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Movie Review: World War Z

The zombie apocalypse has finally arrived, for real this time. It’s not some rinky-dink comic book, or a cable TV show based on a rinky-dink comic book. This is a serious major motion picture. And it’s not based off of a comic book, ahem, graphic novel, no, it’s based off a real book, with real words. Go ahead and go to the bookstore, it should be right on display when you walk in, the booksellers are all like, “Please! Come inside please! Buy our books, any books! Buy anything! A cup of coffee! Something, please, we need to eat, we’re starving! Look, they just did a reprinting of World War Z, and Brad Pitt’s on the cover!”

Because Brad Pitt is the costar of the movie. Rumor has it that Pitt was a little burned that he couldn’t secure the lead billing. The studio execs were like, “Listen, Brad, we want to give it to you, and normally we would. But we’ve got a huge new star taking center stage, a real up-and-comer.” And Brad Pitt was like, “Who is it? Who’s bigger than Brad Pitt?”

Brad Pitt’s haircut is the real star of the film. And once he and his new hairstyle were formally introduced, the rage kind of subsided somewhat as even Brad Pitt couldn’t help but look at the new do in the mirror and think to himself, damn, that is a ridiculously cool haircut.

It’s a groundbreaking new cut, perfect for breathing fresh life into the kind-of, about-to-be-played-out zombie movie genre. You’ve seen the trailers, right? I don’t know how to describe it other than that it’s like a man-bob, but masculine. It’s long, definitely longer than my hair, but professional. Each strand of hair, when combed or pulled back behind his ears, rests precisely at the top of his neck.

It’s great because, while I already told you that it’s professional, it’s also versatile. Perfect for that zombie apocalypse type of … well … what is it that Brad Pitt does in this movie? I never really got it, other than the fact that he works for the UN. They go about telling you what he isn’t. “I’m not a doctor. I’m not a soldier. I’m not a baker.”

And my missing his exact occupation wasn’t due to a lack of me paying attention. I thought I paid pretty good attention. Whatever it is that he does, he gets ferried around by the government from location to location, running around, trying not to make any noise, because that’s how these zombies know you’re coming, noise. But still, you know, he steps on some glass sometimes, and the zombies hear that, or he’ll kick a can of Mountain Dew down the hall, again, it’s an accident, but the zombies hear that also.

He keeps making so much noise I started to doubt that he was a … what should I call him? A specialist? Man, it’s going to drive me crazy, especially because at one point, right after he gets off the plane at a new location, some guy comes over to him and he’s like, “Who the hell are you?” and Brad Pitt’s like, “Do you know exactly what it is that I do?” And I thought to myself, here we go, things might start to make sense here, like maybe he’s an operative, or …

“I work for the UN.” Back to square one. But it’s all inconsequential. Because there’s this haircut. Oh my God, it’s like, if you have this haircut and, let’s say, you’re on a plane and the plane goes down, you’ll wake up and most of your hair is still going to be tucked neatly behind your ears. The man-bob makes it through! And I know that I keep spending a lot of time on shape, bounce, the way that, when he wills it to, Brad Pitt’s haircut can kind of fall playfully in front of his face, just a little, only obscuring say, one eye, the other eye looking back at you mischievously.

But there’s more. It’s like perfectly highlighted. Brown underneath, yeah, but sun kissed, just the right amounts of blond that, while still maintaining its professionalism, it screams out: what isn’t this haircut capable of? It’s the men’s haircut of the future. It’s perfect for at home or at the office. From casually running away from a hoard of zombies to frantically running away from an even bigger hoard of zombies. I don’t know why the director didn’t make the obvious choice to change the title to World War H.

As if to highlight the magnificence of Brad Pitt’s new haircut, they give him this woman soldier sidekick, and her head is completely shaved. What a role reversal! Hey lady, hope you’re not too attached to your hair, because if you want to act along Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt’s new haircut, you’re going to have to buzz your head entirely.

I feel like I’m not saying enough about the haircut, but I haven’t said much about the movie. It’s an OK movie. The scenes where it’s classic zombie stuff, like running, or trying to get through a building, stuff like that, those scenes totally work. It’s just the right amount of suspense and shit-in-your-pants zombies popping out of the closet.

But in terms of plot? Eh. I don’t know. Again, I didn’t not like it. It’s just, you know, what do you think happens in a global zombie movie? Yeah, that’s about it. The ending is kind of lame. But endings are always the toughest part of a movie, and I’m trying not to let my entire judgment of a film be based solely on how well everything wrapped up. Because I’ve found that most movies are constitutionally incapable of having a decent wrap up.

