This 30min movie title: NEIL GAIMAN‘s A Short Film About John Bolton just showed up on Netflix instant viewing. I’d seen the movie before in the video store and I was pretty much shocked by the cover, which depicts a naked vampire woman growling with bared fangs.
"Wow, Gaiman’s really sunk if he’s producing documentaries about fan art," I thought. But I had nothing better to do this evening, so I streamed it.
Luckily it wasn’t as bad as all that. I would favorably compare this documentary with Peter Jackson’s Forgotten Silver. I looked it up on the web, and John Bolton has worked with Neil Gaiman in the past, so Gaiman was able to bring special insight into the character of the artist.
The best part of A Short Film About John Bolton, and the sly-est scene, is where they interview people at a gallery showing of John Bolton’s art, and everyone tries to say something profound about the art without actually mentioning that it all appears to be fan-porn paintings of naked vampires.
I also saw Romero’s Diary of the Dead.
Every since I saw Zombie Diaries at the Austin Film Festival I had been looking forward to Romero’s take on exactly the same premise: video cameras meet the living dead. I figured, the master of zombie horror, with a comparably larger budget, ought to have a pretty good showing compared to a buncha English wannabes.
Well, my gushing review of Zombie Diaries has withstood the test of time. Everything that Zombie Diaries did well, Romero fumbled. Every scene, every line of dialogue, every performance, every character, and every scrap of lighting in Diary of the Dead seemed contrived, whereas Zombie Diaries felt authentic straight through. (are you having trouble keeping the titles separate yet?)
Here’s a tip Romero, if you’re going to have a ragtag buncha college kids in an RV beset by zombies, why pretend to try to make it seem real? And the moralizing about the complicity of a voyeuristic society? I could do without that. I’m just too busy looking at fan-porn.
