ZOMBIELAND (2009), dir. Ruben Fleischer

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This review was originally posted at Cinemaspy.com

Zombieland seems more interested in eliciting laughs than causing goose bumps. It’s quite good at the former, which results in a fun time at the movies overall, and almost makes up for how slight it feels compared to George Romero’s zombie granddaddies or even the more recent films which ushered in the fast-zombie era. To be sure, there are plenty of "zeds" (and to answer your first question, these are the fast models), but the camera only settles on them when they’re devouring a victim or drooling lots of blood and bile. Is it gross? You bet. Scary? Not really.

What’s really terrifying, in Zombieland at least, is the prospect of human attachment. For that reason, the film’s main character Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) was a shut-in long before a Mad Cow-related virus decimated mankind. The erstwhile college student-turned-last surviving remnant of humanity remains highly-neurotic, living by a set of rules advocating safety above all else (Shoot a zombie in the head twice, watch out in bathrooms, etc.), which simultaneously keeps anyone from getting too close. Of course, Columbus secretly longs for the very human contact he avoids; you’d be a contradiction too, he explains, if the first girl you ever let into your dorm room tried to eat you.

Things start to change when he hitches a ride with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), although it takes a while for their relationship to thaw. The pair are opposite numbers, evidenced when they see a zombie woman devouring a corpse: Columbus remarks that it’s a reminder of how far the world has fallen; his new companion, on the other hand, says it makes him hungry. Tallahassee lives in the now more than Columbus, and indeed, his rules for life include enjoying "the little things," such as Twinkies and bashing a zombie’s head in.

They eventually meet two more survivors: Wichita (Emma Stone) and her sister Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), who are headed for a California theme park located in a town supposedly free of the undead. After some initial conflict, the four characters decide to drive to the west coast together, and on the way, Columbus starts to feel some romantic stirrings. He also makes some predictable observations about his new friends and how his previous outlook on life might not have been the best.

In the classic zombie movies, the creatures are supposed to be reflections of ourselves, but screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick invert the formula. Their message appears to be, We’re as much walking dead as the zombies if we don’t try and live, and that means taking some risks, whether it’s our feelings or, in the case of the final 30 minutes, our very lives. Indeed, between where they initially meet and the theme park, the protagonists encounter numerous obstacles, but the undead are rarely the most imposing. Rather, it’s trust issues or past tragedies. The emphasis on the personal extends to set pieces: in one scene there is a surprise raid on a Native American souvenir shop, and zombies are definitely dispatched. But the real point is for the characters to achieve catharsis by subsequently trashing the shop, and to bond with one another while doing so.

Director Ruben Fleischer doesn’t get around to disclosing everybody’s problems, and that benefits the movie, which zips from one moment to the next with only one scene that drags (It features a certain A-list star and is, nevertheless, hilarious). The build-up to the final act promises to mix zombies and a theme park, and without giving too much away, I can say the filmmakers deliver the goods. Think of your favorite kiddie-land rides and amusement park features; for the most part, they’re here and integrated into some pretty satisfying action sequences.

The cast is uniformly terrific, especially Harrelson and Breslin. After a decade in which his career seemed to go comatose, the former has found his comeback role, the kind of potential scenery-chewer many veteran actors would line up for. But Harrelson wisely plays Tallahassee with utmost sincerity, which acts to ground some of the curious things he does and says. (When the character claims he hasn’t "cried this hard since he saw Titanic," we totally believe him.) Meanwhile, Breslin, barely recognizable from her Little Miss Sunshine days, steals quite a few scenes from the rest of the cast, including one in which she fires a shotgun into the air as a warning, then smilingly remarks on the improbability of it. "All those violent video games," she says.

Like Shaun of the Dead before it, Zombieland is an offbeat, unexpectedly sanguine entry to a niche genre. Some viewers may have problems with the last act: at the preview screening I attended, I overheard audience members questioning why anybody would choose to awaken a theme park at night, since the end result would be lots of lights and noises that would attract zombies. Their argument is totally valid, but I would point out the rumor of no zeds in that part of town, as well as the movie’s overall theme that fun often goes against self-preservation.

