FIDO

Well here we are. At the end of the Zombie line. The zombie genre has finally completed its cycle. We've had the primitive films (Revolt of The Zombies), we've had the classical films (Night of The Living Dead, Dawn of The Dead, Evil Dead etc.), we've had some revisionist films (28 Days Later, Les Revenants--this film, rather than being gory, explores the economic and sociological ramifications of the dead coming back to life. Bet you wish you thought of that), and we've even made it as far as parody and satire (Shawn of The Dead, and yes, Fido). I somehow doubt the Zombie genre will ever die but if it did, I think Fido would be a suitable elegy. The premise: domesticated zombies. I hate writing synopses so that's all you get. By setting his Zombie movie in the golden 50s, director and co-writer Andrew Currie creates a scenario ripe for both gags (zombie landscapers, zombie milkmen, zombie servants, killing the craggy ol' bitch neighbour character with a shovel and burying her in a public garden after she becomes a zombie, kids using guns to kill zombies, lassy jokes, zombie love slaves etc.) and political commentary. The towns obsession with safety and armament serves as nice little indictment of our post-911 infatuation with security. The subtext definitely bleeds through the film though it rarely feels forced. I don't know how they did it, but Currie and his team ended up with a 10.7 million dollar budget for the film and they certainly made good use of it. The costumes, sets, and zombie make-up were immaculate, and they managed to fork over enough dough to pad their cast with some pretty big names. They got the smoulderingly genderless Carrie-Anne Moss (just kidding, she's a babe), Dylan Baker (remember Happiness?), Tim Blake Nelson (who's character actually keeps a zombie lover), and Billy fucking Connolly--the backbone of the film. Check this out when it gets re-released commercially but make sure it's the last modern zombie film you ever see. Come on, it's over, time to grow the fuck up.

RENAISSANCE

The more I think about this film the more let down I feel. I had pretty high hopes going into this: an animated French film noir, set in the future, presented in a monochrome aesthetic comparable to Sin City. That was an easy sell. I like Blade Runner. Unfortunately something didn't quite work. The version we were shown was an English overdub, albeit with pretty decent actors, but it still had some synch glitches and you could just tell certain voices weren't suited to certain characters. Not to mention the annoyance of watching a film set in France in 2054 be performed by British actors. Your French grandmother is doing back flips in her grave. As far as the animation goes, well, meh. It was decent, the animators made good use of shadow and texture and a lot of the visual concepts were pretty interesting but I didn't leave drooling. It was mediocre rotoscoping at best. The storyline lacked intensity and most of the characters weren't developed beyond a quick little flashback montage or maybe a line or two about their past. This had the makings to be the smash hit of the Festival but it fucked up. Ultimately, it was a dull film, I actually got bored towards the end and when the story finally unravelled I was just happy it was over. This might be worth renting but only if it's your tenth film on your little punch card because this ain't worth paying money for.

OUR DAILY BREAD

Wanna hear a funny anecdote about my trip to this film? Great. It was Friday night and I was rushing to make it to the Cinematheque on time for my film. It started at 7 and I was about a 15 minute bike ride away. I left the house just shy of 6:30 and busted my ass to get downtown so I'd have time to grab a bite before the film. Against my better judgement I wheeled up to the Falafel House on Granville and ordered the diarrhea meat platter and horfed it down in under 10 minutes (I was in a hurry), sprinted to the theatre and made it on time. I found a respectable seat and tried to get comfortable. After a minute or two something wasn't right, it seemed that the three pounds of chicken shawarma meat I'd packed my gob with just moments earlier were starting to turn on me. So the film began and as you may know, Our Daily Bread is a documentary that takes us through the often disturbing world of mass-market food production. So throughout this quietly devastating film about the horrors of producing food, my guts were rotting and I was teetering precariously on the precipice of "pooing in my pants". It was like some crude vegan poetic justice and I would have cherished the irony had I not been too distracted by the cold sweat and irritable bowels. Just desserts as they say.

All joking aside, this film was my favourite thus far. It was simple, stark, and like I say completely devastating. One might compare it to Baraka as it's basically just a series of moving pictures with no dialogue that shakes you to your core. Unlike Baraka, however, Our Daily Bread is not manipulative. There's no melancholic score, there's no formalist footage, and there's no dialogue pertinent to the film's crux (Sometimes the labourers chat but it's never the focus of a shot). It's just a detached series of portraits about the industry and mechanisms that keep us fed. I appreciated the simplicity and occasional ennui of the film--not everything was gruesome slaughterhouse scenes, there was plenty of fruit picking from indoor plantations, long walks through free-range chicken farms (you hear "free range" and you kind of picture a lone chicken grazing the turf at her own pace, stopping occasionally to glimpse at the sunlight poking through the trees and just being free but of course it's nothing of the sort. They're packed into a barn, and perhaps they could roam freely were there not chickens covering every square inch of grand in these massive enclosures), and large scale chemical spraying.

The ostensible lack of a bias is to the filmmakers credit as well, I say ostensible because certain shots are a little too good. A good example comes towards the end of the film on our tour through a cattle slaughter factory: After being shocked to death and gutted and suitably cleaned the cow, hanging up side down, is brought to a worker holding a massive chainsaw and standing a top a large moveable scaffold. His job on the assembly line is to plunge the saw into the cows ass and cleave expired beast in twain. He does so and in a perfect moment of black humour, his cell phone rings and he answers it while dark blood pools at his feet from the gigantic animal he just cut in half with a chain saw. It was a poster-shot for de-sensitivity (not just the workers') and luckily the only one of the sort in the film. The film closed on a very poignant note. After the cattle workers finished the slaughter for the day they walk around their factory and spray every crag, cranny, nook, hole, crevice, wall, seam, and countertop with a foaming disinfectant--as if to say we can wash away our sins. They need to start showing this to elementary school students.