Last Day: Z

April just went like water through my fingers and here we are now, facing the Z challenge. Unbelievable. I had a blast and hope you did, too. To all my new followers, I hope you continue to find interesting things among the many thoughts that compel me to write in this blog and I'll do my best to give you just that. To all the new friendships and bonds that the challenge gave me, I cherish you all. Thanks for extending me your virtual hand in a gesture of true kindness.

Movie.

Zombieland (2009)
Directed by Ruben Fleischer.

Plot: In the early twenty-first century when zombies have taken over America, a shy, inexperienced college student in Texas has survived by following his 30 rules. He then decides to travel to Ohio to see if his parents are alive. He gets a ride with a boisterous zombie-hating good-old boy headed for Florida, and soon they confront a young woman and her little sister who have survived by conning other survivors out of their food of getaway cars. An unlikely group, circumstances band them together in search of an LA amusement park they've heard is zombie free.

Review: This movie is neither small nor unknown but do forgive me, Z was an extremely difficult letter and my brain is not cooperating after a month long of heavy thinking. Zombie comedies are difficult to execute and hardly ever worth watching but Zombieland is one of those great exceptions. Part hilarious part scary, the movie has a touching backstory that makes sense and is developed with extreme subtleness but to great effect. The acting is superb and the dialogs are just brilliant. This move is up there with Shawn of the Dead and should not be missed.

Book.

World War Z by Max Brooks.
Published By Crown in 2006.

Blurb: The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time.World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.

Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?”

Note: Some of the numerical and factual material contained in this edition was previously published under the auspices of the United Nations Postwar Commission.

Review: I decided to go with this huge blurb because it depicts to perfection the style, voice, and mind behind the book. Narrated as a series of first person interviews, the book contains a hundred individual stories that paint a perfectly clear image of what it was to almost loose the war against zombies. I previously did an extended review of this book for Dark River Press, but suffice it to say it will hunt your dreams. World War Z is a tour-de-force that revived the zombie mythos in 2006, when it was dead and buried. Really zombies-que to bring them back like this, don't you think?