Tales from On Demand 2

Day of the Dead(2008)

So Zombies are in fashion now. I get that. Zombies are cool. I've been a big fan for a lot of years. Thanks to Zack Snyder and Danny Boyle and the Resident Evil frachhise, we even have a new breed of super-human zombies that rely less on over powering their victims with sheer numbers and more on kicking ass. And running. These new Zombies can run really fast. The new breed are also not really dead. It's a virus all the time now. This has shifted the idea of what to do about Zombies. Every Zombie movie is basically the same. The survivors have to fight them off long enough to get somewhere and hole up until they eventually break in, or you run out of food and had to leave or there is enough in-fighting among the survivors that they all kill themselves. Regardless of which, you are eventually fucked, and this is the basis for every climax of every Zombie movie. The difference being that before, the dead stayed undead forever. Until you put a bullet in their head, they are here for good. With a virus, Zombies could either die of Starvation or old age or decomposition and as long as you had a big, heavy door and enough cans of Spaghetti-O's you'll be alright. The purists hate this, and think the dead should be lumbering, brainless masses that use sheer numbers to over power whatever defenses the survivors managed to piece together. I can see it either way. I like gigantic swarming masses of Zombies. Always awesome. But fast, super-human Zombies make for some really spectacular death scenes. I guess it comes down to how much gore you like.
Day of the Dead is not much of a sequel to Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead. It has Ving Rhames in it, I guess to add some street cred, but that's where it ends. It follows Mena Suvari, who is supposed to be believable as a military officer as Zombies over run her home town of Leadville, Colorado, where her unit just happens to be dispatched. That's really all the plot you need to know. The rest follows basic Zombie protocol. There is a sibling who needs rescuing, a family member who has to be killed, a remote bunker, and a government conspiracy that needs exposing. And there you have it.
The movie is perfectly serviceable as a Zombie movie. It offers nothing new. And this is where I have a problem. Not so much with this movie in particular, but with the last few years worth of Zombie movies. With the notable exceptions of Zombieland and Land of the Dead, all of the recent Zombie movies only deal with the initial out-break. I guess that's more exciting, but having the characters deal with a world already overrun with the undead seems like it would be more interesting. The original Day of the Dead was about a bunch of scientists living in a bunker, doing experiments on the Zombies, trying to find a cure, or at least a way to stave off the infection. Way cooler of a scenario, if you ask me. If the remake had gone that route, it would have been not only a more interesting movie, but could have had served as a better sequel to Dawn of the Dead.


-JP

A letter to my eldest son of his 5th birthday

Dear Jackson,
Five years ago today I became a father. There is a song lyric that goes something like: The years go fast, but the days go slow," and that is how I feel today.
I fear you may have inherited my mild case of social anxiety. Just like me, you are open and talkative and funny and interested and smart until you walk into a room full of strangers or a room with more than three people in it. You don't like being put on the spot, and you don't like performing tricks like a trained monkey. You like playing, but you don't really like sports, especially team sports. You don't like to join it in things like wearing your Halloween costume to school, preferring instead to watch the action from afar. You tend to find a little corner and play by yourself within your amazing imagination. I used to think that was kind of sad, but I don't any more because that's how I was and still am to a certain extent, I'm okay with that. You are so much like me in so many ways, it gets a little frightening at times because I can sense what you are thinking because I'm thinking the same thing. It's weird and awesome.
You are so dang smart, and I love that. You would rather watch NOVA or the Science Channel than Sponge Bob or Power Rangers, and even when you do want pure escapism, it's Star Wars or something. I know people are thinking we are turning you into a little nerd, but I don't care. I guess there could be an argument for nature vs. nurture here, but you tend to gravitate gravitate to that stuff on your own, and I guess you can't fight what's in your genes, because you come from a long and proud line of nerds. I just hope you do something with it, because the rest of us seem to be overly educated and unmotivated all at the same time. Like just knowing things is good enough for us.
You also have the biggest heart of any kid I've ever met. There is a lot of love in there, and at times you seem to not know where to put it all. Like how you keep saying you want a sister, and how you want to name her, but you don't know what name because you'll have to decide when you meet her. That right there, where you love your non-existent sister so much you can't stand it. That's what I'm talking about. You also love your brother more than anything and want to teach him things. The whole reason you two share a bed room and a bed is because you lobbied for it for a whole year.
I hope this next year, when you go back to school, and keep learning and keep living and keep figuring out how this world works and how you fit into it, that you stay happy and stay weird and stay awesome.

I love you, buddy.

-Daddy.

