Quarrantine. It could have been good...

I'm not gonna bother with post election rants right now; both of you who read my blog have a pretty good idea where I stand on that issue.lol However, that's not to say I'm not gonna be ranting!

Spoiler follows.

I went to see Quarantine with Matt E. and Paul J. about a week ago, partly because it looked cool and partly because there's not much else of interest in the local theater right now. It looked like an interesting take on the zombie genre, and it proved to be that...and less, in a couple of areas.

Starting back with Blair Witch Project, the Bouncing Handi Cam (BHC) technique was born as a new and creative way to film a movie. It was innovative at the time. Unfortunately, several other movies have taken it up as a plot device, such as was done with Cloverfield. Now its getting tired and isn't creative anymore. And there's more that goes with it, too.

Despite what directors may think, you don't have to wave the camera around like a spastic drunk for me to remember that there's a guy with a hand held camera that's giving us his perspective on what's happening. It may come as a shock, but if the same dude has the camera throughout the movie, its not all that tough to remember who he is and what he's doing. People, in general, can keep track of such things. Do us a favor, director-type personages: bounce it a little at first to give us the effect...then quit it. I'm not willing to get motion sickness just to watch your damn movie.

An additional, equally irritating corollary to the BHC style of filming is the absolute stupidity of the people who are getting filmed. There are cops at the apartment building, who have 15 in the gun and a couple reloads each. If there are three of 'em, that means there's 135 available rounds, and there were maybe 20 people in the whole building. Call me crazy, but if you have to shoot an infected body, chances are you're gonna have to do that for everyone else that gets infected. You know from recent experience that the building is sealed, and that the paramedics can't do anything about the infection. That being the case, kinda seems stupid to feed your neck to somebody you know has been bitten, doesn't it?

I'm getting sick and tired of people who should know better, acting like morons. If you can't have 'em act like they would be trained to act, DON'T PUT THEM IN THE DANG MOVIE! That ranks in Stupid right up there with backwards sights on rifles and endless magazines. There are tons of people that can be experts for movies that can fix the Stupid if the director is smart enough to pay attention to what they say. Most of the time, they aren't. Its getting to the point that directors are the cause of everything that irritates me about movies. If I find another director that gets it right, I'm gonna go see every damn thing he does. At this point, it looks like Ridley Scott comes closest...but he's smart enough to listen to his advisors. I'm thinking there's a trend to be seen there...