A new "Dead" movie is coming!!!

I have a confession to make. I love zombies. My favorite episode of my favorite TV series Angel was when "The Beast" killed everyone at the evil law firm Wolfram and Hart and the company's "fail safe security system" brought all the dead employees back as zombies.

I loved the movie The Serpent And The Rainbow which was about how zombies are really created.

And I love anything by George A. Romero, the absolute and undisputed master of the zombie genre. Mr. Romero has given us zombie classics like Land of the Dead and Day of the Dead and the absolute zombie classic Night of the Living Dead.


Romero's movies have inspired many other artists, like the great Pete Abrams:





Now the master has gifted us with another masterpiece called Diary of the Dead. This latest contribution to the "Dead" universe simultaneously takes Mr. Romero back to his roots as an independent film maker and takes the zombie saga back to its very beginning. Details in Mr. Romero's own words are available here on MySpaceTV:

The Roots

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This film is set to premier at this year’s Toronto Film Festival and is already getting great reviews from the critics. USA Today has this to say:

It sure looked as if the zombie revival was on the brink of expiring. Especially after the flesh-eaters were reduced to a livestock joke in the ill-fated comedy Black Sheep. Tagline: "Get ready for the Violence of the Lambs."

But if anyone could keep the genre on life support, it's the filmmaker who more or less invented it nearly 40 years ago with Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero.

With Diary of the Dead, which premieres Saturday as part of the Toronto International Film Festival's Midnight Madness program, the 67-year-old guru of gobbling ghouls has done a radical rewind, imagining what a 21st-century zombie outbreak would be like.

The film already is creating a stir: A Toronto Star poll of in-the-know festivalgoers picked Diary of the Dead as one of the most-anticipated titles.

Whereas Night used strangers barricaded in a farmhouse to reflect the nightmares of the Vietnam era, Diary downloads a post-9/11 and Hurricane Katrina image of widespread chaos for the YouTube/MySpace generation.

"I had a version of the story in mind when I was doing Land of the Dead," he says, referring to his return to his zombie roots in 2005. "I thought it would be cool to go back to Day 1, when it all starts, and lay media stuff on top."

The action centers on a group of students filming an old-fashioned horror movie for school. The scares turn real when they see shocking TV footage of corpses feasting on the living. The class assignment evolves into a documentary, obsessively shot by Jason (Joshua Close), who is driven to record every terrifying moment of their frantic escape in a Winnebago.

Go read the rest here.


I'll keep you updated as far as the general release date goes.

300

Apparently the deeds of the Spartans at Thermopylae were not sufficiently impressive to the production team behind 300. That must be the case because their exploits have been "enhanced" to a significant degree. For example King Xerxes must not have been sufficiently formidable since he was transformed into a nine-foot-tall giant with the voice of a Goa'uld. His elite personal guard, The Immortals, must not have been fierce enough in real life because they shown as Tolkien style Orcs.

That's not all. The elephants used by the Persians are shown as truly gigantic mastodons and the rhinoceros sent out to charge the Greek lines is the size of a triceratops. The local farmer who was bribed by Xerxes to reveal the pathway to bypass the Greeks and allow them to be attacked from the rear is depicted as a grotesquely deformed hunchback whose parents had fled Sparta rather than leave him to die of exposure (I guess proving the wisdom of the Spartan practice of killing deformed and sickly infants).

This movie is brought to us by the same people who produced Sin City and has the same look. but what was fine for a movie which was an attempt to create the illusion of a comic book come to life just seems out of place in depicting a real life historical event.

This movie would have worked much better if it was set in some mythical realm like Ultima Thule or Hyperborea where it could have been obviously based on the story of Leonidas and his brave 300, but not used real names and real locations. As it is the viewer is left with the impression that the actual deeds of the actual people must have been of only moderate interest since they need so much tweaking.

I hope this doesn't represent the future of Hollywood's historical epic. I would hate to see Washington's crossing of the Delaware opposed by river dragons or the Battle of the Bulge involving friendly gargoyles aiding the 101st Airborne against the Nazis and their army of demonic Sasquatches.

I don't want to give the impression that I didn't enjoy this movie. It was very well done, for what it was. It's just that the Spartans are able to stand on their own feet. What they did will live forever in the annals of courage, fighting skill and self sacrifice. Their deeds do not require Matrix-style special effects and a digitally created monochrome landscape to acquire significance.

Then again I'm not really a part of the video game generation, so what do I know.

Ghost Rider

I was a fan of the Ghost Rider comic way back when so I was interested to see what a movie based upon it would look like.

Pretty good.

This is a movie that could not have been made even a few years ago due to the need to have a character with a flaming skull for a head. The current production company pulled it off, however.

I'm not a big fan of Nicholas Cage, however he did well. Eva Mendes looked hot, which was about all she had to do in this flick. The highlight was Sam Elliott as the demonic cowboy.

The plot stuck fairly well with the comic, which I like.

It was also fun to watch the cops attempt to deal with a flaming demon who could ride his flaming motorcycle straight up the side of a skyscraper and could not be killed.

Hillbilly Rating * * *1/2.

