Until then check Science here.

But the 1970s tunnel vision of our name directors is a hash for another day. I bring it up at all because Clooney’s newest vehicle, The American, exists for the same reasons, and Clooney, to his credit, has basically admitted as much in interviews. The American is a familiar fusion of high art and low genre, a formula art-genre picture. I usually use that term – “art-genre” – dismissively, because I normally sense that the creators of these sorts of pictures are deluding themselves: serving formula disguised as an instantly minted masterpiece. But I don’t get that vibe from The American, I think it knows exactly what it is.

The American is another picture about a lonely assassin rapidly approaching a point in his life that could be described as being over the hill. The assassin, of course, is seen in a botched or troubled situation in the beginning, and this, of course, prompts him to enter into a precarious scenario that is meant to be his last job. The assassin, usually, finds himself comforted by an impossibly beautiful woman, which is more believable than usual because the killer is, himself, either impossibly handsome or impossibly charismatic and debonair, with money, of course, being a non-issue. The American is unavoidably in the school of Le Samourai, and a number of other fatalistic existential noirs where everything is beautifully hopeless.

Clooney, at his most Clooney-ish (Out of Sight, Ocean’s Eleven) is a suave, glamorous bad-boy prankster who gives performances that exude more than a bit of conscious self-satire (which is a roundabout method of self-congratulation). Clooney has been compared to Cary Grant a number of times, but his strategy is more reminiscent of Warren Beatty in that the text of his “star” performances seems to be “yeah, I know I’m a lucky sonofabitch, and I know you love me anyway”. Like Beatty, Clooney likes to occasionally toy with that, to turn everything down to a simmering suggestion where the tampering down of his persona is meant to evoke something more timeless and existential. The American is one of those roles in the tradition of Clooney’s underrated performance in Solaris. Clooney doesn’t do much here that you haven’t seen before, but he’s more confidently open and matter of fact. There’s a great bit, one of Clooney’s career best, when he realizes that his Gorgeous Opportunity for Personal Salvation and Self-Actualization (Violante Placido), a prostitute he’s been seeing as a client, is asking him out for real. Clooney’s half-step, his disbelieving half-swallow, is worth seeing the picture for alone.

The movie, directed by Anton Corbijn (Control), also mercifully spares us most of the clutter inherent in the assassin-on-the-run scenario. The American is about soaking in the Italian countryside and the bodies of the young women; it is also about the minute details of putting a weapon together (which is a refreshing deviation from cliché: Clooney’s last job is one of construction, not on-the-site execution). I have read a few comparisons to Antonioni, but Corbijn isn’t that committed to his character’s state of mind at the expense of plot. Antonioni was a master of an atmosphere that told the real story at hand; Corbijn is very assured with wonderfully (and occasionally extremely) composed shots that let us feel our way around familiar territory.

This picture uses – in the tradition of these lonely hunter movies – gorgeous people, gorgeous scenery, gorgeous clothes, and movie situations as stand-ins for universal loneliness and confusion. Most of us feel the American’s detachment, his depression, his alienation, at least some of the time. This genre blows those feelings up into a vehicle that gives us the ideal embodiment of those frustrations: these troubled, seemingly unearthly, people act out a more exciting version of our tedium and uncertainty. Movie killers aren’t merely bored, they’re trapped in an existence that invites words such as “ennui”; words that sound more than a tad overblown when applied to a lonely Friday of drinking beer and watching cartoons and maybe, after a number of those beers, calling a hook-up you barely knew anyway. Corbijn and Clooney have made a strangely touching movie out of spare parts.

Probably because a mass piranha sex and bloodbath would be too much for the picture’s budget. The best jokes are saved for the last twenty minutes, and they are admittedly pretty impressive. The director, Alexandre Aja, of High Tension and the surprisingly intense remake of The Hills Have Eyes, has a blunt, merciless way of staging violence that marks him as some sort of talent; though he’s probably a talent without any sort of rudder such as reasoning or point of view, he appears to be a strictly B-movie man in a humorlessly nihilistic vein that seems to have become a specialty of French horror filmmakers. Aja brutally punished his heroines in High Tension, he brutally punished the tourists in Hills, and now he brutally punishes the young’uns here for having the gall to drink and drug and fuck. Joe Dante, of the original (and, truthfully, overrated) Piranha, was lighter and cheekier, and he respected his characters enough not to play favorites: the innocents bought it just as regularly as the guilty. There’s a moment in this Piranha where Aja could have played a similar trick: with the party girls and the little tykes shimmying a robe above piranha invested waters, but this scenario plays out just as you would probably guess. The inexplicably derided Eli Roth, who cameos here, managed more interesting, atmospheric duels of sex and guilt in his Hostel movies, and his pictures, at certain moments, were legitimately kinda hot.

P.S. I didn’t see Piranha in 3D, as the ticket price (north of $15.00) struck me as a rather absurd effort in the name of “due diligence”.

The general preoccupation of these movies, besides creating varying ever-escalating opportunities for Ferrell and company to blow their tops, is the hostility that men and women tamper down in order to function in society. The point of these pictures is that that hostility is unleashed; Ferrell and his ensembles, relying on considerable improvisation, wallow in the confusion and self-consciousness and self-absorption that consumerist society encourages. This is most apparent in Step Brothers, with the intentionally overt references to the Cheesecake Factory, to Dane Cook, to Bed, Bath and Beyond. The happy ending of Step Brothers, which I initially took to be straight-forward, is, it now seems to me, meant to be ironic. Ferrell and John C. Reilly are delusional losers who, near the end, pick a different delusion in order to function more conventionally in mass society. Yet, every successful character (most memorably Ferrell’s brother’s wife) is painted as deranged and miserable, with a clock ticking over their heads toward the inevitable implosion.

The Other Guys is Ferrell and McKay’s most successfully conventional movie (though Ferrell isn’t officially credited as screenwriter this time). This movie proves that these guys can, from start to finish, make something that looks like a mainstream all-star movie, with three clearly defined acts with action beats that, while not especially memorable, are at least in league with most of what constitutes action these days. The picture is more clearly “blocked”, with more mind paid toward shots looking like shots. There’s less turn-the-camera-on-see-what-we-get spontaneity this time, most of the jokes play as if they were scripted, then rehearsed, then delivered.

Yet again, The Other Guys suggests potential for a movie that doesn’t quite materialize. The picture is initially meant as a parody of buddy cop action movies, a premise that’s, of course, as unoriginal by now as the subject of the parody itself. The Other Guys opens with a predictably loud, hyperbolic chase, with two rowdy badasses (Samuel L. Jackson and The Rock) smashing and grabbing and destroying half the city to bring down what turns out to be minor perps. Most of the first act is awash in promising jokes that don’t quite land their targets. Jackson and The Rock are too obviously posed as fascist hunks, particularly Jackson, who is entirely incapable of a performance these days that isn’t pitched to the rafters of a theater somewhere on one of the outer rings of Saturn. At first, you think that the scale here – the largest McKay has worked on – has mooted the team’s sensibility. Everything is played obvious and too buddy-buddy, including the casting of the supporting cops, which includes that one seemingly senseless, brain dead lug from the terrible tazer scene in The Hangover.

Then Jackson and The Rock leave the picture (in another promising gag that doesn’t quite pay off) and we see that the buddy cop thing is misdirection. The Other Guys are Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg; one a dweeb content with the paperwork (seen as the bitch work), the other a bad boy cop himself disgraced by a screw up (yet another promising joke that doesn’t quite work). These misfits find themselves with a case that could potentially sweep them into the limelight, to the place once occupied by Jackson and the Rock, and it is here that the movie somewhat takes off. The Other Guys is, like the other McKay/Ferrell movies, about repression and barely-checked outrage at the status quo of society, it is about our media addictions, with jokes on the inferiority complex of online writers, the physical discrepancies between people who look like Ferrell (a lot of us) and people who look like Wahlberg (not nearly as many), and the humiliating jobs that supposed bad boy cops have to take on the side (another Bed/Bath reference), among others. The picture, in short, is meant as a parody of the desperation the recent economic collapse has caused, a parody of the fame/regular guy caste system. (It is certainly no coincidence that the villain, played by Steve Coogan, is a Bernie Madoff variation, or that one of the best, most uncomfortable, jokes involves one of his henchmen supposedly killing himself.)

