 L I S A M O R T O N |
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 M I C H A E L M A R A N O |
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Once upon a time, the American alternative cinema bristled with life and energy; the movies were fast and a little subversive, and somehow all had a sort of West Coast mentality. It probably all started in 1965 with a movie in which even the title for cryin’ out loud promised more speed, more sex, and more violence: Russ Meyer’s seminal Faster, Pussycat, Kill Kill. Meyer’s story of three stacked babes on a path of vengeance took them from the Sunset Strip to the vast wastelands of the Mojave Desert, and spewed so many great lines along the way that it spawned an entire cottage industry of rock bands and graphic novels. In the ‘70s this fine tradition continued, with the ultratalented Jack Hill amping up the blaxpoitation genre and making a star of Pam Grier in the process, while over at Roger Corman’s company directors like Paul Bartel and Allan Arkush made infectious low-budget classics like Death Race 2000 and Rock and Roll High School. Unfortunately, the heyday of the high-octane microbudgeters died out shortly thereafter, replaced by the increasingly dirgeful cycle of slashers in the ‘80s and direct-to-video/cable cheapies in the ‘90s and after. As the low-budget alt-thrillers gave way to formulaic, CGI-driven monster flicks, there was a brief spark of possibility in the work of directors like Quentin Tarantino, who grew up admiring these West Coast funfests and regurgitated them in new forms. My problem with the work of Q.T. has always been that those forms simply aren’t new enough. If you’ve seen the original source material, the rehash can look pale by comparison. Kill Bill’s martial arts, for example, will simply never stack up to The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, no matter how many pop culture references are worked into the dialogue. Ideally, American cinema should have taken that Meyers/Hill/Bartel aesthetic, kept the wild enthusiasm and pace (and the West Coast style/setting), and found a way to work in new technologies and actors in something that didn’t rely on those earlier classics for story elements. And that’s why I like Zombieland so much. One part crazy comedy, one part gorefest, and one part low-budget road movie, first-time director Ruben Fleischer has created one of the most enjoyable exploitation movies not made 30 years ago. Although the first half of the movie is set in Texas, it winds up in Los Angeles and the West Coast, and so fits nicely into my sub-sub-genre of West Coast genre-crossing thrillers. It’s frantic, violent, and very funny, with an inventive visual style, 21st-century effects, and the kind of dialogue guaranteed to be quoted for years. The script, by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, draws from post-apocalyptic zombie stories like Max Brooks’ World War Z and equally from "fast zombie" films like 28 Days Later to create a story set in a world emptied by a nasty virus. Like the last George Romero offering Diary of the Dead, Zombieland dispenses with the setup in an opening titles sequence, but unlike Romero’s serious assessment, Zombieland’s beginning includes some of the best visual gags in the movie, as zombie princesses attack soccer moms, and our protagonist "Columbus" (all the characters are named for their destinations or origins) explains his crucial "double tap" rule. Fleischer sets up some of his visual motifs right here, introducing Columbus’s rules, which will appear in print throughout, and the slow motion often used to capture the mayhem. Before long, Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) has joined up with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a redneck with a special talent for zombie killing; but, because Zombieland is entirely too smart to be simply a buddy flick, it adds in a pair of switchblade sisters, the lovely Wichita (Emma Stone) and the 12-year old Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). The pre-teen ends up choosing their destination: Pacific Playland, a California amusement park that she believes is undead-free. The quartet form an uneasy alliance, based on mistrust and need, and head west, spending time in Beverly Hills before a grand, final encounter in Little Rock’s dream place. In an era when an alarming number of movies run over two hours (and have the useless bloat to prove it), Zombieland runs a perfect 80 minutes, taking exactly the right amount of time to tell its story. Like the roller coaster rides that figure into the climax, Zombieland understands that these kinds of thrills can grow weary if carried on too long, and it never holds on any scenario long enough to let things slow down. The story and joyful direction are aided considerably by a terrific cast. Jesse Eisenberg as our narrator, Columbus, is the perfect lovable neurotic, the twitchy guy whose OCD has saved his ass in a holocaust even while his goal is simply to brush a girl’s hair away from her ear. He manages to make Columbus charming without ever diminishing just how messed up this guy is. I know a lot of people who say they don’t like Woody Harrelson, and I’m here to tell you—brothers and sisters, I was in your ranks until I saw this film. