going to be an interesting lesson in film editing. 

Animals House meets Monster Mash

After the Cars 2 debacle, there was some noticeable apprehension among Pixar fans when word trickled out that Monsters Inc. would get a prequel. So I won’t tease a riddle in front of you, I’ll just blurt it out: Monsters University is a worthy and spirited follow-up to a Pixar classic.

In short: Pixar didn’t ruin it. Not that the animation company, now a Disney property, has a habit of ruining things; it’s just dangerous to tinker with the classics, especially considering that Disney is now on something like Little Mermaid 4, Peter Pan 8 and many other direct-to-VHS cash-grabs.

Monsters University takes place many years before the scare-floor events of Monsters Inc., back when green one-eyed beach ball Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) and blue mammoth James P. Sullivan were starting college to become professional scarers. (In case you forgot, monsters frighten human children while they sleep to generate screams, which powers the monster world.) They both enroll at Monster’s University, the Harvard of scream. Mike, wide-eyed and book smart, naturally detests Sulley, a natural scarer whose dad left a tall MU legacy. A rivalry blossoms.

Like the first movie, University is endlessly inventive and witty. Invoking the spirit of college, it throws in all kinds of little college humor: hacky sack on the university lawn, reheated food at the union, secret fraternal orders with mysterious initiation ceremonies, that one kid who never took pen and paper to class, and lots of dorm-room horror. Shocker: Mike doesn’t room with Sulley, but with chameleon Randall (Steve Buscemi), who will go on to become the villain in the Monster’s timeline.

Sulley and Mike both enter the difficult scarer program, the most prestigious field of study at MU. Other fields include scare-can design, closet door fabrication and scare theory, but the top students all go on to be scarers, which is why Mike and Sulley compete against each other so fiercely. Eventually they’re booted from the program, though, after humiliating their professor, who looks like one of those terrifying mantis shrimp creatures. The only way they can get back into the program is by competing in the Scare Games, an intramural set of events organized by the fraternities and sororities, including Roar Omega Roar, a bunch of meatheads with popped shirt collars.

The lack of villains and any sort of heavy-handed conflict makes the film especially family friendly and light. There’s a silent fetch game in the library, a review of scare tactics, a maze of unfazed teens, a simulated bedroom with mannequin child, and a team race involving allergy-activating balls of thorns. The entire movie is rather harmless. Even its thrills late in the movie, at an all-girls summer sleep-away camp, are cheery and fun.

I especially enjoyed how the film focuses more on Mike (whereas Inc. more prominently featured Sulley) and his questionable career as a professional scarer. Mike’s a brilliant strategist, but his instincts on the scare floor are terrible. Mostly he’s just not frightening, which is the ultimate humiliation for a monster. The movie makes a case that not everyone can be the star player; sometimes we have to pass the ball to help the team most. It’s an inspirational message for Generation Me so I hope audiences admire the complexity at which it develops across the film’s vibrantly colored and pleasingly paced story. Sulley really drives it home late in the film as he tells Mike: “You may not be scary, but you’re fearless.”

Crystal and Goodman are solid performers, and their Mike and Sulley are two of the great Pixar pairings, right up there with Woody and Buzz. What surprised me most, though, was the rag-tag group of new characters in Mike and Sulley’s frat, Oozma Kappa: the two-headed Terry and Terri, pink sludge and momma’s boy Squishy, and Art, a Muppet-like goofball who will surely be a fan favorite. Squishy’s mother also has a prominent role, though always in the background. There she is doing laundry during the secret frat initiation rite. There she is listening to heavy metal with curlers in her monster do while she waits for her son and his new buddies to sneak into Monsters Inc., the company, not the movie. I found myself continuously howling at the spontaneous gags this movie threw at me.

Go see Monsters University. You will not see a more delightful animated movie this year. And if you ever waivered in your support of Pixar, let it earn it back now with this hilarious gem.

(As usual with a Pixar movie, I'm adding pretty much every photo that was made available to me. Expand the post three photos down to get the rest of the stills. Enjoy!)

Monster's University concept gallery

 

 

Man of steel, emotions of glass

Logic bomb: The best part of every Superman movie is always Superman, never Lois Lane. The worst part of every Superman movie is always Lois Lane, never Superman.

