Philadelphia Weekly

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Directed by George A. Romero
B

Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Feb. 15

For George A. Romero, one zombie movie a decade has been enough (minus the '90s, alas), each film summing up its respective decade with the series' astonishingly flexible metaphor. So what on earth compelled him to resurrect the undead only two years after Land of the Dead? In a buzz term: new media. Land, after all, was carrying on a story that began in the primitive days of 1968's Night of the Living Dead. It just didn't seem right for Romero to sum up our age without acknowledging digital technology.

And so like Batman and Bond before it, Diary of the Dead hits the restart button on the franchise, opening with a whole new group of people idly wondering why corpses are walking around ... and chomp! Diary is a "movie" shot and edited (complete with manipulative score and ponderous narration) by a group of Pitt film students driving through Pennsylvania as the world falls apart.

Having dealt with the Iraq War in Land, Romero keeps his direct Bush administration knocks to a couple Katrina shout-outs. But he spends a great deal of energy on the rise of Internet news, his characters shooting, posting and viewing online footage as the mainstream media fails them. Indeed one character's face is almost entirely behind a camera, filming even as he's harangued for not, you know, putting the camera down and screaming.

It's a bit sad that Diary, Redacted and Cloverfield had practically the same idea on how to cinematically incorporate the rise of YouTube et al., and sadder still that said idea really originated back with The Blair Witch Project. Diary can be hoary about its now-ness--when one bitten character says "Shoot me," he doesn't just mean with a gun--but it's surprising how elegantly its ideas are incorporated into a lean and terrifying zombie movie.

The last two Dead movies, Day of the Dead (1985) and Land of the Dead, were not strictly zombie movies; they soft-pedaled the exploitation kicks while exploring how human society evolves when there are beasties munching on flesh.

Diary brings back the exploitation: There are clever killings galore, from arrows to swords to Amish guys wielding scythes. And it's bizarre that none of the other 10,000 zombie movies have ever thought to depict what happens when you smash a container of acid on a zombie's head. Why does only the creator of zombies (now 68) know how to take the genre in new directions?

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Definitely, Maybe
Directed by Adam Brooks
D+

Reviewed by Sean Burns
Opens Fri., Feb. 15

Passing itself off as a romantic comedy despite being neither romantic nor particularly comedic, writer/director Adam Brooks' terminally bland, brutally overlong tale of yuppie navel-gazing stars a subdued Ryan Reynolds, pushing the limits of cloying as a divorced dad with a serious case of the "poor-me"s. Sitting down one night with his movie-cute 11-year-old daughter (Little Miss Sunshine's Abigail Breslin, on hand here as a mewling prop), he decides to tell the story of how he met her mother.

Neat idea. Maybe somebody should make a TV show out of it. Oh, wait a minute ...

For a lot of reasons that don't actually make any sense when you stop and think about them, Reynolds changes everybody's name and launches into an epic bedtime dissertation on his entire romantic history, thereby keeping the kid (and presumably the audience) in a cheap, pointless sort of suspense as to which of these gals will turn out to be the actual mom. Is it Elizabeth Banks' sketchily drawn Wisconsin good girl? Or maybe it's Rachel Weisz's hard-nosed journalist man-eater? How about Isla Fisher's dippy, free-spirited world traveler, who seems to drop in and out of the story whenever the screenplay runs out of material?

None of these women is particularly fascinating, and they don't have much reason to be interested in Reynolds, who arrives in Manhattan so naive he's never heard of Kurt Cobain, and sets about working on Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, finally growing up to be just another dull ad executive. It's tough to figure out what Brooks was trying to get at here, as his behind-the-scenes political maneuverings are unconvincing at best, with historical context forcibly distending the timeline for so long, it's tough not to wonder how Reynolds could possibly spend 16 years in New York City, running into the same three girls over and over again.

There is, however, a nifty supporting turn from Kevin Kline as a Norman Maileresque literary lion gone to seed on campus, thanks to a steady diet of booze and young coeds. While it's slightly unnerving to see an actor of Kline's stature reduced to taking a throwaway role in a Ryan Reynolds picture, there's no denying he lends the film a jolt of unpredictability every time he appears--a momentary respite from these tedious, attractive people and their banal romantic problems. Even a stereotype like the boozy horndog writer is maybe exciting enough to watch a movie about. Everybody else in the film, definitely not.