On the Movie Bum: Oh My God, this is the Greatest blog post I've ever read in my life!

On the Movie Bum

            “Oh My God, this is the greatest movie I’ve ever seen in my life!” If you know where this line comes from, then give yourself a cookie. You’ve officially spent waaaaaay too much time on the internet.

            If you haven’t, then let me tell you about great the Chester “the Movie Bum” A. Bum. A creation of Nostalgia critic and generally awesome guy That Guy With the Glasses, the Movie Bum does pseudo reviews of that are currently out in theaters. And before you ask, yes he begins each and every single one of his reviews in this manner. Yes, even the Twilight flicks. Now this schtick has two very effective catches: one is the aforementioned fact that he’s a Bum, meaning the occasional homelessness joke, which come off as slightly offensive, but I tend to let them slide, seeing as how they don’t come from a place that’s too mean spirited. The second is that as he explains the movie, he himself tends to notice the flaws with said movie.

            Now that second part, not the first, is what I feel like is the main joke of the series. While the whole Bum thing is rather hilarious, I feel like it’s more like icing on the cake for that second joke.

            Now, most reviewers probably aren’t particularly effected by something like this, but something about viewing a movie in a movie theatre, especially a major blockbusters, make them all the better the moment. Things like plot holes the size of a house (see Promethius) or scenes that should make you face palm so hard, you break your jaw bone (see Spiderman 3) tend to get lost in the background noise of all that surround sound and a screen a story high.

            What I’m getting at is that Bum reviews pretty much summarizes the movie going experience of the average schlub (myself included). At first, he or she thinks “that was fucking awesome” and then he or she realizes, whether it be in middle of the night getting a drink or explaining to friends later “that movie made no sense whatsoever” or “that movie sucked ass,” followed by the inevitable “why did I ever think that was a good movie.”

            I don’t know about you, fair reader, but I can assure you from experience that I’ve certainly had this experience. I remember watching the aforementioned third Spiderman movie and thinking it was the greatest movie ever, only to realize it sucked later on. Even more recently, I saw World War Z in theatres (I really regret not watching Pacific Rim, but that’s a story for another post), and I can’t help but think that it was the zombie apocalypse that everyone wanted to see: zombies everywhere and we get to see what it’s like for the world to be overrun by them. On reflection, however, I realize that this has been done before, albeit with less UN bullcrap and much more symbolic weight (see Walking Dead, the videogame at least, or any classic Romero Zombie movie).

That’s all I got for now. This is Opinionated A Schlub saying: change! You got change? Aw, c’mon help a guy out! Change?

Review: World War Z

If there’s one thing that World War Z does well that no other zombie movie does right, it’s that it manages to capture the shear scale and insanity of an initial zombie outbreak. It neither relies it’s main character waking up in medias res like in Walking dead or 28 Days Later—one of the few things I dislike about both—nor does it just leave it’s audience to assume that the world has been overrun like in most all zombie apocalypse movies before it save maybe 28 Weeks later. We hear the news reports of chaos breaking out all over the world and just like the trailer shows us, we see the chaos the initial outbreak causes. And we also see get to see the rest of the world go to hell in a hand-basket. I suppose this is one advantage to zombie being so damned popular is getting to see a movie where all we get to see all this. The sequences in Israel and the one on the plane have to be two of my favorite zombie scenes put to celluloid, if only because I knew exactly what song they were playing in the former.

That being said, this intensity kind of works against it. While the aforementioned in medias res approach to both Walking Dead and 28 Days are sort of a copout, they were necessary so that we the viewer get to see the harsh, unrelenting reality of living both with the threat of the undead but also that of the living pushed to the brink. World War Z loses this emotional punch beneath the crazy chase sequences and scientific accuracy.

While I’m at it, I’ll add a few last minute nit-picks: some of the sound effects sound a little too “trailery”, the various booms and bwa-wa-wa’s sounding a bit like something out of Inception. Not to mention the final sequence at the end feels a little lack-luster in comparison to the majority of the scenes before it, making it feel a bit anti-climactic.

TL;DR

While it lacks the emotional punch of either Walking Dead or 28 Days Later (the latter my favorite zombie movie to date) it makes up for it with it’s intensity and sheer scale. I say give it a look, if only for that one Israel scene.