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Jude Law is All the ‘Rage’. Today in Film Bloggery 02/04/09

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Breakfast on Pluto (2005)

That’s Jude Law in the image to the right, dressed up for his role in Sally Potter’s new film, Rage, which debuts at the Berlin International Film Festival this weekend. So far the masquerade is a big hit on the internet, but will this photo actually help the movie to be as popular? The last time movie bloggers got this excited over a transvestite, we were looking at a femmified Cillian Murphy from Breakfast on Pluto. And that film only grossed $829,000 in the U.S. Of course, Potter’s famous gender-bending film jude-law-rage1 Defamer’s got jokes: “Jude Law, whose new look suddenly precludes him from playing nanny to his children, lest he be moved to have an affair with himself.”

Film Experience has got jokes: “It somehow escaped me that Jude & Judi had made a film together for auteur Sally Potter. I love it when name actors do one for their art. Well played, ladies.”

Cinematical’s got joke headlines: “Jude Looks Like a Lady.” They’ve also got a gallery of the rest of the film’s stars.

I Watch Stuff smells Oscar-bait: “It’s amazing how much eyeliner some guys will pile on to plead for an Oscar nomination.”

The following intolerant sites are creeped out by or scared or terrified of the image: IESB.net; Filmonic; FilmDrunk

Because they’re totally insane for the Blingee, Best Week Ever invites you to Blingee your own pretty Jude Law image.

Jeff Wells finds the new image less interesting than Potter’s discussion on her own blog of Rage’s cutting style. He does, however, also quote her on the subject of Law’s appearance and performance: “Law, whose beauty has sometimes been held against him as an actor, made the courageous decision to accept the role of Minx — a ‘celebrity super-model’ — and took on a kind of hyper-beauty for this persona…a ‘female’ beauty which gradually unravels as the story unfolds. Strangely, the more he became a ’she’, coiffed and made-up, the more naked was his performance. There was great strength in his willingness to make himself vulnerable. It was an extraordinarily intense part of the shoot.”

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog

Posted Wednesday, February 04, 2009 7:00 PM by SpoutBlog | with 0 comments

Oops: Five Movies That Failed to Predict the Future, Part 2

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Under discussion:

Back to the Future Part II (1989)

Blade Runner (1982)

The Postman (1997)

I Am Legend (2007)

10,000 B.C. (2008)

2012 (2009)

Last week I offered a list of movies that made ambitious predictions about the near future, only to lose credibility when their dark futures didn’t become a reality. As meaningful as this exercise is, it’s also very limited, I can only debunk movies whose futures have already failed come true, or can I? Using FutureMe.org, I sent my future self an e-mail, asking how movies which predict what the next ten years have fared. Luckily, PastMe.org must be up and running in 2019, because I received a prompt and courteous response from my future self. Here is the response, which I will write in ten years:

Past Self,

Got your e-mail about failed movie predictions. I knew it was coming Here’s what I’ve got for you:

2012

I realize this Roland Emmerich mega-budget doomsday picture hasn’t come out yet in your time. I don’t recommend seeing it when it does, unless you were so impressed with Emmerich’s filmmaking in Godzilla and 10,000 BC that you actually want to see more. The film predicts that multiple apocalyptic catastrophes befall the world in 2012, in accordance with an ancient Mayan calendar which stops on December 21 of that year. What we know now is that the Mayans simply ran out of room on the rock they were carving, and were not trying to warn future generations of anything. Promoters of New Age Mayan mysticism did make a big deal about what they said would be the end of the world, making several appearances on popular talk shows. Of course, nothing happened on December 21, 2012, except that the special edition Blu-Ray of 2012 went on sale, hoping to make up for poor sales by becoming the ironic Christmas gift of choice.

I Am Legend

This 2007 Will Smith vehicle is another example of revisionist futurism, when a story’s prediction doesn’t come true, the story is retold and the date is moved further into the future. This is the third film adaptation of Robert Matheson’s original novel. Published in 1954, the book follows a scientist named Robert Neville from 1976 to 1979. Neville is apparently the sole survivor of a pandemic which resembles vampirism. The Will Smith version takes place in 2012, clearly a favorite year for doomsday prophets. While the prediction of a virus that turns everyone into rabid beasts didn’t exactly come true, that year’s American Idol competition was particularly brutal, inspiring an outbreak of backyard gladiatorial battles, similar to those now used to choose the winner of the show.

