This evening's entertainment was brought to us by whoever made the movie Zombieland and made available a free preview screening of it to the Boston movie-going public.
It had no conceivable connection to library science, but did offer a health angle since, like many of your modern zombies, the ones here are the result of a virus, rather than witchcraft. The virus even has a pedigree: mad cow to mad human to mad zombie.
You can't argue with that kind of attention to detail.
The virus causes "swollen brain," fever, insanity and of course a ravenous hunger for flesh. It's not completely clear that it causes death, so these zombies may not actually be undead (except in the sense that so many of us are, of not-dead), but that's what makes it scientifically plausible.
Anyway, the movie was pretty amusing at points, and featured plenty of splattering gore and exciting zombie-caused and zombie-experienced deaths. Many of the college-age guys leaving the theater with us afterwards were extremely pleased with it, so I expect it to do well at the box office.
Jesse Eisenberg is the narrator (called Columbus--everyone goes by the name of the city they're from, so as not to get too familiar with each other: a wise move when you might have to shoot someone at any time if they fall victim to the plague), an unlikely survivor of the zombie apocalypse.
He is joined by Woody Harrelson as Tallahassee, playing that role he plays so well--a slightly off-kilter, manically energetic guy who sometimes (as in this case) has a heart of gold. You can tell because it doesn't even occur to him to hit on the young woman they meet, even though she may be one of the last women on earth and is way cute: she's clearly destined to end up involved with the young man, and that's totally cool with Tallahassee.
I tried not to speculate that, if these are really the last people on earth, Tallahassee would wind up hooking up with the little sister after a while. I mean, when she's older. You'd assume the question would have to come up eventually, right? If you were just bumming around a world full of zombies with nothing to do? Yeah, he's 35 years older than her...like there's anyone around to point out that that's totally inappropriate.
Oops. I started speculating. So the movie didn't completely engage my full and undivided attention.
I should perhaps have previously mentioned that they meet up with two sisters, played by Emma Stone as Wichita, and Abigail Breslin as Little Rock. It's not explained why they're "from" different cities, but maybe they're going by where they were born. I'd have a different name from my sisters according to that system (just call me Havre), so it works for me.
Once assembled, our crew of adventurers drives around, kills zombies, and holes up in the palatial Hollywood mansion of a certain popular movie star. And morbid shenanigans occur.
This was not a particularly thoughtful movie or one likely to promote any sort of extensive personal growth, and the characters do a few unbelievably stupid things, but it was entertaining. I've seen a lot worse.
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