As Dead as a Pan

If you had asked me to come up with a list of actors I would expect to see pump-actioning and machete-swinging their way through a mob of zombies this year, I think it would be reasonable to say that neither Adam Driver or Bill Murray would have been particularly near the top of it, and yet this is what we find ourselves seeing during Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die. Is it therefore the case that this film is a particularly odd one, or simply the case that zombie films have become so ubiquitous everyone is bound to end up in one?

Well, I’m not sure about the latter part – it’s starting to feel a bit silly talking about ‘the current boom in zombie movies’, considering it’s been in progress for the vast majority of the current century, but on the other hand there hasn’t been a major English-language entry in the genre for a bit. The Dead Don’t Die is a fairly odd movie, though. Here is where I make one of my occasional confessions and admit that, feted independent American film-maker though he is, I have never seen a Jarmusch movie before. I think I came fairly close to seeing Ghost Dog and Only Lovers Left Alive, but seeing films isn’t like playing horseshoes – ‘fairly close’ means nothing in this context.

Therefore I have no idea how representative the new film is of Jarmusch’s output, although I can at least be confident about saying that, up to a point, it does a reasonable job of looking and sounding like a movie by the late George A Romero (who is duly acknowledged in the credits). We find ourselves in the small country town of Centerville, apparently ‘a nice place to live’ according to its own publicity, in the company of police chief Cliff (Murray) and his deputy Ronnie (Driver). Something odd seems to be in the air – the times of the sunrise and sunset are a bit off, and Ronnie’s watch and cellphone have packed up too. Could it be connected to worrying news reports that fracking at both poles have accidentally thrown the Earth off its axis? (Shades of The Day The Earth Caught Fire.)

Well, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise when the dead start clawing their way out of their graves and attacking the living. One of the first to do so is Iggy Pop, who makes a predictably convincing zombie given that he has looked rather cadaverous for many years. The cops, along with various other town residents and visitors, find themselves taking cover from the shambling horde, wondering what to do next (Ronnie repeatedly opines that it’s all going to end badly). Could salvation lie with the town’s eccentric sword-swinging undertaker (Tilda Swinton)?

There are many perplexing and distracting things about The Dead Don’t Die, but the most perplexing and distracting one of the lot is Swinton and her character. Given that most of the film is a tongue-in-cheek cruise through B-movie tropes and other Americana, one has to wonder about the inclusion of a funeral director with a samurai sword, not really a stock character in this kind of film. But wait! It gets even more whimsical – Swinton doesn’t just play a samurai-sword-wielding undertaker battling the undead, she does it while deploying a Highland Scots accent somewhat reminiscent of Maggie Smith in the Harry Potter films, and a peculiarly formal mode of speech reminiscent of no person ever. And Tilda Swinton’s character is named Zelda Winston. It is enough to make one scratch one’s head at some length.

Still, if nothing else, it does reveal Jarmusch’s ability to get a good cast for this movie. Quite apart from Swinton, Murray and Driver, it also includes Chloe Sevigny as another cop, Steve Buscemi as a Trump-supporting racist farmer, Danny Glover as the local store owner, Rosie Perez as a news reporter (her character is named ‘Posie Juarez’), Selena Gomez as a visiting hipster, and Tom Waits as ‘Hermit Bob’, an unhinged fellow who lives in the woods.

So, a good cast, and the zombie apocalypse is one of those scenarios which will always have potential provided you approach it with a new spin in mind. However, quite what Jarmusch had in mind when he came to make this film is difficult to discern – given the background of many of the actors, and some of the character names, you’d be forgiven for assuming it’s meant to be a parody of the classic Romero zombie film – it certainly cleaves particularly closely to the formula, virtually paraphrasing dialogue about how the risen dead are compelled to seek out the things that mattered to them when they were alive – thus we get the spectacle of zombies shuffling about muttering about coffee and wi-fi.

The thing is that if so, it’s a comedy where it feels like they’ve forgotten to include most of the jokes. There’s the odd good invariably deadpan moment, but the film mostly just trundles along being neither particularly funny nor really trying very hard to be frightening. Everyone knows how this story goes, and it unfurls here pretty much as you’d expect (the odd apparent nod to Plan Nine from Outer Space notwithstanding). It’s more like a pastiche than a parody or spoof – a technically competent one, but one with serious issues in the script department. There’s a lot of cross-cutting between the different characters, which ends up more or less going nowhere – they tend to get the odd good moment, before the film seems to run out of things to do with them. One group of characters dies off-screen, another seem to get completely forgotten about. The film also seriously underperforms when it comes to the climax and ending.

