Seed NewsvineWho's That Videotaping At My Door?
Waiting for the Lasalle bus this afternoon, on my way to watch "George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead," I received a picture mail message on my cell phone. It was of some animated character jumping around, trying to be funny. On the bus, a young lad sitting across from me swept his finger across his iPhone, probably switching between photo browsing and checking his email. The bus grumbled forward.
Inside the actual auditorium, in the row in front of me, a tall white guy with thinning hair, had his headphones blasting at full volume. It sounded like Rammstein or something. As I leaned forward to ask if he was going to turn it off by the time the show started, the house lights came down. The first ad began to play onscreen but the projectionist forgot to stop the preshow slides that were still up; in front of me was a moving car in a Honda ad, racing across a Concession combo snapshot from the lobby. There was a lot of shit going on.
The kind of shit that accumulated into a big problem for Jack Gladney in Don DeLillo's White Noise (no, not the Michael Keaton romp, it's an actual book) and the shit I was dealing with is at the epicenter of Romero's latest scathing zombie flick which, again, peels away at the layers of American consumerism and its instant gratification fix. The fix these days comes in the form of what Peter Travers of Rolling Stone calls the "youtubification" of America; pretty much everyone and anyone has the capability to post whatever they want on the internet (from blogs to viral videos) for everyone to see. What you want (not necessarily what you need) is only a click away and there's always so much of the same thing (why do people always re-post movie trailers on youtube?). What's significant? What's worth looking at? This is what Romero's interested in exploring.
Once more, there is an inexplicable outbreak. The dead are rising. They move slow and go, "Ugghhhooohh." A group of film students from the University of Pittsburgh are out shooting their semester mummy horror film in the dark woods when they begin hearing reports of attacks over the radio coming from their Winnebago. The group splits in half; we follow the section of the group with videocameras who are going to head back toward the dorms to find their friends. The leader of this group, the Director of their semester film, is glued to his camera. He not only insists that he documents everything, but in a crucial scene in a hospital when his peers are being attacked in another room, instead of helping them, he finds a nearby electric outlet to recharge his camera battery. This guy is serious about capturing this cataclysmic event.
This might ring echoes of "Cloverfield," that loud and dizzying monster movie from last month, which I didn't know what to do with. But that film was all spectacle. It's brains lied in the aesthetic and sound design. Romero's handheld camera film, on the other hand, is a masterclass in sociological film study. "Diary" teeter-totters on a film that has genuine scares (thanks to the loud acoustics of a theatre auditorium) and a ripe black comedy that shines light on the insanity of the American bullshit-info-bloated existence. A character late in the film basically voices Romero's concern with the access to and distribution of information, particularly the visual media. When there's so much between the sender and the receiver, how do we know what we're watching is entirely factual--or truthful?
I can't say that the young individuals of "Diary" are especially well-prepared or smart (the only really creative character turns out to be Samuel, the deaf Amish farmer, who obviously read Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide), but they serve two purposes: 1) To be eaten by zombies and 2) To embody the generation of web savvy and ADD-addled young Americans that Romero finds both annoying and horrifying. There are some memorable lines delivered in the film, most notably: "Everyone with a heartbeat, freeze and shut the fuck up!"
Another line that stuck out was, "There's always an audience for horror. Believable horror." If that's the case, then there's always going to be an audience for Romero.
