To continue, if one thinks of the horror genre's flipside to the zombie, the invisible man, much can be made of Romero's latest (but I'm only going to make a little). What turns out to be the primary evil about invisibility? No responsibility for the body, right? That's exactly the privileged status Hopper and his community have attained. They're the invisible ones who can do what they want with all the demoralized bodies out there. They have the servile society which buffers them from any worldly consequences that might not have been thought of in their construction of a world of pure ideas. This servile society, despite having the same dualistic nature as the invisible one, has been reduced to the status of pure body (witness Cholo's misguided attempt to become invisible) so that the privileged can live on invisibly. Thus, the line about the zombies being the same as us. I happened to catch a bit of 20/20's defense of greed last night, where it was argued that no one's hurt by a world where only a few have the majority of wealth. I think this movie serves as a good allegory against such stupidity. Such a world works only as long as the visible can be made to dream of being invisible. Once this dream's crushed, one is essentially reduced to a zombie, even accepting it (as did Cholo). But there's a bit of hope at the end, where one doesn't have to desire invisibility, take responsibility for the body, and can just maybe escape the dilemma of a conceptually imposed dualism.

Anyway, there's plenty of interpretative possibilities in this film, just as much as any of the others. (I didn't even touch upon how invisibility relates to the nature of technological warfare, but it's a good allegory for that, too.)

And that wasn't actually Bud, but Shaun from the Shaun of the Dead film. I know this only because of the extras on the dvd.

I don't dispute that Land is a natural extension of Romero's previous themes. But your summation of them is just as intellectually effective as Romero's movie; probably more so, in fact. Good ideas and consistent themes don't by virtue of themselves equate to good cinema.

That's an interesting question, and where we subjectively branch apart, I suppose. I found the analogues (visual or otherwise) very mediocre and obvious. The characters are uninteresting; the exploration of the politics is threadbare; a potential gold mine of situational details are overlooked (negating, to me, what's normally a key point of interest in Romero's work); the plot devices are weaker than ever; the visual aesthetics and imagery all fairly standard for a movie of this genre, at this stage in that genre's development. Even for raw gore, I prefer Day.

Romero's themes may be consistent and his ideas may be good, but to me they lack artistic life and spontaneity in this instance. It all feels rather wooden to me, rather dead. Aesthetically, Romero's previous movies had a certain immediacy and rawness which seemed unique to them, the result in part of a budget effectively applied; -- Land lacks this quality, its ambitions more discernibly exceeding its production values, the result feeling half-baked and half-glazed (and in a questionable flavor at that.)

Mm. I'm hungry for donuts.

As in the actor playing the part, or the depicted character himself? Sure looked like Bub to me.

K