Category Archives: Reviews

Brains!

immunologically Jaime King, Black Summer

Let’s face it: America has a zombie problem. They’ve invaded our TV shows, our films, our commercials, our toy shelves, our seasonal pop-up Halloween stores, not to mention the takeover of comic-book shelves and bookstores. According to BoxOfficeMojo.com, there have been 70 zombie movies since 1980 — 23 of them since 2012.

So Black Summer, the latest horror series from Netflix, comes as something of a relief. Sure, it’s yet another homage to the flesh-eating undead. But at least it’s a fresh take on rotting corpses.

Created by John Hyams and Karl Schaefer, co-creators of Syfy’s Z Nation, Summer is supposedly a prequel to that eccentric zombie series, which was intended as a counter-punch to The Walking Dead, though Nation was canceled recently after five seasons. In truth, Netflix calls it a prequel likely to draw in the cultish fans of Nation, because the two shows share little zombie DNA. Summer is set at the onset of the apocalypse; Nation took place three years into the apocalypse. Summer takes itself (perhaps too) seriously and feasts on tension; Nation featured a zombie stripper whose arm fell off mid-dance. Image result for z nation strip club

Set a few months after an initial outbreak wipes out Denver, Summer thrives in the chaos of a nation that knows it is being overrun and unprepared to stop the takeover. It’s absolute mayhem when we drop into the premiere. Handheld camera operators follow survivors with long uncut shots as they creep through tunnels, break into abandoned houses and sprint down deserted streets (easily the most terrifying element of the show). If The Walking Dead is a cinematic look at the potential end of mankind, Summer is a flat-out sprint from that possibility; much of the show looks as if it were shot with GoPro cameras atop running actors.

And Summer has to capture that frenetic pacing, because character development is essentially non-existent. Instead, the story line — what little there is of one— revolves around getting from Point A (a suburb that’s been evacuated) to Point B (a sports stadium where survivors are being airlifted to safer parts of the country), and the depth of the characters goes as far as them not wanting to be eaten.

Though largely a B-list cast, Jaime King is the biggest name in the credits as Rose, a mother looking for her daughter after they get separated in the evacuation. Co-stars come and go as they get their own story threads, run away or become Lunchables. Jaime King, Black Summer

But that is the show’s unspoken strength. Black Summer is about thrills and thrills only. No maniacal Walking Dead human villains, no abstract debates about humanity’s role the apocalypse, no absurd rules to avoid becoming a living appetizer. Summer runs solely on adrenaline and instinct; there’s no time to debate morality because survivors are dropped from one creepy situation to the next.

The downside of this is repetition, and it’s hard to see Summer aspiring to be anything beyond zombie chases and run-ins with scumbag survivors taking advantage of the chaos. One episode consists almost entirely of a foot chase with brain-eaters that has about a half-dozen words of dialogue. Deep? No. Effective? Quite.

What Summer lacks in depth it almost makes up for in structural simplicity. Each episode is presented as a series of smaller chapters, with simple title cards laid over a black screen. As we follow characters, they are constantly crossing paths with each other, so we’ll see several scenes from different perspectives as we follow the different survivors. Image result for black summer zombie foot chase

Episode lengths range from your standard 45-ish minutes to a mere 20 minutes — the finale, which is a descent into chaos as the city is overrun. The lack of format works here, as it nicely underscores a lack of structure in an overturned world. Government forces are impotent; survivors accidentally shoot each other; some humans are as venomous as the undead. Summer forgoes exposition for breathless escapes.

Most effective are the zombies themselves. For one, they’re fast: think 28 Days Later or World War Z over the stumbling mumblers of, say, Night of the Living Dead. And zombies don’t die with a simple head trauma. Here, creatures usually need a fusillade of automatic gunfire to be brought down.

In a sense, Summer is The Walking Dead without the bloated melodrama and pretentious blabbering (and, unfortunately, big-budget makeup and special effects). Summer is less a TV show than a sensory experience. It’s not going to redefine the zombie movie, but Summer manages to breathe some life into a genre at risk of dying out from overexposure.

Say Cheese, For Old Times

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Nearly 50 years ago, Dr. Edwin Land, the genius who invented the Polaroid/Land Camera, made a cryptic short film — just him in a lab coat wandering through a gutted factory talking about the future of cameras. He pulled out a wallet that looked like an iPhone for size comparison and spoke of “a camera that would be like, oh, the telephone…our long awaited ultimate camera that is a part of the evolving human being.”

The bold prediction underpins Instant Dreams, a trippy documentary about the film and device that not only made it possible to develop images in less than a minute, but ushered in the very era of immediacy that would eventually kill the Polaroid camera. As much about the birth of digital photography as the death of the analog process, the film peeks into the lives of aficionados who still favor the point-and-shoot method over digital trickery.

“For a product to be truly new, the world must not be ready for it,” Land said in the home video, which unwittingly forecast the emergence of cell phones when he introduced the Polaroid in February 1947. What Land could not have envisioned were the photographers, artists and others who would not let go of his outdated technology even after his death in 1991 or his company’s demise in 2008.

