World War Z

I awoke to get ready to leave for the office, but I sat down to finish watching “World War Z” first. It starts off well enough, although it gets to be too much about Brad Pitt saving the world. He comes through with the breakthrough observation, and he is the first test case. He barely survives numerous situations, including a plane crash. When you take a moment to step back and think about what you’re seeing, it’s ridiculous. It’s like a George Romero movie multiplied a thousand times over through the magic of CGI. It’s too bad the family gets dumped off and largely forgotten. I couldn’t see what was so special about this one person. We hardly get a real look at any of the zombies. They’re like a mass of locusts. I thought about the recent outbreak of measles as I watched all these people getting converted into zombies. Brad Pitt was the only actor in the cast that I recognized, though I understand that Bryan Cranston and Ed Harris dropped out of the picture. If you don’t accept the concept of zombies, this whole thing is laughable. I wonder what setting off a nuclear bomb would have done to the problem. The zombies were incredibly fast, more athletic than real people. They could have held the Zombie Olympics, and I’m sure they could have set some records in track and field. The zombies seemed incredibly strong, so I think they would have done well in the shot put. I’m absolutely sure they would have done great in the javelin. The fear in this movie is in the sheer numbers as opposed to the nature of the change. I feel like they could be some advantages in being a zombie. You don’t have to go to work or pay rent. I don’t think that zombies have relationship problems. In fact, I don’t think they communicate with each other at all. We don’t get to know too much about Brad Pitt’s character Gerry. He could be anybody, really, although I thought he should be younger. He was going around the world killing zombies and trying to get some information. It sure seemed like he was wasting a lot of valuable time on planes. He should have been in constant contact with people. The authorities really needed to take advantage of communications systems. One thing that was funny was listening to Gerry offer his theory of the zombies’ weakness. At least he was a pretty good listener and didn’t disregard what he was told earlier. The scene in Israel didn’t make sense to me. The helicopter pilots should have had a sense of what was happening outside the wall much sooner. How foolish it was to have such a loud crowd with grave danger on the other side. They should have been fortifying their defenses. The scene in the jet was frightening, with shades of 9/11 in it. How does a zombie get locked inside a small space without anyone knowing, anyway? I don’t think they showed exactly what happened with the Chihuahua. I found it hard to believe that Gerry could be so severely injured and still get up and walk around a few days later. It was harder to believe that he could so around fighting the zombies without each step being excruciatingly painful. Gerry drinks a soda towards the end, which is a moment that seemed like a joke, like the pause that refreshes. Do zombies drink soda, or anything else, for that matter? The movie grossed $202 million in North America, so it was the biggest zombie movie of all time, and we can look forward to a sequel. I thought the movie should have done more to make us care about the fate of humanity. It seemed to make a case that the world is horribly overpopulated, and the zombie epidemic did a good thing by thinning out the major cities of the world. This movie made me think about George Romero and what he must be thinking of the zombie craze. I read that his top ten films of all time are “The Brothers Karamazov,” “Casablanca,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “High Noon,” “King Solomon’s Mines,” “North by Northwest,” “The Quiet Man,” “Repulsion,” “Touch of Evil,” and “The Tales of Hoffmann.” Romero turned 75 this year. I had ideas for a zombie musical and a zombie version of “Ratatouille.” I don’t know about the box office appeal of such movies, however. Max Brooks wrote the book about World War Z. The interesting thing about him is that he is the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft. He went to Pitzer College in Claremont but didn’t graduate from there. The director Marc Forster has films like “Monster’s Ball,” “Finding Neverland,” “The Kite Runner,” and “Quantum of Solace” among his credits. It doesn’t look like he’ll be around to direct the sequel. I know that I couldn’t devote much of my life to making a series of zombie movies. I’d want to go on to other things. I don’t know how George Romero has done it. I would have nightmares for the rest of my life. I looked through the record store but didn’t buy anything. I went back to the office to grade some papers, and I talked with one of the students about how the semester was going. I hear on the news that Oakland is supposedly making a bid to get the George Lucas museum, but I have to think it’s a longshot that has the slightest chance of happening if the Chicago plan falls through. Why wouldn’t Lucas take it to Los Angeles as his second choice? I wanted to get home and watch The Big Bang Theory. I read a little bit about Mayim Bialik, who was born in 1975 and went to UCLA. I guess I first saw her in “Beaches.” I wanted to stop thinking about zombies for the rest of the day. I watched “Imagine: John Lennon” again. I saw that the cinematographer was Nestor Almendros. Supposedly, the first cut of this film was 24 hours long. Some of the people who died on March 4 include Mark Sandrich (1945), Williams Carlos Williams (1963), Richard Manuel (1986), Nestor Almendros (1992), John Candy (1994), and Horton Foote (2009). Today is a birthday for Patricia Heaton (59) and Catherine O’Hara (61). According to the Brandon Brooks Rewind radio segment for March 4, James Cagney won the Best Actor Oscar for “Yankee Doodle Dandy” in 1943. In 1982, “Police Squad!” premiered on ABC. In 1994, John Candy died from a heart attack at age 43 while in Mexico filming “Wagons East!”