George A. Romero's Diary Of The Dead

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

Release Date: February 15th, 2008 (wide)

Starring: Shawn Roberts, Joshua Close, Scott Wentworth, Joe Dinicol, George Buza

Directed by: George Romero 

Premise: A group of film students encounter real zombies when making a horror picture in the woods.

[w/o horse]

Until recently I thought I'd missed the theater release.

I'm already standing in line.  Because there might be a line.

[MacGuffin]

EXCL: Dead Man Walking
Source: ShockTillYouDrop

Las Vegas is burning. Or so CNN wants you to think. I'm sitting in the Delta Terminal at the Salt Lake City airport, eyes fixed - like so many around me - on the flat screen television hanging from the ceiling. My curiosity and concern are amplified by the hellish visions onscreen. Wolf Blitzer's white Muppet head is telling us there's a casino fire. Behind him, on a monitor, there's the proof: The Monte Carlo has been adorned with a fiery crown. A surface fire, really. Everyone inside is safe and systematically evacuated. In fact, the fire's been out for hours, but Blitzer is reminding us of what the scene looked like when the top of the Carlo was roasting. The anchor then introduces a series of MOS ("man on the street") videos - images captured via cell phones and digital cameras of the casino by the Everyman, a testament to the MySpace and YouTube generation where instant gratification comes but with the click of an "upload" button.

Vegas was never razed in a hellish inferno, needles to say. The Carlo suffered a few blackened blemishes (its poker tables to be populated soon enough). However, I couldn't help but think the whole incident is an apropos end to my trip to Sundance where, just days earlier, George Romero and I sat down to discuss Diary of the Dead.

The latest entry in the "horror gets real" trend (see: Cloverfield, Rec, The Poughkeepsie Tapes and, naturally, The Blair Witch Project), "Diary" is now the fifth cogitative chapter in Romero's undead saga - a smaller, more intimate approach than 2005's divisive Land of the Dead. Here the director, who started this whole "zombie thing" in '68 with Night of the Living Dead, returns to Night One. You know, when the dead start walking among the living and society uniformly erupts with a panicked "WTF?!" and collapses.

Romero trades in the one-location scenario that dominated his first three "Dead" films, and gave them a delicious taste of claustrophobia, for something more akin to a road movie structure: Skimming across the back roads of Pennsylvania dazed and confused, a small indie film crew huddle in their RV trying to make sense of a sudden zombie outbreak. They're led by director Jason Creed (Joshua Close) who is determined to document their journey (for a film called "The Death of Death" - a moniker used by Romero for his DC Comics series "Toe Tags") and post his findings regularly via a MySpace page. This doesn't sit well with Creed's girlfriend (Michelle Morgan) or pal (Shawn Roberts, encoring in a different role after a bit part in "Land"). Relationship rifts grow. Creed's obsession intensifies and he places a blinding responsibility on himself to right the misinformation being spread by the mass media concerning the severity of the situation.

Approaching 68 (at the time of this writing), Romero is no less spry and humble than when we last saw him in Toronto just before he embarked for Land of the Dead. Gone is the trademark tan fishing vest - with the "Aim for the Head - Shaun of the Dead" promo button attached to the chest pocket - we've seen him wear so often. It's goddamn cold in Park City, Utah and even here the Zombie Godfather fights off a chill only one of his shambling corpses would love.

"I'm feeling a little older, man," he answers, sitting down next to us when we ask how things have changed for him personally since Land of the Dead bowed to a critically lauded reception. Following "Land's sour box office turn, rumors circulated Romero fell into a lugubrious state, disappointed by its performance. He subsequently packed his bags and left Pittsburgh (where so many of his films have been set) heading north to Toronto where he now resides. If any low spirits clouded him, they've evidently been expurgated as he explains age is the only change he's feeling these days.

"I'm still very inspired to keep going. Land of the Dead...Universal was terrific and they let me make my movie. I like the movie," Romero states looking at us over his signature wide, well, we'll just call 'em "grandpa glasses." "I know a lot of fans didn't because maybe they thought it was too big, that's not why I did Diary of the Dead. It was just so hard. I started to say to myself, 'Where do I go [with the next film]?' What am I going to do - Mad Max? Because I started this whole thing with just a bunch of people in a farmhouse."

