Braaaaaaaaiiiiinnssss!i just got out of a screening of George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead. I need to let it sink in before I make some big statement about it.
Tag line is a double entendre...ya think?
But I do have a question, rhetorical or otherwise: has anyone else ever noticed there are two kinds of zombie films? There's the serious, socio-politial statement-making kind (see: everything else Romero's done, pretty much) and then there's the fun-loving, zombies-are-really-pretty-silly type (see: Return of the Living Dead, Shaun of the Dead). To be fair, there's also the zombies-are-gory-as-fuck subgenre (see: Italian-made, circa 1970s-80s. I recommend Nightmare City and Demons for a trash-tastic double feature). Anyway, my point is, I realized tonight that I actually prefer zom-coms to zom-agit-prop. (Yeah, I did like 28 Days Later. It's not a hard and fast rule.) And Romero obviously knows he's Making A Statement, because there's a joke to that effect early in Diary. But what exactly is that statement, and why is he still using zombies to make it? Old-school zombies, while cool as fuck, are pretty undynamic when you think about it. Am I going to go to hell if I say I liked the Dawn of the Dead remake more than Diary of the Dead?
More on that later. And fuck all, I'm going to hell anyway, so who cares?
More importantly, I checked out Werner Herzog's latest doc, Encounters at the End of the World, which sees the intrepid filmmaker bringing his camera and droll narration to Antarctica to hang with the scientists and oddballs (and oddball scientists) who dwell there. I'm starting to understand that I'll never grow tired of Herzog's films. Normally, voice-over makes me want to kill, but he's just so right-on with his observations, filming someone who's just launched into some long anecdote and then breaking in on the soundtrack: "Her story goes on forever..."
Herzog muses that explorers like the South Pole-obsessed Shackleton (his Antarctic cabin, above) were motivated by "absurd quests to the the first."
He caps on penguin movies, he captures an impromptu rock n' roll jam performed as glaciers loom, he gets footage taken below the ice of the sea life (familiar to fans of The Wild Blue Yonder). As Rescue Dawn proved, this is a director who admires folks who aren't afraid to peer over the edge, existential and otherwise. "Is this a great moment?" he quietly asks, after one scientist tells another about a newly-discovered organism as if he were telling him what he ate for dinner. His timing is, as always, impeccable.
Tomorrow I'm seeing a doc from another chatty camera-wielder, Nick Broomfield. Also, the latest from Noah Baumbach and Johnnie To and ... Renny Harlin?
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