No Comic Day
But work. Which is somewhat nicer now that they changed the time to earlier. Since I didn't have comics to pick up afterwards, I got home around noon and had the afternoon to myself.
In other news, I finally got around to watching Romero's Diary of the Dead this weekend. It was... okay. Some good ideas, but too much crap that didn't work and the performances weren't all that hot. A bit more detailed, a bit more spoilery, behind the cut.
I mean, the general idea, of something a university film crew made to document their experiences when a zombie apocalypse starts while they're shooting a horror movie as part of their course, well, that's pretty cool. And there's some nice ideas that come out of that, and the general look of the film is pretty good. But, as I said, the performances were a little weak at times, not so much because of the actors (though some of them weren't the strongest either) but because sometimes the lines just got so hamfisted, like they were hammering the idea home when a little more subtlety could have done wonders. And sometimes it looked like they were trying a bit too hard to work a particular moment that everything else flew out the window. Take one example. At the beginning of the film, they mention how in horror movies the slow monster doesn't catch the girl (who trips and such so it can catch up), just gets close enough to tear her blouse and expose her breasts. So, naturally, as I expected, at some point later in the film, they do just that. Have the monster shamble after a girl in the woods, and gets close enough to tear her top. A little obvious, but fine in theory. The problem is that the way they played it requires a) the girl to run from a relatively safe, open area, with multiple places to go indoors, into the woods for no reason at all and b) the zombie to completely ignore the camera man in favour of the girl. And I don't mean "he's gonna chase one of them, so he chases the girl for plot reasons", I mean, the zombie is right next to the camera man while the girl has already taken, and the zombie lumbers after the girl. And of course, c), despite the very slow moving zombie, nobody is able to kill it at that point.
The other big problem were the moments of idiocy. I mean, characters acting idioticly at times is part of any zombie film. But I much prefer it in a downplayed way, where you could at least understand the mistakes they made. But here it was too much. For example, they're in an enclosed, 'safe' area, with a bunch of people with guns. Suddenly, they (the movie-makers) need a threat. So they say "Uh, yeah, one of our guys just died, he had a heart condition. Now nobody knows where he is." ONE OF YOUR GUYS DIED? AND YOU KNOW HE'S DEAD? AND PEOPLE LET HIM SHAMBLE AWAY? I mean, they could have at least made it servicable if they said "One of our guys has a weak heart, and he hasn't checked in for a while. We're worried he might have died somewhere quiet, and turned." But no, instead they look like the stupidest organized group in the world, whereas before they were portrayed as fairly competent. Also, zombies don't hide. You got a zombie in a room full of people hunting it, they're going to find it or its going to find them very quickly. Likewise, there was another point where a person had turned into a zombie and was wandering through a house.. Everybody's freaked, so they decide to go to the panic room. They're reasonably armed. There are security cameras everywhere that could be used to track the progress of the zombie. You don't hide from a lone zombie, you track it down and kill it so you can do anything else you might need to do without trouble.
I think a lot of these problems were down to a single, wider problem - the movie tried to do way too much with lone zombies as a threat. Perhaps it was for budget reasons, they couldn't hire all the extras to be zombies, or perhaps it was just bad writing, I don't know. And, unless you're going with fast zombies that aren't very Romero-esque, lone zombies just aren't much of a threat, unless it's a one on one situation in a dark/enclosed area, or you've got people who are just too stupid to be allowed to live. And they chose option B. (Okay, for people who love to argue, yes, there's a couple other options, like 'first part of the outbreak when nobody really knows how it works' and 'everybody's unarmed and nobody wants to get close enough to go for the head with an improvised weapon', but they're not as common). And choosing stupidity is what prevents many zombie movies from being truly great. What they really needed to do was have more large groups of zombies that they had to worry about.
In other news, I've been experimenting with Twitter. Mostly just to prove to myself that my updates would be as boring as I'd imagined they'd be every time I thought about doing Twitter. So far that bears out.
Oh, and the Ships & Giggles Forum, my last remaining message board forum to discuss comics and such, died a couple months ago, apparently due to accident with one of the site admins or something. Well, it's back in a new location finally. So, there's that. I don't think any of my flist were regulars there, but for me it's nice at least.