Directed by Dutch filmmaker Willem Baptist, Dreams follows quirky camera buffs, including German-born artist Stefanie Schneider irremediably , who wanders the deserts of the American Southwest in a vintage pink bathrobe and Crocs, taking Polaroid art shots of her hen and whatever model she can engage for the day. She keep a hoard of foil-packet, expiration-dated Polaroid film stockpiled in her vintage fridge because “Colors show up in a very very different way, not what you actually see with your eyes” on these photographs. She relishes even the splotches, bars or streaks, the age-or-light induced imperfections of such images.

We meet Stephen Herchen, a retired chemist who continues to work with and touts Polaroid film as one of the most complex analog chemical processes “that’s ever been created.” We meet New York magazine editor Chris Bonanos, author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid, who provides the history the camera and preaches and practices its use, a prophet for an analog religion that has all but disappeared in the digital age.

We hear newsman Lowell Thomas on old newsreels, extolling the virtues of this “new” technology — “press a button, and have a picture.” Long-dead science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke discusses how tricky it is, predicting the future and being ahead of your time, as Land was.

Author Bonanos describes and even demonstrates (Baptist follows him to parties, out in public with his camera) the “social” interchange” that is part of why he thinks of this process as inherently human; waiting for the shot to develop, the writer says, “forces you to make small talk to fill in the moment.” The cameras were criticized back in the day for not providing images as sharp as 35mm film, an idea which Bonanos dismisses — “The eye forgives everything if it’s a good photograph.”

The film also does a canny job of illustrating the camera’s distinctiveness — the Polaroid remains the only camera that does not leave a trace of itself after taking a shot: no negatives, no digital storage capacity. Each picture, Dreams underscores, is distinct unto itself, like a fingerprint or snowflake.

What’s missing from the film is the sense of fun the camera itself provided. The score is often brooding, the testimonies of its demise usually melancholy. There’s little whimsy here, including the beauty of tactile connection with old technology, from wrist watches to turntables to instant cameras. Dreams could have used a scene or two shot in the fun, washed out, overexposed tone that made Polaroid so distinct. And it completely ignores the commercial resurgence of instant cameras; a casual glance at Amazon demonstrates instant film is hardly dead.

Which is a relief. Instant Dreams can be too somber at times, but, like the film itself, give it some time and its beauty comes into focus.

Steven Spielberg’s Homage to the Master

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I’ve never been one for conspiracy theories. But I think I’ve stumbled upon one.

Steven Spielberg was Stanley Kubrick’s prized protege. They talked often, visited each other’s sets, even teamed up to make the underrated film, A.I. Spielberg has always been an immense talent, but let’s face it: Having Stan the Man as your corner cut man is like a writer having Salinger as a writing tutor. If you don’t take advantage of the teachings, you don’t deserve school.

I’ve been doing an inordinate amount of research into Sir Kubrick of late, and discovered a little YouTube nugget of an interview with Spielberg. In it, he sheepishly admitted he did not care for The Shining when he first saw it, and (very) reluctantly told Stanley as much when Kubrick asked his impressions. Only after watching the Jack Nicholson movie a few times, Spielberg spilled in the clip, did he recognize the movie’s genius and, more importantly, its subterfuge.

The Shining, an adaptation of a Stephen King horror movie, is not the haunted house flick audiences (and King) were expecting. I remember Dad’s disappointment when we left the theater. More than 46% of the nation’s critics at the biggest papers in the country gave it a thumbs-down.

Over time, though, its reputation has risen like a zombie with the munchies. Instead of a haunted house story, critics and historians posthumously realized, The Shining is a haunted human story, touching on domestic abuse, alcoholism, even the genocide of the American Indian. The American Film Institute recently named it one of the 30 most thrilling movies in the past century. The AFI also named Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance among the top 25 cinematic villains of all-time. What the AFI failed to note is that Poltergeist, the Disney-fied horror film ostensibly made for kids and families, was secretly a dark homage to Stanley from Spielberg, who wrote and produced the movie.

Try it as I accidentally did: Play The Shining theme over any three minutes of Poltergeist, and you’ll see that the whimsical score and sitcom lighting were simply a ploy to get it a PG rating. But when played with a traditional horror score, the movie feels entirely different — and the images are sheer Kubrickian. Here’s a sample. At 1:20, you’ll swear Stanley rose from the dead for the editing booth:

Now for something less theoretical, FactSlaps:

Chinese princess Xin Zhui’s body, who died in 163 BCE, is so well preserved that her skin is still soft her arms and legs can bend, and her internal organs are still intact.
Camels gave humans the common cold.
Science knows more about coffee, wine and tomatoes than it does about breast milk.
Hugh Jackman was a party clown before being famous.
More people watch online video game play than major cable networks and subscription entertainment services.
The Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest structure, stands 2,716 feet tall. It has 24,000 windows, contains 393,000 cubic yards of concrete and took 22 million man hours to build.
World renowned cellist Yo Yo Ma once left his 266 year old cello, worth $2.5 million, in the back of a NYC taxi. It was returned to him in time for his evening concert.