Toronto. Diary of the Dead.

"Fear not, Romero junkies. The old guy still has it," announces Scott Weinberg at Cinematical. "Just to be clear: [Diary of the Dead] is not another chapter in the series that began with Night of the Living Dead and continued on with Dawn, Day and Land of the Dead. Instead it's a stand-alone and entirely fresh take on the inevitably impending zombie apocalypse."

"Any time's a good time for a new George A Romero zombie movie, but perhaps the best time is midnight, at a world premiere screening at which the director will speak, for which several rowdy viewers have come dressed as zombies, and for which you have arrived slightly inebriated," blogs Ben Kenigsberg for Time Out Chicago. "An allegory the media's failure to question the rush to war with Iraq, [Diary] is shot in the manner of Blair Witch, with the no-name cast members taking turns videotaping each other. What initially seems like amateurishness is actually the film's style - a call to advocacy, to record reality through DIY means before it can be distorted by the media and the government."

"[J]ust when you thought he had nothing left to do but make fun of himself, Romero reminds you that he can bring the creepy too, in a handful of well-timed, dark corridor sequences," writes Michael Lerman at indieWIRE.

"Am I going to go to hell if I say I liked the Dawn of the Dead remake more than Diary of the Dead?" asks the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Cheryl Eddy.

Romero "undercuts" the film "with running narration that keeps stating and restating the theme, effectively dulling its impact, and marring what otherwise might've been a ripping good time," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "A very mixed bag for me, though opinions from my colleagues are all over the map," adds Scott Tobias.

Updates, 9/14: "The 'handheld camerawork' device fails miserably as we're never privy to the team of gaffers that run ahead of our intrepid heroes to light everything (flatly) before they arrive," writes Mike White. "Also, the 'handheld shots' are obviously steadicam. I'm sorry to geek out about this but Romero never lets up on the 'you're watching people tape this' aspect, causing me to see all of the ways in which it wasn't."

Diary "gleefully engages with themes of spectatorship and subjectivity," writes Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door. "It's the most labyrinthine and multifaceted of the director's Dead films, possessing a master's grasp of visual/aural interplay, in addition to a wicked mix of humor and pathos - in Romero's universe, a deaf, scythe-wielding Amish dynamiter is at once a ridiculous figure of fun and a tragic hero prone to a selfless (and gruesome) act of martyrdom.... By the end of Diary of the Dead, the camera has become a conduit to death and resurrection (cinema as simultaneous remembrance and perpetual life-force)."

Update, 9/19: Nathan Lee talks with Romero for the Voice: "'I once had an idea for a script about a guy who just sits biting his fingernails watching the news,' he says, laughing. 'Like a Warhol thing.'"

Updates, 9/20: "'It's too easy to use,' remarks one of Romero's film-student characters, first of a camera and later of a gun, which is roughly the same lesson learned by the cameraman protagonist of Haskell Wexler's 1969 cinema verité classic Medium Cool," blogs the LA Weekly's Scott Foundas. "Like that movie and David Cronenberg's 1983 Videodrome (which, a good two decades before 'reality TV' became a media-world buzz word, offered the sage forecast that 'Television is reality, and reality is less than television'), Diary of the Dead and Redacted both posit that our culture's so-called 'democracy of images' comes with certain responsibilities - that what, where and when one chooses to film are decisions not to be made lightly, and not without significant consideration of the moral and ethical consequences."

Marc Savlov talks with Romero for the Austin Chronicle.

Update, 9/24: "Romero's attempts at mock-verite are very convincing - he began his career as a documentary filmmaker in Pittsburgh before taking a gamble on features - and while Diary of the Dead is serious-minded, it's not all so Costa Gavras that it skimps on the stuff that keeps us coming back to these movies again and again: the flesh-eating is plentiful and gruesomely entertaining, and KNB's makeup effects are amongst the most convincing yet realized (and there have been a lot of zombie yarns since 1968) and are greatly aided by seamless CGI substitution," writes Robert J Lewis for the Movie Forum.

Posted by dwhudson at September 12, 2007 6:37 AM