The sense that this is a movie which has just been slapped together is only heightened by the inclusion of a bunch of jokes I can only describe as seeming lazy. There’s an in-joke about Adam Driver being in the stellar conflict movies. At one point the film’s theme song plays on the radio, and Murray’s character wonders why it sounds so familiar – Driver’s character tells him it’s because it’s the theme song of the movie. At one point Murray wonders about Driver’s weird prescience and is told it is because he has read the whole script of the movie, not just the scenes he is in. If this is supposed to feel knowing and witty, it does not; it just feels rather tired.

As I say, this is not a complete disaster, but the odd good moment and a generally well-staged zombipocalypse do not make up for a film which often feels stilted and self-conscious, narratively baggy and no real sense of what it’s supposed to be and why it’s here. I am assuming most Jim Jarmusch movies are better than this one; it’s certainly a disappointment as a zombie film.

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It’s clever, but is it Art?

Regular readers may be a little surprised to find a mainstream Disney family film popping up on a blog which is, more often than not, just a little bit more niche, if not actually obscure. Then again, sometimes you’re just out contemplating what film to see with a person of somewhat gentler tastes. ‘Okay, so there’s a political thriller about the ethical considerations of using drone strikes against terrorists, or a musical about talking animals,’ I said, leaving the choice up to them. So Jon Favreau’s new take on The Jungle Book it inevitably was.

I suspect that the reason many people are so familiar with The Jungle Book – surely Rudyard Kipling’s best-known work to modern audiences – is the simple fact of the existence of Wolfgang Reitherman’s fully-animated 1967 adaptation. Certainly it has a very special place in my own memory, for all that I didn’t actually see it in its entirety until I was 19 – a fairly sumptuous storybook illustrated with pictures from the film was one of my fondest possessions as a small child, and I recall painstakingly copying out many of the backgrounds, let alone the main characters. So, as you might expect, I was even more dubious about this semi-remake than usual.

You probably know the story: Mowgli (Neel Sethi) is a young lad who has been raised by wolves, so to speak… no, hang on, he’s literally been raised by wolves, in a reassuringly non-specific South Asian jungle of some kind (everyone calls it a jungle rather than a rainforest throughout). Mowgli hasn’t quite managed to fit in with the wolves, but soon he has more serious concerns as the tiger Shere Khan (Idris Elba), undisputed apex predator of the area, learns of his existence and makes it very clear that man-cub is on his own personal menu. Mowgli’s mentor, the panther Bagheera (Sir Ben Kingsley), decides that the only thing to do is for him to go back to live amongst other humans – but along the way Mowgli encounters the extremely laid-back bear Baloo, who suggests there may be another, much less energy-intensive option. But Shere Khan is on his trail and has no intention of letting his prey escape…

The first thing I suppose one should say about the new Jungle Book is that, at its heart, it does seem to have a sincere desire to respect Rudyard Kipling and his original stories. These are rather darker and more serious than you might expect if all you know is the Reitherman movie – they read not entirely unlike a rather more erudite and polished precursor to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan novels (I feel compelled to share with you Kipling’s claim that Burroughs wrote the first Tarzan just to see ‘how bad a book he could write and get away with it’).

The virtually non-stop near-photorealistic CGI of the new Jungle Book allows the film to have moments of gravity and seriousness without simply coming across as weird – these are about as convincing as talking CGI animals get. Shere Khan, the main villain, is genuinely impressive and genuinely scary, on the very limit of what you can reasonably include in a family film without drawing accusations of actively seeking to traumatise small children.

So the film tones it all down a bit, and departs quite considerably from Kipling in the process, by turning the levels of cutesiness and sentimentality in many portions of the script up to tooth-rottingly high levels. Not to mention, of course, that most of the animals speak with American accents and using idiomatic American English. The results are, needless to say, a bit difficult to process at first.