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect role for Harrelson, or an actor who could have played Tallahassee better. Just trust me when I say Woody Harrelson’s usual shtick can actually be very, very funny, with the right character and a gifted director guiding him. And what a stroke of inspiration to make Wichita and Little Rock not just tough chicks, but tough con artist chicks. Not since Tatum O’Neal rode to fame on a Paper Moon has a movie been graced with such an excellent preadolescent grifter as Abigail Breslin’s Little Rock. Emma Stone’s Wichita is a looker with a heart of gold, and she has a sweet chemistry with Eisenberg that’s never bubblegum icky. So we know the movie’s funny, but it also works as an action-horror movie. Fleischer—who came from a videogame-and-commercials background, claims he was less comfortable with those elements of the movie, but you’d never know it. The fighting, running, and blasting—even when performed on rushing amusement park rides—is always crystal clear and exciting, never resorting to the dreaded Shakycam and choppy editing that seems to kayo so many action movies these days. Tony Gardner’s makeup effects are eye-popping (and yes, I mean that in every possible sense), with a couple of crunchy bits that produced a collective "ewwww!" from my audience. Heck, I wish I’d thought of ‘em first. Thirty years from now, I hope movie-loving geeks will be talking about a new wave of fresh and frenetic goofs, but I’ll lay down a bet right now that they’ll still be riffing on Zombieland. Yep, I think this one has joined the ranks of cinema’s undead. Click here and scroll down for Lisa Morton's bio. |
OK, I'm getting a little sick of zombies. Nothing personal to all the shuffling legions of zombie fans out there, but I'm reaching saturation point. Just like I am with vampires. It's almost as if the zombie market, in fiction and films, is becoming a consumerist industry in and of itself. And when you consider that the greatest zombie movie of all time, George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, was a critique of this kind of mass production/consumption mentality, well... something tells me that somewhere a zombie Hegel is laughing up his maggoty sleeve. The glory of zombie as a trope is that, at their best, zombies are us. That's why in George Romero's hands, zombies can be scary, and why in the hands of those who parody Romero well, like Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright in Shaun of the Dead, they can be painfully, humiliatingly funny. A lot of filmmakers who rip off Romero for scares often don't get this. Look at Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead. Those zombies blew because they were nothing. They didn’t mean anything. Ditto, the Resident Evil movies. For scares or laughs, we have to recognize zombies. They have to be familiar. In the case of Shaun of the Dead, in which both the living and the living dead go through the same automatic flatline brain functions of their existences, that recognition can be can be squirm-in-your-seat uncomfortable. Going back 40 years to Night of the Living Dead, Romero has been making zombie movies with messages by using this recognition that zombies are us, social commentary that elevates his flesh-eating ghoul chomp-fests out of the dumpster of exploitation to high art. Not just high art, but the new folklore of the modern era. For the rest of human history, the assumed way to kill a zombie won't be to sew its mouth shut with salt, but to shoot it in the head, thanks to Romero. The new zombie comedy and Romero parody Zombieland doesn't recognize that zombies are us, yet it still works. The zombies are the world at large, not us specifically. The main characters are outsiders and exiles. They've never been part of the world, so the zombies can't function as "us" in the way they typically do. The movie starts with some sweet Jimi Hendrix riffs from his "Star Spangled Banner", and the riffs are a dirge for the society that is the zombie in Zombieland. Not the people itself. But this voracious machine that gave us SUV culture and suburban sprawl. Zombieland, as a zombie movie and pretty funny comedy, features protagonists who were never ingested into society in the first place. One character is a walking jumble of OCD behavior and Asperger's. In this context, Zombieland's humor has less to do with Night of the Living Dead than it does with The Stand. Zombieland is less about the end of the world than what you do with the end of the world. It's pretty impressive that Zombieland can function on this level and milk some pretty great sick humor out of the situation. Zombieland, as a story about exiles, hits a lot of the same notes as Fight Club. Adventureland vet Jesse Eisenberg plays a milquetoast young man crushed by the banality of his existence much like Edward Norton was in Fight Club. He's less than half of a complete person who finds a sort of Tyler Durden in the form of Woody Harrelson's Natural Born Killers-like zombie basher. Superbad's Emma Stone and her kid sister Abigail Breslin play pint-sized sociopaths with significantly less moral capacity than was exhibited by Bub in Romero's Day of the Dead. It takes the whole of the world to lose its humanity for these four to find theirs, which is ultimately an excuse for director Ruben Fleischer to nuke us with John Woo/Bugs Bunny visions of a zombie apocalypse, complete with a Wild Bunch-like climax in slow motion that's a ballet of gore, gunshots and transcendent, Nietzschean confrontations with coulrophobia. Yeah, some really smart and cagey characters do stupid things just so the movie can have a third act. But Zombieland, by showing us what people who are zombies ordinarily would do in a zombie apocalypse, is a new take on the genre and is pretty damned funny in its own right. Click here and scroll down for Michael Marano's bio.
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Click below to read Lisa's and Mike's (and before that Mike's and Gemma Files') other throw-downs:
