Of course what I write is "my opinion". I wasn’t consulting a burning bush while typing my last entry. So I will apologize for any confusion that not stating so may have caused to any addle-minded readers so unfortunate to have lost themselves in a difficult cerebral quandary.
Note: THE FOLLOWING IS MY OPININION.
However, regurgitating boring production details, gleaned from the internet (someday I too shall Google factoids!) in order to defend the massive failure of 'Land of the Dead' is a poor method to say the least. (I would challenge anyone to find any Director who hasn’t complained about the Producers’ interference in their project.) Furthermore, it does not, by any means, display an understanding of the undead genre. Rather, viewing films and reading written material about the undead makes one knowledgeable of what constitutes a good zombie story, be it a movie, a novel, a comic book or what have you.
Nonetheless, the production method of ‘Diary o/t Dead’ is frugal. So I will stand by my former argument that the studios did not want to give out any cash for another Romero Dead film, whether it’s ‘Diary’ or any future project he may be deliberating.
It is quite apparent that this new Romero debacle has obviously been fashioned for the video-posting-generation of Y, (or is it YZ? who cares), that has been conditioned for the quick intake of palsy-ridden, jittery snap scenes and poorly written dialogue consisting of a series of sound byte quality lines. But perhaps there is a reason for this. After all, Romero has been known to use his films as a vehicle for social commentary. Thus, it can be inferred that the creation of young, shallow, one-dimensional, stereotypical characters is completely intentional. By doing so, Romero is criticizing this new vapid generation that is all too similar to the undead ghouls that past movie heroes (and heroines) have been called upon to vanquish, or in many cases, outrun. His inclusion of the “professor” character is a subtle means of informing today’s youth that they should hold in esteem their more traditionally educated elders. Or maybe, because Buffy had Giles in the ‘Vampire Slayer’ series, Romero felt that he needed his own Englishman to dispense tidbits of innocuous advice to a bunch of Ritalin doping kids. And maybe I’m giving too much credit to his penchant for expressing societal concerns via the movie screen.
Romero’s premise seems worthy I admit. That being; a living dead movie shot on-the-run, by a group of amateurs archiving the experiences of being in the midst of a zombie pandemic, while disputing the misinformation being broadcast by the corporate media. But I fear he has failed in his delivery. Watching the “confession room” scene in ‘Diary’ is painfully reminiscent of the numerous Reality-TV shows that have flooded the market. Perhaps there’ll be a 1-800 number in which we can text-vote which character we want to see torn apart by ravenous monsters on 'Survivor: Undead Outbreak'.
So go ahead George, YouTube us up a zombie movie. Feel free to continue beating that undead horse.
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