Out on the press tour for "Land," Romero hinted at a direct sequel (the first of its kind in the franchise) that would pick up with the film's crew of the Dead Reckoning (Simon Baker, Asia Argento, et al.) as they trekked across a zombie-ridden land - hence, the Mad Max overtones. Universal didn't exactly come knockin' for a follow-up, however.

"All of the zombies films I've done have grown out of what's happening out there in the world. It's not like I sit there and think, 'Oh, I just found a new way to kill a zombie - let's make a movie!'" What Romero became more in tune with in the wake of "Land" was the feverish explosion of new media. "Everyone was becoming a reporter." Not only that, but videos posted on the web from all over the world revealed the wide spectrum of content - from a dumb-ass on a trampoline being struck by a crowbar to brutal executions on a far away continent - that was easily available to anyone willing to watch.

"But I'm more concerned about ideas and about people being so captivated by it. Thinking, or being fooled into thinking, they're doing the right thing when in fact they're not and that's what I wanted to talk about in ['Diary']," he explains. "The Presidential debates - the questions are not being asked by anchors anymore, they're being asked by people in the blogs. But what I found was that I sensed some danger in that. People being captivated by it, people more than willing to do it. There could be a lunatic out there - a Hitler of today...he doesn't need people in a town square, he could throw up a blog now. It's dangerous. You can say anything and get a million followers. If you sound halfway convincing, you'll have a lot more."

"I had a sketchbook for this film, had some notes and concept pages worked out already," he continues. "I sort've said, one day in the shower, 'This all comes together!' I can use film students and go back to the very first day when the dead start walking and they're out there with a camera shooting a project and they start to shoot what happens."

Diary of the Dead, Romero says, was to feel like a vacation next to his experience on "Land" - during which he supposedly walked off of the set out of exhaustion (or was it frustration?) one day. "It's always difficult to make a film - it's night, it's cold, all that shit," he grumbles with a smile. In his head, he envisioned "Diary" as a true guerilla filmmaking effort: Shot under the radar, raw and without even the vaguest hint of a theatrical release planned.

"There's a film production school in Florida called Full Sail and I wanted to go there and shoot with the students. I've gone down there and lectured a few times - made a film down there with the kids. I just wanted to do 'Diary' absolutely low budget, just to do it. Just for my soul. And I would basically make a partnership with the school and say, 'Maybe, because of my name, people could make some money on it and we can split it.'" Artfire Films ultimately sunk its teeth into the script and presented a modest budget for Romero to play with. "I said, 'I don't want a lot of money because I want people to leave me alone. Basically, we wanted freedom - to get it as close as possible to the way we would have done it at the school."

Filming began in the fall of 2006 in Toronto and Romero describes the experience as "absolutely great. It was light-hearted for everyone involved, the actors were sensational." Everyone involved immediately fell into the groove of the extended takes that were required to pull off the home video effect Romero was reach for. "We were shooting shots that were eight pages long. There were a couple of days when we did nothing but set the shot up and then shoot only one shot that day, but it'd be eight pages. So, I think this cast, if I asked them, 'We're gonna do the whole movie in a single shot,' they would've done it. Never was a shot blown because an actor blew their line. It completely reminded me of the days on Night of the Living Dead where it was just friends coming together to make a movie with no interference."

Before our conversation is called to an end, Romero leans in and inquires about that "other" vérité-flavored film Cloverfield robbing all of the entertainment headlines. "I didn't know there'd be all of these movies coming out - who knew?" he shrugs. "I didn't know about Cloverfield, Redacted...maybe there is a collective subconscious. Now there are all of these films using helmet cams and handheld news stuff. We've seen all that news about these soldiers in Iraq with helmet cams - that's how we found out who did what to who [on the battlefield], it's a bit like Rashomon."

Diary of the Dead opens in theaters February 15th with a sequel currently in the planning stages.

