WARM BODIES

Nicholas Hoult plays R, a zombie who cannot remember his full name. He shuffles around an airport with dry, witty narration filling his thoughts. M (Rob Corddry) is his best friend, and sometimes they get hungry and team up to go look for brains. During one of these meals out, R eats the brains of Perry (Dave Franco), and R finds Perry’s feelings for his girlfriend Julie (Teresa Palmer) becoming his own. R then saves Julie and hides her in his Wall-E like shelter full of the remains of human society.

Director Jonathan Levine made the indie coming-of-age film The Wackness, which was reasonably entertaining if not very original. His follow-up feature was the terrific 50/50, which was a great convergence of actors and script. Warm Bodies ends up somewhere between the two. The highlight of the film in terms of both actor and script is Nicholas Hoult. His depressed narration includes most of the best lines and Hoult manages to get across a lot of emotion despite sticking to the grey, dead features of the classic Hollywood zombie.

The supporting cast fits the film, but no one is trying too hard to make Warm Bodies a very serious film, which for a Rom-Zom-Com is the best choice. Rob Corddry just plays himself, Teresa Palmer is a beautiful and relatable lead, and John Malkovich agreed to be in this movie, which is less impressive now that his recent work has included Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Jonah Hex.

As for the story itself, if R and Julie wasn’t enough of a hint, Perry sounds like Paris, R’s best friend is M, and Julie’s best friend wants to be a nurse. The star-crossed connections become painfully clear when R approaches Julie at her balcony, and this is the main flaw of the film. Director Jonathan Levine keeps the focus on the Shakespeare romance instead of on the zombie comedy. This is only a problem because it places the audience in the awkward position of rooting for necrophilia, an obstacle that even the most dedicated romantic would have trouble overcoming.

Warm Bodies is an entertaining riff on Romeo and Juliet that seems very original at the start, but soon reveals its conventional side. It’s not gory enough to be a zombie classic, but it’s good enough to be the first worthwhile film of 2013.

The Hollywood Calendar: 2013 Preview

In mid-summer 2012 I was joking about the so-called apocalypse that the Mayan calendar predicted for December, and I said, “It’s okay if the world ends, I’ve already seen The Dark Knight Rises.”

You see, I’d been following the production of Nolan’s film since the premier of The Dark Knight, and I’d been following The Dark Knight production since I saw Batman Begins. It was a cycle of permanent anticipation that influenced me whenever I walked past the Batman section in Curious Comics, or wanted to debate some film trivialities with my friends. It didn’t consume my life, but it meant there was always something to look forward to and think about, no matter what happened to me personally. I imagine this is the sort of comfort that religion holds for spiritual people, which I suppose would make Christopher Nolan my God.

But, now that The Dark Knight Trilogy is completed, is there nothing left to look forward to? Well, Nolan is considering a full-on science fiction film written by his brother Jonathan called Interstellar. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks just announced they are working on a third WWII mini-series for HBO called Masters of the Air. Jurassic Park 4 was just announced for 2014. Joss Whedon is currently preparing a post-Avengers TV series called S.H.I.E.L.D., which will include fan-favorite Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg). And for the five of you who haven’t heard, Disney bought Lucasfilm and has Star Wars Episode VII scheduled for 2015. Star Trek director J.J. Abrams has just signed to direct, which will surely re-ignite the “Trek vs. Wars” debate.

My point is that by the time the apocalypse came and went I had new things to look forward to, and there is a very good reason for this. The film industry is a perpetual motion movie machine, and it has fallen into a predictable pattern over the last thirty to forty years with the goal of making film geeks like me give free word-of-mouth promotion. I’m not going to fight it, so let’s see how 2013 fits the pattern:

The year starts in February-March (I’ll explain why later) with a spread of action films (Good Day to Die Hard, Snitch), genre films (Oz the Great and Powerful), and delayed holdovers from 2012 (GI Joe: Retaliation) that have mid-range ad campaigns and mid-range expectations.

May is the start of blockbuster season, which, like the last few years, opens with a Marvel film (Iron Man 3) and takes us to the summer and to the year’s biggest movies (Star Trek Into Darkness, Man of Steel, Monsters University, World War Z, Kick-Ass 2, Pacific Rim, The Wolverine, Elysium).

By September we are into the genre films and new franchises that are not sure things (Riddick, The Tomb, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones).

October is where everything gets mixed. We have big sequels (Sin City: A Dame to Kill For), Award-seeking genre films (Gravity), remakes (Oldboy, Carrie), and some quirky originals (The World’s End, from the makers of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz).

November mostly gets crowd-pleasing blockbusters (Thor: The Dark World, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Frozen) with a few interesting early Oscar-contenders (Ender’s Game).

December has a final push of blockbusters (The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Jack Ryan, Anchorman: The Legend Continues), but this is also the time for all the currently unpublicized Oscar-contenders to make their bids.

The end of the year is January, which is where we are for the 2012 movie cycle, and this is where movies go to die. You may have noticed that your options at the theatre are limited, and the best films are the Oscar-contenders held over from December. The box office is the best evidence. Currently the highest-grossing film of the month is the Del Toro-produced horror film Mama. Past winners include Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Big Momma’s House 2, and Spice World. Essentially, January is a good time to catch up on your reading.

My point, if I have one, is this: if you enjoy movies but haven’t seen a good one in a while, don’t despair. The Hollywood calendar will reset after Seth MacFarlane hosts the Oscars on February 24, and this perpetual motion machine will continue to churn out good films, bad films, and ugly January films until a real apocalypse puts a stop to it.

ZERO DARK THIRTY

If you were thinking that two years is a bit soon to be making a film about the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, I have news for you: the film has actually been in production since 2009, two years before Bin Laden was killed.

Mark Boal won many accolades for the accuracy he brought to the screenplay of The Hurt Locker, and after he and director Kathryn Bigelow scored big wins at the 2009 Oscars they planned to work together on a follow up. At that time, Boal, through his military contacts, was following a Navy SEAL team's operations. As luck would have it that SEAL team ended up being involved on the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. Within two days of the assassination, Bigelow announced they were re-working Boal's Black Ops script into the film that is now Zero Dark Thirty.

So, how does a "based on true events" story turn out when the events and the film production ran parallel? Actually, quite well. The film, which is up for 5 Oscars including Best Picture, is a string of events filmed in the still-popular handheld fashion that the Jason Bourne series used to excess. It is one third torture and interrogation, one third spy bureaucracy, and one third Call of Duty.

Central to the CIA investigation is Maya (Jessica Chastain) and her evolution from naive young agent to heavily-disguised operative. If this film wins anything at the February 24 ceremony it will be for Chastain's performance. She has given several great performances in ensembles over the last few years with The Help being a standout, but in Zero Dark Thirty she stands above a cast that includes a dozen recognizable faces including James Gandolfini. As the investigation drags on, her patience thins, and Chastain turns into the female equivalent of Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. To put it simply, she is the strongest female lead Hollywood has put out in a long time.

As the story progresses through the many terrorist attacks that have occurred in the past decade the tension continues to mount, and Bigelow succeeds in the same way Ben Affleck did in Argo, or Ron Howard did in Apollo 13. Even though everyone knows how the story ends, tension and suspense build out of the relationship that is built between the audience and the characters. It is a terrific feat of visual storytelling and performance that makes this a highly recommended film.