diary of the dead Tagged Articles at Cinematical

400 Screens, 400 Blows is a weekly column that takes an in-depth look at the films playing below the radar, beneath the top ten, and on 400 screens or less.

With awards season in full bore, I thought I would go back and look at some of the year's most wonderful sleepers, the films that "fell through the cracks" and are not appearing in awards lists or on top ten lists -- one reason being that they came out earlier in the year and were not issued on "for your consideration" Academy DVD screeners. I'd like to start with one of the most overlooked great films of the year, one that was virtually ignored by both the press and the public: The Dark Knight.

Just kidding. Let's start by looking at The Violin, which is very much worth tracking down. 2006 was the year of the much-publicized "Mexican New Wave," and most writers focused on three major films (Pan's Labyrinth, Children of Men and Babel), while passing over of the terrific smaller ones, like Duck Season and Battle in Heaven. Directed by Francisco Vargas, The Violin was made at around the same time, but didn't surface until 2007 in film festivals, and then early in 2008 for a tiny theatrical release. At the risk of cheapening the film with a cursory plot summary, it's the story of an aged, one-handed man who -- more or less -- helps his guerrilla son by serenading a sensitive but sinister military captain (he has to strap the violin bow to the stump of his hand). Vargas shoots in gorgeous black-and-white, cannily switching between hand-held and still shots.

Despite having previously established my feelings about this weekend's Quarantine, I must confess a new willingness to give it a fair shot later tonight. Regardless, this week's Cinematical Seven is all about first-person horror movies, with a couple of oh-so-subjective stipulations:

• We're leaving The Blair Witch Project (1999) out of this. It might not have been the first of these movies, but it was undeniably the most successful and influential. There are only seven slots here, and I feel like everyone has already made clear whether they find this scary or just stupid (I fall in the former grouping, though I say this having not seen the flick since my teens). If you still feel the need to take BWP to task, comment away.
• Also omitted will be The Last Broadcast (1998), which drew mild controversy at the time of its release for its similarity to Blair Witch. I'm only not writing about it because the copy of it sitting just over on my shelf here has remained unwatched. My bad.
• The previous film by the guys behind Quarantine is The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007), which -- being in the hands of the Weinsteins -- has not yet seen the light of day beyond a couple of festivals. Having not attended any of said festivals myself, I'll just sit here and guess that it'll get dumped to DVD (probably under the Dimension Extreme label), and not any earlier than next year at that.

Now, on with the list...

Here's one of my dirty little secrets: I love lists and I keep track of my year's ten best movies all year long. Most other critics hastily assemble their lists at the last second, which is partly why so many December movies dominate; critics can't remember what they've seen earlier in the year. My list shows that 2008 has had a pretty poor first half, but I do have some contenders for listhood. Two movies are currently competing for the top spot, though I need to see them both again to be sure. Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon (6 screens) is one; it has a lovely, laid-back, observant quality and feels less severe than some of Hou's other recent films. But I haven't yet decided if the film is a comedy or a tragedy. It all feels pretty light and insignificant, except for the saddest thing: no one seems to notice the red balloon of the title, drifting around Paris, unable to find a boy like Pascal to love it. The film also contains the year's most vibrant performance: Juliette Binoche playing a frenzied single mom working with a puppet troupe.

For an emerging filmmaker, the Sundance Film Festival provides a starting point for the life span of a feature-length work. There's a far greater sense of immediacy, however, for the filmmakers involved in the shorts program, where a wide variety of material tends to begin circulating the festival world before fading into complete obscurity. That's why the short films that screened yesterday as part of the third annual Sundance Institute at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) signified the most important aspect of the two-week event: With few exceptions, the films on display received the kind of exposure that helped validate this frequently neglected format. While some of the titles are available on iTunes, many that were shown to a packed house finally got the long-delayed reception they deserved.

