Here’s your box office wipe-up for the weekend of October 2-4. Now with helpful section headings.
Zombieland kicked ass
Buoyed by strong word-of-mouth that I thought it didn’t fully deserve, it more than tripled the next-highest new release (and no, I don’t consider a re-release of Toy Story in 3D a new release). That said, it did have its moments. It’s at least a triumph of solid execution, if not of creative thinking. …Or perhaps you prefer your box office roundups with more truthy pop-psychology?
Horror comedy struggles with general audiences because of its awkward thematic and tonal clash: comedy is generally benevolent while horror is inherently malevolent, rendering horror comedy too funny to be scary and too scary to be funny. Zombieland skirted this issue by falling squarely on the side of action comedy in its marketing campaign. [BoxOfficeMojo]
Good point. But on the other hand, go f’ck yourself.
Invention of Lying… not so much.
I wanted to see this more than Zombieland, but ended up seen Zombieland to see what the fuss was about. Perhaps that was Invention’s problem. For a movie you’d expect to have good buzz (who doesn’t like Ricky Gervais?), it didn’t have very good buzz. But you know what does have good buzz? A bee drinking martinis. Remember I said that.
Jew Zombie Killers Can’t Hump: A Zombieland Review
Zombieland is a road movie about two of the last survivors of the zombie plague, who don’t really have anywhere to go. They’re instead driven by their desires: Woody Harrelson’s “Tallahassee” a desire to find the last Twinkies on Earth, and Jesse Eisenberg’s “Columbus” to finally kiss a girl. It’s a sort of funny premise for a sort of funny movie. A movie that turns out to be a lot like the Twinkie — tasty enough, but provides little nutritional value, and after you’re done you feel kind of dirty. It’s pleasant going down*, but you get the sense that the whole thing was ultra processed, created using proven science formulas to manipulate the consumer’s senses in a specific way. Crap, this is a really good analogy, someone call USA Today.
This is the newest trailer for Zombieland (if you’re keeping score at home, this is international version — I posted the R-rated version a few weeks ago). It stars Jesse Eisenberg as a shy, cerebral neurotic who teams up with Woody Harrelson, an impulsive, slovenly redneck, to kill zombies. Their relationship kind of reminds me of me and my old roommate. He’d always be on my ass about not cleaning my dishes, and I’d always be punching him in the stomach for being Jewish. Also, we fought zombies. Anyway, I’m trying not to waste too much breath on this movie because it looks like a ball of cliches mooshed together and deep fried in unoriginality and then dipped in Woody Harrelson. “Dude! It’ll be funny because they’ll kill zombies! Dude! It’ll be cool ’cause he’ll wear sunglasses. And then he’ll get hit in the head with a golf ball!” No. Just, no.
FirstShowing interviewed the writers of Zombieland, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. One of the projects they are trying to get greenlit is Earth vs. Moon, “a big, epic, sci-fi war movie”. They say the script was inspired by a Stephen Hawking speech about the need to colonize space as a back-up plan for humanity.
Wernick describes it as a “hardcore, 300-style [Ed.- so hot right now *cuts self*] movie with some comic relief to it, but about the Earth and a colony on the moon essentially in a civil war.”
Reese explains that it’s “set about 300 or 400 years in the future [....] It’s about two societies at war, but it’s also about a family, not at war, but a fractured family. Half of them have gone to the moon and the other half are still on Earth and so they are on opposite sides of this conflict and we wanted to make sure that as big of movie as it’s going to be, it works on a small level.”
Below you can watch the red-band trailer for Zombieland — from director Ruben Fleischer starring Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg — a film I just can’t bring myself to care about. I mean, sure, it looks pretty, as you can see from the screencap above, it’s just that once you strip away the bigger budget, isn’t it just Shaun of the Dead starring two guys with less comedic chops? Now, I know what you’re thinking - “But dood, it’s a zombie stripper, ZOMGLOL!” True. But even that kind of reminds me of something else. Namely, Zombie Strippers. Bottom line, it doesn’t look horrible, it just looks like something I’ve seen before. Kinda like your tits, mom, now leave me alone I’m trying to eat breakfast.