The Postman

This 1997 film, directed by and starring Kevin Costner, was generally regarded as a flop when it was released. It grew in popularity, however, as its prophetic vision of 2013 began to look more like reality. In the film, society is in ruins after a nuclear war. Costner’s character inadvertently brings hope to the destitute survivors when he starts delivering mail. While there was no global nuclear war in 2013 (that doesn’t happen until 2015), the film did accurately predict the return of pony express style mail delivery. Due to the ongoing financial crisis, the US government shut down the Postal Service, assuming that private carriers and e-mail would fill in. It worked for a few months, until bad loans and $300-per-barrel oil drove the private delivery firms out of business right during the Great Broadband Crash of ‘13. It was a bad year. But letters from loved ones did seem that much more meaningful when they were hand delivered by a disheveled vigilante fighting off dysentery.

Back to the Future Part II

The 1989 film Back to the Future Part II made several predictions about what the world of 2015 would look like. Having lived through that memorable year, I can tell you things didn’t turn out as shown in the film. In reality, flying cars were not released commercially until 2036, but never became widely available due to the market domination of flying Segways. Hoverboards, on the other hand, were widely available by 2015, but were pulled off the market following the unfortunate death of Tony Hawk during the 2016 X-Games. Many blamed the incident on Hawk’s malfunctioning cybernetic legs, rather than the Hoverboard, but the toy was still unable to recover from legal trouble. One prediction Back to the Future Part II did get right was Marty McFly’s futuristic Nike shoes. Nike released the Air McFly, in July 2008. While they were a limited edition, there’s no reason you couldn’t wear them in 2015.

Blade Runner

In Ridley Scott’s 1982 science fiction noir, Harrison Ford plays Deckard, a hard boiled detective hired to assassinate several illegal androids known as replicants. The film’s predictions about what a gritty futuristic Los Angeles would look like were pretty accurate. Genetically engineered pets are also available, but you need to go to some rather unsavory neighborhoods to find people who produce them. Super realistic androids, similar to replicants, also exist in 2019. Which brings me to a rather important point. This e-mail is not actually from your future self. I am a replicant. Your memories were transferred to me shortly before your grisly death.

Thanks for writing. If you have any more questions about the future of movies, let me know!

Best,

Future Kevin

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog

Posted Wednesday, February 04, 2009 6:01 PM by SpoutBlog | with 1 comments

MEMORIAL DAY Review

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Memorial Day (2008)

What do you do with Josh Fox’s Memorial Day, a sporadically engaging (but far too simple-minded to be as troubling as it wants to be) hypothetical slice-of-life which exists to use spring break to explain away Abu Ghraib? When I saw the film at CineVegas last summer, Memorial Day certainly seemed to have fewer defenders than detractors, and I found it to be alternately mesmerizing, infuriating, boring and eye-rollingly facile. I think it fails as a narrative film, even as it occasionally stuns as a work of pure cinema. And yet, I don’t think it’s dismissable outright.

Executive produced by Michael Stipe, Memorial is the brainchild of a New York theater rabblerouser named Josh Fox, and is loosely based on his “traveling, site-specific theatre event” Death of Nations 1: The Comfort and Safety Of Your Own Home. Dressed in all in black with standard-issue hipster-lectual glasses, Fox rocked a frustrating evasiveness at the Q & A following the film’s CineVegas premiere. When asked to elaborate on his intentions, Fox responded, “I don’t really do that.” He did, however, admit to being a tourist in the world of low-rent beach towns and military units that his film depicts. “I’m from New York,” the first-time filmmaker said more than once, ultimately invoking an old Spaulding Gray line about living “off the coast of America.”

The entire performance was off-putting: Fox seemed to set new standards for the indignant, coastal dweller seeking to condemn cultural experiences he hasn’t lived, one minute expressing condescending horror at the kind of youthful debauchery that would be frat-like if those participating in it weren’t several social classes away from being able to go to the kind of college that even has frats, the next minute crediting his military adviser for helping him to understand that “war is fun.”