WORLD'S GREATEST DAD (2009), dir. Bobcat Goldthwait

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This review was originally posted at Cinemaspy.com

Comedian Bobcat Goldthwait might be best remembered for his voice, which resembles a perennially-stalled car engine, but he’s developed into an accomplished director who can generate laughs and pathos from problematic material. His 2006 Sleeping Dogs Lie revolves around an act of bestiality, and his latest features auto-erotic asphyxiation as a plot point. But in World’s Greatest Dad, he also dares to show the parent-teenager relationship as the simmering pot of antagonism that it can be, and adolescents for the borderline-sociopaths they often are.

Robin Williams plays Lance, a failed writer whose day job is teaching a sparsely-attended high school poetry course. He’s also the single dad of Kyle (Daryl Sabara), who as offspring go, might embody the nightmare of every remotely-dorky thirty-something contemplating whether to procreate. Kyle shows little intellectual potential, and his knee-jerk response to any cultural activities is mean. ("The only thing more queer than music are the people who listen to it," is a typical Kyle-ism.) Apparently, his only interest is pleasuring himself in strange and potentially-lethal ways. When such an adventure goes terribly wrong, Lance frames it as a suicide, going so far as to fabricate a good-bye note.

However, being the writer he is, Lance can’t help but embellish a little bit, making Kyle out to be smarter, more tortured and less of an asshole than he really was. Luckily, aside from the one student who was Kyle’s only friend (Evan Martin), no one else knew him well enough to say otherwise. But when the note gets out, Kyle quickly becomes an object of obsession among the entire school, romanticized by the Goth girls who scorned him, even embraced by the principal, who was a half-step away from expelling him.

Lance doesn’t help matters by faking his son’s supposed memoirs, and painting him as a closeted genius who loved Emily Dickinson. But one gets the feeling that if he had said Kyle admired Fred from Scooby-Doo, the kids would have all shown up the next day wearing orange-colored ascots. Goldthwait, who also wrote the screenplay, has something to say about how we idealize the dead, and how we tend to try drawing connections between tragic figures and ourselves. Why do we do it? In the case of Kyle, it’s a lot easier than getting to know him when he was alive. However, in filling in the proverbial blanks with false details and their own imaginations, Kyle gradually turns into the opposite of what he had been in real life.

We get treated to many, many shots of Kyle’s likeness reduced to a brand, but there are also a few scenes showing students taking genuine inspiration from his made-up story, and I would have liked if the film’s second half spent a little more time arguing why Lance should consider keeping up the ruse. Instead, everyone around him becomes self-absorbed, at which point it’s easy to root for him to call it all off. More screen time could also have been given to the Evan Martin character, who represents the real victim of Lance’s fraud: he wasn’t just Kyle’s only friend; it was true the other way around, too, and now his memory is the one that seems to matter the least.

But overall, World’s Greatest Dad pulls off the trick of being very funny with pretty dark material. Williams, who gives his best lead performance in years, manages to shoulder the entire second half by being largely reactive; one of the movie’s assets is his impish grin, which in scenes where peripheral characters wax touchy-feely about how "being a parent is the toughest job you’ll ever love" or his late son’s gift for prose, seems to take on a life of its own. At the same time, Williams imbues Lance with weighty and tangible sadness, which is surprising until one recalls he did the same in The Fisher King and Good Will Hunting.

As for the first half, it flies by on the relationship between father and son, which feels genuine in its propensity for emotional scarring. I give Goldthwait and Sabara equal credit for their keenly-observed, perfectly-executed teenage misanthrope, who proves thoroughly unlikable, but not in a cartoon way. The key was making Kyle pathetic. In a terrific scene early on, he instigates a fight wherein he gets his ass handed to him, but adding insult to injury is the other student isn’t even the jock Kyle accuses him of being. "I’m not a jock. I don’t even play sports," Kyle is told while being held down and struck.

In another standout moment, after his father purchases him an expensive new computer monitor, Kyle’s sullen response is, "It’s not even the biggest one." While it’s painful seeing this bratty kid’s combination of entitlement and ingratitude, we know that’s part of what adolescence is all about. In fact, these scenes underscore the sadness of what eventually transpires, because we watch Sabara play this petulant bastard early on and think to ourselves, "He’s just going through an obnoxious phase." Sadly, he never gets a chance to grow out of it.