Animated efforts almost always offer the best ingredients in any shorts program, since it's here that you'll find a combination of inspired side projects from gainfully employed studio animators and the works of struggling independent artists. The latest program couldn't beat the sheer brilliance of cult animator Don Hertzfeldt's short Everything Will Be Ok in last year's showcase, but two particularly memorable films left distinct impressions this time around.

Vexille
After premiering at Cannes in 2007, Fumihiko Sori's Vexille traveled the world, got a limited US release in February, and has now, finally, arrived on DVD. Set in Japan during the year 2077, Vexille is a female agent sent to Tokyo to determine whether Japan is developing robotic technology that has been banned by the UN -- this after being dumped by the UN and lurking under a satellite cloaking device.

The flick is all sorts of pretty; it's got women as the two main heroes, and a score by Paul Oakenfold, which makes the whole deal even more tasty. Reviewing it from TIFF, Scott said the film has "the most eye-popping animation this side of Miyazaki." How can you beat that?

Well, you could beat that with a disc or two full of special features, but unfortunately, this is all we're getting for the time being. Just the movie. However, if you demand special features on your discs, and happen to have a region-free player, there IS a Region-3 2 DVD version with a Making of featurette, interview, CG images, and trailers.

Check out Scott's review | Buy the DVD

Among my favorite film books is Michael J. Weldon's two-volume "Psychotronic" film guide. The first was published in 1983 and the second in 1996 (Michael hopes to publish a third at some point). Unlike Leonard Maltin's annual book, Weldon doesn't update an existing guide; each new guide is an entirely new volume. If you want to read about Halloween, you need Vol. 1 and if you want to read about Halloween 4, you need Vol. 2. A "Psychotronic" movie can be fairly easy to define. It's basically any of the "lower" film genres, dealing with the more questionable elements of society: horror, sci-fi, bikers, strippers, superheroes, zombies, kung-fu, vampires, comic books, drugs, sex, action heroes, rock 'n' roll, midnight movies, monsters, witches, cults, serial killers, magic, time travel, robberies, heists, contract killers, gladiators, Spaghetti Westerns, mad scientists, murder mysteries, pimps, voyeurs, etc.

Now and then, an interview yields an unforgivably tantalizing piece of information -- and, while 9 times out of 10 these nuggets are pure, idle, meaningless crazy-talk, now and then they're just too good to ignore. So it is today, as Empire pulls a sidebar from their recent interview with Diary of the Dead director George A. Romero where he idly mentions that one of his dream projects is a stage adaptation of ... John W. Campbell's Who Goes There?, later filmed as The Thing from Another World. Later, of course, filmed as The Thing.

It turns out Romero's a huge fan of the 1951 iteration of the tale, citing it as a major influence: "It really worked, it really scared me." And that admiration isn't just academic; Romero notes, teasingly, that "I watched The Thing many, many times but there's a reason for that ... I keep trying to get hold of the rights and I'd love to do it as a stage play." Romero then goes on to offer his own take on how to make the live theatrical version a more visceral experience: "I'd love to freeze the whole audience ... first of all, we'd have to chill the whole theatre down to some sub-zero temperature."

Empire points out that in a universe that's already offered us Evil Dead: The Musical, a live play of The Thing doesn't seem like a stretch; I'd also add that Cronenberg's The Fly is also due to hit the boards in an operatic adaptation in July. In his interview with Cinematical, Romero mentioned that he's already working on following Diary of the Dead with a sequel -- and, since we're indulging in some crazy talk, which project would you rather see the director focus on: More zombies for moviegoers everywhere, or a (literally) chilling night of theater for the lucky denizens of one city?

What a quiet weekend for indie films! Two holdovers performed very well, while several newly-opened films faced difficulty in attracting audiences. In its second week of release, The Band's Visit (Sony Pictures Classics) expanded from seven to 13 theaters and enjoyed a per-screen average of $9,769, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. The Israeli film may sound like a traditional culture-crossing crowd-pleaser (tiny Egyptian police orchestra gets lost en route to a gig, spends the night in a tiny rural Israeli town, everyone learns important life lessons), but the material is deftly handled to produce a very satisfying and thoughtful entertainment.