Therefore, logically speaking, Lois Lane should stop appearing in Superman movies. It would be the quickest and easiest fix to this ongoing issue of sub-par Superman reboots. Fear not, though, fanboys, you will survive Lane’s omission and you will do so with the usual grace, humility and decorum afforded to obsessive comic-book fans such as yourselves.

Of course, I say all this for the hypothetical next time, for the next Superman, if there is one. Because in this one Lois Lane is front and center in Zach Snyder’s Superman fever dream, Man of Steel, about how the Boy From Krypton saves our entire planet with the help of a plucky journalist with impossible sources and unrealistic press access.

It’s not that I don’t believe that Superman can’t have sidekicks, it’s that I don’t believe his sidekick would be a journalist, especially one who reminds her editor that she’s a “Pulitzer prize winning reporter” every chance she gets. I’m sure the Pulitzer-prize winning Chicago Sun-Times photographer who was just replaced by an iPhone will get a chuckle at her overuse of the phrase. What’s worse, though, is how the movie gives us bogus excuses — coincidence mostly — for Lois Lane to be in scenes in which she clearly doesn’t belong. Yes, that’s Lois Lane in space quick-drawing a galactic space pistol.

As for Superman, he’s the angsty and brooding oddball that Christopher Nolan’s Batman films have foreshadowed. (And look: Nolan even produced this.) It’s easy to draw an emotional line between Batman and Superman, and call out “done,” but I do like this Superman and his inner turmoil. His Kryptonian father, Jor-El (Russell Crowe), says the people of Earth will consider him a god — or maybe just God — which is why his Earth father, Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner), insists he hide his powers. “They won’t understand you,” he tells a young Clark Kent, frequent victim to school bullying. This fear of isolation alienates Superman and troubles his soul, which is why he falls off the grid, takes a job on the Deadliest Catch TV show and wanders around Alaska questioning his purpose and very existence. His fear of who he is serves as the thematic core of Man of Steel, and I loved how it was all framed within the sci-fi tweaking of his origin story.

Yes, this is a sci-fi movie, more than any other Superman movie before it. The bulk of the beginning takes place in Krypton, where dragon monsters roam the skies and large space armadas wage a civil war for Krypton’s few remaining days before it all goes supernova. Even after the movie leaves Krypton, there is a great deal of spaceships, warp drives, eugenics workshops, earth-carving terraformers and sub-orbital space labs. The villain is General Zod (Michael Shannon), who was exiled from Krypton the same day it blew up; funny, you’d think the courts would be closed that day. Decades later, he finds Earth and immediately holds it hostage until he’s given Kal-El, Superman’s Krypton name, who hasn’t even outed himself to his earthling buddies. Then they clobber each other until all of Metropolis and every IHOP in Kansas is in ruins.

At least there is action, albeit hyperactive, spastic and manic in its delivery. The last movie, Superman Returns, had Superman lifting heavy things. It looked like an Olympic event. It was a bore. Now here we are with this, Superman punching Zod over three skyscrapers and then Zod kicking Superman through six. Train cars are tossed like darts, jets are picked apart midair, missiles are caught and thrown back, steel beams are swung like foam bats, and bullets are seen ricocheting off uninjured flesh. This movie is not lacking the gratuitous Superman hero shots, that’s for sure.

Snyder (300) for all his excesses in previous films, dials down the style for this one, instead going for a more straightforward and traditional approach with none of the contrasty panels of action. I enjoyed how he tapped into the all-American spirit of Superman. Much of it is in tiny details: wooden church pews, creaky screen doors, rusty wagons in freshly mowed lawns, laundry drying on the line, swings blowing in the breeze and flags fluttering from the porch. One can’t help but feel patriotic watching the Man of Steel, and then in comes the 9/11 imagery to sucker punch you into submission. I’m sick and tired of shots of aircraft crashing into buildings. I’m sick of shots of skyscrapers tumbling down, the floors pancaking under their own weight. I’m sick of shots of people running away from dust clouds in the canyons of their cities. The Avengers did it, as have countless others, and now here it is again with very few differences. It is exploitative and inappropriate. Steven Soderbergh was right: the entire nation still has PTSD. And yet, here is Snyder waving it in our face for a cheap thrill.

