I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how good the new Dawn of the Dead was, particularly in light of how mediocre Hellboy was, and in anticipation-slash-worry about how Kill Bill Volume 2 will be. (I’m afraid I won’t be satisfied unless, pace Tenacious D, it rocks my fucking socks off.) So I was tickled to read the following from Chris Puzak, from his positive review of the new Dawn:
This movie’s garnered a lot of positive reviews, although I think if I read another one which talks about what a biting critique of consumerism, the original movie was, I’m going to scream. Yes, George Romero made some jokes about shopping malls in the original, but the movie was basically about zombies eating people. The way people are going on about it, you’d think Michael Moore directed the movie from a script by Howard Zinn. I wish critics would just admit they like watching gory movies instead of pretending they watch them for the alleged social commentary.
My sentiments exactly!
Meanwhile, in the interest of equal time, Chris (and Franklin Harris) liked the Hellboy movie, and Dave Intermittent didn’t like Kill Bill Vol. 1. (Which I guess I can understand, but man, if Quentin Tarantino really is embarrassed about liking female ninjas, making two epic potentially career-killing movies about them sure is a funny way of showing it!) Meanwhile, John Jakala didn’t like the Hellboy movie, and commenter Mason accurately pointed out that this was that rarest of occasion where the grafted-in Hollywood-standard romantic subplot was the best part of the film.
Also on the great minds think alike front, my criticism of Elvis Mitchell from that Dawn of the Dead review I linked to above generated a surprising amount of “hear, hear”s. One of my favorites was from cartoonist Matt Wiegle:
…I also keyed in on Elvis Mitchell’s review as lazy [and] annoying. I may be reading too much into it, but it seemed as if he had some weird class issues going on with the remake, by both slamming it as an “expensive Troma Production” and by saying it was “clearly made in Toronto;” I feel critics often beat a film with the Toronto Hammer when they want to make it seem cheap or lazy. It was as if he was saying “This movie would like to think it’s high-class, but it’s not! See? Toronto!”
Amen. And it’s even dopier than usual to say that sort of thing about a remake you’re unfavorably comparing to an original that was shot in Pittsburgh.