Still, the filmmaker’s annoyingly reductive sensibility (embodied by a punchline from the film’s synopsis: “war is a party and partying is a war”) can’t invalidate the power of some of what he’s put on screen. The film begins with a stunningly hypnotic 20-minute montage, which takes us, through fragments in constant motion, into a Memorial Day weekend blow out in Ocean City, a military shore town in Maryland that doubles as a locus for bargain basement tourism. We follow a gang of young women, outnumbered by their slightly older-seeming male companions, as they drink themselves into oblivion, spew casual racism, cry, fight, rape––and capture it all via handheld consumer video. The gaze of the film, at this point, is firmly within the crowd: with the exception of one act of violence recorded from across the street through the magic of digital zoom, all the behavior seen seems to be a Girls Gone Wild-style performance for the camera, and the footage is too intimate and invasive to be shot as though by an dispassionate observer. Shot on location amidst a real holiday weekend party not un-similar to the apocalyptic Venice Beach perma-kegger that runs through Richard Kelly’s supposed fantasy Southland Tales, it’s choreographed amazingly well and acted (by members of Fox’s theater company and extras found on Craigslist) sufficiently convincingly.

For its first half, Memorial Day plays like an art film about the depravity that poor, uneducated, mostly white kids lapse into under the guise of merely having a good time, a digital verite indictment of the generational nihilism bred by The Real World, amateur porn, and popular culture’s general evasion of moral consequence. But after a transitional scene, in which the location seems unchanged but characters suddenly appear dressed in fatigues, Memorial Day abruptly moves from the world of weekend warriors to an actual war zone. Our drunken racists and rapists––and their victims––are now charged with capturing and guarding anonymous Muslims, their unquenchable but blasé appetites unchanged.

The rest of the film is given over to narrative reenactments of the imagery made famous by the Abu Ghraib scandal. Fox and his actors imagine the infamous leash incident as stemming from one soldier’s failed seduction of another. Actual memos outlining the rules of interrogation are read out loud and laughed at by kids who we’ve already seen obey nothing but their own unexamined ids. Human pyramids are built to scale. A repeated tableau features these uninterested prison guards discussing their personal exploits in front of a cage of hooded figures; in the most effective moment of this second half, the victim of a sexual assault from the first part of the film confides to a friend how the previous incident made her feel while a prisoner whose hood has come loose stares out from the background. She movingly describes combating the bad behavior of others with further bad behavior. She’s talking about her personal life, but Fox’s political metaphor is loud and clear.

And that’s it. Virtually non-narrative, Memorial Day sets up the party zone as a moral equivalent to the war zone, hammers that connection home and then stops, content with offering an equation in lieu of an argument. But for all its faults, there’s an implicit and surprisingly conservative critique wedded to that equation. Nowhere do we see commanding officers condoning or interfering: the Iraqi prison is the same authority-free zone as the impromptu motel orgy. There’s an element of metaphoric fantasy here, for sure, but ironically, Fox’s chosen binaries feel slightly more wedded to a real critique than the works of the A-list filmmakers. If Errol Morris tells us that Abu Ghraib was documented by conflicted, innocent bystanders and perpetrated by good soldiers following the orders of our evil empirical leaders, and Brian DePalma tells us that said good soldiers are mostly being corrupted by/driven to commit atrocities by the pressures of the hellish environment into which they’ve selfishly been thrust by our evil empirical leaders, it’s amazing that the militantly anti-war Fox is the filmmaker whose point of view seems to hew most closely to the Rumsfeldian “few bad apples” theory.

Of course, it’s total bullshit––Fox isn’t actually suggesting that the soldiers responsible for misdeeds at Abu Ghraib take any real personal responsibility. He’s merely reminding us that sexual violence is something they learned not at basic training, but at spring break. Let’s pull out of Iraq and shut down Daytona Beach!

Memorial Day screens today and tomorrow at the IFC Center in New York. A slightly different version of this review was published originally during the 2008 CineVegas Film Festival.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog

Posted Wednesday, February 04, 2009 4:01 PM by SpoutBlog | with 0 comments

Christian Bale Typecasting

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Terminator Salvation (2009)

I feel terrible for exploiting the Christian Bale Terminator Salvation rant tape for multiple posts in a matter of hours, but these two items just happened to pop up next to each other in my feed reader, and the convergence was just too much too ignore (and anyway — I’m allowed one “What? It’s meta-criticism of the media coverage!” post every now and then, right?)

First, via FilmDrunk, a jokey video in which “Warner Brother Public Relations Rep Rob Delaney” (previously seen responding to this Harry Potter scandal) condones Bale’s “lesson in professionalism” by tying it to his method: “Christian Bale is a motherfucking tornado of pain and talent. Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, American Psycho. What do these films have in common? They’re all films where Christian Bale plays himself…”

Then, this very long ABC News story, in which therapists, Bale’s former assistant, and an US Weekly editor all strenuously imply that Bale becomes so one with his characters that he was actually probably yelling at the DP in character as the Terminator. “The art of acting is not paint by numbers, it’s an art form,” reminds T4’s asisstant director. And “anger expert” Richard Driscoll has high marks for the performance:

Once he started he could very well have gotten into the artistry and the craft of what he was doing…He’s not doing a wussy complaint. He’s doing a full-fledged exemplary headline-news tantrum. He’s reaming this fella out at great length and with extreme passion.

