Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.
Okay... I’ll cop to it.
I’ve had a wicked case of writer’s block regarding reviews for the last few weeks, and a big part of it is because I saw two films that I fully expected to enjoy, films that came from filmmakers I have boundless respect for, and my near-total rejection of both films actually stopped me cold.
I don’t like writing negative reviews. And I think that makes me the odd man out in the critical community. If you look at Rotten Tomatoes sometime, check out the most venomous reviews for a film like BRATZ, some easy target for hatred. Most critics act like a sports car owner who finally got to drive the Autobahn when they are given free reign to be as negative as they want to be, and they go for it. I get it. If you see 200 films a year or so, the shit starts to stack up pretty quickly, and I think critics use these monkey-pile movies as outlets. They figure that no one is going to step up to defend something like BRATZ (and they’re right), so they pile on, working harder to make each other laugh than they do to inform with most reviews. And you know what? That’s just the way it is. That’s human nature. Most of the people who review films professionally start with decent intentions, and most of them burn out and hit a wall after a time that is fairly unavoidable. Think about it... you’re digesting hundreds of films a year and then not only laying out opinions of them, but also hopefully supporting and defending those opinions with some sort of contextual framework or personal anecdote or experiential connection. Hundreds of times a year. And if you’re really laying yourself out there, really digging in and trying to contribute something of substance to the conversation about the art form we call film, it’s exhausting. Especially when faced with things you genuinely hate.
But what about when you really want to love a movie?
And we all walk into films with certain predispositions towards them. We can’t help it. When you watch a lot of movies, you can’t help but file away your reactions to certain filmmakers, certain themes, certain genres, and you divide things up by a sort of shorthand. I have all of my 7000-plus movies in binders, and the binders are grouped loosely: Asian cinema. Horror films. TV on DVD. Animation. The Essentials. Trash I Love. My Favorite Directors. It would be madness for anyone else to try and find anything in these binders, but for me, it all makes a certain twisted sort of RAIN MAN sense. And I am sure you would find several of the films of George A. Romero in the binders I am most fond of, just as I’m sure that at least one of Michel Gondry’s films is in my binder of the films I absolutely can’t live without. I like these guys. I’ve liked these guys for many years... for most of my life, in Romero’s case.
But, holy shit, I hate their new films.
Let’s start with DIARY OF THE DEAD. To those who are giving this positive press, I have to ask... are you fucking kidding me? If this film did not have George Romero’s name on it and you saw the movie cold and were asked your opinion of it, you would demolish this film for its acting, its heavy-handed attempt at social commentary, its dramatic failings. And you would be right. This script is the very definition of “missed opportunity,” time after time after time. Basically, the structure of the film is a bunch of terrible actors get in a Winnebego during the end of the world, then drive by a bunch of more interesting films without stopping for any of them. Romero stages a few grand gore moments, but that isn’t a reason for me to recommend a film. I would expect nothing less from guys like Greg Nicotero and Romero. That’s not the issue. The issue is the way the film fails at all the things Romero used to do so well. How many people have ever defined a genre with as much authority as Romero did for zombie films? Before he made NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, there were zombies in movies, but nothing with the iconic and immediate power of the ones he introduced. His microcosm-of-America message is hardly subtle in the original film, but there’s a righteous fury underlining what he says that makes it real. It works. Same thing with the masterful DAWN OF THE DEAD.
And for the record, I liked LAND OF THE DEAD a lot. It’s not the greatest film of his career, but it’s a solid effort, a worthy entry in the series. I was excited at the end of that film, hoping to see another entry that followed those characters and further explored the break-down of Romero’s world. I like that he continued to push forward in the chronology of his personal Apocalypse. Not many filmmakers have ever explored the end of the world as completely as Romero has, and I love the progression from NIGHT to DAWN to DAY to LAND. It makes sense. And it’s bleak, but there’s room for hope. You can still root for humanity to get their shit together and endure.
If the choice is the survival of the characters in DIARY OF THE DEAD or the end of our species, then I’m afraid I’m willing to let the roaches have the place. I was a little puzzled when everyone ranted about what “douchebags” the characters in CLOVERFIELD were... I thought they were just bland kids who made some bad choices. Here, I actively disliked pretty much every single character in the main group of college kids who hit the road together when the first reports of zombies start coming in. And I think Romero dislikes them, too. The film seems to be recoiling from them most of the time. It’s a combination of the writing and the acting. The cast is, simply put, rotten. Scott Wentworth’s turn as the drunken media professor is community theater ham, and Michelle Morgan’s voice-over manages to perfectly capture the unpolished monotony of most amateur YouTube videos, which makes for a fairly painful sit. There are some interesting performers, but they’re all the people who show up for five minutes and then leave the movie again. There’s an Amish mute guy with pockets full of dynamite. There’s a group of black guys who take over a warehouse and start to stock up, and the implications of their sequence are genuinely provocative. A rogue National Guard squad crosses paths with the kids in the Winnebego, but the entire scene takes place off-camera, and the aftermath seems truncated, ridiculously tame.
