Zombification

A friend of mine, Grace Lee, has a new movie out, a "much less than $1 million" mockumentary, American Zombie, all about zombie rights in Los Angeles. It's playing at a limited run here at the Sunset 5, and hopefully will find its audience. That may be some combination of zombie movie fans and non-zombie indie film fans.

Zombie films have a tradition of social satire going back to George Romero's skewering of consumer culture in Dawn of the Dead. For the first part of Lee's film, the high-functioning undead (as opposed to the menial-suited low functioning and dangerous feral zombies) appear as metaphor for any alienated ethnic or other oppressed demographic group who want their fair place in the American dream machine. But as we dive into the struggles between Director Lee, playing herself, her collaborator and the zombies themselves, the movie becomes an anti-p.c., irreverent shot at the liberal documentary's relationship to such an interest group, and what it says about the documentarians.

Lee achieved IFC programming and a lot of accolades with The Grace Lee Project, about the surprising number of Asian-American women who have been given her same name, so there's a sense of American Zombie commenting on her own practice, which certainly informs the believability of the filmmaking-within-a-film side of the story.

The handling of the zombies is more ambiguous, as the high-functioning ones Lee and co-writer Rebecca Sonnenshine have chosen to focus on sometimes (particularly early on) don't seem very zombie-like, save for patches of dry skin or alarming moles on their cheeks. Even their zombie frailties, like loss of memory, seem almost human. The cast plays even the most comic moments naturalistic and the shooting is more documentary than horror film, with satisfying payoffs in the last third of the movie, when the doc crew follows their subjects to the "Live Dead" festival retreat, and the narrative builds most clearly.

It will be interesting to see where zombie film fans place this in their canon in the years to come. Its premiere at the 2007 Slamdance Film Festival, which runs as an even indier counter to the Sundance Film Festival (also in Park City the very same January dates, but in fewer and smaller venues), makes it the zombie Sundance film, i.e. the zombie social satire of the Sundance film.

Most of all, there's several moments near the end that unsettle as they wrap up the coverage of several key characters. Zombie is a one-way trip, from healthy living tissue to endlessly rotting flesh, and all the zombie characters are growing differently now, darker. They may band together to protest, "We're here, we're dead, get used to it," but maybe that's not what's most important to them.

After all, you've got to kill the brain to kill the ghoul.

Slicko

Just saw Michael Moore's Sicko tonight. Go go go go go. This is a big agenda-setting movie like An Inconvenient Truth, and I believe that like Al Gore's movie, this one will put a long-dormant issue front and center, right where it needs to be.

If Gore's movie is about what it will take for us to survive as a species, Moore's is about what it will take for us to survive as a nation.

I was just listening on the radio about how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's defining phrase, "The New Deal", was actually just a single mention near the climax of his first Democratic Convention acceptance speech.

For those of us who are old enough to remember when nobody even imagined Ronald Reagan could be elected President, remember "the common good?" Lower case, but covering everybody?

France does. England and Canada do. Cuba...be prepared to wonder if we've really got it so good. You know, that American exceptionalism thing, that lock on material wealth, at least in the big spreadsheets, that gives us a little license to be smug?

Nobody is working at Moore's level in agitprop documentary. Feature film level, and our audience erupted many times, applauding at the end. He even manages to make George Bush, in the brief shot that opens the movie, entertaining.

Think of it:

1989 Roger and Me
2002 Bowling for Columbine
2004 Fahrenheit 9/11
2007 Sicko

That's a serious body of work. And the in-theater experience of the new one is so good because the stories and the people are great. Although he narrates throughout, Moore keeps his physical presence out of the first half of the movie, building to the picture's great set piece when the filmmaker rents a yacht and takes three 9/11 workers, heroes who can't get the proper treatment in the U.S. for ailments suffered during their volunteer rescue effort, to Guantanamo and then Cuba in search of a cure.

Per former British Labour Party hero Tony Benn, governments should be scared of the people, not the people afraid of the government (V), as Cheney/Rove/Bush have made us. He says the two biggest tools of repression are fear and demoralization. We know what he's talking about. Now Americans need to be pissed enough that we scare our government.

The fact is that everyone knows the U.S. health care system is a nightmare. Moore does a big service digging back to actual Nixon/Ehrlichman moment in 1971 (on tape, natch') when they greenlit starting our current system -- putting our national health care system on a profit basis.

I once read that master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa said his job was to expose the troubles of mankind, that as an artist it was not his job to provide the solutions. But in his practice Moore goes further and, by example and a simple, elegant "common good" summarizing polemic, points the way.

Without overly saying it Moore is basically saying we just have to nationalize the whole thing. Single payer = free and guaranteed health care for all Americans, on demand. Close down and delist Kaiser Permanente, Blue Cross and Blue Shield.

We're the last industrialized Western nation to lack it. We're the wealthiest nation in the world.

If the rest of them get to live a life free of the constant worrying about their family's cost and coverage, why not you and all your fellow Americans?