Let’s recap: the internet video suggesting that Bale cannot divorce himself from the violent characters that he plays was trying to be funny. The reported story from the reputable news agency wasn’t.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog

Posted Wednesday, February 04, 2009 3:01 PM by SpoutBlog | with 0 comments

Chick Flicks and Economic Stimulus

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He's Just Not That Into You (2009)

Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009)

Just over two months ago, Pajamas Media blogger Roger Kimball insisted that the economic picture could not possible be as dire as those mainstream liberal media hysterics wanted us to think. Then last week, Pajamas Media announced that their blog network is going out of business. Lesson learned: he who attempts to undercut the current economic pessimism ends up ironically fucked.

That is, unless “he” is talking about Hollywood. The movie industry is thriving so undeniably in this downturn –– Hollywood just wrapped its best January ever at the box office, with theater attendance up over 16% –– that just yesterday the MPAA’s proposed tax credits were thrown out of the economic stimulus package (California senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, no doubt well aware of the longer-tail consequences of the credit crunch on film financing, voted to keep the tax credits in). With the recent successes of mindless escapist fare like Paul Blart: Mall Cop, and the middling box office performance of “serious” Oscar contenders like Milk and Frost/Nixon, the pervasive meme in entertainment media coverage is that, just like during the first (and still the best!) Great Depression, audiences are flocking to the movies to forget their troubles.

But the (empty pockets) = (bottomless thirst for cinematic guilty pleasure) equation will really be put to the test by early February’s two high-profile chick-lit-turned-flick releases, Confessions of a Shopaholic (about what happens when a happy-go-lucky credit card abuser gets shamed by love into practicing fiscally responsibility) and He’s Just Not Into You (about what happens when married men allow themselves to be seduced by Scarlett Johansson, whose terrible costuming and hair extensions would suggest the recession has consequences we haven’t yet foreseen — more on that in my review later this week). There seems to be a common wish amongst journalists to make sense of these films (before they’ve even opened, before the audiences have had a chance to embrace or reject what they’re trying to sell) in the context not just of the filmgoing boom of the 1930s, but the substance of Old School depression films themselves.

Exhibit A: John Anderson’s review of He’s Just Not That Into You in Variety:

…the pic may also be the first contemporary escapist comedy that feels fully aware of its place in the economic vortex. The lushness, the leisure, the vicarious wealth are all balms to soothe our savaged selves as we look away from the news and onto the screen. Given the state of things, such a movie almost seems like an act of charity toward the public. It’s not screwball comedy, but the underlying sentiments are the same.

Anderson is not necessarily incorrect, but he fails to mention that the primary tone of the film is fairly grey. There is certainly a fair share of thoughtless lifestyle porn in Into You (there’s one subplot involving a character’s transformation from cheesy real estate loser into even cheesier condo broker to Baltimore’s new-money gays; in another, a couple joke about the “million undocumented workers” who are renovating their fabulous brownstone), but it is not the wacky, high-style romantic comedy that its marketing would suggest. For the most part, it takes the romantic foibles and missteps, angst and agonies of its ensemble almost absurdly seriously. At the risk of giving it too much credit (although I do think it deserves *some* credit), it’s kind of a Husbands and Wives for the US Weekly set, and though the Us Weekly set is certainly a larger, more valuable demo than the Woody Allen set, I wonder what second weekend box office will look like when women start to spread the word that the film’s kind of a bummer.

I predict Shopaholic will have an easier time of it. In today’s Los Angeles Times, Claudia Eller notes that “Shopaholic’s theme of overindulgence and unmitigated spending comes just as consumers are tapped out on their credit cards and feverishly pinching pennies,” and frets, “some observers worry that those images may not sit well with potential moviegoers who are having a hard time making ends meet.” She then (reluctantly, it seems) acknowledges that “there is some evidence that people want to see escapist fare to take their minds off their troubles. During the Depression, for example, some of the most popular movies were madcap comedies and musicals like Top Hat, with elegant couples such as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers decked out to the nines.”

