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Tag Archives: Drew Goddard
World War Z (2013)
Be Prepared for Anything. Our War Has Just Begun.
I feel a little awkward going into this review. I indeed saw this movie, and I even saw it in theaters, but as I go to write the review, I feel like I don’t remember the movie at all. It hasn’t even been that long! I saw this movie a week ago! I don’t know if that’s a sign that this movie is bad, or that drugs are bad. Mmmkay? Either way, it’s a big movie, and one that I was excited to see because of the subject matter, so it deserves a review, as best I can muster one. Let’s see if I can jog my memory as I review World War Z, based on the novel by Max Brooks, written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard, and Damon Lindelof, directed by Marc Forster, and starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Fana Mokoena, Daniella Kertesz, James Badge Dale, David Morse, Ludi Boeken, Matthew Fox, Peter Capaldi, Pierfrancesco Favino, Ruth Negga, Moritz Bleibtreu, Abigail Hargrove, Sterling Jerins, and Fabrizio Zacharee Guidoas.
While sitting in traffic, former UN employee Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) and his family – wife Karin (Mireille Enos), and daughters Rachel (Abigail Hargrove) and Constance (Sterling Jerins) – are witnesses as mayhem breaks out all around them. Radio reports suspect a massive rabies outbreak, but it looks a lot more like zombies. And an extremely fast-acting strain of zombification that turns people into zombies 12 seconds after being bitten. Gerry manages to get his family to the safety of a naval landing craft, but in exchange he must return to his former post and find the cause of the infection in hopes of finding a cure.
From what I have deduced from my notes and my limited memory, I enjoyed this movie very much. I also didn’t have the same problems that I heard from many people that disliked this movie because I have never, and would never, read the book this was based on. Or any other book for that matter. But most of the anger I heard about this movie was based around the fact that they didn’t stick very closely to the book, but I would have no idea about that. Judging this movie on its own merit, I enjoyed it. I did feel like the name was a little mediocre, and that it also was probably the result of someone’s sloppy hand-writing when they were writing a movie about World War 2. But then I appreciated that they didn’t waste much time getting into the movie. They get started with the zombies right away. The virus doesn’t waste any time either. It takes about 10 seconds for it to work. That keeps the action moving, but I did think that it hindered a staple of the zombie movie. There could be no real suspense built in scenes where the audience knows someone’s been infected but the other characters do not, or when someone really close to one of the characters is turning zombie right in front of them. Zombie movies love to do that! But in this movie, all you have to do is wait 10 seconds and if they haven’t turned, they aren’t going to. It’s a minor gripe, and I did like the scene Gerry thought he might be infected so he prepared himself to jump off the roof of the building if he thought he was turning. Downright noble of him. I also thought this movie showed for the first time how easy it could be to survive a zombie apocalypse with things like battleships at our disposal. Especially since it only takes 10 seconds for someone to turn. There’d be no chance that zombies could make it onto one of these ships, allowing us to be safe on them for a very long time.
I would say there were a couple of parts to the story I took issue with, and almost all of them require ::SPOILER ALERT:: The first one was when the scientist that accompanied Gerry died. The savior of humanity is really gonna die by slipping and shooting himself with his own gun? I know he probably had minimal military training at best, but come on. That’s a little goofy. And then I took issue with the part where all of Jerusalem falls. They all died because some people in the city had the rhythm in them? They started singing and dancing for no reason, which attracted the attention of the zombies and caused the entire city to die. And people wonder why I refuse to dance. From now on I’ll be able to say, “Because of the zombies.” And how about the doctor in the WHO (World Health Organization) facility that turns because he’s looking through a microscope and reaches for the infected blood while not looking? I’ve seen that episode of Scrubs and I know that kind of thing can happen with infected blood, but shouldn’t you be a bit more careful? And how is there not a doctor in the WHO facility that refers to himself as Doctor WHO? Also, how does that facility not have some ability to set off alarms remotely so that they can draw the infected away from where they need to go? I also thought it was interesting that they overcome the problem by infecting people, because the infected wanted a clean host for their own virus. It especially made me happy because my Hepatitis C would save me from the zombie apocalypse. ::END SPOILERS::
I dug all the performances in the movie. I love Brad Pitt. He’s one of those people that I want to hate because they’re so handsome and women love them so much that I wish they weren’t also great actors, but he is. I would say that his lady, Mireille Enos, was not believable. I guess her performance was, but I don’t see someone that looks like Brad Pitt going for a chick that’s just cute at best. He pulls Angelina tail! I also took issues with her, and all of them were based around her cell phone. I wanted to thank the movie for showing the world the arduous process of entering a contact into a cell phone. It’s something no one in the world has any familiarity with, so I’m glad they spent so much time showing it. And then this bitch almost gets Brad killed, and DOES get some nice military guys killed, because she had to try to call him multiple times. He said he’d call you, bitch! As good as I thought Brad did in the movie, I found myself less interested in him and more interested in Daniella Kertesz, the bald Israeli lady. I liked her. She was badass and hot. And she was missing a hand, and that’s my biggest fetish.
One could say that I’d have to call World War Z completely forgettable because of the empirical evidence I have from personally forgetting most of the movie shortly after watching it. But as I started writing the review I realized that everything I could force myself to remember was enjoyable. The story was good and kept me interested all the way through, even with the few small quibbles I had with some parts of the story. And the performances caused no complaints. I’m perfectly comfortable recommending that you see this movie while it’s still in theaters. World War Z gets “Mother Nature knows how to disguise her weakness as strength” out of “That’s not stupidity or weakness; that’s just human nature.”
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The Cabin in the Woods (2012)
I’m Drawing a Line in the Sand. Do NOT Read the Latin!