We see what the new found McKay (kinda) polish could build toward: contrast; a picture that opens conventionally and slowly unleashes the old Ferrell madness, which would seem crazier with a normalcy effectively established as counterpoint. Sadly, The Other Guys, a PG-13, never quite goes far enough; you keep counting the great-on-paper jokes that should be allowed to mutate into something more outrageous and thematically complete. Ferrell’s character turns out to be a hidden madman, a great idea that, again, gives the actor contrast, a starting point, a course. Ferrell is a dwarfed regular guy, a regular guy with dimensions of survival and self-preservation and canniness that Wahlberg doesn’t grasp. Ferrell, in a gag that does pay off, has an inexplicably beautiful wife (Eva Mendes), as well as a parade of ex-lovers who aren’t over him. The idea goes with the Jackson/Rock riffs in the beginning, as well as with the businessmen who are screwing everyone over – this is a little guy empowerment thing, a somewhat self-loathing parody of a guy enjoying the baubles of celebrity with nary an explanation (I wish they hadn’t delivered an explanation at all, but that joke works too.) The partners, over the course of the movie, switch places: Ferrell is the sexual aggressor, Wahlberg is the emasculated one with a woman he can’t quite get.

The picture is eventually a tribute to the anonymous working-class, and while that jives with everything that comes before, you wish that Ferrell and McKay hadn’t been so forgiving. You wish that a great sex joke between Mendes and Ferrell, with him screwing her while she’s dressed as her mother, would be allowed to grow wilder and wilder. You wish that Ferrell and Wahlberg’s wonderful performances had been allowed to reach full lunacy. You wish that Michael Keaton, who is every bit as good as you hope as the police captain, had been used in more original ways. You want, after four movies worth of implication, for these guys to throw the pop-cultural hand grenade that they seem to be capable of throwing. The Other Guys, still amusing, at least shows that McKay and Ferrell now know how to dress a wolf up in sheep’s clothing.

The Eclipse is an easy movie to overlook, but I wouldn’t recommend it, it has a modesty that is becoming and ultimately rather poignant. That has a lot to do with Ciarán Hinds and writer-director Conor McPherson’s treatment of him. The Eclipse is one of those movies where a bereaved man mostly performs quiet tasks while being quietly bereaved. The difference between this and any number of “mysterious tragedy long ago” pictures is Hinds’ containment, his refusal to pity himself. Hinds’ character, Michael Farr, lost his wife sometime in the past. He’s also a failed writer working a visiting-writers’ workshop in a small seaside Irish town; which means he also has to weather the casual superiority and entitlement of the visiting writers. Michael doesn’t pull any of the tricks you expect him to: he doesn’t pester the writers to look at his work, he doesn’t hint, he doesn’t cry in his room once he’s all alone at the end of the night in order to assure that we get it. He tends to his work, he tends to his daughter, and you can tell that, to him, his dull sort of bored lack of happiness is a relief from the pronounced unhappiness of his past. You grow to admire Michael, who has moved beyond notions of self-entitlement. He’s bravely parred of expectation.

And that pulls you toward him, you sense that he’s reached a point that deserves reprieve. The picture eventually becomes a kind of ghost story, with Michael seeking a visiting supernatural writer’s advice, and McPherson’s quiet, calm, command of mood takes you in. This is a supernatural picture with a sense of the every day, so the appearances of the ghosts feel like an actual intrusion, which is unusual for most horror films announcing themselves as horror with a capital H. Michael Farr is one of the most purely likeable characters I’ve seen in a movie this year; and, in the irresistible ending, he gets to, as a Peckinpah character once said, “enter his house justified”.

