Huffy Flounce

There may well also be a re-enactment of a conversation which never happened. Who can say?

It's being downloaded as we speak!

Good man.

Will listen next up in my car!

I just got a pass to something called Demolition. I know little about it other than it stars national treasure Chris Cooper, so I'm in. Tomorrow night at 7.

From the previews I've seen, Jake Gyllenhaal trying to deal with a dead/missing girlfriend/wife. Drama thing.

Gone Girl 2: Gone Girlerer?

I remain hopeful that the eventual sequel to Gone Girl will somehow relate to dog training and be titled Here Boy.

Roll Over: Play Dead.

Writing this from inside the theater waiting for Demolition to start! Second row from the front. Oh my aching neck!

What a weird, wonderful movie. Quite possibly the best of the free screening films yet.

Better than SuckerPunch?

Sadly, I paid $1.20 to see Sucker Punch thereby disqualifying it from counting as a free screening.

But yes. I didn't want to run Zack Snyder over with my car as a direct result of this film, so I'll call it far better than Sucker Punch.

I have still never seen it.

Don't ever. I'd disown you.

I enjoyed writing about it after I saw it.

That was the day I disowned you, wasn't it?

My take on it was pretty deeply negative. Don't know why you'd want to disown me for that.

I've never given a Snyder movie a positive review. My record's solid. It's airtight. I could run for president with it.

You enjoyed writing negative things about Sucker Punch. I won't disown you, but enjoying anything related to that movie puts you on thin ice.

I liked Dawn Of The Dead.

I've never seen Dawn of the Dead. Thus far, I've not felt as though I've been missing anything.

It's a good one. Written by James Gunn if I recall?

Snyder sucks the life out of the Gunn for me, though some Gunn still peeks through on occasion. Having the people give some of the zombies celebrity names based on their passing resemblances to celebrities is a pretty Gunn touch, but I don't think it gets played the way Gunn would have played it. I could be wrong about this. Maybe Gunn was happy with Snyder's direction. Still, some part of me wants to believe that the Gunn script was a living, breathing thing before Snyder's direction infected it.

One element, in particular, is very Gunn, and it probably would have been pretty fun if it had been executed in a more Troma-like style by someone with Gunn's particular sensibilities. Snyder plays it straight and makes it unbelievable within the world he establishes. This is an impressive feat, considering the fact that this is a movie about corpses reanimating, running like sprinters, and feeding on human flesh.

The element I'm speaking of is SPOILER: Zombie Baby. It's the kind of thing Gunn almost certainly would have pulled off with some flair and humor. Slither's decent proof of this. (So is Super, maybe. It has some grotesque moments played for laughs.) When Snyder does it, it just comes out of left field and feels like a betrayal of the film's established mythos. It comes off as a goofy moment in a movie that otherwise takes itself incredibly seriously. Why would a zombie baby be born with that kind of coordination and strength? That shit's straight-up Troma. It would have played in the Tromaverse. Something *even goofier* plays in Peter Jackson's zombie movie, though a big part of why it plays for Jackson is that it didn't feel out of place in the world he established. It doesn't work for me when Snyder does it.

It's a such a short scene that it probably shouldn't have stood out to me the way it did. I remember it really bugging me, though. This was before I knew anything about Snyder and Gunn, though, so a rewatch could lead to a different reading. It could also be that I'm over-applying what I now know of both directors onto my memories of the movie.

I also felt like a lot of what I liked about the original was lost in the remake. I like the original's commentary on the mall culture of the seventies, and I like that it plants the seeds for the trainable zombie in Romero's Day of the Dead. I like that it shows the characters making an actual home of the mall and, for a time, finding something close to normalcy. I like that it also focuses on their eventually becoming bored with this normalcy and feeling trapped. I like that the marauders show up and disrupt this normalcy. I like that it suggests that some human behaviors are so deeply embedded in our brains that they can transfer over to our reanimated corpses. Snyder's movie focuses more on running and aggression and on the humans-have-the-capacity-to-be-monsters-more-vicious-than-zombies-and-having-zombies-put-them-in-a-corner-really-brings-this-out element of zombie narratives. This last thing is something Romero's Day of the Dead also does, but it's something Romero built up to over three movies. The Snyder movie gets there a lot faster. Just like the zombies. (Note: I don't have a problem with fast zombies. They work for me in Return of the Living Dead.)

I guess it wouldn't have worked to parody mall culture with the Snyder movie, since mall culture was pretty much over by then. I'm sure a lot of what annoyed me about the narrative was already there with the Gunn script, but I'm not sure it would have annoyed me as much if Gunn had directed. For one, I just assume Gunn would have played up some of the absurdity and humor. I also suspect that some of that was originally in the script and that Snyder either played it down or cut it. I also just feel heart in Gunn's movies. I don't often feel it in Snyder's.

I have spent an inordinate amount of time figuring out how I would have got food and guns back and forth between the mall and the gunshop.