Kind of like this review. I spent so much time talking about the haircut, and then I made that awkward, forced transition to review, and now I’m trying equally as hard to abruptly end it without really making it too obvious that I don’t know what I’m doing. So, uh, yeah. It’s not bad. The movie, that is. The haircut is fantastic.

Movie Review: Man of Steel

You’ve seen the trailers. Everybody knows the story. It’s Superman. What can you really say about a Superman movie? Americans are more familiar with Kal-El’s origins than they are with the Bible. There’s nothing to spoil here. There’s nothing to do except comment on what worked and, unfortunately, everything that didn’t.

The previous new Superman movie was so bad that I personally thought that the man in the red cape was going to be condemned to at least a twenty-year exile from the big screen. But no sooner did the tepid reviews of Superman Returns start trickling in than Hollywood announced plans for a reboot.

And then they teased it out like you can only tease out a big superhero movie. In any other genre, audiences won’t have the patience for these types of games. Like, a year before the release, they’ll show a glimpse of the costume’s shoulder pad. And then a month later a poster. This all culminated in the onslaught of trailers released in the past month or so.

Which, I’m sorry to say, kind of baited me in. The previews looked great. Everything felt cool and modern. I was actually sort of looking forward to a Superman movie, I couldn’t believe it. But then I saw it, and the cynical jaded part of my brain laughed at how gullible I’d been. Because a stunning three-minute trailer does not guarantee a whole two-plus-hour feature film.

It’s stupid to complain about the story, but I’ll do it anyway. How many times are we audiences expected to sit through another tried-and-true opening of Jor-El sending his infant son to escape from the dying planet Krypton? Russell Crowe gives a totally generic and bland performance as Superman’s biological dad. He tries warning the Kryptonian leaders about the planet’s imminent destruction. Nobody listens.

General Zod shows up. There’s a chase scene. There’s a flying bird thing that Jor-El rides around, and it’s almost exactly like the flight scenes from Avatar, only sepia-toned. General Zod gets banished to the Phantom Zone. Wow! So exciting. I really can’t imagine where they came up with such a novel idea for a Superman origin movie.

And then it’s just this weird out of order montage of Clark Kent growing up, learning about his powers, about himself. Even though Jor-El dies, he’s somehow still around the rest of the movie, talking to Superman in his weird Russell Crowe pseudo-English accent. General Zod has an American accent. I never understood why they don’t just streamline the accents at casting. It doesn’t matter, really, because everyone on Krypton speaks English I guess, that’s all that’s important.

You know what? I’m not even going to talk about the plot anymore. There are some cool scenes here and there, but ultimately it’s a boring, boring movie. It goes on forever. There are a lot of grandiose ideas and sweeping shots filled with a larger-than-life Superman-ish score. A lot of the more glaring plot holes are either casually written-off or more blatantly ignored. Like Kevin Costner talking about why the government didn’t show up to collect the spaceship. “I don’t know why they didn’t come. They just didn’t.” Or when a bearded Clark Kent shows up at Jor-El’s twenty-thousand year old spaceship and emerges in a Kryptonian Superman costume, totally clean-shaven.

And then it’s just punch, punch, fly, kick, hit, punch, heat-vision eyes, punch, shove, fly, swoop, kiss, punch, punch, punch, punch, fly, punch, fly for the rest of the movie.

And is it just me, or do the effects here feel kind of cheap? It’s like, maybe Avatar set the bar pretty high in terms of digital graphics, but every new CGI laden movie that comes out lately, it feels like the artists are just rushing through the film. Everything’s kind of blurry, just a little too intentionally soft around the edges. I keep seeing the preview for World War Z and it looks just the same, like a bad cartoon. Also, another note about cinematography here, they went for the whole shaky camera thing, which, I don’t know, I guess it was supposed to make me feel like I was chasing Superman or something? And what about those sun glare spots? That’s like the first thing that everybody makes fun of in modern movies. Why are they still doing it?

Whatever, I can make snarky comments about the production all I want. But I’m mostly kidding. This was a highly polished big budget Superman movie. It looked cool. It would have been good as a series of ten-minute installments. Really, the problem lies with the Superman story. We’re talking about a character that’s older than my dead grandfather here. His story is legend and as such it is immune to change.

