Friday 19th March 2004
One of those days. Three hours of sleep, and then: the suck.
Our story actually begins a couple of nights ago, when JestBuy, for the first time in the history of the planet, called me. Apparently, my laptop, dead since early January, had finally been fixed. So I went and got it back. Again.
An hour later, still running on battery, I caught it doing the same old UpArrow thing at me. Although I finally had my M key back. Of course, the new development was the BIOS warning me, on startup, that a device was missing from the machine. Probably the DVRom or the A: Drive. Who knows.
So, since Hunter had to go play with the army anyway, I grabbed the laptop and leapt onto the freeway. Which, we now know, added an hour to getting where I wanted to be. Dumb luck I'd left an hour early to leave an hour open to deal with JestBuy, which I instead misspent on the road behind various TwatFish-adorned minivans. Which just figures.
At this point, we edge in on good news. I dropped Hunter off [the army and I don't get along; I'm smart, and they're governmental] and went off to Goodfriends for an hour or two to drink coffee and ponder the future of Pandemic. Somewhere in there, looking over a couple hundred printouts from all over the 'net, a couple of amazing things clicked. And now, notwithstanding a couple of really esoteric questions I've got to find answers for, I think I've got about the first 150 pages of the novel written out in my head, waiting to get dumped to ROM once I get the laptop back.
Of course, at this point, the laptop is sitting uselessly next to me on the bar while I deal with a Spiral and a UniBall--relics from the twentieth century, and overrated at best. So, having made a few calls to people who would have computers and the intellect to get my questions, I made a few more notes about stuff not covered by my phonebook of printouts, and went back to grab Hunter. Now, we're off to JestBuy.
Of course, the other night, when I first discovered that my laptop was still broken, I managed to get through to 1-888-BESTBUY [which rarely works for me, of course] and explained the problem. Nicely. With tastefully minimal use of neat words like fraud, extortion, FBI, and lawyers. From that, I got the recommendation to return to JestBuy here in town, and force them to fix or replace the laptop onsite, because nothing first handed over in January should still be both broken and extant.
So, I gave that a try. Which very nearly almost worked.
First, I got the thing turned on. Thing One: the device was missing, but unidentified. Thing Two: for once, everything worked perfectly; the UpArrow jammed on the startup.
So here's the situation. Three in the afternoon on a Friday, and I'm in the Computer Repairs Section of the Customer Service Suburb of JestBuy, and my laptop is dinging like a schizophrenic car alarm, attracting attention from the CompUSA next door. Why's it doing that? Because: the UpArrow key is jammed. See? Jammed. Believe me? Try unjamming it. Can't? Internal. Grok? Whee.
So: the point has now been made.
Unfortunately [here's the surprise, of course], JestBuy don't fix laptops. Instead, JestBuy assure me that the thing will be fixed or fucking well replaced by the end of the month. Which is probably meaningless in principle; in practise, more than enough people were paying attention, by then, to probably make it stick. So that might be good news.
As for the four hundred bucks the frauds at the other store charged me in ransom before giving me my broken laptop back the first time, that's become a larger mystery still. This time, at this other store, the guy who'd recently become thankful that I'd killed the beeping for him was able to get deep enough into the system to ascertain where and when this extortion actually happened. And, what happened was that, while the laptop was handed over in January with the expressed written understanding that it was a PSP [warrantied] job, for which I'd be charged exactly $0 without expressed written confirmation of changes, someone somewhere arbitrarily decided to upgrade the repair to something I should pay four hundred bucks for. Which, without expressed written consent, and a deposit made in advance of repairs, certainly equates to employee misconduct, and potentially equates to interstate fraud. The misconducting employee? Anna, of course.
She was dumb enough to do this, and sign her fucking name to it.
There are idiots on my planet. Get'em back off.
So. As things stand on that issue, my laptop is back in enemy terrority. If I ever get it back, it'll be in the next eleven days. If not, I'll get a new one. Given that half the reason I bought the most advanced model available to date was for conspicuous consumption, I'm not accepting a replacement which isn't comparable in that fashion. At this point, sticking me with a cheap laptop made in 2004 could actually be construed as defamation.
So. JestBuy.com is definitely going to have a bit of content to it, once this is all over. And, for that matter, the Author's Notes of Pandemic, since it's important to me to explain why the book was delayed, so far, by nearly three months. These frauds can sue me if they have an issue with my presentation of the collected facts; fine by me; it only serves to advertise the novel.
