Night of the Living Dead review

 Number 327 on the top 1000 films of all time is George Romero's 1968 zombie-horror film 'Night of the Living Dead.'

Barbra (Judith O'Dea) and her brother are laying flowers on her father's grave when her brother is attacked by a zombie. Barbra runs in terror to a nearby house where she meets Ben (Duane Jones) and a group of other survivors. Together, they need to figure out how to survive the coming zombie hordes.

I am conflicted about this film. I am well-aware of its reputation. In many ways, it pioneered the zombie-horror genre popularising many of the tropes we now see in the likes of the Walking Dead Franchise or Z Nation. However, at its heart, 'Night of the Living Dead' is a siege film.

A group of characters are boarded up in a location and are besieged by an enemy force. Romero's unrelated sequel Dawn of the Dead follows a similar plot line. But I often find siege films lacking in tension and forward momentum. The characters are stuck in one place not going anywhere neither physically or emotionally. In many ways, Night of the Living Dead also fell into this trap until the characters decide to escape for a safer location.

That is until they start making stupid decisions which screws everything up. Stupid characters making stupid decisions for no other reason than to forward the plot is an annoying and tiresome cliche. Unfortunately it has become a mainstay of horror films. Is Night of the Living Dead to blame for this? I'm not sure.

What I am sure about is how I did not like how they reduced Barbra to little more than a damsel-in-distress. After she is rescued by Ben, she very much becomes an empty shell lacking in agency. While this would be a realistic reaction, it is difficult to believe that a character like that could survive in a world like this. Originally, Barbra was written with more grit, but upon casting Judith O'Dea, Romero rewrote her character.

But one thing Romero did right was the casting of Duane Jones as Ben. He very much carried the film on his back, as Ben was the leader of the survivors. Plus, it was a rare occurrence to have a black man star in a 1960's film. Originally, Ben was supposed to be a crude, un-educated truck  driver, but at the intellectual Jones' insistence, he was changed into a more well-rounded leader.

One cliche I was glad not to see was the one black character dying first in the horror film.

*spoilers*

In fact, Ben was the last one to die. And I did not like how he died. It wasn't in a glorious last stand with the zombies, but by a posse of white men who mistake him for one of the undead and promptly shoot him. But was it a mistake? There are some who have read into the racial undertones of a white man shooting a black man in the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement.

Either way, I found it to be an anti-climatic death unworthy of a good character. Reportedly, Jones wanted it this way saying it would be too Hollywood for him to be the last-man standing. That, notwithstanding, I would have preferred if he had been killed by a paranoid or scared man panicking over whether Ben was a zombie or not. Then his death might have had more meaning.

Nonetheless, I did enjoy Night of the Living Dead. It wasn't without its flaws, but it was still entertaining.

Lincoln review

 Number 836 on the top 1000 films of all time is Steven Spielberg's biographical period-drama 'Lincoln.'

The year is 1865. The American Civil War is coming to an end. President Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) is desperately trying to pass the thirteenth amendment so he can formally abolish slavery. Will he succeed? A sprawling ensemble cast includes Hal Holbrook, David Costabile, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

As I'm sure you're sick of hearing by now, I don't like period dramas. They are neither interesting or engaging. their huge casts only serve to complicate or confuse things. And, by their very nature, they're so lacking in conflict, the writers have to really struggle in generating any type of narrative tension. It's not like a thriller where there's a murder to be solved or the will-they, won't they trope, you have in romance films.

Lincoln only cemented this belief further. For me, it was unengaging, uninteresting and difficult to follow. The overly-large cast only made things more confusing. I'm sure it was just me and my short-attention span, but I did struggle in differentiating the different characters after a while.

Daniel Day-Lewis won his third acting Oscar for his role. But I'm going to be controversial and say that I don't think this role was Oscar-worthy. Compared to his magnificent performance in There Will be Blood, his performance here was very average. This is true especially by Day-Lewis standards. Unlike with There Will Be Blood, I don't think I can pinpoint one exact moment where I thought "yes, that's why Day-Lewis won this Oscar. I think Denzel Washington in Flight, who was also Oscar-nominated, was just as good if not better.

Source Code review

 Number 839 on the top 1000 films of all time is Duncan Jones' science-fiction thriller 'Source Code.'

Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a soldier who becomes an unwilling participant of a scientific programme called Source Code. He is repeatedly sent into an alternate reality where he has the chance to stop a domestic terrorist from blowing up a commuter train and killing everybody on board. Stevens assumes the identity of one of the other passengers and soon forms an attraction to a young woman called Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan.) Vera Farmiga plays Captain Goodwin - the soldier guiding him through the reality and Jeffrey Wright plays Dr Rutledge - the scientist who created Source Code.

I find a lot of science-fiction very pretentious. It's overly-intellectualised made by people who are not only smarter than me but like to rub that in my face. Or maybe I'm just stupid to realise their big, philosophical points. However, Source Code was not like that at all. And that's what I enjoyed the most: its simplicity. The storyline is easy enough to follow: Captain Stevens must identify a domestic terrorist to stop him from not only blowing up the commuter train but the city of Chicago as well. He has only eight minutes to do this otherwise the programme resets and he must start all over again.

The film has real heart too. Although, I thought that at first, Gyllenhaal and Monaghan didn't have the best chemistry, by the end, I thoroughly warmed to their relationship. I was rooting for the two of them to live happily ever after. But there are moral quandaries abound in Source Code. It is revealed that Colter Stevens, for all intents and purposes, has died in battle and his body is being kept alive in a life-support chamber. His mind is being stimulated within the Source Code programme. And Captain Goodwin must decide whether it is morally ethical to keep him alive or to let him die.

Source Code comes in at just over an hour and a half. A lot of science-fiction goes on far longer than it should, but Duncan Jones picked the right length. It didn't need to be any longer. As the storyline revolves around a time loop, there was a real danger of Source Code becoming monotonous and repetitive, yet this was never the case. 

I might argue that if the film could have been expanded anywhere it would have been with the villain. Derek Frost is a domestic terrorist who thinks that society is sick and should be rebuilt from rubble. But there has to be rubble at first. Perhaps an extra ten minutes or so developing his motivations would have been nice, but then again, I don't think it was that necessary. You can argue that Dr Rutledge was a more obvious villain keeping Stevens in an eternal torment, because he has been the only subject compatible with the Source Code programme. Jeffrey Wright played the villain well with his velvety tones doing little to gloss over his odiousness. 

True, a timeloop story is hardly the most imaginative, I've seen it plenty of times in Star Trek, but the execution of Source Code is what made it such a thrilling and enjoyable watch.

JFK review

 Number 306 on the top 1000 films of all time is Oliver Stone's epic political thriller: JFK.

Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) is the former New Orleans district attorney. After President Kennedy is assassinated, the Warren report declares that Lee Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman) was the lone perpetrator. Garrison has his doubts and reopens the investigation. He inadvertently unearths a massive conspiracy theory. The huge ensemble cast includes Tommy Lee Jones, Joe Pesci, Kevin Bacon, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau and John Candy.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: a film needs a very good reason to be over three hours long. And it needs an excellent reason to be three hours and twenty-five minutes long. JFK had no such reason. it was one of the longest films I've seen and far longer than it needed to be.

It's safe to say that Kennedy's assassination is one of the most controversial topics in history. Few people believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was acting as a lone wolf. The true perpetrators range from the mob to the CIAS to the Russians to the Cubans. Any one of these explored in isolation could have made a very interesting film, but where Stone went was how he tried to connect everything. Reportedly, he read two dozen books on Kennedy's assassination and his research team read 100-200 books. And it was like Stone tried to include every single scrap of information he could find. This made for a bloated, unfocussed film.

The supporting cast was huge and certainly could have been trimmed down. Garrison's many deputies were very similar to each other and I regularly mixed them up. Some of them were also ultimately pointless to the plot as they were involved in subplots that went nowhere. Bill Broussard (Michael Rooker) is one such deputy who becomes uncomfortable at how the conspiracy begins to implicate LBJ. He betrays his former boss by starting to work for the feds, but we never see any consequences for this.

Stone was heavily criticised for taking liberties with history. But my issue isn't so much was he included, but what he didn't, which was nothing. He included everything which was not necessary. I could have done without seeing how Garrison's investigation was affecting his family life. This would have cut the film down a lot.

And everything was slow that after a while it became very tedious. Much of the film were characters sitting in a room either quietly talking or loudly yelling at each other. As such, a lot of the supporting cast was wasted. Gary Oldman did very little as did Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. With so many famous faces, it's inevitable that you can't give them all the attention they deserve and a lot of them did fall by the wayside. Although, John Candy and Joe Pesci gave memorable performances and Costner's ending monologue was particularly powerful.

The film did have the potential to live up to its ambitious premise, but if you have to watch a film in two halves then it is too damn long.