blargblog

Night of the Living Dork

Last night I decided to see the remake of Dawn of the Dead, since I'd read good reviews and I'm a fan of the original. Due to various factors, I ended up going to the last show of the evening at 10:20pm. On learning that there was a sneak preview of Hellboy starting at midnight in the same multiplex, I made the wacky impulsive decision of buying tickets to both, even though Dawn wasn't supposed to get out until 12:15. I decided that with previews, if I ran over to the second theater once the credits for the first film began, I could make it to Hellboy without missing much.

Dawn of the Dead: Well, it was okay, but was completely missing the soul of Romero's original. The new version tries to lift itself beyond simple gross-out fest by manipulating viewer emotions -- empathy, fear, worry, regret -- in certain ways but fails completely, because the characters are rice-paper thin. Romero's characters are much more human. For example, In the original film, a pregnant woman is a strong heroine whose predicament has emotional weight. Romero uses the extreme situation to highlight the natural human fear of parents in post-nuclear times: am I bringing a child into a world that is getting worse, rather than better, due to pollution, nukes, and other scary shit? In Romero's film, the situation is exaggeratedly bleak -- the world is being taken over by zombies -- but he connects with real human worries and emotions through skillful writing. In the new remake, there's a pregnant woman, but she's not the hero of the film, but rather a helpless victim. The pregnant woman in the new movie is basically played as a joke; her storyline ends in a really stupid manner: basically as a punch line to a really ugly joke about pregnancy.

Hellboy: I ended up making it into the theater during the previews, so no problem missing anything. Except there was a weird incident near the end of the film where there was a very abrupt cut from one scene to another (it felt like fifteen minutes of movie were missing and suddenly we were deep into the climax of the movie) and me and the people sitting around me were convinced the projectionist had skipped a reel or something. There was a lot of grumbling in the audience. A large group of people gathered around the manager after the film, and she assured us that the film was intended to be like that, and that she had checked with other theaters. I still wasn't completely convinced, and went on a film junkie website and asked other people who had seen it elsewhere in the country and they had seen the same thing. So either the studio has distributed a screwed-up print of the film, or the director simply decided to go for an abrupt cut to disorient the audience for some sort of artistic effect. (Or, I suppose, the studio might have shortened the film.) I'm now tending to believe the abrupt cut was on purpose. Poor manager, having to deal with all of the people angry at her for having screwed up the movie!

Anyhow, as for the rest of the movie. A lot of genuinely fun moments married to an utterly cliché storyline. I liked it in the end. There were certain places where the cliché plot deviated from the norm and real human emotions were displayed by people who had previously been cardboard cutouts that really won me over. The humor and emotional conflicts and connections between Hellboy and other characters in the film were the highlights for me. Which wouldn't be what you might expect from an action movie. But Hellboy is shown to be emotionally vulnerable in a real way. The basic human desire for love, even from one's grouchy boss, is shown. Me like.

Postscript: After an evening of filmic horror, the night's biggest grossout came when I decided to get a burger at a 24-hour McDonalds right next to the movie theater. The grease was pouring off of the "meat." I don't know what the hell I was thinking. The scariest moment of the night, by far.