More than anything, though, I think it’s just a case of hating the target Romero picked (the YouTube generation) and the execution of the idea. I don’t think he had anything of merit to say about our reality TV world, unable to put the cameras down no matter what is happening around us. There’s a conversation to have about this... but the shock is how little Romero seems to have to add to that conversation. The stuff about the government editing the TV footage and the YouTube footage being the only "Truth" is handled in a really obvious manner. There's none of the elegance of Romero's best work. Nothing that suggests that this is the same guy who staged the ending of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, still one of the great stark images in all of black-and-white horror. And I say that as someone who has days where he thinks perhaps we should have kept the genre black-and-white for its own good. His final scenes with Duane Jones are harrowing, and they look just like real documentary footage of the day taken in Little Rock or Memphis or Birmingham... charged imagery that must have packed a monster punch in theaters when it first played. There's none of that in DIARY OF THE DEAD. And the ending, complete with powerfully unnecessary voice-over, is particularly painful.
BE KIND REWIND is a different situation. I think it boils down to one thing more than any other: Michel Gondry is a creative, entertaining, inventive thinker, and he is absolutely not a screenwriter. ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND is a phenomenal film, but it was due in no small part to the way Charlie Kaufman’s sensibilities combined with Gondry’s to create something beautiful and sad and unique. ETERNAL SUNSHINE is crazy, but there’s a rigorous structure to it, and thematically, it’s a complete piece of work. Elegant, with beautiful characterizations. I liked THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP quite a bit when it came out, but I acknowledge that it’s sort of a mess as a script. It felt like Gondry was working out some personal thoughts and ideas, and I didn’t mind the shaggy sort of shapelessness.
Here, it’s an issue. And what really bums me out is how much I love that trailer. I think the two minute version of BE KIND REWIND is awesome, and I watched the trailer several times when it was first released. There’s a sweetness to the trailer and a silliness that I was really looking forward to in the film. But whimsy’s a hard thing to do, and by about eight minutes in, I was already worn out by just how whimsical BE KIND REWIND wanted to be. It’s exhausting. I’ve written a lot about Jack Black over the years. I’m a big fan. And I really don’t like anything about his work in this movie. Put this side-by-side with his work in HIGH FIDELITY, and you tell me which one is the performance of someone who is in control of what he’s doing, and which one is just sort of everything turned up to full-throttle for the entire movie. Or even look at his work in MARGOT AT THE WEDDING, which is a really undervalued film from last year. His work is maybe my favorite thing in the film. He’s wonderful with Jennifer Jason Leigh. Real. There’s desperation, and it’s part of the character, and it’s real. The desperation in BE KIND REWIND is a sort of flop sweat. It never feels to me like anyone agreed on what reality they were playing, and so none of it feels real.
It’s like community theater. And, hey, maybe that’s the point that Gondry is making. Maybe he wanted everyone to cut off a huge slab of ham. Mia Farrow and Danny Glover are sort of shockingly bad in it. I don’t know what they’re playing, but by the time they’re recreating DRIVING MISS DAISY, I was genuinely uncomfortable with everything they were doing. I just wanted it to stop.
I don’t buy the ending. I don’t think the movie earns it. It’s sort of striving for this CINEMA PARADISO style comment about the community of the movies, the way we all bond in the dark when we recognize ourselves up there. And I get the point in Gondry’s film. I can see how he’s trying to play it. But I just don’t feel like it earns it, and I sort of hate that. I hate that we’re asked to just buy these things that are the very texture of great filmmaking. We’re asked to accept whimsy and a sort of native crudity as a substitute for competence in places, and that’s what bothers me. Gondry’s a real filmmaker. I respect him. But when a film feels this undercooked, this tossed off, I don’t feel like the filmmaker necessarily respects me.
And now that I’m done, I look at this, and I can still think of a dozen reasons both political and personal not to publish negative reviews for films like these, films I really wanted to like.
But it’s really all a sort of tapdance, isn’t it? Like I said... it’s easy to pile onto something like BRATZ. But it’s chickenshit not to admit when you’re let down by filmmakers you really like, and I realize that the longer I do this, that particular type of chickenshit is an occasional failing of my own. So even if these are offered up late (I’ve got some other catching up to do this weekend here on the site, and it means I finally get to share some cool stuff with you I’ve been sitting on for a while), and reluctantly, here they are.
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