[w/o horse]

Just pre-ordered my ticket for the 10pm showing this Friday at the Nuart with director George A. Romero in person.  I just pre-ordered my ticket to see Diary of the Dead, the new George A. Romero film, at the Nuart on Friday and George A. Romero is going to be there in person.  I just got a ticket to see George A. Romero present his new film Diary of the Dead this Friday at 10pm at the Nuart.

[w/o horse]

There's been a lot of horror activity in the LA theaters lately (my friend:   Do our theaters think it's Halloween?) so rather unexpectedly I've been able to talk a lot about Diary and hear a lot from other people about Diary.  Across the board it's agreed that the social commentary in this one is heavy handed and irritating, and what's most disappointing about that is Romero is like the horror filmmaker to point to for subversive and subtle critiques.  It turns out that the subversive may require the subtle.  It occurred to me during Diary how fucking eerie and creepy Romero's films can be (he's a kind of shy, humble man in person), so when he said at the beginning of the screening that this one was to him more like Night of the Living than any of the sequels I can agree the most in that certain scenes excitedly make the skin crawl.  I wish they wouldn't do films handheld and make them feel handheld, this one or any other, but what can I do.

Basically he still does it better than his imitators.

[Pedro]

Was surprised to find this review in the Economist.  HAS SOME DETAILS ABOUT THE THIRD ACT'S SETTING.

The Living Daylights
Source:  The Economist

GEORGE ROMERO'S "Diary of the Dead" portrays a zombie outbreak, a menace Mr Romero first made famous with his 1968 shocker, "Night of the Living Dead", and which has since been explored by generations of film-makers.

Films purporting to show real events captured with a video camera eventually run into a problem of credibility: when all hell is breaking loose, no one in his right mind is going to keep filming. Mr Romero deflects disbelief by opting for the same solution as his predecessors (his camera-wielding first-person narrator is an obsessed film-maker), though he updates it by having the other characters accuse Jason Creed (Joshua Close) of succumbing to the malady of "the YouTube generation".

When the zombie outbreak occurs, Creed and his crew abandon the cheap mummy film they are making and set out across America documenting mankind's losing battle with a cannibalistic army of the living dead. "You think nothing's real until you've filmed it," says his angry girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan), more than once. Neither novel nor true, that observation is a piece of misdirection on the film-maker's part. Video in "Diary of the Dead" is simply a new way for Mr Romero to tell a story, and to do it without a studio breathing down his neck.

After three official sequels to "Night of the Living Dead" and scores of unofficial ones, the mother lode should be exhausted, but Mr Romero keeps finding new ways to terrify his audiences with his rotting brainchildren. The third act, set in a deserted mansion with surveillance cameras in every room, breaks scary new ground in suspense, and the indescribable last shot is as horrifically beautiful as one of Francisco Goya's black paintings. "Diary of the Dead" effortlessly refutes its own diatribes against digital technology, which has permitted this unrepentant maverick to make his best film yet.

[MacGuffin]

Although Cloverfield does a better job of capturing the you-are-there, videocamera POV, Diary is Romero doing a better job at showing us the world in a post-9/11 - Katrina world; a world so relied on its blogs and youtube vids. I liked his social commentary in this one far better than Land Of The Dead; this more than that shows Romero back to form.

[w/o horse]

I liked his social commentary in this one far better than Land Of The Dead; this more than that shows Romero back to form.

Isn't sly commentary Romero's form?  I wonder if you thought the commentary was accurate, or if you thought it was generally truthful?  Wouldn't the parallel here be if Night of the Living Dead hadn't been set in a let's say symbolic cabin in a symbolic wilderness but had taken place in the midst of a race riot and the zombies had been the policemen?  Then everyone would have gone "yes, I understand exactly" but the movie wouldn't have been any fun right.  I definitely felt like Romero's foreground approach to social messages not only interfered with the energy of Diary but also burdened his views with responsibility.  And it's not a film that will or should change lives, it's not the appropriate conduit for actual demonstration because it's fantasy.

[GodDamnImDaMan]

F'N Horrible movie.