Year One

No, not a review of the movie, silly!

It's been a year since I moved down to LA to start my brilliant "film career." How has it been? OK.

I'm still poor, starving, not really doing what I want. But I feel I'm slowly getting somewhere. I like where I'm living, I enjoy who I'm living with, and my creative projects ARE taking hold, even if it's not happening as quickly as I'd like. I've made a lot of cool friends, had a lot of cool (and flat-out weird) experiences, and I am able to (barely) pay the rent every month, while working in my chosen industry.

And that was my goal right out of school. But now that goal's been completed, and it's time to figure out what comes next.
1) Do I make a movie? That's what I'd LIKE to do, but I don't have the $$ for that yet.
2) Do I try to move to another job that suits me a little better? Maybe. But sticking it out where I am now COULD lead to more doors opening. On the other hand, the big studios are floundering right now, meaning they spend less money on marketing, meaning I have less to do where I'm at anyway.
3) Do I just go crazy freelance? Act, work on sets, edit, travel, do whatever I can wherever I can? Ideally, this is what I'd like to do, but it's just so hard in such an unstable economy to go for it at the moment. But I don't want to KEEP saying that, and ten years down the line, find out I've done nothing but do glorified advertising for shitty movies.
4) Do I head for graduate school? I'd love to do animation at a place like CalArts. But it's so expensive!!! Is it worth wallowing in the student loan swamp even longer than I am now? And how much longer would that set back my (theoretical-as-of-yet) first feature?

I guess I'm just young and antsy, but I really know I can do a lot more with my life than what I'm doing now. It sucks that jobs are scarce, Hollywood is flailing and failing, and I'm completely broke.

Anyway, movie reviews!

"Wall Street" I checked this movie out because it deals with similar themes as a project I've had stewing around in my head, and I wanted to see how other filmmakers have let it play out. Overall a really fun movie, made even more eerie thanks to how it juxtaposes with the state of our current economy. My favorite things were seeing Charlie and Martin Sheen play as actual father and son, and of course Michael Douglas in arguably his best role of all time. Good fun!

"The Blob" (The 80s Version) I caught this on TV and was amazed I hadn't seen it until now. While I'm not a huge fan of Kevin Dillon's acting, this gruesome, fun, effects-filled B-movie extravaganza was right up my alley. A little better than the 70s "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," but not quite as good as Cronenburg's "The Fly."

"Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" Now THIS is how you make an animated movie!!! I wasn't expecting much from this film, but it's definitely one of the best of the year.
In many ways this movie reminded me of "The Emperor's New Groove" in the best way possible, in that it is far more insane, goofy, loopy, and silly than most other animated features, sharing more in common with a Chuck Jones short. Honestly if I had read the screenplay of this movie, on paper I would have likely thought it too weird to really work, but it was executed perfectly.
The movie is also a wonderful example of GOOD VOICE CASTING (I'm talking to YOU Dreamworks!). Bill Hader and Ana Farris are both practically cartoon characters in themselves, and their vibrant bouncy energy translates brilliantly. The 3-D in this movie is really cool too, as food falls towards the screen.
Finally I want to note that I really appreciated the lack of overt bathroom humor in this movie. Often animated films (especially...ahem....Dreamworks films) will have a lot of juvenile, rather unfunny jokes for the kids, and a lot of "adult" sexual humor meant to go over the kids' heads for grown-ups. It's one way to go about things I suppose, but everything in "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" is just FUNNY no matter how you slice it. The only semi-lewd joke involves a monkey eating his own poop (mistaken for brown ice cream), but even that is actually pretty funny.
Seriously, no matter your age, you will laugh your ass off at this movie. Between this and the surprisingly good "Surf's Up," I like what Sony Pictures ImageWorks has been up to.

"Law Abiding Citizen" I went to an advanced screening of this movie, so here's an early review. The film has some story issues if you think about it too hard, and relies a bit too heavily on its "Silence of the Lambs" vibe, but overall it's tons of fun. Gerard Butler, whom I've always been lukewarm about, probably gives his best performance I've seen, and it's really fun to watch him torture poor Jamie Foxx as he continues to commit more and more brutal crimes in order to take down the justice system, somehow all while still imprisoned.
The movie begins to run out of steam after the first half (where all the best kills are), and it is NOT for the faint of heart (several short, but very violent moments are peppered throughout), but all-in-all a really good time, especially since I saw it for free!
It's also refreshing to see a city movie take place in Philly, after seeing so many set in Boston (thank you Scorsese), New York, or LA.

