Last night I went out to see 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle’s take on the zombie apocalypse film. Let me just say that I’m a huge fan of the zombie apocalype genre. Give me a shotgun and a shambling army of the undead and that’s pretty much all it takes to make me happy. I’d have to say that I haven’t enjoyed a zombie film this much since Dawn of the Dead. And yes, I know the “zombies” aren’t zombies in the technical sense but that’s neither here nor there. Its like Trainspotting, but with zombies instead of heroin addicts! Wait, that’s a lie. Still, the quality directing and interesting camera work set the film apart from the usual B-movie zombie standards. To break it down, the pluses are: zombie-like hoards ravaging a dark, gritty, abandoned London, sprinting(!) zombies, insane amounts of carnage, Godspeed You Black Emperor!-inspired score (which apparently, actually includes a track by them as well). On the down side: complete and total lack of shotguns.

Sweet! Its about time, but Evangelion Death & Rebirth and End of Evangelion are finally going to get released on DVD here in the States. The release dates are July 30th and September 24th respectively. After seeing only bits and pieces of low resolution digital downloads of fansubbed versions I can’t wait to get my hands on these DVDs.

After watching The Prisoner, a Jackie Chan film, I feel slightly dizzy and disoriented. The film obviously comes from the school of thought that believes if you toss enough random things into a film a coherent plot will eventually emerge. This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it. You just can’t really judge a film like this by the same standards that you would something like say, The Royal Tenenbaums, that’s all. It tried to balance about 4 different story arcs, and rather than try to deftly interweave them as your conventional run-of-the-mill film might, this film boldy chose to just randomly slosh them together until something resembling a conclusion resulted. Namely, a huge gun battle against half of the army of the Philippines on a military airstrip. How did Chinese prison inmates end up in a gun battle on an airstrip in the Philippines? I couldn’t even begin to explain.

Since I have yet to hear back from CoreComm about finishing up my interview, I’m going to assume that they’re trying to give me a hint here. However, being notoriously bad at taking hints I still plan on giving them a call Monday just to see if I’m still in consideration or not. It’d be really nice to find out that I still have a chance, especially since I’m now in the last 5 hours of my employment at the Student Computer Centers. I can’t believe I’ve worked here four years, but since this is the best paying job I’ve ever found for doing nothing I shouldn’t be too surprised that I stuck around this long.

I saw Minority Report last night, and really enjoyed it. I’d say its easily the best Philip K. Dick adaptation since Blade Runner. Of course, that may be a given considering that competitors for that title are films like Impostor and Total Recall. At any rate, I thought the film was at its most intersting when it was dealing with the paradox of knowing the future vs. changing the future. Predesitination vs free will. Now there’s a good fun Philip K. Dickian subject. Unfortunately, just when it was getting good it kind of skirted the issue and turned into a straightforward murder mystery. Even so, I can’t really complain and I still think it did justice to the source.

I ended up seeing Star Wars episode 2 twice this weekend, one more time than I told myself I would. The second viewing wasn’t brought on by a fit of fanboy giddiness, but more out of hope that I would like it more than the first time I saw it. As a disclaimer, I probably should mention that I fall into the camp that thinks that even if a Star Wars film is bad, hey its still Star Wars. Even so, my first viewing left me a little unconvinced. I wasn’t overwhelmed, I wasn’t underwhelmed, I would say I was just adequately whelmed. My biggest problem was the lack of memorable dialog. Bad dialog is forgivable, and a good thing too since there’s enough of that to go around but there weren’t really any of the moments that stood out like in the first movies. Of course, I’m willing to allow that those movies are so memorable because geeks everywhere have had over 20 years to memorize all the dialog. Aside from that, I enjoyed it much more the second time. No matter how critical and cynical I might have tried to be, I couldn’t deny that the action scenes and effects were really great. I’ve decided that I’m not going to ask for too much from Star Wars, and I think I got what I asked for and thats good enough for me.

Ok, so it looks like I really should have given Sam Raimi a little credit. In spite of my low expectations from the trailers, Spiderman is now on my very very short list of good comic book to film translations. The computer generated Spiderman was much more believable than I thought it was going to be, save for a few brief moments here and there. Its a good thing the movie is doing well, because that practically guarantees a sequel which I’m really really hoping would have Venom in it. Oh man, that would be amazing.

Last night I went to see Big Trouble, not entirely sure what to expect. I knew it had to be at least somewhat funny, I mean its based on a novel by Dave Barry so its got a lot going for it right there. On the other hand though, it has Tim Allen in it. But on the other other hand, it has Jason Lee, Janeane Garofalo, and Andy Richter (who, I should point out, has virtually the entire sum of his screen time featured in the commercials for the movie. Why do they do that?) Oh yeah and Johnny Knoxville is in it, playing against type as a complete idiot. With about a million different characters and a run time of only an hour and a half, it was frequently a bit loose and unfocused but fortunately it was even more frequently very funny. I would even go so far as to call it zany. And not just to have an excuse to use the word “zany” in two posts in a row either.

Rented the Ghost World dvd last night, and though I liked it just fine it wasn’t really what I was expecting. Probably because my only previous impression of it was gathered from briefly flipping through parts of the graphic novel in a bookstore. I’d really like to read the comic now, because it seemed to me that it would be better suited at telling that kind of story and fleshing out the characters than the movie did. Not to slight the movie, which did an excellent job, but it just seemed like something I’d find more fulfilling as a graphic novel, especially the ending (which I’ve heard is actually pretty different in the comic).

Another thing that happened while I wasn’t updating this: I saw The Royal Tenenbaums. Twice. Easily the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. Ok, its the only movie I’ve seen this year, but it sets the bar pretty high.Also, as an indirect result of the soundtrack (which featured songs by both

the Velvet Underground and Nico), I’ve realized that I could really stand to pick up a few Velvet Underground albums. Downloading the Nico tracks from the movie lead to me downloading VU tracks featuring Nico which just lead to more VU downloading which then left me wondering just how I’d missed out on something this good before.

I’ll freely admit it, as if it wasn’t obvious enough from my last post, I’m hardly a die-hard Lord of the Rings fan. I mean, I just finished the first book yesterday. Nevertheless, I was really excited about seeing the first movie today, and I wasn’t disappointed. Honestly, I can’t recall ever seeing a better book-to-movie translation. Almost all of the differences between the two didn’t detract from the feel of the book and were probably necessary to fit the different medium. My only major complaint was that they revealed things in this movie that didn’t happen in the books until the 2nd novel. Sort of a spoiler for me, but I guess its my own fault for not having read all of them sooner, eh? Strictly visually speaking though, I thought the movie was stunning. It made just about every other fantasy-type movie seem hopelessly cheesy in comparison. Of course, plenty of them look cheesy on their own merits, but still.

Stopping off in the bathroom after the film, I was incredulous to seem someone take a cellphone call while at a urinal. I was just a little disturbed by this. Who does this? I’ve heard of this from other people, but I didn’t think people really did this. There are some times that I just don’t want to be reached, and honestly I’d rather not have the sanctity of my post-film bathroom break violated by taking a phone call. What would that conversation be like anyway? “Oh hi mom! *flush* Hold on, I’ve just got to zip up here!” I’m not sure, but I think this is what voice mail was designed for.