So what do we have? Just this never-ending intro, an infinite origin story. Superman is all beginning, no end, not even a middle anywhere in sight. To make Superman relevant, to keep the character interesting, someone’s eventually going to have to do something wildly different. But in a good way, not in the blue electric Superman from the 90s. Otherwise he’s destined to a fate of obscurity. Maybe not immediately, maybe not this generation, but eventually there’s going to be another Superman origin movie released, and all the kids are going to look at this giant S and think, this is boring. Man of Steel was boring.

Movie Review: The Great Gatsby

When you go see The Great Gatsby, make sure you stick around after the ending. Once the credits finish rolling, spoiler alert, the camera cuts to Thanos, the purple guy from the very end of The Avengers. He’s still smiling and laughing and getting his evil plans all in order for The Avengers 2.

That was a funny joke, right? Yeah, it’s just that, I’m not really sure how to write up a review for a movie like The Great Gatsby. It’s easy when I really like something, when I really don’t like something, or even when I think something is just really boring. That’s something to say, and I can say it, and I can try to make little jokes here and there.

But did I like The Great Gatsby? I don’t know. I didn’t hate it. It wasn’t totally boring. It’s kind of hard to make heads or tails of what’s going on, mostly because everybody that went through any sort of high school in the US, even if they didn’t do any homework or study for a single test, just by sitting in English class we’ve all sort of absorbed The Great Gatsby, the lighthouses, those big eyes on the billboard.

It was the symbolism of the novel, those little things that I forgot about, that after I had seen them on the screen, I was like, oh yeah, I remember my teacher from junior year going on and on about this scene or that scene. And the movie had about the same subtleties of a high school English teacher saying, “Remember that billboard. Remember those eyes. It’s going to be on the test,” every time they’d zoom in on an image, trying to distill what worked for the novel into wide-angle camera shots.

The movie was very cartoony. It reminded me of 300, the same kind of all-CGI background. This isn’t a critique, just an observation. Because, like I said, the story is so familiar, any Gatsby movie is going to wind up being an interpretation of sorts, and I guess I’d have to say that it was kind of cool, seeing the whole over-the-top 1920s depicted in over-the-top big studio movie special effects. If only I had gone for the 3D.

The acting was fine, with one exception being Tobey Maguire. For some reason, whenever I see this guy in any film, I can’t shake the jazz flute emo scene from Spider-Man 3 out of my head. Also, one time I saw this video clip totally out of context, Maguire was being harassed by some fan who wanted a picture, but he totally overreacted, slapped this guy’s camera out of his hands onto the ground. Maybe that guy deserved it, but I don’t know, you’re a celebrity, you’ve got to learn how to keep those impulses a little more in check.

Which really has nothing to do with The Great Gatsby, but like I said, I really don’t know what else to say. It was big. Everything was loud. There were some weird hip-hop music scenes in the beginning of the movie which didn’t exactly add to the whole 1920s feel. I thought the score got better as the movie progressed, they’d take modern songs and have them peppered throughout the movies as if they had been performed by bands of that era.

And again, it wasn’t a bad movie. The story made more sense to me than it did in high school. Maybe I should have been paying better attention in class. Maybe the director of this adaptation really dumbed down the plot. Or maybe it really was a faithful adaptation of a great American novel.

It’s not a love story, not really. It’s about wealth, power, life, how the drive of ambition, the American dream on steroids, it’s about wanting something, getting it, not feeling fulfilled, and wanting it even more knowing that the closer you get, the further it eludes your grasp. That’s the whole lighthouse thing, right?

I kept wondering as I watched the movie, are high schools still going to be able to teach The Great Gatsby? Are the teachers going to tell the kids not to watch the movie, “Trust us, kids, don’t think you can just watch the movie and be prepared for the test.” Because I think you totally could have just watched the movie and aced any Gatsby test. If I had a time machine, and I sent a copy of this movie back into the past, to when I was in the eleventh grade, would it have worked? I can’t be positive, but I want to say yes. Also, I’d send back a copy of this review with a note to my English teacher. It would say:

Dear Mr. Anselmo. Look at this whole eight hundred word document that I’ll eventually write about The Great Gatsby. Come on, you’d be lucky to get eight hundred words about anything from any one of your students. Just the fact that I’ll eventually think about all of the stuff you’re teaching right now means that sooner or later you’re going to get through to me. And so please consider upping my grade. I’m looking at my high school report card right now, and I’m really hoping that the letter grade is going to change in front of my eyes. Please. See you in the future, Rob G.