In other news, I finally got around to watching Romero's Diary of the Dead this weekend. It was... okay. Some good ideas, but too much crap that didn't work and the performances weren't all that hot. A bit more detailed, a bit more spoilery, behind the cut.
I mean, the general idea, of something a university film crew made to document their experiences when a zombie apocalypse starts while they're shooting a horror movie as part of their course, well, that's pretty cool. And there's some nice ideas that come out of that, and the general look of the film is pretty good. But, as I said, the performances were a little weak at times, not so much because of the actors (though some of them weren't the strongest either) but because sometimes the lines just got so hamfisted, like they were hammering the idea home when a little more subtlety could have done wonders. And sometimes it looked like they were trying a bit too hard to work a particular moment that everything else flew out the window. Take one example. At the beginning of the film, they mention how in horror movies the slow monster doesn't catch the girl (who trips and such so it can catch up), just gets close enough to tear her blouse and expose her breasts. So, naturally, as I expected, at some point later in the film, they do just that. Have the monster shamble after a girl in the woods, and gets close enough to tear her top. A little obvious, but fine in theory. The problem is that the way they played it requires a) the girl to run from a relatively safe, open area, with multiple places to go indoors, into the woods for no reason at all and b) the zombie to completely ignore the camera man in favour of the girl. And I don't mean "he's gonna chase one of them, so he chases the girl for plot reasons", I mean, the zombie is right next to the camera man while the girl has already taken, and the zombie lumbers after the girl. And of course, c), despite the very slow moving zombie, nobody is able to kill it at that point.
The other big problem were the moments of idiocy. I mean, characters acting idioticly at times is part of any zombie film. But I much prefer it in a downplayed way, where you could at least understand the mistakes they made. But here it was too much. For example, they're in an enclosed, 'safe' area, with a bunch of people with guns. Suddenly, they (the movie-makers) need a threat. So they say "Uh, yeah, one of our guys just died, he had a heart condition. Now nobody knows where he is." ONE OF YOUR GUYS DIED? AND YOU KNOW HE'S DEAD? AND PEOPLE LET HIM SHAMBLE AWAY? I mean, they could have at least made it servicable if they said "One of our guys has a weak heart, and he hasn't checked in for a while. We're worried he might have died somewhere quiet, and turned." But no, instead they look like the stupidest organized group in the world, whereas before they were portrayed as fairly competent. Also, zombies don't hide. You got a zombie in a room full of people hunting it, they're going to find it or its going to find them very quickly. Likewise, there was another point where a person had turned into a zombie and was wandering through a house.. Everybody's freaked, so they decide to go to the panic room. They're reasonably armed. There are security cameras everywhere that could be used to track the progress of the zombie. You don't hide from a lone zombie, you track it down and kill it so you can do anything else you might need to do without trouble.
I think a lot of these problems were down to a single, wider problem - the movie tried to do way too much with lone zombies as a threat. Perhaps it was for budget reasons, they couldn't hire all the extras to be zombies, or perhaps it was just bad writing, I don't know. And, unless you're going with fast zombies that aren't very Romero-esque, lone zombies just aren't much of a threat, unless it's a one on one situation in a dark/enclosed area, or you've got people who are just too stupid to be allowed to live. And they chose option B. (Okay, for people who love to argue, yes, there's a couple other options, like 'first part of the outbreak when nobody really knows how it works' and 'everybody's unarmed and nobody wants to get close enough to go for the head with an improvised weapon', but they're not as common). And choosing stupidity is what prevents many zombie movies from being truly great. What they really needed to do was have more large groups of zombies that they had to worry about.
In other news, I've been experimenting with Twitter. Mostly just to prove to myself that my updates would be as boring as I'd imagined they'd be every time I thought about doing Twitter. So far that bears out.
Oh, and the Ships & Giggles Forum, my last remaining message board forum to discuss comics and such, died a couple months ago, apparently due to accident with one of the site admins or something. Well, it's back in a new location finally. So, there's that. I don't think any of my flist were regulars there, but for me it's nice at least.