Zombieland got very strong reviews, both on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. What did I miss here? I usually love this kind of stuff, but I found it painful to sit through.

Here’s 12 reasons. Because 11 seemed inadequate.

1. It’s a zombie comedy movie in which there’s not a single innovation brought to zombies. Or comedies. Or movies.
2. There’s a voiceover that tells us exactly what the narrator is thinking without subtext or humor, and foreshadows with extreme obviousness exactly what’s going to happen throughout the movie.
3. Substitutes crappy CG blood SFX for practical blood effects that have somehow worked believably and cheaply in movies for a number of decades.
4. Despite the fact that the entire internal monologue of the main character is based on his self-imposed rules, the plot itself has no rules.
5. That unintentional irony is the only one found in the entirety of the movie.
6. Weapons are seen as precious, but are casually discarded and then easily found again; food seems to be scarce, yet the characters loot a grocery store for a Twinkie – which doesn’t exist in a location where by all reasonability it absolutely and certainly would, except it can’t because then the joke would pay off with 2/3 of the movie left to go – and don’t stock up on any other food.
7. The movie begins in Texas. Columbus is headed to Columbus. He hooks up with Tallahassee. Are they going to Tallahassee? Why would Columbus agree to go to Tallahassee? Then they hook up with Wichita and Little Rock, who are going to California. (side note: why doesn’t Tallahassee name them based on where they’re headed, too? even if they lied to him, they still must have said they were traveling together) If Columbus really wants to go to Columbus, why does he stay with any of them? Why does Tallahassee?
8. Oh suddenly we’re in Beverly Hills. Never mind.
9. A character scams another character by betting that zombie killers unknown to her will hesitate while aiming a loaded shotgun at the face of a little girl whom the zombie killers believe to have been infected. This after establishing the movie’s primary rule that you absolutely don’t hesitate to kill a zombie – including little girls – when confronted with that exact situation.
10. The plot is obviously conceived by someone saying “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if an amusement park was overrun with zombies?” (spoiler: no, it isn’t) followed by “Uh oh what are we going to do to pad out the movie’s first 70 minutes?”
11. Abigail Breslin, formerly an intriguingly natural performer, gives the absolute worst line reading – “Do you have any regrets?” – in the history of cinema, as a setup to the movie’s most ham-handed, horrendously unfunny joke.
12. Entering a tiny bathroom where a zombie would be easily detected and dispatched: be cautious, freak out and don’t do it. Entering a sprawling mansion where multiple zombies could be hidden anywhere: yeah go ahead and sit down to watch a movie. Take time to make a bowl of popcorn that exists there for no reason whatsoever.

BONUS reason to hate Zombieland: Sorry, Jesse Eisenberg: it’s not working out. Please stop appearing in movies.

Tags: Movies, review, zombieland

Nope, no real reason. Just found a pair of Schwarzenegger-related goodies this week and wanted to pass them along. I care about you like that.

First of all, this excellently-edited piece of Schwarzeneggerian one-liners. 10 minutes long without a single wasted second.

(buncha violence, some NSFW language. All totally worth it. via the brilliant minds at Pajiba)

And here’s a terrifically simple photo-comic via a deviant little site called superpoop:

Think fast: what’s the ONE Schwarzenegger movie that you would pop into the player – right this second – and watch?

Tags: arnold schwarzenegger, commando, james cameron, kindergarten cop, Movies, terminator, total recall, true lies

Quentin Tarantino’s birthday is coming up this week – March 27th – so I figured I would get rid of some old links sitting around honor the writer/director with a pair of terrifically clever items I’ve recently come across.

Halfway Cinema is a great site that posts a screengrab of a movie’s exact midpoint. A deceptively simple idea, and you’d be right in guessing that often a movie’s halfway-point isn’t anything remarkable or meaningful from a cinematic storytelling perspective.

Until you see something like this one – obviously from Kill Bill: Vol. 1 – that represents a rather wonderfully significant moment in that movie:

I also recently discovered The Oatmeal, a comics-and-quizzes site in which a fantastically demented and talented illustrator/writer creates some of the most hilarious visual concoctions I’ve ever seen. These range from this simple but brilliant Pulp Fiction tribute:

…to other insane works such as:

• 5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin the Mouth
• How to use a semicolon
• How Everything Goes to Hell During a Zombie Apocalypse

And so very much more inspired, grotesque and otherwise life-affirming lunacies. Please go to The Oatmeal and plow your way through all of its content immediately. You’ll be oh so happy you did.

This concludes Quentin Tarantino Day at Burbanked. Kinda ran out of steam there.

Tags: halfway cinema, kill bill, Movies, pulp fiction, quentin tarantino, the oatmeal

And there are more. Oh yes.

Tags: mundane things, sean connery

(via @scarletscribe)

Tags: handsome mens club, jimmy kimmel, movie, TV, youtube

As it has with tons of movie bloggers, I have remained confused and confounded over the fact that this year’s The Karate Kid remake is stubbornly holding onto its classic, audience-dumbing down friendly title, especially – as sites such as Nuke the Fridge have wisely pointed out – the movie’s latest trailer makes a very clear point that Jackie Chan’s character Mr. Han will be teaching his young ward kung-fu and most certainly not karate.

But I think I’ve figured out why the filmmakers not only kept the title, but never actually considered updating it in the first place. It’s because we would constantly make fun of them:

Tags: jackie chan, kung-fu, movie, nuke the fridge, one-sheet, the karate kid