Evangelion 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone (try saying that ten times fast) is also what I would call a curiosity. Set in the future when an evil organization sends super killing machines to destroy some city in Japan (I guess Godzilla and Mothra were previously indisposed) and there’s only one organization that can stop them. Each evil machine seems to learn from the defeat of the previous one so that old strategies and methods of defense quickly become obsolete (it’s just as true in modern warfare, though it takes a little longer). In other words, it’s like a video game where each victory isn’t a victory, but just jumps you up another level. In true anime form, the story (by Hideaki Anno, who also surpervised the directing) holds together kinda, sorta, but never really makes much sense, though it’s difficult to say whether this might at least partially be due to this being the second installment in a series. True, I haven’t seen the first one, but I doubt it would make that much of a difference. The animation is often beautiful and there are some fun scenes (though also one disturbing one where a teenager ends up lying naked on top of his naked sister—it’s suppose to be tres droll, but is more a tad disturbing). In the end, it falls to two people, twins (the aforementioned brother and sister, but with their clothes on), the offspring of the scientist who invented the weapon that can defeat the bad guys, to save their city. For some reason, these two are the only ones who can operate Evangeline, the robotic fighting machine that is mankind’s only hope, and the operating of it leads to all sorts of “why doesn’t daddy love me” conflicts. The male twin is also the lead. He spends much of his down time when he’s not saving the world being bullied at his school and pushed around by other people, which seems to me to be an odd way to treat the only person who can stop an evil organization from destroying the world. But this is anime, after all.
Zombieland is what is known as a post modern zombie movie, i.e., it’s not about how we got zombie’s so much as being about how we live in a world in which zombies are assumed. It’s also post modern in the way it is self aware of what it is, which is very tongue in cheek, at least when the cheeks are not throwing up vile vomit. It revolves around Columbus, a germaphobic loner played by Jessie Eisenberg in his usual nerdy persona. Columbus has 32 rules for surviving zombies, all very smart ones. Unfortunately (for me and apparently for me only, because everyone I talk to loooooooves this movie), the writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick don’t seem to think they have to play by any rules at all, especially when it comes to the actions of the characters, who tend to do things more in accordance with the style and objective of the authors rather than what they would really do in such a situation. This means that the characters are extremely smart when Reese and Wernick need them to be, and extremely and inexcusably stupid when Reese and Wernick need them to be. On the plus side, this allows for some clever scenes, especially a very funny Saturday Night Live type sketch starring Bill Murray in a cameo (though the basic comic idea here has already been done in Shawn of the Dead, a movie I preferred overall). At its worst, you can feel nagged and annoyed at the arbitrary nature of much of it. At its best, you can just relax (well, relax as much as you can with the fear that the next bathroom door you open will have a zombie in it) and go along for the ride. The characterizations and dialogue are above average, the most clever aspect of it being that though Columbus’s obsessive compulsiveness and various phobias are the parts of his personalities responsible for his survival (imagine a world in which only Monk and Felix Unger survive), at the same time, the arrival of zombies is the impetus that cures him of his germaphobia and saves him from his destiny of masturbation being his only method of sexual release. Abigail Breslin, as a 12 year old con artist, gives perhaps the best performance here (she’s almost unrecognizable). Though everybody works very hard, both behind and in front of the camera, and the apocalyptic scenery of empty streets and deserted landscapes have a certain beauty to them, in the end, for me, it never really rises to what it wants to be.
Howard Casner - Rantings and Ravings 