So we left. And we went off to VillageIdiot for a bit. And that led to an interesting argument which requires me to mention that, in point of fact, Hunter actually assembled most of my new tower. That I first built a computer in 1979 [back when you pretty well had to] and built a supercomputer in 1992 is meaningless when compared to Hunter's ability to plug a drive into an IDE slot. Apparently. Given her vehemence. I don't get it either. But, that's the fact: she's the one who actually connected most of the stuff in the machine. Make a note of that, I guess.
So, now that I'm in the sort of mood Harry Knowles always warns against having, we're off to see Dawn of the Dead. Which I'll keep as spoilerfree as possible, given that, in all probability, anyone who could actually have been damaged by spoilers has probably already seen it.
There's a certain irony in seeing Dawn of the Dead in a cinema at a mall, surrounded by fucking zombies. Or, there would have been, if the zombies in the film had been like the zombies in the original, which is what most of the audience were like. You know the type: they actually cackle at the fandango.com advert. Those zombies.
Being trapped in the Night of the Living SpEd, I had the whole gametrail of fauna around me. Behind me: the paranoid schizophrenic who has yet to learn that films are not, in fact, interactive, who appears to believe sincerely that 'the fuck you doin don open yo I know y'all ain't openin tha door ooohh...' is an effective thing to screech like Minnie Pearl in a blender at the screen. In front: the RICer poof with the jarhead haircut, whose three-inch bangs are the only part longer than a millimetre, and which are the only parts bleached down to CC DeVille from jet black; he's mostly on the Nokia to his mother, arranging a ride home since he's only twenty-three. To my right: Hunter, and then the DrunkTank; ironically, they smelled better than the blathering mendicant behind me, who kept telling Ving how to run a mall; also, they lacked the general mental wherewithal to remember whatever it was they'd started to say, so they stopped to reboot every few seconds, letting me hear a little from the film. To my left, of course: no one. Because these idiots had the minimal self-awareness to stay the fuck away from a guy six and a half feet tall in a black leather trenchcoat. That No Child Left behind thing must be working after all.
Following the various trailers--HellBoy, which has never impressed me much in any form, Troy, the story of the face which launched a thousand remakes, VanHelsing, starring the same chick from the last vampire/warewolf film, and, of course, fandango.com, starring various brownbags whose sage babbling triggered whooping emissions from the zombies--the film finally started. And that was a good thing.
Okay. Two important 'spoilers'. Very nice to see Tom Savini [oddly a friend of a friend, though I've never personally met the guy, for some dumb reason] hopping into the ever-cameoed role of the Sherrif Who Has the Secret, and, better still, to see Ken 'Peter Washington' Forre as the televangelist, since he's pretty much the only guy allowed to say 'when there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth', regardless of context.
Otherwise, any potential spoilers are all over the trailers anyway. And the subject of major debate.
Do Zombies Run. In this film? Very much so. In reality? Not much evidence of zombies. In mythology? What's a zombie? I wonder about the people who tell me [of all people] that the sprinting zombies in this film, or the Infected in 28 Days Later can't be zombies, because zombies don't run. Be that as it may, I say none of them can be zombies, because zombies aren't undead. You want the last zombiefilm ever made? Grab The Serpent and the Rainbow. Hatian vodu and poisons. That's what a damned zombi is. Romero reinvented the concept, if not technically the word. To my knowledge, there's no instance of anyone in any of his three films calling his ghouls 'zombies.' I'm not sure where that began, anymore; it just sorta became.
So, I don't much care whether zombies can run. The ran in Return of the Living Dead in 1985; they forgot to die first in Night of the Comet in 1984; they had hotdogs in their mouths in Horror at Party Beach in nineteen Murmurmutter; they evolve; a lot; and it's time again.
I'd say that these things were zombies, insofar as any anthropophagous exhomosapiens ever have been. Their zero-to-sixty [barely an exaggeration] is immaterial.
The look of the film was...interesting. Kinda like Hulk was, in a way. Maybe it was just the ?print [I assume it wasn't digital, anyway] I saw, or maybe I was so desperately surrounded by opstreperous morons that I was hyperactivating, or maybe it was a matter of design, but the framerate on the film was oddly confused. I've managed to get the same effect in Adobe Premiere, just dragging the stoppoint of a scene back and forth, and letting the software compensate for it. Really weird effect. And oddly disassociative. So it may well have been intentional after all. Otherwise...I'm nearly confused about something.
