a farther room

Some current and some not-so-current recommendations:

Diary of the Dead

After forty years working in the field he created, horror maestro George Romero’s latest zombie opus, Diary of the Dead, is perhaps his best since the seminal 1968 genre-spawning classic Night of the Living Dead.  Too bad the Weinstein Company, underestimating the appeal of this low-budget chiller and the marketing prowess of Romero’s name, opted for a straight-to-DVD release.  

In Diary, we follow a band of young film students who, finding themselves caught amidst a zombie attack and the resulting collapse of civilization, decide to document the experience through grainy digital handheld, simultaneously providing our on-the-ground, film-within-a-film perspective of the madness. 

As always, Romero doses the blood-splattering thrills with a potent thread of social commentary, here taking as his subject the 21st-century culture of info-overload, our concurrent obsession with technology, and the moral relativism born of the two.  Haunting meta-musings from one of the masters - a very cool must-see.

The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford

Brad Pitt is Jesse James, already a legend when the film opens, a man who’s seen his legend fire aflame, then flicker.  He’s brash, gregarious, fey, melancholy, cruel, ruthlessly paranoid - often all in the same moment.  It’s the sort of performance I wouldn’t have thought Brad Pitt could give.  The film overall is a stunning commentary on celebrity, reputation, obsession, and longing.  Casey Affleck crawls the skin.  And Roger Deakins’ cinematography is astonishingly breathtaking.  There are flaws here, a few of them – largely the occasionally gawky and awkward fact-filling voiceover.  But all in all, a stunning film.  

Medium

For the last few years, this show has been among my favorites on TV.  It’s silly, sure, but surprisingly suspenseful, eerie, and poignant.  Patricia Arquette stars as Allison DuBois, a Phoenix housewife with clairvoyant powers that enable her to foretell the future through precognitive dreams.  The show effectively balances her everyday financial and familial woes with the supernatural ones.  And British character actor Jake Weber is fantastic as her gentle, put-upon husband.  If you like potboilers, this one’s hard to beat on network TV.  Now in it’s fourth season, the throughline of the plot has picked up with Allison’s three young daughters all showing signs of nascent psychic abilities inherited from their mother.  What’s more, it’s got perhaps the best opening title sequence in TV history.  Great stuff.

Zodiac

Growing up in San Jose, my mom used to tell me stories about living in San Francisco during the Zodiac Killer’s eerie, enigmatic spree of violence.  She described walking the streets of the city before and after work, always glancing over her shoulder, always peeking into doorways as she passed.  My dad, a law school student, worked as a cab driver at the time – of interest because one of the Zodiac’s victims was a cabbie - and, as my mom told it, there was a generalized sense of unease around the Bay Area, one which only dissipated after years. 

David Fincher’s film on the subject, likely my favorite movie of 2007, goes to great length to capture that sense of atmosphere and anticipation.  Alternately suspenseful, horrific, even blackly funny, it’s a painstaking journey through the arduous, multi-year hunt for the Zodiac, and a trenchant portrait of America in the late-sixties/early-seventies.  There’s a new director’s cut available on DVD, which I haven’t yet seen, but whichever cut you catch, this movie is the tops.

Four Sheets to the Wind

This stunning little indie premiered in competition at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.  Full disclosure: it’s produced by my brother, Ted Kroeber, and features a teeny-weeny cameo of my own.  That being said, it’s a gem.  Writer-director Sterlin Harjo tells the quiet, gently comic story of a young Seminole Indian’s circuitous coming-of-age.  Toss it into your Netflix queue!

El Orfanato

In English, it’s The Orphanage, a Spanish-language film from director JA Bayona and exec-producer Guillermo Del Toro.  A wrenching parable of grief and loss framed within a classic ghost story.  Creepy, elegant, powerful.

In the Heart of the Sea

Just finished Nathaniel Philbrick’s gripping true-life account of the sinking of the whaleship Essex.  A tale that’s got it all – desperate Quakers, eerie sea lore, vengeful whales, even rampant cannibalism.  Tell me, what’s not to love here?