Everyone in The Expendables tries to enter their house justified. This is a Sylvester Stallone movie, which means there’s a lot of lame self-congratulatory humor disguised as self-deprecation. You know this picture by now: it is a Dirty Dozen animal with a bunch of past-their-prime stars invited back for another round of back-slapping, knife-throwing and gun-firing: in addition to Stallone, there’s Mickey Rourke, Eric Roberts, Dolph Lundgren, Steve Austin, Randy Couture and, for relevance, the younger Jason Statham and Jet Li. In an exceptionally lame cameo, there’s also Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis.

I will be forthcoming: I could only make it through an hour of this thing. If you feel that should disqualify me from weighing in, then I understand and hope you still steer clear of this movie in case you haven’t already checked it out anyway. I am somewhat usually sympathetic to Stallone’s shtick, I admire his clever ability to stay in the game, but The Expendables is one of his worst pictures…ever. (Yes, I’ve seen Cobra.) Dull, ineptly staged, Stallone takes himself too seriously to stage a simple blood bath, he wants you to feel for these cliches, to miss the meat-head, sexist, politically pathetic action movies of the 1980s. There are a few moments that are passable in comparison to the rest of the picture: Rourke gets to do his bit where he rambles on for minutes about nothing in a way that’s ludicrous and still sort of cool. (It’s his version of Brando’s late career nonsense authority.) Statham, the only real actor in a prominent role (Rourke, from what I can tell, is just a walk-on), somehow convinces you that this somehow means something to him. But this picture is the pits, a condescending effort by a rich star to throw red meat to what he sees as his beer-swilling rube audience. The Expendables are faux working-class.

Scott’s saving grace – for him, at least – is that he is a photogenic kind of dork-loser. He isn’t especially physically attractive (Cera’s chin appears to be evaporating – he could be the live-action Chicken Little), but he’s faintly cute in a way that women tend to think of when they say they’re into funny guys, or that they are into “geeks”. Scott is the kind of guy – undemanding, with a vacancy upstairs that gives him an illusion of confidence – that gives girls an illusion of their own originality; they can applaud themselves for not dating a stereotypically attractive or successful man. It’s an extension of the pretend-rebellion you see in people who must behave as artists to compensate for not actually creating art: men-children such as Scott go with (or for) the colored hair and the tattoos and the voices of unceasing disenchantment. Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) turns out to be the neon-hair girl literally of Scott’s dreams. She’s an object to pursue, a potential do-over in place of a past ex who has gone on to the sort of successful music career with which Scott pretends to aspire. The picture is about Scott confronting Ramona’s “7 Evil Exes”, with a few of his own exes refusing to be forgotten as well.

The opening is funnier and more knowing than most any youth picture I can recall since Ghost World (which Scott Pilgrim resembles in a number of ways). In between the volleys of verbal bitchery, we see the confusion and loneliness. Scott’s band launches into a primal-stripped number, and the camera pulls back and zooms in at once – a Hitchcock trick – to underscore the vacuum, the hopelessness, of these characters, with the music literally floating toward the sky in self-consciously retro 1980s Nintendo/Atari/arcade graphics that will come to partially define everyone in the picture.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World gives you a lift – its a beautifully transporting whirly-gig of a movie. This picture is exhilarating in a specific kind of way: you sense a promising filmmaker beginning to take hold of the medium in a way that is his; you sense his glee at his blossoming powers. The central contradiction is between the method of the movie and the characters themselves (again like Ghost World): the characters are – poignantly- self-pitying and adrift, while the film itself is breathless and ecstatic, an explosion of the various pop culture artifacts these people cherish. This movie is shot, cut and lit like a comic book and a primitive video-game at once, with pop-up facts and word bubbles, and super-powers that aren’t dully over-explained: they just are. Scott Pilgrim uses video-games to conquer the problem that movies have had with depicting how the internet has changed and affected us: surfing the web isn’t cinematic. Here, video-games, physically dynamic and exciting, allow us to see how the internet has influenced youth, how it has merged with pop culture to empower and confuse us.