The Good Shepherd

Front Page Magazine has a review of the film The Good Shepherd:

In the early going of The Good Shepherd, we learn that somebody tipped off Fidel Castro to the Bahia de Cochinos as the place where an exile army, backed by the United States, would land. Thus advised, Fidel crushes the invasion, a loss that has CIA man Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) rather downcast. Who tipped off the bearded one? It will be more than two long hours before viewers find out, but first they must endure political education.

Lesson number one in this film is that all CIA men are manufactured by the Skull and Bones society at Yale, a kind of spook finishing school, where we see them cavorting in skeleton suits, swearing secrecy, and wrestling in the mud while being pissed on by their "brothers." Edward Wilson doesn't like the urine treatment but stays aboard even though he believes the Bonemen are a squad of soulless, backstabbing sellouts. This interminable film, which the Washington Post called "brilliant," gets a lot more wrong, though sometimes in an entertaining way.

[. . .]

A Soviet operative turns out to be the Heroic Russian, a veteran of Stalingrad and frostbite. The lesson here, children, is that unlike the duplicitous Yale pansies, the Soviet spooks actually fought Nazis in combat. In the post-war period, the game is to grab as many German scientists as possible, the obligatory dark hint of a Nazified USA.

The Bonesmen proclaim that some leader in Latin America, an eloquent, gentle peasant, has become a threat. It is made clear that the spooks need to create these threats to keep themselves in business. The CIA, acting through the front company Mayan Coffee, unleashes locusts on the reformer's crops. The Good Shepherd thus attempts to deal with the Guatemala of Jacobo Arbenz. After Cuban revolution, Wilson tries to swing a deal with a mobster, Joseph Palmi, played by Joe Pesci, who reportedly lost three casinos to Fidel Castro. Even over the heavy-handed score comes the sound of a barrel being scraped.

[. . .]

At the end of his career, Wilson finally opens an envelope which, as a child, he took off his father after his suicide. In this note, Wilson's own father confesses to being a coward and sellout. Wilson burns the letter and moves on. Despite their failures, Wilson and his Bonesmen gang wind up running the CIA. General Sullivan portrays the agency as the de-facto U.S. government, responsible to nobody. As Clover observes, "Agency first, God second."

Among the Hollywood left the CIA has served as a convenient three-letter code for evil. This clumsy film takes the tradition to new lows. Spycraft and espionage remain of interest but there is not much evidence that cinema can convey it in a dramatic way that also does justice to the truth.

What is most disappointing about this is that the CIA richly deserves to be kicked around, but not for the reasons given.

The truth is that the CIA is the most left-wing of all the government's agencies. Even the State Department only matches the CIA in leftward tilt. All through the Bush Administration the CIA has ran a series of covert operations intended to discredit the President's policies and undermine his position with other world leaders and the American people.

The Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame affair is an example. Wilson's trip to Niger, at the suggestion of his CIA employee wife, Valerie Plame, where he told one story in a classified verbal briefing (he was never required to file a written report) and told another story in an op-ed piece in the New York Times was a put-up job.

The "outing" of Plame as a CIA worker by Washington's gossip industry was just icing on the cake as far as the Agency's leftist nomenclatura was concerned since it resulted in Fitzgerald's long and damaging political witch hunt. And this is just the most well known Agency attempt to torpedo the Administration.

Bottom line is that the Agency was created under a Democrat administration and came into its own during the Kennedy/Johnson years when the Ivy League "best and brightest" very nearly succeeded in destroying the nation. The CIA has never been able to grow beyond the politics of its founders and shapers and probably never will.

Borat

Ben Stein reviews the movie Borat. Here are a few of the points he raises:

2.) Much of the movie is about Borat making fun of people who have been completely kind to him. This is just infantile and narcissistic oppositional disorder. It's also rude, and it's not very funny. Maybe it is if you are five.

3.) Much of the story is mocking and belittling Southerners as a group. When I watched it, I thought, "How unoriginal can you possibly get? This is standard Hollywood fare and has been for fifty years. What is at all creative or new about this?" Plus, I like Southerners. Love them. They are great brave people who fought like demons to beat the Nazis who were killing us Jews. How ungrateful can you get?

[. . .]

5.) Worst of all, it has acute mockery of Christians. There is a long scene mocking Christian fundamentalists, in which Borat makes cruel fun of the idea of Jesus as Savior. He makes fun of Christians who take him in and save his life. Why isn't anyone noticing this? Are Christians just so used to getting kicked around that they don't notice anymore? It makes me very uneasy for a Jew like Sacha Cohen to explicitly mock Christ. It's sacrilege to the great majority of people in this country, for one thing. For another, it's insulting to the great majority of the people in this country who have made us Jews feel so welcome -- unlike people almost anywhere else. When did mocking Christians become the business of Hollywood? Was I out of town when that happened? I don't like it.

The first point, which I did not reproduce, conserned the anti-Semitism of the movie. I point out the Mr. Stein is Jewish as well as being a Hollywood insider.

In the interests of full disclosure I have not seen Borat and have no plans to see it in the future.