According to imdb.com, last I looked it up, the film was made for about $45million [three times what Romero reportedly needs to film Twilight of the Dead]; according to the director and producer, though, it was only twenty million. Given that twenty million would barely cover the opening crawl of the next StarWars film, I'd be impressed by that. I actually wonder, thinking about it, whether maybe the principal was, in fact, $20million, and Universal added another $25million for post. Because the effects were really very nice. Particularly the long, arial shots of the beginning of the epidemic, with cars smashing into each other at top speed and little antfarms of zombies zipping along and bottlenecking between the wreckage. I've seen better CG, but rarely; and, given the way most of it was done in this, it really wasn't that instrusive. Far better than, say, that goofy, flat-textured Licker in Resident Evil ever was; the scariest element of that film was watching some dickweed with 3DStudioMax forgetting to add any shading to that thing.
Otherwise, the film was a pretty good update. The unavoidable oneliners got slightly annoying after a while [if you're gonna implant dry wit into a horrorfilm, you're required by Federal Law to have Jamie Kennedy, okay?], but, compared to the overlit piefight and orange blood in the original, twenty-five years ago, it was still refreshing. And, in this case, far too intellectual for the zombies surrounding me in the cinema; so there was less cackling and armchair replays than there would have been if it had been the 1979 version of the story: 'wooHEE: muddafugga shaff'is ass widda muddafuggin PAH!'
Man, I hate people.
So. Given twenty-five years and roughly as many millions of dollars in budget, the question now: is the remake better or worse.
Which is, of course, begging the question. Because this isn't actually a remake. It's a companion. While it's a cinch that the cars and clothes are markedly newer in this film than in the last one, there's still the lingering impression that, while this is going on in Wisconsin, the original Dawn of the Dead is occurring concurrently back in Pennsylvania. There are parallels between the two hulking cops, but nothing to suggest that they're remotely the same character. It's simply a different film, about different people, in a different place, with the same title as the film you just kinda understand is happening a thousand miles away on the same day. And that, as far as I'm concered, is great.
That said, and granting that I'd want a little time to think it over before setting this in anything heavier than hypertext, I think I actually preferred the new version. I certainly preferred the lack of carpeting on the walls, and the lack of piefights, and so on. But then, giving it a little more thought still, this was actually more like Day of the Dead in a few ways. There weren't all that many zombies in it, for example; they were more of an understood external force, preventing anyone from getting out of the mall. I'd say they were zombies, but they could just as well have been gangs.
As for things I would personally have fixed--and here's where it turns out I lied about keeping the spoilers out of this; it's probably safe to give up on this now if you want to avoid knowing anything beforehand--my one major issue--although it nearly explains away a similar issue I had with Day of the Dead from 1985--was that people killed by things other than zombies appeared to stay dead. And that's a bit of a shock--especially given 1990's remake of Night of the Living Dead, in which even Ben eventually succumbed without having been bit. But, this time, a truck driver who gets shot to death is never seen again, and is even theorised to be dead for good becuase, otherwise, 'she'd have got back up by now'. Between that and Frankenstien's demise in 1985, I'm officially confused now. Unless there's some secret immunity vector we won't know about until or unless Romero gets to make Twilight. Which is, of course, something I'm terribly curious about.
Also--well, as mentioned, I'd have used less oneliners. But I tend to optimistically assume that smart people exist out there. So that might be a mistake. But I'd have bothered developing the characters a little more--like Romero did--and pushed a more impending issue of action. This version never got into dragging like the original did, and it necessarily lacked the now-laughable plot device of a mallbased small arms shop; but there were a few points at which the survivors appeared to live in a world without zombies, or even internal conflict. Although, again, the mistrust within the mall, more like Day of the Dead than like Dawn, was a better move than the bikers and piefights and Monroeville Mall muzak [not that this film lacks some perfectly chosen muzak in the lifts]. Still, it could have been a little more realistic, I suppose.
I could complain about character stupidity. But that's never wise. So I'll just complain that various characters were really very stupid at really very obvious times [as much as I'd like to question the intellect of anyone who trades a crowbar for a croquet mallet; has no one else played Manhunt yet?]. More by inactions than by actions. But...that's just how people tend to be, I suppose. Maybe they'll evolve one of these millennia.
That's pretty much it, though. I was pretty happy with it in general.
Now we'll have to wait and see whether Resident Evil: Apocalypse stands a chance in, well, hell of catching up. We can hope.
More later....
--Gremlin