The director here is Edgar Wright, and this is his third film following Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. I have a great affection for those pictures, particularly Hot Fuzz, which somehow mashes the movies of Tony Scott, Bad Boys II, The Wicker Man, and a British comedy of manners into something coherent and original. Shaun of the Dead was well-directed in a somewhat self-effacing way that fit the material, but Hot Fuzz implied formalist ambitions. Hot Fuzz, which calls for an approximation of Tony Scott’s nearly subliminal hyper-stutter style, revealed Wright to have the potential goods of a cinema madman himself. Hot Fuzz doesn’t parody 1990s/2000s action movies; it recreates their occasionally addictive, pompously bombastic sugar-rushes only with visual (and mental) clarity. (It was also pretty damn funny.) Wright, a smash-up artist and gifted mimic, approximates his various sources even more effectively this time out. This picture is a sensory rush reminiscent of De Palma, and, like good De Palma, all the tricks and bits (split screen, animation, etc) mesh into something of one piece. And, again like De Palma, there are satirical implications, such as an early scene (a possible steal from Natural Born Killers) of Scott and Wallace exchanging glib one-liners that’s set to the Seinfeld score and laugh track. The picture, time and again, parodies the idea that TV and the internet have given us of everyone being a star, and, like The Incredibles, it shows what that indiscriminate elevation to celebrity leads to: everyone, once again, being just another number. The internet, revealing every niche to have followings in the thousands, obliterates our illusions of originality. Everyone in Scott Pilgrim is a rock star, a dancer, a warrior, a superhero, and what keeps the film from being a drag is that it understands that all of this sound and fury is still a fucking blast. But a blast with a price; even the picture’s setting, Toronto, is used as a gag for mass anonymity. A reliable, economically feasible, movie stand-in for cities across the world, Toronto is, like Scott and his friends, culturally everything and nothing at once. This movie, some kind of classic, is a true picture for its generation.

Scott Pilgrim is a romantic comedy with a refreshing streak of responsibility, characters who would be quickly discarded for plot convenience in other movies refuse to be forgotten – they get their say and their due. The Thorn in the Heart, Michel Gondry’s newest picture, is similarly empathetic, and it pulls a devastating sleight of hand on you. Michel returns to France to shoot his aunt Suzette telling stories of her marriage to Jean-Guy and of her adventures teaching in various school houses throughout the rural countryside. Suzette is a commanding presence, small and somewhat stooped, but with eyes that are piercing and intelligent. We see right away that Suzette fits the bill of that strict teacher you despised at the time but grow up to adore; the one, as the movies say, who “got through” to you. Suzette is an engaging storyteller, and she isn’t prone to undue sentimentality or to self-congratulation; like any great teacher, she puts you there, and the certain elements – the points – resonate long afterward.

The picture opens with a Gondry dinner. Suzette is telling a story of how Jean-Guy, who is now deceased, acted at a dinner many years ago. The scene is long and doesn’t explicitly inform much of what will follow, but it is possibly the key to the entire movie. Jean-Guy, a work-horse, a giant in the family, is, in a different way, the only equal in Suzette’s sphere, and the story of Suzette and Jean-Guy is really the story of Suzette and their son, Jean-Yves, who we slowly realize has continually disappointed his parents and himself. Jean-Yves, big, strapping, but awkward (he looks a little like the filmmaker Terry Gilliam), hides under long hair and bandannas and layers of clothing. At first, he appears to be an amusing anecdote along the route of mapping Suzette’s teaching experiences (he was a student of hers too), but we see his defensive body language, his hurt. We see how Suzette and Jean-Yves look at one another: quickly, now on to other things.

