New on DVD
0 Comments | Winnipeg Free Press, Jun 30, 2010 | by King, Randall
The Crazies
THIS is the second DVD release of The Crazies we’ve seen this year. The first was Blue Underground’s Blu-ray edition of the original George Romero non-classic from 1973.
The Crazies Version 1.0 has its good points, but it hasn’t exactly earned a place for itself in the horror-movie canon on the level of Romero’s more celebrated zombie movies.
For the contemporary remake, director Breck Eisner actually incorporates more grisly Romero-esque zombie imagery (courtesy of makeup ace Rob Hall) when a town comes under the unsavory influence of a bio-engineered virus code-named “Trixie,” rendering its victims homicidally unbalanced.
The malady comes to the attention of the sheriff, David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant), when a disturbed townie shows up at a baseball game carrying a shotgun. Attempting to disarm the deranged interloper, Dutton shoots him.
But more unpleasantness occurs, including an uptick of pathologically nutty patients showing up at the office of David’s doctor wife Judy (Radha Mitchell). When soldiers in haz-mat suits start establishing a perimeter around the town, the madness kicks into overdrive, even as the afflicted start taking on the appearance of zombies.
“You know what?” David tells his deputy Clank (Joe Anderson). “We’re in trouble.” The threesome take it on the lam from both the afflicted and the military.
One mustn’t undervalue Romero’s originality, but on pretty much all other fronts — drama, horror, performance and production values — the remake is superior to the original.
The DVD extras include a doc on Hall’s invaluable contributions to the film, as well as a prequel-like The Crazies Motion Comic. If this and the recent DVD release of The Book of Eli is any indication, the motion comic is evidently now a de rigueur DVD extra on genre films.
Creation
SOME Christian creationists have adopted a shoot-the-messenger attitude towards Charles Darwin, the Victorian scientist who advanced the theory of evolution in his landmark 1859 book On the Origin of Species.
The dubious recent documentary Expelled painted Darwin as a kind of brutal proto-fascist whose 19th-century notions of survival of the fittest transmogrified into 20th-century ideologies of tyranny and death camps.
Director Jon Amiel’s film Creation attempts at least to suggest Darwin (Paul Bettany) intended no casual refutation of biblical dogma. As portrayed here, Darwin’s life work was a product of a tortured process that almost drove him to the brink, exacerbated by the death of his beloved daughter Annie (Martha West) and the disapproval of his devoutly Christian wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly, Bettany’s real-life missus).
Adapted by screenwriter John Collee from the book Annie’s Box by Randal Keynes, the film rather obsessively details the theory’s birthing pains. But there is surprisingly little emphasis on the religious divide created by Darwin’s work, save for a line from Darwin’s atheist peer Thomas Huxley (Toby Jones) who asserts: “You’ve killed God, sir.” On the opposing side, Emma tearfully suggests to her husband that he has declared a “war on God you cannot win.”
Unfortunately, Amiel sets the stage for fireworks that don’t come. In the larger part of the film’s running time, Darwin is mostly seen suffering alone, or in hallucinogenic communion with his dead daughter. It is ironic that in depicting a man of ideas, Amiel has little interest in portraying those ideas, save for a time-lapse scene in which a baby bird dies and is re-integrated into the earth, an oblique illustration of the amoral natural world in which Darwin has effectively stranded himself
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