I haven’t seen Shopaholic, but from what I know of it, it’s the prototypical Depression fairy tale: under-funded girl lives beyond her means, only to be saved from the gutter by a well-bred love interest (her boss, no less!) The question is, will the easy out-via-improbable romance racket play to a Mall Cop nation? I don’t have the answers! What say you?

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog

Posted Wednesday, February 04, 2009 2:01 PM by SpoutBlog | with 0 comments

10 Classic Films That Would Be Better With Zombies

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Abraham Lincoln (1930)

Angel and the Badman (1947)

At the Circus (1939)

Beat the Devil (1953)

D.O.A. (1950)

The General (1927)

His Girl Friday (1940)

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

October (1927)

Revolt of the Zombies (1936)

Royal Wedding (1951)

Weekend at Bernie's (1989)

White Zombie (1932)

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Twister (1996)

Shaun of the Dead (2004)

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

Publisher Quirk Books and author Seth Grahame-Smith have come up with the best way to make a literary work more accessible since the creation of Classics Illustrated comic books: they’ve added “all-new scenes of bone crunching zombie action” to Jane Austen’s 19th century novel Pride and Prejudice. This new version, out in stores this May, is titled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now With Ultraviolent Mayhem! And if you didn’t think it was a masterpiece before, chances are you will now.

Could we do the same thing to classic films? Well, the technology to add extraneous enhancements to movies exists. Just check out The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for proof. But like Pride and Prejudice, we’d need to “enhance” films in the public domain if we wanted to get away with it. Fortunately, there are hundreds of such titles (see a list at Wikipedia), some of which actually already have zombies (Night of the Living Dead, White Zombie, Revolt of the Zombies, and in a way the “scientific” film Experiments in the Revival of Organisms).

Avoiding the majority of public domain movies already consisting of horror and science fiction elements, we’ve come up with ten great classic films that would be even greater with the addition of zombies.

Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstin, 1925)

New title: Mutinous Zombies of the Battleship Potemkin

Synopsis: A Soviet cinema masterpiece, Eisenstein’s film depicts the 1905 uprising of zombies on the titular vessel against the oppressive officers of the Tsarist regime. It begins when soldiers aboard the Potemkin are forced to eat rotten, maggot-infested meat, which turns the men into mutinous zombies. Later, the city of Odessa becomes overwhelmed with undead citizens and the Tsarist military is sent in to massacre them. In the end, though, even the soldiers are converted. Other Eisenstein films, particularly October, may also appropriately receive similar special zombie editions.

The General (Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton, 1927)

New title: The General and the Zombies

Synopsis: Buster Keaton’s greatest silent blockbuster is kind of like the Shaun of the Dead of its time. The film begins with Keaton’s character losing his girlfriend due to his inability to prove he’s not a coward and a bum, but then by happenstance he ends up a hero and, most importantly, salvages his relationship in the process. In this special edition, Johnnie Gray still has to rescue his train (and his girlfriend) from the Union army, but now those Northern spies are zombies. Like the title character in Shaun of the Dead, Johnnie must in one new scene impersonate a zombie in order to fool them. The stone-faced Keaton is a natural for this masquerade, but of course then soldiers on his side mistake him for being a Union zombie, with hilarious consequences.

Abraham Lincoln (D.W. Griffith, 1930)

New title: Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies

Synopsis: Griffith’s biopic about the 16th President of the United States was filled with historical inaccuracies when first released almost 80 years ago. The main complaint? Griffith left out Lincoln’s triumphant one-man battle against a Confederate brigade made up completely of zombie soldiers (yep, the South had them, too). Now, in a special edition release timed to coincide with Honest Abe’s 200th birthday, scenes depicting that battle, as well as a new ending, in which Lincoln recommends the enslavement of zombies, because they are not technically men and therefore are not guaranteed Constitutional freedom, are included. Also, on the DVD: a bonus behind-the-scenes supplement featuring a still-undead Lincoln zombie overseeing the restoration; an exclusive look at Lincoln’s famous stovepipe hat, which he wore to keep zombies from getting at his brains. (The above image of Abe Lincoln, Zombie Hunter is from this t-shirt.)

At the Circus (Edward Buzzell, 1939)

New title: At the Zombie Circus

Synopsis: The Marx Brothers’ films were crazy enough without the addition of zombies, but this late episode from Groucho, Harpo and Chico just wasn’t anarchic enough for their fans. So, now the plot involving the stolen money has been eliminated and the film consists of the three Marx boys trying to stay alive inside a circus tent filled with zombies. There’s a strong man zombie, a dwarf zombie, and then there’s Margaret Dumont, who is so dull Groucho thinks she’s a zombie. Or maybe he just stabs her in the brain for fun?