Michel never admits this, but it is clear, after watching the entirety of The Thorn in the Heart, that the movie was a ruse to unite Suzette and Jean-Yves. This isn’t the situation of popular melodrama, in which one of them is conveniently responsible or clueless. It is clear that a series of casual misunderstandings slowly took hold and became a much larger elephant in the room too difficult to work around. Jean-Yves is different from his parents at every turn: he’s gay, potentially a stifled creative, and the picture doesn’t give you much idea that he’s employed. It is suggested that Jean-Yves’ artistic ambitions may have been similar to Michel’s. It is more than suggested that Suzette always felt a greater affinity for her nephew, the magnificent creative, who didn’t have the masculinity of Jean-Guy or the mental ferocity of Suzette to contend with, Michel could be a whirlwind guest and could then go home. Jean-Yves is mostly “not Jean-Guy” or “not Michel”.

A few years ago, Gondry directed, from Charlie Kaufman’s script, one of the best pictures of the decade in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (a picture, I might add, that would make an interesting double-bill with Scott Pilgrim). In that movie his boundless visual imagination was justified and deepened. Since then Gondry’s been – not surprisingly given his free-associative talent – considerably uneven. The Science of Sleep and Be Kind Rewind have their moments, but they’re also irritating and never really take root. The Thorn in the Heart strips Gondry of most of his artifice, and what remains is a stirringly direct honesty and compassion: a true humanity. You respond to Gondry’s generosity: he never exploits his family, he never pries them for juicy moments of heartbreak, most of what I’m describing is slightly off-screen, a ghost. The picture, beautifully shot, boils down to something devastating in its simplicity: the need for communication, for interior atonement, the need to reach beyond yourself. One of Suzette’s final lines (altered slightly to make sense out of context), in reference to Michel, not Jean-Yves, says most of it:

Even when you were a boy we didn’t have to show our claws. With you there are things that I pick up on, that I grasp without feeling the need to make long speeches.

The Thorn in the Heart is a great movie.

Rolling Stones: Stones in Exile would make a wonderful double-feature with The Runaways. This doc, just an hour, goes into the making of the Stones’ classic Exile on Main Street. The picture is relatively dense with detail – the tax issues, the French mansion, the travel, the drink, the drugs, the myths – but it’s also lively and reverent without being too reverent. Stones in Exile manages something that should be impossible: it demystifies the album without demystifying it. Let’s try that again: the picture, and it is important that more movies do this, stresses the work that goes into creating anything, just as it stresses the incalculable chance of endeavors such as Exile on Main Street, which appear to be perhaps accidental leaps of faith. That said, the mystery of this album – an exhilarating, heartbreaking hurly-burly genre-bending masterpiece – remains.

The Losers is one of a number of band-of-tough-guys movies out this year. Here’s the secret: they almost always sound more fun than they actually are, because they generally have so many personalities to contend with that they never really get out of Act I and go anywhere. The Losers is thoroughly mediocre in that so-dull-its-relaxing-to-sorta-watch-while-drinking-a-six-pack-with-your-brother way. Jeffrey Dean Morgan has a gruff, charismatic sexiness; Idris Elba is wasted in a nothing disgruntled second banana role; Zoe Saldana has a slender/lithe woman-of-dreams sexiness (she’s also better than almost every movie she’s given), while Jason Patric enjoys whatever club in Miami this movie bought him.

Saint John of Las Vegas is so good-intentioned it doesn’t exist, with a number of indie-movie stereotypes hanging around so you feel better about your life. That said, it stars Steve Buscemi, the poet laureate of the broken alcoholic (when will he make a Bukowski movie?), so it isn’t all that bad. Well, it is, but Buscemi is still open, amusing, devastating, memorable, generous – a great actor.

So, for that, I can’t work up much anger over the fact that Romero hasn’t made a good, or even particularly competent, movie since maybe Monkey Shines or maybe The Dark Half, both of which had moments. I had to look him up on IMDB to pinpoint his last decent movie, and, looking at Romero’s films, it becomes obvious that he’s enjoying a late-career mini-resurgence: the new Survival of the Dead is his third picture in five years, a major shift from the seven-to-ten years that could sometimes pass between projects. The zombie movie, largely apolitical (of course) these days, owes its godfather a steady gig at least; particularly given that Romero was reportedly/famously screwed out of much of the financial windfall for his first film, and still masterpiece, Night of the Living Dead – still one of the greatest American movies of all time.

