My Brother and I started doing "Zombie Movie Wednesdays" over the winter because we are both statistically unemployed and really we had nothing better to do and what? I'm not being defensive! You're being defensive, so shut up!.
The trouble is, we ran out of zombie movies fast because there are really only so many, and already we were watching things like "Serpent and the Rainbow" which is only vaguely zombie-ish, and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" which has no zombies at all but does star Luke Perry, so Score! .We had to expand our criteria a little and what we came up with was it had to be a) A zombie movie, or b) Something Really Awful (Think anything recent with Jason Statham...) or c) It had to star Keanu Reeves because we both feel he is the most talented non-actor working in show business today, (Although you could make a strong case for Nic Cage.)
This brings us to "The Day the Earth Stood Still".
I mean, talk about "the perfect storm". It has Keanu in the lead role, it has unnecessary updates to a 1950s classic, and it represents pretty much everything I hate about movies today. And no, I don't mean robot insects that devour everything in their path and get inside people and eat them to death and fly in a CGI swarm that looks ominous. It has those to be sure, and if they were real, I would definitely hate them... You can't go around accusing ME of being a lover of indestructible, nano-robotic, death machines. Trust me, I would vote "no" on any legislation that funded research into a unyielding death technology. I've seen enough Terminator-related fiction to be on a constant vigil for the rise of Sky-net©.
No, what I hate is taking a classic sci-fi work and updating it simply because "we have better tech now.", because what inevitably happens is all the stuff that made the original brilliant, like...I don't know...acting, is shed for more booms and bangs and trucks being eaten off the highway and giant glowy spheres that steal all the animals and etc... The reason the original was classic was because it's Anti-Cold War message preyed upon the collective unconcious fears that our society was grappling with coupled with the carefully woven threat that Klaatu and Gort represented in their personification of an unknown future. Well we still don't know the future, but I'm fairly certain there are no giant death robots made out of bugs involved.
About halfway through the movie my brother starts doing all Keanu's lines as Ted, and I start doing them as Johnny Utah and the film surprisingly doesn't change very much at all and if anything the Johnny Utah lines come off better than the original ones. And we are making a lot of snide references to "The Lake House" and pretending like it didn't make us cry, and we're talking about how if this movie doesn't keep going 60 mph, Dennis Hopper is going to make it explode and we are just about the most hysterical two people in the world, or at least we thought so and Holy Shit! I just wrote this whole article about my brother and I and didn't say anything about the movie in question so maybe I better spend the last paragraph giving a serious review because Mama Pop isn't paying me all these gold Krugerrands to just talk about how funny I am. Wait a minute... these aren't Krugerrands! They're chocolate! And they're old! I always fall for that trick. Damn it!
Okay about the movie... It starts out with Keanu wearing a beard that looks like it belongs on a mannequin in a wig shop or like you would buy in a disguise kit from the back of a comic book in 1976 and then he finds a glowy sphere and turns into an alien and then he comes back years later and...you know what? Fuck this. I just bored myself so much writing that that I pretty much need to lie down and take a nap. The new version is watchable, provided you have a strong sense of humor and a willingness to suspend disbelief times a million. Rent the one from 1951. The end.
Also, if you watch this movie without doing a bad Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness impression, than you're really missing out.
Also also, make a lot of popcorn because maybe your brother is a big, fat popcorn hog and doesn't remember that "Sharing is Caring" too.
They're including the 1951 version in the DVD release, and I can't decide if their thought process was "Please compare our crappy re-visioning to the classic" or "Maybe you'll buy our movie if you know you'll end up with at least one good one."
Posted by: Mouse | April 10, 2009 at 12:58 PM
I just saw Keanu on some entertainment channel yesterday, and the beard he had on there was odd. Did you ever see jackass the movie? The end where they had that guy dress up as a terrorist, and they glued "hair from down there" onto his face?
Yeah, thats what it looked like.
Posted by: LovelyLayla | April 10, 2009 at 01:25 PM