It’s time for another October Horrorthon! I had heard so much about today’s movie that I was very excited to see it finally come out, not only on DVD, but also on RedBox. When it finally arrived, I had already set my mind to go and pick it up when my roommate told me he had purchased the digital copy of it. Score! A few days later, when we both had the time to sit down and watch it, we prepared ourselves to watch the movie that our friends and many critics have been talking up since its original release. That movie is Cabin in the Woods, co-written by Joss Whedon, co-written and directed by Drew Goddard, and starring Kristen Connolly, Fran Kranz, Jesse Williams, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford, Brian J. White, Amy Acker, Jodelle Ferland, and Sigourney Weaver.
A very typical scenario unfolds as a group of college students decide that the best thing they can do with their time is to go to an isolated cabin in the middle of the woods for a vacation. The stereotypes involved are the nerdy quasi-virgin Dana (Kristen Connolly), the stoner Marty (Fran Kranz), the egghead who is actually a receiver on the football team Holden (Jesse Williams), the jock who is also on full academic scholarship Curt (Chris Hemsworth), and the whorish blonde who is actually only recently blondized Jules (Anna Hutchison). Okay, so they’re slightly off the normal stereotypes, but they get much closer as time goes on. As does the story, as the group find the basement of the cabin, filled with various items of creepy origin. They pick a journal and read Latin words aloud, which sets a zombie redneck pain-worshipping family on the loose to kill them. As typical as all of this sounds, there’s something very atypical happening behind the scenes…
A lot has been made of the idea of “the twist” in movies, mostly since M. Night Shyamalan made it super famous. We’ve also seen movies before that mock the cliché’s of horror movies while adhering to them themselves, such as the Scream movies. The twist to this movie takes that stuff to a new level. But here’s the question that brings people to my reviews: is it amazing? No, not really. I was not nearly as charmed by this movie as I expected to be, and certainly not as charmed as everyone made me think I would be. But I’m still trying to put my finger on why I didn’t like the thing. I’ve watched it twice already and I remain relatively confused. I’ll try to work it out as we go along. The writing was probably a big part of my dislike of this movie. I never really minded the idea of the twist in a movie, but when you spread that twist all the way through your movie, it hardly feels like a twist. I was just confused by the two seemingly-unrelated movies until the reason for both stories made itself clear. At that point I thought it was a really cool idea for a movie… and then the movie kept going. I get it already! You’re so clever for lampooning the entire horror movie genre. Now get to making a good movie. But the movie never salvaged itself as far as I was concerned. I’ve no intention of spoiling the twist in this movie for anyone as I was given the pleasure of not having the movie spoiled for me, but I took issue with the fact that the movie seemed to spoil itself. Hell, the movie actually starts with the twist before it gets into the typical dying college kids movie. But I also don’t know how they could have made this movie work for me. If the twist stuff wasn’t in the movie, it would have just been another underwhelming horror movie. Maybe I would’ve liked it if they didn’t reveal the twist stuff until Dana and Marty were in the middle of it, but I can’t really know that because that’s not the movie I watched. All I can really know is that this movie didn’t work for me, certainly not as much as I thought it would with Joss Whedon’s involvement. But where I did see his involvement in the writing, I liked it. I’m mainly referring to the clever and funny moments in the dialogue that really worked for me, though not enough to redeem the rest of the movie. You could see that stuff in the dialogue from pretty early on, like the, “I learned it from watching you!” interaction between Curt and Jules.
The look of the movie was mostly fine, but there were parts of it that were less than convincing. What made them better is that they were close to, but legally distinguishable from, many classic horror movie monsters, and that was fun to pick them out and recognize them. There were zombies, werewolves, ghosts, giant bats, and angry robots, but they also had some more specific monsters like a Cenobite reminiscent of Hellraiser, a killer clown reminiscent of Pennywise from It, and there was apparently even a Reaver from Firefly, but I didn’t see it. The main zombies were a bit of a problem from, but only because they were occasionally unconvincing and reminded me more of the creatures from the Thriller video. Otherwise there were no complaints about the looks.
I liked the greater majority of the performances in this movie, so anything I didn’t like about the movie was probably not their fault. I liked Kristen Connolly a lot, especially because she was really cute and opened the movie walking around in her panties. Would girls actually walk around in their underwear with all their windows open in a busy residential neighborhood? If they do, then I officially hate my mom for having us live on the outskirts of town. Anna Hutchison got her boobs out in the movie as well, but that was disappointing because I didn’t find her nearly as attractive as Connolly or Amy Acker … or Chris Hemsworth for that matter. I don’t wanna sound gay or nothin’, but I’d let that guy vacation in my cabin in the woods. Wink wink! I even liked Jodelle Ferland as Patience Buckner, but that may have been mostly because I seem to be inadvertently reviewing her entire career. She was in Silent Hill, one of the Twilight movies, and the second Bloodrayne abortion. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but four movies now for someone most people probably can’t name is pretty weird. Also, she did fine in the movie. The only performance I really took issue with was Fran Kranz. I realize that they were going for the super cliché pothead character, and he was even probably supposed to be a little bit annoying. If that was true, it worked. That dude got on my nerves.
I guess expectations hurt Cabin in the Woods with me more than anything else. When a movie is talked up too much, it will inevitably find a very difficult time matching those expectations. I expected to be blown away by the movie, but instead it was just okay. The idea of it was nifty, but it wasn’t surprising as I thought it might be because they put the twist of the movie right up front, the look was mostly hit but occasionally miss, and the performances were mostly excellent. I still feel like, if you want to watch a movie that turns the horror genre on its head, you’d be better off with Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. It’s not a bad movie, it was just underwhelming to me. Pick it up at RedBox for a dollar so that you can find out for yourself. Cabin in the Woods gets “And you have no pants” out of “Cutting the flesh makes him have a husband’s bulge.”
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