If the new Jungle Book struggles to assimilate the competing demands of being faithful to Kipling while staying viable as a family blockbuster, this is before we even consider its somewhat confused relationship with the 1967 film. It goes without saying that this has obviously been a major influence – Mowgli closely resembles his animated counterpart, and the characterisations of Baloo and Bagheera, for instance, owe much more to the previous film’s script than to Kipling’s writing. The plot follows roughly the same sequence of events and there are numerous moments which I suspect will seem odd and incongruous unless you’re aware of the animated version.

Yes, I’m mostly thinking of the songs, which primarily seem to have been included because everyone knows the songs from The Jungle Book and would, presumably, feel cheated if they weren’t in this version. But the fact remains that it is very obvious that they have literally floated in from a different film entirely – Bill Murray’s crack at ‘The Bare Necessities’ seems rather perfunctory, Scarlett Johansson’s oddly tepid version of ‘Trust in Me’ has been banished to the closing credits, and then there’s…

Well, there’s one moment which defines just how mixed up this version of The Jungle Book is, but it’s also the moment which above all others justifies the price of the ticket. Mowgli gets kidnapped by the monkeys of the canopy and dragged off to their lair in a ruined temple. The script refers to them as ‘the Bandar-Log’, something drawn directly from Kipling, and yet they are still led by King Louie, which is pure Reitherman. This version of King Louie is a hulking, menacing anthropoid of colossal size (he claims to be a gigantopithecus rather than an orangutan, which is supposedly in the name of ‘realism’ – there are no orangs in India – but I suspect is more to help some of the revised lyrics scan better), played, rather in the manner of a mafia don, by Christopher Walken. The whole tone of this sequence is one of threat and jeopardy…

…and then Walken launches into a (it probably goes without saying) very idiosyncratic rendition of ‘I wanna be like you’, rather in the manner of William Shatner doing one of his dramatic recitations of a pop classic. It is just magnetically bizarre – the weird thing is, I know I would have felt it was a complete chiz if Walken hadn’t done the song, but at the same time it just felt horribly wrong to do it in quite this way. A few moments later the same wonderful song is, incomprehensibly, rearranged as a cue to accompany an action sequence. Kipling and the legacy of Reitherman and Jon Favreau’s own tendencies as a director of CGI-intensive action movies are engaged in a peculiar three-way battle for supremacy, and I’m still not sure who actually comes out on top.

Still, at least casting Walken as the ape removes any chance of the film being accused of open racism, by sensible reviewers at least: diversity quotas are also surely satisfied by Bagheera being Asian, Shere Khan being black, and Kaa having had a sex change. Modern sensibilities should also be assuaged by the virtually-obligatory insertion of a subtext about environmentalism and protecting the environment.

This finds its culmination in the climax of the film, which is where it comes a little unravelled: Kipling’s story is about growing up and taking on responsibility, but you get a strong sense that, thematically, this film would much rather be about the importance of family and friendship and not destroying the environment. I’m not saying the film entirely fails to resolve all of these themes, but it has to put itself through some fairly severe contortions to do so. I was also left very unimpressed with how the film ultimately resolves itself – the priority seems to have been keeping the option of doing a sequel well and truly open, rather than, say, concluding the story in a satisfying way.

This isn’t a bad film by any means: it looks sumptuous, the cast do good work with the roles that have been written for them, and when Favreau is allowed to do one of his big action sequences it is usually pretty good. But the various influences of Kipling, Reitherman, and action-movie doctrine never quite cohere. There are probably enough good bits in The Jungle Book to make it a worthwhile and entertaining watch, but I can’t imagine anyone already familiar with the story finding this completely satisfying.

 

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The Art of War

I like George Clooney. I’ve enjoyed his screen performances ever since the first movie I saw him in, which was From Dusk Till Dawn, far too many years ago for me to comfortably contemplate. I even didn’t think he was too bad as Batman, though the film in question is another matter. I have come to admire him all the more following his reinvention of himself as a progressively-inclined hyphenate, making a series of impressively entertaining and intelligent films like The Ides of March, Good Night and Good Luck, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. I will give a sympathetic hearing to anything he cares to promote in my direction.

And the trailer for his latest project, The Monuments Men, makes a good, stirring pitch, for what looks like it’s going to be a rousing, old-fashioned movie with the best of ideals at its heart. In addition to writing, producing, and directing the film, Clooney plays Frank Stokes, a senior art historian who makes a heartfelt pitch to the US government: the year is 1943, and the outcome of the Second World War is no longer in doubt. However, the months ahead will see the majority of Europe’s greatest cultural treasures placed in desperate peril as the war rages around them – to say nothing of the standard Nazi procedure of stripping any significant cultural items from any territory they occupy.

