![]() Just about the most vexing question about the film - it is not a "problem" as such - is the question of authorship, by which I mean the question of who to blame for everything that goes wrong. That film isn't actually Diary of the Dead (words that first appear in the closing credits), but The Death of Death, directed by University of Pittsburgh film senior Jason Creed (Josh Close) and edited together by his girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan), mostly using footage shot by Jason but occasionally incorporating some of the video clips he downloaded showing the terrible international epidemic of - all together now - the dead rising from the grave to eat human flesh. But the most characteristic element of Romero's film is actually the one that most clearly sets it apart from Cloverfield, and makes it more like Redacted: where the monster movie was explicitly presented as found footage, the exact unedited videotape found in a camera in the former Central Park, we are told literally within seconds of the beginning of Diary that we are watching a finished film, assembled by one of the survivors in some vain attempt to make sense of all the chaos going on around her. ![]() Only the criminally underrated Redacted gets things just right, and even that film hedges its bets by couching the home movies in among several sources of artificial found footage.īecause they've been released so close together, and both are horror films, it's the easiest thing in the world to lump Cloverfield and Diary together in this discussion. It's also not an idea that has been all that well served by the films that it purports to explain: Cloverfield ignores the theme almost completely, while Diary of the Dead humps it to the point of exhaustion. That's certainly an intriguing idea, although it feels like the people making probably aren't the same people spending all their time on YouTube. The idea seems to be that within a very short time, a very large portion of society has become helplessly addicted streaming video and the idea that things only exist if they can be captured, digitized and uploaded for the whole world to see. ![]() Romero's Diary of the Dead - could possibly have been made in reference to each other, but that's part of what makes it so fascinating: that three very different filmmakers would almost simultaneously hit upon the same technique for three very different reasons.Īs everyone who had the ability to write mentioned a month ago when Cloverfield was new, this style seems unavoidably linked to the rise of YouTube, that generation-defining paradise for video diarists, politicos, pop culture collectors, musicians, and so on to infinity. Abrams-produced Cloverfield and now, horror grand master George A. It seems highly unlikely that any of the three films so far made with this aesthetic - Brian De Palma's Redacted, the J.J. There is no doubt in my mind that the most interesting development in cinema right now is the curious explosion of first-person camcorder movies (somebody needs to come up a name for the style soon, but not me).
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