Tag: romance

Warm Bodies

Reviews

warm_bodies_film_posterKicking off what I hope will be the triumphant return of Zombie Wednesdays here at Aim for the Head, I bring to you a classic tale of boy meets girls. Or zombie eats girl… or, well, he doesn’t eat her. Not on camera anyway, that would get much higher than a PG-13 rating.

I’m talking about Warm Bodies. Based on the book, it is the story of Romeo and Juliette set in a post-zombie-apocalyptic world and casting Romeo as a zombie. And as dumb as that sounds – like Twilight levels of dumb – surprisingly it works.

The movie opens with R and he… wait… they put the first 4 minutes of the movie online, so why don’t you just watch them:

So, he’s a zombie, and then we cut to the survivors, living in a walled off section of the city, struggling to survive. And we meet Julie, daughter of the man in charge who isn’t happy with the status quo. She, her boyfriend and a few others head into the unreclaimed city to search for medical supplies. Things don’t go well for the survivors, but R and Julie meet, and R saves Julie from being eaten. And the movie goes on from there…

I don’t want to spoil the film, so I’ll stop talking in specifics. Instead, I’ll just say that you’ve never seen a zombie movie like this before, in a manner similar to how you’d never seen one like Shaun of the Dead before, but not in remotely the same way. Warm Bodies leans far more toward a typical romantic comedy than it does a zombie horror film, but that’s okay – as I’ve said many times on this very blog, zombies are best as a setting for human drama. The biggest shift you have to make in the world crafted here is that there are two kinds of zombies, corpses and skeletons. The corpses shamble around looking for brains and in their “downtime” they shuffle through almost normal human stuff in normal human places. The skeletons have given up all pretense of humanity, they hunt food with purpose. And like with many zombie movies, the humans are divided into two groups as well, though they don’t get cute names to group them under. One group is content to hide behind a wall and scrounge their survival from the ruins of pre-zombie life, while the other group wants to get back out there and live again.

Anyway… is this the best zombie movie ever? My wife thinks so. I disagree, but I do think this movie is very good and I like the message it delivers in both its subtle and completely unsubtle ways. Most movies about zombies wind up being about hope, or crushing hope depending on how it ends, with a side helping of “people are the real monsters”, but Warm Bodies brings along a message of connection, about interacting with people and looking them in the eye. It isn’t the best zombie movie ever, in my opinion, but it is well worth watching.

Movie Round-Up: April 2nd, 2010

Reviews

Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married Too:

Jason’s I’m Not Going To See This Tyler Perry Movie Either.

The Last Song:

I’m usually a Nicholas Sparks movie fan.  As pompous and arrogant as he is, he does write a good love story most of the time, and they generally translate to film well.  But his last, Dear John, was a let down.  In that movie, the father-son relationship was great but the romance was stilted.  The Last Song is much better.  I got to see a screening of it thanks to Movie Jungle.  Here the father-daughter works in addition to the romance, so we get a whole movie instead of half of one.  Miley Cyrus isn’t the world’s greatest actress, but she does alright, however Greg Kinnear and Bobby Coleman steal the show.  It makes for a pretty good date flick.

Clash of the Titans:

I actually saw the original in the theater as a child.  I’m a fan of Ray Harryhausen’s work.  That said, I agree with David Jaffe that remakes aren’t evil, and in fact are needed to keep stories alive.  As proof, the wife saw the original for the first time this weekend, and after seeing current fare like Avatar, the old stop motion stuff just looks… old.  No kid born after the release of the original is ever going to really like it unless they are a huge fan of old stuff, and keep in mind that “kids” born after the original might be almost thirty years old.  Anyway, I was excited to see the new film.  Thanks to 43kix and Gofobo, I got to.  This isn’t the same film.  There are some parallels, but it deviates as much as it stays the same.  This is both good and bad.  For me, this was fantastic, because it means I could watch the film and not feel like I had to compare the new stuff shot for shot with the old stuff.  For some people, this will be bad because what they want is a shot for shot remake of the old one.  I’ve heard some people say the new film lacks character and depth, but I felt it actually added character and depth to what was a fun yet fairly cardboard plot.  In any event, I recommend seeing it.  I had a blast watching it.  A word of warning, however, don’t pay the extra money to see this in 3D.  Totally not worth it.  The 3D (added to the film after the fact, it wasn’t filmed for 3D) is flat and never adds anything to the scenes.  In fact, it makes watching the film more annoying because of having to wear the glasses.  See it in 2D, I promise you aren’t missing anything.

Superman on TV again.

Reviews

Well, I’m late with this. Its a character flaw.

But last week was the premiere of the new Superman TV show Smallville. And boy was it good.

The last show, live action show that is, Lois & Clark was pretty good when it started. Sure they did some lovey-dovey romance stuff, but they focused mostly on the superhero stuff that we all really want to see. That lasted a season or two, then they did the wedding (the absolute worst TV show in the history of TV shows) and it really started sucking even more after that.

I’m hoping that Smallville doesn’t fall into that trap and keeps a healthy level of action with its drama.

In this incarnation, we are taken back (although they did update it to the present day) to the beginning. Clark Kent is a teenager, a freshman in high school. He knows he’s different, and he hides his super powers. In the first episode, they introduce the Kents, Lana Lang, Lex Luthor, and Kryptonite (which I felt they did in a very cool way). The series looks to focus on Clark coming to grips with his true nature, using his powers for good, all the while just trying to fit in and be like everyone else. Teen angst with super villians.

Rock on.

Smallville comes on the WB network at 9pm on Tuesdays. I strongly recommend checking it out. I give it a 9 out of 10.