Bearing this in mind, Clooney and his sidekick Matt Damon lead a crack team of character actors (Bill Murray, John Goodman, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville and Jean Dujardin) into the war zone with a view to either protecting said cultural treasures or retrieving them from the hands of the Third Reich…

The full-blown war movie has gone a little out of fashion these days, and The Monuments Men is by no means what you’d call an action adventure. Instead, it is more of a comedy-drama, albeit one motivated by the noblest of concerns – in interviews, Clooney himself has said it originated out of his own desire to make a film which was not, on some level, a cynical one.

As I said, I like Clooney, and I’m all for idealism, and if the film is arguing for the vital importance of culture as part of the bedrock of civilisation, then I’m absolutely with it all the way – but while The Monuments Men has some moments of real quality, on the whole the film is a bit of a disappointment when compared to some of Clooney’s previous work. The trailer is great at pitching the central premise of the film – a sort of high-minded amalgam of The Dirty Dozen, Dad’s Army, and (possibly stretching a point) The Da Vinci Code – but the movie itself is less successful at turning the premise into a satisfying narrative.

For one thing, I get the impression that this movie is rather less of an epic than Clooney would have liked it to be, clocking in at a smidge under two hours, and the main consequence of this is that the whole putting-the-crew-together element of the story is raced through in the course of the opening credits. As a result, the early scenes of banter and camaraderie take place between a bunch of people we don’t actually know that well, and the effect is rather like going off on an adventure with a bunch of complete strangers. In this kind of film the first act is everything, and the film never quite recovers from this bumpy start.

The movie also struggles to accommodate the sheer scope of the story it’s trying to tell – as the characters admit at several points, the numbers involved are mind-boggling, and the story ranges across practically the entirety of western and central Europe. Forging a coherent narrative out of all this proves extremely difficult. In the end the film opts to focus on the hunt to rescue a few particularly significant pieces of art, with some other episodes woven into the story, but the final effect is still that of a film which is a collection of disparate bits and pieces. Some of these are effectively funny, or moving, or tense, but they don’t quite cohere into a really great film.

Perhaps it’s just that the ideas which The Monuments Men is trying to explore are too big and abstract to lend themselves to a film of this kind. Certainly the movie itself seems unable to quite decide on what its central message is – ‘Watch yourselves! No piece of art is worth your life!’ Clooney warns his team as they disembark in Normandy, but by the end of the film he’s stating the exact opposite to justify some of the sacrifices made in the course of the story. Hmmm. Inevitably, when dealing with the issue of cultural obliteration during the Second World War, the spectre of the Holocaust is raised at several points in the course of the film, but it never quite comes up with a way of really engaging with this beyond an uncomfortable, reverent silence.

Still, the performances are good and it’s well mounted, and it’s not what you’d actually call a bad film – it just really struggles to convert its good intentions and big ideas into the meat and drink of narrative film-making. I won’t deny it was a bit of a disappointment to me, but I still wouldn’t describe it as a bad film – average, more than anything else. One of Clooney’s minor works, I suspect, but still laudable on many levels.

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The Land of the Rising Daughter

From the Hootoo archive. Originally published January 21st 2004:

[Originally this followed a review of The Last Samurai.]

And so we move on to Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation: another week, another film about a troubled American (this time round it’s comedy legend Bill Murray) finding spiritual solace, of a sort, while visiting Japan. A joke about how it would be much more interesting if Tom Cruise starred in the thoughtful tale of bittersweet urban heartache and Murray led the samurai revolt is pretty much obligatory at this point – so feel free to make one for yourself.

Murray plays Bob Harris – not the whispering muso DJ but a Hollywood star – who’s in Tokyo to promote a brand of Japanese whiskey. (It has become a sort of urban legend that really famous actors are forever flying off there to endorse unlikely products – Tommy Lee Jones selling coffee, Cameron Diaz plugging mobile phones – for ridiculous sums, on the understanding the ads never appear outside Japan.) Quite how famous Bob actually is is a bit vague, as hardly anyone makes a big deal out of meeting him and he’s not mobbed on the ginza, despite his face appearing on billboards and the sides of trucks. But anyway.

