WAS1 Productions

Originally Written 03/28/04

I went to see the remake of Dawn of the Dead. The film was quite good. It updated Romero’s work, but stayed true to a lot of the source material, from what I could remember from it. The feel of the movie was also reminiscent to the recent film 28 Days Later. Romero’s zombies were slow and rambling. They were much easier to get away from but had some pathos to them. These new breed of zombies are much meaner, faster and more scary. A couple of scenes made you realize they were lost souls as well though.

What makes a zombie film interesting for me is not just the horror and the gore though. It’s a perfect setting to show how people handle the end of the world. It gives the filmmaker a chance to bring together a small group of people who are a microcosm of society. Yes the characters tend to be archetypes, but it still gives a chance for some interesting interaction.

This film was solid on that front. It’s not high drama, but it was still interesting and gave the writer a chance to deal with things like racism, classism, people fighting for control of the group, etc. The story was simple, but it kept my attention. There were some clever bits of dark humor too.

There were some failings with the film, like how the credits were amped up with MTV quick cuts that threatened to give you a seizure and how it seemed like there were two or three sets of credits at the end because they kept on showing more of the ending. However, they did choose some great music, like Johnny Cash’s recent song, “When the Man Comes Around” using Revelations imagery, and “People Who Have Died” by the Jim Carol band. Anyway, for fans of the genre, I’d say it’s definitely worth checking out.

Originally Written 03/28/04

Welcome to Collinwood was an interesting little caper movie. It wasn’t really a gritty drama and though it had a couple of dark-comedy moments that wasn’t what it was going for. It was more just a straight-forward story of a bunch of small-time crooks trying to pull off a job of a lifetime that just happened to fall into their hands.

The film wasn’t perfect, but it was nice in how it was kind of understated. It was also very much a character movie and it was fun watching the ensemble of interesting and imperfect people try and pull things off. It had some good actors in it too, like William H. Macey, who I always like and George Clooney. The whole cast was good.

Another neat thing about the film, which was set in a suburb of Cleveland, was the jargon. The characters kept on using slang terms for various things in the crime business and the way the dialog was written was clever in how you could guess the meaning of the word, without having to have it explained.

For example, one character who was facing a prison sentence asks his girlfriend to find him a Melinski, which turned out to be person who will claim responsibility for a crime and do the time, in exchange for money. One of the features on the disc was a list of the words and where they came from, usually from the person who originally came up with the idea.

Originally Written 12/29/04

House of Flying Daggers was pretty good. It reminded me some of Hero in a few ways. Like Hero, the story was interesting but kind of just okay, until the third act, where things fell into place and you could see all the layers to it. That really impressed me, and the ending was very emotionally brutal, but compelling.

The choreography, cinemaphotgraphy and settings were all superb. The fight scenes were impressive too, though the special effects of the weapons flying around were a little more obvious here, if that’s the right term to use. I though the effects were a little more organic in Hero.

The sound was also amped up as well. That made sense since one of the characters was a blind martial-artist, who used sound to pinpoint things. However, that made the fight scenes a little aggitating for me, since I don’t like loud noise.

Overall I liked Hero a bit more, though it’s hard to compare the two films. I did enjoy Flying Daggers, and the points I mentioned against it were small compared to the positives about the movie. I was glad to have gotten a chance to see it in the theaters.

Originally Written 12/29/04

I just finished the audio book to The Five People You Meet in Heaven. I have mixed reviews on it. The writing could’ve been better and it was very melodromatic, pithy and cliched at points. It was also predictable in a few places too.

However, even with those problems, the emotions of the story did ring true a lot of the time and I smiled and felt my eyes tear up in places. I also liked some of the narrative styling about how you learned about the characters life from layered flashbacks.

The theme of the interconnectedness of people and the worth of one’s life, reminded me of It’s a Wonderful Life; I liked the sentiment. It could’ve been better, but I also enjoyed it some and it was a good diversion and worth spending the five and a half hours I listened to it while driving around this past week.

Originally Written 03/01/05

I just finished listening to a really interesting audio book tonight. It’s Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach. It’s all about the various ways cadavers are used in all the fields of medical science, from disections in anatomy labs, to car-safety tests and firearm and armor testing. It also covers a lot of history, from the dark days of grave robbing for disection cadavers in Victorian times, to all sorts of funeary practices.

The author is pretty good too. She had a nice wry sense of humor, which helped deflect from the heaviness of the subject matter, but she was also sincere. I liked the choice of narrator for the audio book too. It was a fascinating read or listen, sometimes macabre, but in a neat way and always interesting, and definitely profound. It makes you think about what to do with your remains after you die. While medical science still sounds weird to me, I should really go ahead and register as an organ donor.