Night of the Living Dead is ferociously paced – a mean, angry, despairing, terrifying movie; which is interesting because Romero is otherwise usually a dawdler. Romero is a smart, clever cult filmmaker, and like many smart, clever cult filmmakers he understands the need to turn his limitations into strengths in order to thrive. Romero’s 1970s pictures have a raw, unpolished vitality – many of them (especially Dawn of the Dead) look like comic books with every other panel torn out. The rhythm, the pace, is never especially impressive, but the decay and the outrage eat at you. (Sorry – came naturally.)

I belabor the strengths of past Romero pictures to get at what is missing from the new zombie trilogy: Land, Diary, and Survival of the Dead. The new pictures are unpolished and crude as well, but not in any kind of dirty/funky/subversive ways, they basically look like the blandly-lit made for cable movies that you might flip through on the Sci-Fi Channel or on ABC when it was producing those awful Mick Garris/Stephen King miniseries. In his new pictures, most prominently Survival, Romero is aiming for a lyricism that he doesn’t seem to have the chops for. There are moments: Survival’s silly final image is also rather sad; and Diary had a great capper as well, but mostly these pictures are cheap and clunky; with other potentially great sequences – like the moment in Survival of a guy swimming zombie waters while enemy snipers try to pick him off – lost in point-and-shoot staging and slack editing.

The politics in Survival of the Dead are less coherent, which is frankly a relief as the politics of the new Romero pictures have become relentlessly literal-minded. The new picture has the most promising set-up of the new Romero zombie movies: two rival Irish clans clashing over whether to kill the dead or attempt to make them useful. Yes, this has been done: in Day of the Dead, and a number of imitators sense, but the idea of a human scenario eclipsing the zombies is an appealing one, and it is nice (for a bit) to see Romero trying a low-fi Western on for size. But you soon realize that the zombies don’t mean anything anymore, and they don’t make any metaphorical sense. In the old trilogy, the zombies were primarily the personification of social unease: the tormented have-nots rising up. In the new movies, they are basically homeless people that characters always want to care for: buffoonish and un-threatening (the best kill in Survival is a steal from Dead Calm). The focus is now less on some sort of revolution than on a decent Medicare plan for the dead. This sentimentality, which makes next to no sense (you’re not really sure which clan you’re supposed to root for, and I don’t mean that in a good way), could almost be unintentional self-parody: that Romero himself has mellowed out, and doesn’t really remember what these things meant to him anymore.

All that said, I still like Romero and will continue to await his future films with affection, even his worst have a zest, a pleasure, for movie making that considerably more polished pictures lack. The Romero imitators are all more technically competent than the maestro, but almost all of them – with the exception of Edgar Wright – lack his soul. The Crazies, a well-reviewed remake of Romero’s crudely effective follow-up to Night of the Living Dead, follows the same predictable pattern. It is well-made. Director Breck Eisner has an eye, he keeps things moving, and the picture has a few set-pieces that could’ve come in handy to break up the monotony of Survival of the Dead, especially a nasty pitch-fork encounter in a hospital. But the picture is entirely pointless and apolitical, which should be impossible given the set-up; and the conclusion, which should come with a jolt of anti-authority outrage, is reduced to a fashionable gotcha moment. If Romero had just a tenth of these wiz-kids showmanship he might really do something again. And these kids – and that includes Zach Snyder who made the effective-but-also-pointless Dawn of the Dead cover – might be able to do something if they ever decided to step up and put away daddy’s toys. But that isn’t how this business appears to work; you’re apparently rewarded for competent work by graduating to even larger, more pointless material.

Unrelated aside: Please check my latest review at Slant, which can be found to your right under the Elsewhere column.