Anyways, Superman is played by Henry Cavill (Immortals), a relative newcomer who will hopefully have a better run than poor Brandon Routh did in the last movie. Cavill, to his credit, seems to be a more versatile actor, if only because this script is better than that clunky paperweight of Superman Returns. His scenes with Costner, and Costner’s scene with younger versions of Superman, are utterly key to the emotional arc of this Clark Kent. There is real depth here between this father and his alien son. By the end, as Superman essentially becomes Superman, it’s abundantly clear that his human father played a magnificent role in his life. Costner, so often maligned for simply being Kevin Costner, is an exceptional asset to this movie.

The same can’t be said for Amy Adams, who plays Lois Lane. Adams is a fine actress, but she served no purpose in this film other than all of the purposes: She’s there when Superman appears to the military. She’s front and center when they interrogate him. She’s taken up to space for no reason. She arms bombs. She kills Kryptonian strongmen. She has a lengthy conversation with Jor-El for heaven’s sakes. At no point is this movie safe from Lois’ tinkering. Even after Superman zips through Metropolis doing “Mach 24” Lois Lane still manages to find him like some kind of weird stalker. She really is forced upon us, this movie and even Superman, who doesn’t seem emotionally stable enough for a girlfriend, even a Pulitzer winner who will smooch with one of her sources — a journalism no-no.

All cards on the table, though, let me drop some sacrilegious atom bombs here: Lois Lane has always been a dopey character. Always. Without exception. Margot Kidder from the Christopher Reeve movies, Erica Durance from Smallville, Teri Hatcher from Lois & Clark, Kate Bosworth from Superman Returns, even Noel Neill from the George Reeves TV series, Adventures of Superman. They all are jammed into plots where they don’t belong. And they don’t belong because I refuse to believe that a man capable as much as Superman would want to spend it with someone as vapid and arrogant as Lois Lane. This isn’t an attack on women in the Superman story just on Lois, who I would prefer to be a minor character than a major one.

I guess I can keep hoping for a Lois Lane-free Superman movie, but that day seems less and less likely, especially after Man of Steel, which features Lois Lane so heavily it would be nearly impossible to evict her from the next one.

Oh well, these things are getting rebooted every three years anyway. Next time, perhaps.

Someone needs to bing these yahoos

Want to play a game? Start by typing this into a Google search: “A soulless vacuum of product placement, dead-on-arrival jokes and a sinister misunderstanding of what technology is or will ever be, all told by two comedy relics doing their tired, shameful shtick hunched over computers far more advanced than themselves.” Now hit enter.

Voila, you should be back to this review. It’s like an infinite loop, and it’s the most meaningless stunt you’ll pull today unless by chance you somehow wander, in a lonely and destitute state of boredom, into The Internship, a new movie about Google’s long, gentle reach in the computer world.

I knew Google was brilliant before this movie. Most people do. That’s why Google is now a verb: “Google this,” “Google that,” or “Google me a better movie.” So it all comes off irritating, and a tad disingenuous, to see Google featured so prominently in a movie that is more in love with Google than any of its characters, especially its leads, Nick and Billy, two guys who live in 2013 but are somehow still figuring out the most basic concepts of the Internet. Billy, for instance, keeps saying “on the line” for things he views, you know, online. The Video Professor (Google him) would have a field day with this technophobe.

Nick (Owen Wilson) and Billy (Vince Vaughn) are deadbeat salesmen from an old order of salesmen, the shoe-leather salesmen from Glengarry Glen Ross: working their angles, pitching their patter, twisting personal stories back to sales hooks … the “coffee is for closers” salesmen. Anyway, they’re laid off and with only the most basic understanding of computers — they have to go to the public library to use one — they sign up for a tech internship at Google. The program doesn’t pay, but if they make the cut after the summer, they get full-time paid positions.

Of course, since the people at Google are so brilliant, they witness these two bozos shamefully pecking at keyboards and mixing up C++ with letter grades on report cards and rightfully have Google security remove them from the tech giant’s campus. And that’s it; the movie only lasts seven minutes. Ha, only in my dreams. No, Google doesn’t notice these two imbeciles, even after they fail the pre-quiz, the one that asks them if it’s OK to steal pudding cups from the lunch areas.

