Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/20/22

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, October 20, 2022

Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009)

Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009)

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin, Bill Murray, Amber Heard. Screenplay: Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick. Cinematography: Michael Bonvillain. Production design: Maher Ahmad. Film editing: Alan Baumgarten. Music: David Sardy.

Zombieland feels so much like a parody of the series The Walking Dead that I had to check to make sure that the movie premiered before the first installment of the TV show. (It did. The series started on Halloween in 2010.) I think if the series had been as entertaining as the movie, I would have stuck with it past the three or four seasons it took for me to burn out on it. Because really there’s no way to take the notion of zombie Armageddon seriously, even though the idea of a viral plague of zombieism may have gained a scintilla of credibility after the Covid pandemic hit. Ruben Fleischer does many things right in the movie, starting with the casting. Woody Harrelson is one of those actors who always improve the movie they’re in, and Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin give him solid support. And Fleischer does something I appreciated: He gets most of the gross-out effects, the splattering of blood, brains, and body parts, over with in the opening credits so he and his screenwriters can just get down to concocting funny situations and lines for his characters: the nerdy Columbus, the Twinkie-jonesing Tallahassee, and the con-artist sisters Wichita and Little Rock. The idea of putting Columbus's “rules” on-screen to be splattered with blood and guts was inspired. This was Fleischer’s debut as a film director, and while he hasn’t quite moved beyond this first achievement, there’s still time.