Also in its second week out, In Bruges (Focus Features) stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as hit men cooling their heels in Belgium after a job gone wrong. James Rocchi said it moves "in unexpected directions which are the kind of unexpected that you do not actually expect." Specialty audiences turned out in good numbers to see it, to the tune of $8,178 per screen at 112 locations.

Diary of the Dead, George A. Romero's first independent zombie film in over 20 years, follows a group of student filmmakers who, making a low-grade horror film in the woods, drive back to civilization ... only to find it isn't there anymore. We watch the film unfold as footage they shoot travelling through desolate and deadly buildings, neighborhoods, towns, cities -- coming to grips with the fact that the dead are walking and hungry and everything they knew is over. Shot outside of Toronto, where Romero now lives (but, as tradition demands, set near Pittsburgh), Diary of the Dead played both the Toronto and Sundance Film Festivals; Scott Weinberg's review from Toronto can be found here, while Jette Kernion's review is here.

Writer-director George A. Romero spoke with Cinematical about his zombie film legacy that stretches back to 1968's Night of the Living Dead, his concerns about the possibilities and perils of user-generated media, which Presidential candidate he thinks would have the best handle on attacking armies of the dead, and the undying popularity of the undead he created. " (If) I created anything ... it was the "neighborhood zombie" ... the guy with Nikes and a sweatshirt. ... Neighbors are scary, and when they're dead they're a bit scarier. But once you have that, it's idiomatic ... I half expect the zombies to show up on Sesame Street hanging out with The Count. ..."

Cinematical: I've read several notes and quotes from you saying that Diary of the Dead essentially felt like a new beginning.

George A. Romero: For me, it was a new beginning; I made four zombie films before this, and they sort of tracked, they were along a single storyline, even though they were 10 years or more apart, each of them. And they were just getting too big. The last one (George A. Romero's Land of the Dead) was a studio-supported film, which, you know, I turned around and looked at it: They let me make the film I wanted to make, I loved working with Dennis Hopper and Leguizamo and people like that, but I felt the film and I had sort of lost connection with the origin of the series, which was a little guerrilla movie that a bunch of amateurs made in Pittsburgh all those years ago. And I wanted to go back to ... I wanted to see if I had the chops and the stamina to make a little guerilla movie. I happened to have an idea that I wanted to do something ... all of my zombie films have had this kind of socio-political satire underneath them, and I've always used them as snapshots of the time in which they were made.

I got an idea that I wanted to do something about emerging media, with the mainstream losing its power and Joe Blow from Oshkosh taking over on the blogosphere. And it all sort of fell into place. And I thought 'Well, I can make a little film, do it pretty inexpensively, about students who are out shooting a student film when the sh*t hits the fan, when zombies sit up and start walking around.' I said 'We can go back to the very first night, and we can try to pretend ' -- even though that was 1968 and this is now --- 'that this is the same first night, when this phenomenon first begins to happen.'

In case you haven't enjoyed enough movies about zombies and the undead lately, Diary of the Dead supplies you with yet another opportunity. However, this low-budget film is from the guy who first introduced most of America to the horrors of the walking dead: George A. Romero, who made Night of the Living Dead back in 1968. (So the zombie genre is the same age I am. Cool!)

Diary of the Dead isn't a sequel to the other movies in Romero's Dead series, but it does tend to assume that you know Romero's standard operating rules about zombies. If a zombie bites you or if you die in any way, that's it for you -- you're undead. The undead are cannibalistic, and the only way to destroy them is to destroy their braaaaains. Unlike the other Dead movies, this one is shot as if it were a documentary -- a survivor has pieced together footage from the first night that the dead come back to life.