Billy and Nick are put onto a team of rejects, because that’s how Google apparently hires people: mash everyone into groups and then hire the teams that work best based on arbitrary tasks. Never mind that bad people end up on good teams and good people end up on bad teams, but whatever. Their team is made up of the infantile fantasies of terrible screenwriters. Two of them are Star Wars nerds, one who dresses up in kinky Princess Leia cosplay and another who rambles in some sort of ghetto-dweeb dialogue. There’s an Asian kid, who plucks hairs from his eyebrows to appease his raging tiger mother who isn’t even present in the movie. Another kid doesn’t notice the Golden Gate Bridge in front of him because he’s too busy Googling on his Android-powered phone. (Funny how no one has an iPhone.)

The teams are thrown into a techy thunderdome of coding, debugging, customer service and, inexplicably, Quidditch, the fake hockey-meets-soccer-meets-geekfest sport in the Harry Potter universe. Yes, they play Quidditch. If you see the movie, then this is your cue to use the bathroom; you won’t miss anything. I don’t know, maybe they play Quidditch at Google. The movie was filmed at its Mountain View, Calif., campus, so it’s definitely a possibility. I’m just not so sure why it’s here, other than to suggest (over and over again) that coders, programmers, software designers and tech-savvy engineers are terminally nerdy fanboys who can’t go 30 seconds without scratching their neckbeards and grumbling some Star Wars or Harry Potter trivia. The stereotypes this movie plays into seem unusually two-dimensional.

Going back to the Google facility, it’s probably framed accurately, if Google exists in a Dr. Seuss book: rainbow-painted bikes, candy-colored beanbag chairs, oversized umbrellas, snazzy sleep pods, indoor slides and enough smiling, high-fiving extras to make you question your own happiness at a job that’s not Google. Apparently, Google didn’t pay a thing to get The Internship to feature the company as this theme-parky computer utopia. Again, maybe Google really is this way, but then why just focus on the perks? We see all these people drinking free coffees, riding free bikes and napping on Google’s dime, but I never really got an idea what Google does. The movie only cares about the carnival atmosphere. Ultimately, The Internship should have used a fictional company, if only so it could make some jokes about companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft. As it is here, though, the film seems more concerned with framing Google in a positive light than making us laugh, which it does very few times.

Even more frustrating, this movie has a woman problem. In the real world, tech companies are tripping over themselves to include more women, and to clean up the sexist, misogynist and discriminatory environments that the fanboys have created. It’s a sexist and mean attitude, and it shouldn’t be here in this movie, yet here it is with an extended sequence in a strip club, where women are given more speaking parts than any other portions of the film. Football movies, gangster movies, Las Vegas movies … a strip club scene isn’t that far fetched in other genres. But a movie about a company and its search engine? Surely it qualifies to be stripper-free. But no.

Much of this would be forgiven if only it were funny. Comedy can be a rewarding phenomenon and it can gloss over other failures, yet The Internship inspires more cringes than guffaws. Will Ferrell molesting a customer at a mattress store. Cringe. Vaughn singing Alanis Morisette songs in a convertible. Cringe. Wilson and Vaughn explaining a pointless blender metaphor. Cringe. Vaughn referencing Flashdance. Cringe. The kid with mother issues talking about his breakfast, “milk of the bosom.” Cringe, cringe, cringe. Cringe times a googol.

What it all comes down to is that Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn are comedy dinosaurs who are unfunny at best, despicably outdated and pathetic at worst. They haven’t been funny in a very long time; since 2005 according to that Onion piece. Vaughn runs his mouth a lot, his trademark, and 80 percent of what spews out is nonsense, just noise to fill the silent void in this dopey comedy. Wilson, whose coifed hair looks like an Elton John wig, just seems tired and defeated. They’re both doing their Wedding Crashers parts and it’s painfully out of place here at Google of all places. These guys were once comedy elites, now reduced down to the quality of Rob Schneider, Katherine Heigl, Mike Myers and Adam Sandler.

And then Google … it has enough geniuses there to know better to get involved with a film that doesn't have the most fundamental understanding of comedy, the Internet or technology. I mean come on, the movie could have Googled better jokes. So it’s only Google’s fault for jumping into bed with The Internship.

All I know is I’m switching to Bing.