Tales from On Demand 1

So I don't know if you know this or not, but I have suffered from insomnia on and off throughout my life. It comes and goes depending on several factors, such as stress, food, caffeine and drug use*. My high-school and college years I hardly slept more than 3-4 hours a night, and that was when I was trying to go to sleep. If I wasn't too concerned, I'd just forget to go to bed, and it would magically be time for work all of a sudden. Well lately I have been in one of those cycles. In the past, I would draw comics and read and watch movies and listen to music and smoke cigarettes and drink coffee and Dr. Pepper and get snacks from the local 7-11. I know what you are saying: All of this crap is exactly why I couldn't sleep, and to that I say: FOOLS! I didn't do all of that at the same time, and I periodically cut every last bit of all that out on similar assumptions, and it never worked. It actually made me more loopy because I was bored and hungry. Also, my insomnia started around age 12, long before all that stuff was so important to me. Well I am in a similar cycle now, and I can't blame it on junk food because of my new found respect for not being a fat-ass and wanting to live to usher my kids into adulthood. Since I now have a house full of people with relatively regular sleep schedules and not a house full of a brother with the exact same habits as me, I can't do all of the stuff I used to do to keep myself sane. If my gym was open 24 hours, I'd go there, but it isn't, so I can't. What I usually do is play computer games and read and watch TV. We all know broadcast TV sucks egg rolls late at night, and I haven't purchased the cord to hook up my computer to the TV like I keep threatening to, so I can watch whatever I want via download and hulu.
All this is a preamble to a new, hopefully short-lived series here at powerama called Tales from On Demand. Where I occasionally review a movie or show or whatever found on Cox On Demand.

Case File #1: Surrogates.
(Spoilers)
Is Bruce Willis done? I mean that in the "stick a fork in 'em" kind of way, not the "Can I get that plate out of your way, sir?" kind of way. I don't know. He's always been a little hit and miss, and I still love him, but he seems to be making really poor decisions lately(The notable exception being the Stylo video for the Gorillaz).
Or maybe I just notice when he's bad more than I notice when he's good, because he's supposed to be good, that's what they pay him for.
I can see why the movie was green-lit. A comic book movie starring Bruce Willis? With robots? I'm in. Set in a futuristic world where humans live in isolation and interact through surrogate ("Avatar" was taken. Twice.) robots the film follows Tom Greer(Willis), a cop investigating the death of the son of the inventor of the surrogates, who had been ousted by the company he founded to make these things. In this world, everybody stays home and their robot counter-parts live their lives for them. The benefit being that everybody is safe, free from bodily harm or disease. There hasn't been homicide or an accidental death in years. But someone has figured out a way to kill the user by destroying the robot, something that should be impossible. It takes the weird fascination we have with the Sims and Farmville out of virtual and into reality. But here is where the movie makes a few false assumptions. The most important being that people like me, and a good chunk of the world can't fucking stand the sims, and see it as a complete waste of time. They do address this, by way of a fringe element of society living without surrogates, relegated to reservations where they can sit and think about why they haven't kept up with technology. It would be like sending everybody who still uses Internet Explorer 6 to live in Canada. Naturally, these folks are the main suspects in the murders because they are all uppity. So the plot becomes very predictable here. After Greer's surrogate is destroyed, he has to venture out into the real world himself, uncovering a conspiracy to take down the surrogates. Guess who's behind the conspiracy? Yep. The guy who invented them, and who now thinks they are bad and is, ironically, leading the anti-surrogate movement by use of a surrogate. His idea is to destroy them all, along with their stupid users, and wipe the slate clean. Not if Bruce Willis has anything to say about it. He just wants to destroy the robots themselves. Which is what happens. Completely predictably. Everybody then ventures out in their house pants and woobies and see the sun again.
The movie is shot well, and acted okay, but is just kinda dumb. I like how the surrogates look a bit 80's glam in a little nod to William Gibson, but other than that, not much going on here.

Next time: Day of the Dead.

-JP



*prescription, silly.

Happy 4th, everybody!

You know what the fourth always makes me think of ? Of course not, you are not in my head. Two things, actually:
1) The time when I was 14 and set off a bunch of fireworks in my room. They were cleverly hidden in a coffee can, and I was messing around with a bic lighter, and lit them. As soon as I realized what happened, I tried to smother the fire with my hand, and off they went. In a coffee can which also had my hand in it. When the smoke literally cleared, I had burns up to my elbow, and a big black spot on the carpet. The doctor at the ER asked me about my Sisters Of Mercy T-Shirt, explaining that he did his residency at Mercy Hospital, not realizing it was also the name of a goth band. We put an area rug over the spot in the carpet, and my room smelled like smoke for a long time after that.
2) Holy crap Jackson is almost 5! Do you know how different my life is now than it was 5 years and nine months ago? A lot I can tell you!
The boys are totally into Star wars right now. Joe just likes the robots, but Jack in starting to get into the ins and outs of the whole story. By chance, we are going backwards chronologically. We watched the Original Trilogy several times, but then we played Lego Star Wars a whole lot and they started wondering who the other character were, and so instead of watching the Prequels, we started on the Clone Wars movie and are about half way through the first season of the TV show. So when he eventually does see the Prequel Trilogy*, he'll all confused.

So anyway, Happy 4th everybody!

-JP


*If someone wants to purchase the Prequel Trilogy on DVD in widescreen for Jackson for his birthday. he'd love it!