"Zombieland" I often have more to say about movies I dislike than movies I like, and I'm probably going to say a lot about "Zombieland."
If you weren't aware, I LOVE zombie movies, mainly because they're fast, cheap, and out-of-control. Anyone can make a pretty cool zombie movie with very little money, and it's no surprise a lot of early filmmakers make zombieish films when they're first breaking out in the biz (i.e. Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi).
However for the same reason there are a lot of shitty zombie movies out there. Because anyone can make a zombie movie cheaply, any two-bit horror-loving punk (like me!) with a film camera often tries to make a zombie movie, and winds up with something pretty stupid.
Also, in the last ten years we've seen a LOT of zombie films get made, and frankly, I think they've run their course and need to die down (har!) for a while. The same goes for vampires, but at least zombies weren't pussified (and I'm holding out and praying werewolves stay cool for a while).
Bottom line...if you're going to come out with a mainstream zombie movie NOW, you'd better be sure as hell that it's actually good. Zombieland got great reviews, so maybe my hopes were too high. Because I thought the movie was actually pretty superficial. Sorta fun, but superficial. It felt like ZombieLite for the regular film-goer who couldn't stomach a "real" zombie movie.
A REAL zombie movie (especially after a decade-long surge of popularity) has something going on under the surface. I'm not saying I need to be hit over the head with a message like "28 Days Later" (a paradoxical "art-house zombie movie" that didn't work), but even Zach Snyder's "Dawn of the Dead," which worked mostly as fun escapism, still took some cues from the Romero original and had a bit to say about consumerism and human paranoia in survivalist situations. "Shaun of the Dead," like "Zombieland" was also a romantic zombie comedy (rom-zom-com!), but under its goofiness lay an examination of British humor and pub culture, and culminated with a rather dramatic scene of Shaun having to shoot his own mother.
Yet "Zombieland" is just a silly adventure film, played for laughs, and nothing else. There are hints of a deeper movie lurking beyond the edges of the screen at times, mainly when Jesse Eisenberg explains WHY a loser like him would survive a zombie apocalypse, and his "list" of survival tricks that ties the movie together is admittedly pretty clever. I also enjoyed the scene in his dorm room when Amber Heard goes ape-shit because it was neat to see his longing tenderness so quickly switch to horror and revulsion, even if it did remind me of things I've seen in other films before. Yet at the end of the day, everything in "Zombieland" felt very surface-level, as the heroes have a run-of-the-mill adventure to save our damsels in distress. And not a single one of our heroes gets tragically bitten, a staple of the well-developed zombie flick. I suppose that was the point; take this "scary" genre and trivialize it, but I don't think that's a good goal to strive for. Even my favorite part of the movie involving (SPOILER!) Bill Murray I saw coming a mile away. Since Bill Murray wasn't signed on for the entire film, I knew he'd get offed in some comical, accidental faction...and I was right!
OK fine...maybe not all zombie movies have as much depth as I'm giving them credit for. But they at least have scares, right? In "Zombieland" my horror instincts kept kicking in ("Look behind you!!!"), but every time I was bummed out when no monster jumped from the shadows. And the "kills" were almost all pretty uncreative. Just basic "blasts to the head." Nothing anywhere near as enjoyable as PJ's "Dead Alive" lawnmower kill, or the "Dawn of the Dead" guys picking off celebrity look-a-likes from the rooftop.
And how did everything still work? For a zombie apocalypse, it seemed like most of the world was still (relatively) intact. Bill Murray's house was in pristine condition. Never did we see the survivors going hungry or looking for food (except for twinkies). The characters talked about how rough it was to go without showers, but Emma Stone (whom I liked by the way) was able to continue on day after day with perfect eye shadow makeup and lustrous hair. And at the amusement park finale, all the power works, and the rides are still fully functional. Didn't anyone working on the film see "Life After People" on the History Channel and realize how quickly things start to deteriorate without proper maintenance?
Yes, the acting is good. Yes, the camerawork and cinematography is what you would expect with an A-list budget. But it felt to me like somebody just wanted to show zombies in an amusement park (admittedly pretty cool), and wrote a film around that idea. "Zombieland" may have been well-executed, but it lacked the spark and spunk of originality it clearly thought it had, and I found it uninspired.