Monday 12 October 2009

Critical Week(s): Stuck in Zombieland

Simon Pegg and pals (above) have a lot to answer for. Five years after Shaun of the Dead brilliantly combined zombie horror with comedy, we're in an epidemic. There's also the fact that I feel like a zombie at the moment with an overload of movie screenings - but that's usual for this film-packed time of year when Raindance and the London Film Festival converge on us critics like an inexorable, undead force. Soon we're left with sunken eyes and wobbly legs, barely able to remember which film we saw an hour ago, let alone last night.

As a result of this, I missed a week in this blog, and I saw 21 films in the past fortnight. Zombies featured in five of those (Zombieland, Colin, Jennifer's Body, Surviving Evil and The Descent Part 2) - six if you include Nicolas Cage's nutty performance in The Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call: New Orleans.

The best of these two weeks were Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!, Grant Heslov's The Men Who Stare at Goats and Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control; the worst were Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau in Couples Retreat, Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler in Law Abiding Citizen.

And so it goes. The screening frenzy continues here for the rest of the month (I havd 15 films in the diary for this coming week), but I'll switch on Wednesday to a daily London Film Fest blog, with reports on the celebrities parading through Leicester Square and of course the films themselves. We kick off with Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox on Wednesday - can't wait.

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