Staying at the same hotel is Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a young woman still figuring out what to do with her life, who’s only in the country to accompany her photographer husband (who means well but is basically a bit of a putz). Bob and Charlotte get to know each other, and…

Well, nothing much actually happens, if we’re honest. This is one of those films that’s been very widely praised, and has certainly been crafted with a good deal of care and skill, and is very satisfying to watch. But the actual plot could be written on the back of a stamp. Bob and Charlotte basically have a very restrained and almost totally chaste affair before going their separate ways. The fact that it happens in Tokyo is largely immaterial – because, although there’s some pretty scenery, the obligatory karaoke sequence (oh, how I love karaoke!), and some bracingly un-PC jokes about the Japanese, Coppola seems more interested in the city as a sort of absurd summation of everything about modern urban living, as seen with all the sense and personal investment stripped out of it (she also seems very interested in Johannson sitting around her hotel room in her pants, judging from the huge number of scenes in which this happens).

I’m probably not doing a very good job of selling you on this film, which is a shame as it really is rather good, honest – for one thing it has a couple of what I’m sure will prove to be the funniest scenes of the year, as the none-more-deadpan Murray contends with a demented TV commercial director and later on a rather excitable prostitute someone’s had sent to his room. But Murray is excellent throughout, his lugubriousness also deployed to express a real sense of listlessness and quiet despair, as well as the realisation that his relationship with Johansson isn’t in any proper sense real. Johansson is every bit his equal in a much less showy part, giving the film heart and soul. It’s a hugely accomplished performance, and all the more impressive considering that only a few months ago the most memorable moment in Johansson’s career was the sight of her getting glued to her bedroom wall by a giant spider.

Sofia Coppola, who knows a thing or two about dodgy early career moves herself, deserves huge credit for writing and directing such an accomplised and distinctive film – even if it isn’t quite the work of utter genius many critics seem to have taken it for. Lost In Translation simply sets out to tell a story about the brief relationship between two very different people – and does it extremely well, filling the tale with charm and longing and real tenderness. A subtle gem.

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Funnier More Peculiarer

From the Hootoo archive. Originally published October 19th 2009:

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to the movie review that’s not afraid to be wrong. Well now, first off this week we look at the latest offering from Ricky Gervais, who’s risen from near-obscurity to international acclaim and bona fide movie stardom in only the time it takes a rather lazy and feckless person to write 170 editions of an intermittently popular internet film review column. Currently he’s on screen in The Invention of Lying, which as usual he co-wrote and directed, on this occasion with Matthew Robinson (fans of the Og-monster can take heart: Gervais’ regular collaborator Stephen Merchant gets a tiny cameo).

Gervais has described this film as an attempt at ‘the funniest Twilight Zone episode ever’ , which isn’t at all misleading, although I don’t recall Rod Serling ever launching a Zone story with an extended comic riff about masturbation, as happens here. Anyway, it’s the story of Mark Bellison (Gervais), an unsuccessful staff writer at a film company. His mum is in a care home and his most recent date with the lovely Anna (Jennifer Garner) was hardly a great success. But his life changes forever when Mark discovers he has the unique, near-supernatural ability to say things that aren’t literally true!

For Mark lives in a world superficially almost identical to our own, but where everyone is completely, literally and brutally honest all the time. All their movies are documentary lectures on historical fact. Their advertising is unrecognisable. People openly admit to the shallowness of their love lives. In this world Mark’s new faculty gives him immense power, as everyone takes every word he says at face value, but it brings unexpected responsibilities with it, too. More importantly, though, is he ever going to get anywhere with Anna in the romance department?

Well, you’re going to find this movie deeply irritating unless you cut it some serious slack right from the start, because the premise is so high-concept it’s practically piercing the ozone layer. Do people in this world have dreams? Don’t they ever use conditional sentences? Isn’t the use of the imagination crucial to our existence as human beings? Forget all these questions and many more, as the film ignores them, and while you’re at it do your best not to notice that a lot of the humour derives not from simple honesty but people apparently lacking any kind of interior monologue and being compelled to say every thought that crosses their minds, which surely isn’t quite the same thing.