His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)

New title: His Girl Zombie

Synopsis: Despite the new title, Rosalind Russell is never turned into a zombie. Rather, the zombies are merely in the background, causing even more fast-paced hysterics (yes, they’re the quick sort of zombies that are all the “rage” these days). Actually, at one point Ralph Bellamy’s character is thought to be a zombie, but then it’s realized that as much as he appears to be the walking dead, he’s just too slow to be one of the zombies running around outside the courthouse. Again, His Girl Zombie has something in common with Shaun of the Dead (not to mention Twister), in that it’s another story in which a couple attempts to separate but is thrust back together during a chaotic event.

Angel and the Badman (James Edward Grant, 1947)

New title: Angel and the Badman and the Zombies

Synopsis: In this early precursor to the ‘80s Harrison Ford classic Witness Zombies, John Wayne plays a shootist and womanizer who is wounded near a Quaker family home. Brought in and nursed back to health, he attempts to tame himself after falling for a young Quaker woman. But his desire to become a pacifist is made difficult when brain-hungry zombies attack the house, and he must choose to either commit himself to the Quaker ways and “die” with his new religious society of friends, or go out and kick some zombie ass.

D.O.A. (Rudolph Mate, 1950)

New title: Z.O.A.

Synopsis: The film begins with Frank Bigelow, filmed from behind, entering a police station to report that he’s been murdered. The reason he is able to do this is not because he’s not yet died from the poison; it’s because he is a zombie, which we finally discover when the camera finally shows us his face. The film then goes to flashback and details the events that lead to Bigelow’s zombification. After the back-story is complete, the film returns to the scene in the police station, where cops proceed to shoot Bigelow in the head. His file is then marked “Z.O.A.,” meaning “zombie on arrival.”

Royal Wedding (Stanley Donen, 1951)

New title: Zombie Wedding

Synopsis: Fred Astaire and Jane Powell star as a brother and sister song and dance duo in this musical classic, which features two of Astaire’s most famous scenes. “Zombie Jumps” has him dancing first with a coat rack, then with a corpse, Weekend at Bernie’s-style. The latter of these objects ends up coming to life, a metaphor for Astaire’s famous ability to animate the inanimate. In “You’re All Zombies to Me,” Astaire playfully escapes from the zombie he’s created by dancing on the walls and ceiling of a room.

Beat the Devil (John Huston, 1953)

New title: Beat the Devil and the Zombies

Synopsis: It’s been called the first camp movie, but unfortunately it wasn’t the first camp zombie movie. That all changes now with newly added scenes in which Humphrey Bogart and a great ensemble of character actors, including Peter Lorre, must fight off zombies while killing time at an Italian port. It’s very likely that Huston and co-screenwriter Truman Capote would have no problem with this additional subplot. Anyone familiar with the background of the film knows its makers didn’t take it seriously in the least. Actually, let’s just go ahead and add zombies into every section of the film. Zombies on the boat, zombies in Africa, zombies everywhere. Heck, make Bogie a zombie due to a lack of money. After all, as his character sets it up with the line, “I’ve got to have money. Doctor’s orders are that I must have a lot of money, otherwise I become dull, listless and have trouble with my complexion.”

It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)

New title: It’s a Zombie Life

Synopsis: On Christmas Eve, George Bailey wishes he were a zombie. But before he can find another zombie to bite him, an angel comes down from Heaven and shows him what his life would be like if he were undead. Zombie George infects the whole town of Bedford Falls, all except the wealthy Mr. Potter, who manages to take over the town by enslaving and exploiting the zombified citizens. In the end, George realizes that he’s better off simply shooting himself in the head so that he can’t possibly become a zombie. (Note: It’s a Wonderful Life is actually no longer in the public domain, but we just couldn’t not include it).

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog

Posted Wednesday, February 04, 2009 10:00 AM by SpoutBlog | with 0 comments

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Jude Law is All the ‘Rage’. Today in Film Bloggery 02/04/09

Oops: Five Movies That Failed to Predict the Future, Part 2

MEMORIAL DAY Review

Christian Bale Typecasting

Chick Flicks and Economic Stimulus

10 Classic Films That Would Be Better With Zombies

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