Wednesdae

Last night I hung out with Sean and Chad and a couple of Sean's friends. We caught a showing of Dawn of the Dead, which wasn't exactly a horror film but was fantastic in its own right. I mean, this is the kind of zombie-horror (hehe) that sticks with you for a long time. It didn't quite capture the complete spirit of the original, as far as Romero's political commentary against consumerism goes (although I would argue that a lot of people project that onto the original, and its appearance in the film is largely unintentional), but boy did it capture the sense of existential dread. Eventually, no matter how hard you struggle, no matter how narrow your escapes, they're gonna git 'cha eventually. It may take a while, but they will. There was the proper mix of gallows humor, and all the fun things that come with living through the apocalypse. The nudity, although brief, was a little gratuitous for my tastes, and I wish Ving Rhames had been given more to do. (Here's the point where I make the negative comparison to the first film). In the original Dawn, the small group - four people - allowed Romero to develop each character in his or her own right, so when they died, it had that much more impact. Here, though, even with a two-hour production, only one or two characters got any real development, so the personal impact was less, but the overall impact of dread was worse.

And, for the record, the film's last action sequence, which took almost twenty minutes, used that drop-frame technique I've previously despised in films like Gladiator. But here, it made perfect sense, and fit seamlessly into the movie. I hope this doesn't give other horror directors ideas, because I don't think it's gonna work very often and it seems too gimmicky, but I do have to give props where props are due: they did it, and did it well.