This is really a one-joke comedy, but Gervais is tremendously inventive when it comes to continually putting new spins on it. Most striking is a long section in the middle where the film suggests that not only is fiction essentially a kind of lying, but so is religion – there are shades of Life of Brian in how this is articulated. The laughs never stop coming – quite the opposite – but the movie is quite serious in exploring the ramifications of its central idea. At first glance the movie appears rather thought-provoking, but in the end it seems content to simply nose around big and complex ideas rather than do anything with them or come to any kind of conclusion about its main theme – is it okay to lie to people if it makes them happier?

Probably quite sensibly, it doesn’t try too hard to be naturalistic, but Ricky Gervais gives a typically classy deadpan performance in the middle of everything – and hints at having considerable potential as a straight actor, one sequence where he attempts to comfort his sick mother being startlingly moving. Garner is her usual perky self, and it’s presumably a credit to Gervais’ growing international clout that he’s secured cameos from actors of the calibre of Ed Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Barry off EastEnders. The direction is nothing to be ashamed of, but for me the reliance on using classic pop songs to set the atmosphere got wearing – Charlie Kaufman was mercilessly lampooning this six or seven years ago.

It won’t split your sides, and I suspect a lot of people will be left distinctly unimpressed, but I found The Invention of Lying consistently amusing and rather likeable – even if it’s a bit less clever and profound than it probably aspires to be.

Moving on, one fictional milieu which has skyrocketed in popularity in recent years is the good old Zombie Apocalypse, which is so ubiquitous nowadays you wonder if the media know something we don’t. Forty years after its arguable invention, it’s even gone multimedia – in addition to movies like the Resident Evils, the 28… Laters, the fruits of George A Romero’s sudden increase in work-rate, and various others, there are now high-profile Zombie Apocalypse comics (The Walking Dead), TV series (Dead Set), and novels (the utterly brilliant World War Z). It’s getting so it’s difficult for any new project featuring hungry cadavers and the collapse of society to stand out from the (probably quite smelly and slow-moving) crowd.

Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland solves this problem by playing the whole thing for laughs. In this movie Jesse Eisenberg plays Columbus, a fairly useless twitchy geek making his tentative way across the corpse-ridden US after – we’re told – mad cow disease mutates into a zombie-causing strain. Hmm. (Taxonomists of the undead will note that this movie features another sighting of the recently evolved ‘running zombie’, which seems to be competing well with the traditional strain, particularly in relatively low-budget projects which can’t afford vast mobs of extras.) Anyway, he soon hooks up with zombie-hating, cake-loving badass Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a man crazed with a lust for revenge since zombies ate his puppy, and the duo in turn encounter Wichita and Little Rock (the agreeably comely Emma Stone and surprisingly tolerable child-actress Abigail Breslin), sisters who are heading for a supposedly zombie-free enclave outside Los Angeles. (The thing with the weird names is just one of a few slightly laboured elements of a script which in places tries a little too hard to be quirky). Will this odd quartet survive the manky hordes roaming the land of the free?

Hang on, you may be saying: didn’t the peerless Shaun of the Dead do the whole comedy Zombie Apocalypse routine over five years ago, and set the bar extremely high to boot? True, Shaun was my point of reference going into this movie, and to start with Zombieland falls a long way of its standards – the opening sequence just isn’t particularly funny, with the script somehow missing the right beats and the tone distinctly uncertain. But things improve considerably as soon as Harrelson comes on screen, as he gives a barnstorming and endearingly absurd performance which is exactly the thing the film needs. It improves enormously as it goes on and stops trying to be funny and horrific at the same time. In the end it’s not a true comedy-horror fusion, or a parody of zombie movies, but simply a broad and very offbeat comedy (a bit too offbeat to be really credible in places), which adeptly includes effective moments of romance, emotion, and action. Not to mention splatter and pus, of course.

I found myself enjoying it hugely as it went on, but am reluctant to go into too much detail for fear of spoiling the fun. The small cast give likeable performances, the post-apocalyptic landscape is convincingly rendered (well, the electricity’s still on everywhere, but…) and Fleischer’s direction is mostly neat and effective. There are a few whistles and bells with the graphic design (captions whizzing around the screen) which I wasn’t mad about, and the thrashing heavy metal soundtrack didn’t do a lot for me, either, but by the end I was laughing out loud longer and more frequently during Zombieland than The Invention of Lying. My sources (okay, the inter web) tell me it’s done rather well at the box office – and this is one instance in which, if they can keep the quality up, a sequel would be very welcome. It’s definitely a comedy more than anything else, but Zombieland is also a quality piece of work.

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