Sushi, Farts, And Brilliant Night Skies

 

I spent this past weekend visiting my step-mom’s family in Battleground, Washington. My aunt Shirley, her husband Kier, and their four kids own a house and property nestled between several fields and stands of trees on a hill just outside of city proper. It’s a strikingly beautiful location. Cows graze lazily in adjacent meadows, small farms dot the landscape, the wind meanders around the treetops, making them sway. A vegetable garden about the size of a tennis court sits just to the right of the main road entrance. There’s plenty of room for running and games as the property line cuts a wide circle around the house into the forest. You simply couldn’t ask for a better or more private location to gather a large group of friends and family.

One thing about the Gombart family is that they’re an immensely creative and imaginative bunch. They always take full advantage of this space by decorating the hell out of it each year in accordance with a specific theme, and spend months planning and putting it all together. The last time I went it was Pirates of the Caribbean, while previous years included a rodeo. For this occasion the theme was Asia. A massive paper mural adorned with all the Chinese signs and their corresponding birth dates was taped along the front of the house. Kier stood at the ready with a mallet in hand next to a small gong, clanging it as we walked past to announce our arrival. Around back was a structure made of lashed bamboo poles with lanterns and origami hanging down. Wide canvases painted with Japanese symbols were staked along the perimeter. There was a stage and even a sumo mat spread a few meters away from the porch. 

Everyone ate lunch together – salad, tea, limeade, homemade sushi, fresh fruit. Then we gathered on the lawn to watch the first of three scheduled events: Sumo wrestling. They pulled out all the stops on this one, including two of those “one-size-fits-all” plastic sumo suits. It’s your own personalized fat suit that you squeeze your legs into, hoist up around the shoulders, and then inflate via a nozzle behind your neck. When I put mine on I felt like I was wearing a space suit, except my belly and ass were spilling all over the place while my arms flapped uselessly at my sides. You’re also not able to actually walk in these things. I waddled and hopped awkwardly to the mat, my cousin scooting over in his suit to square up in front of me. Speakers were set up, and Kier downloaded a virtual soundboard with chants, gongs, a 3-second countdown, and even a gravelly voiced announcer with cool phrases like “First blood!” and “Megakill!”

He also had the foresight to include farts.

Sweaty and bulbous, we squatted down in preparation for the match when Kier triggered a thunderous fart. It echoed across the landscape and sent our audience into peals of laughter. After the countdown, my opponent and I lunged at one another, colliding our portly synthetic epidermises to the tune of several more rips of splashy flatulence. By the time I had knocked my cousin out of the ring we were both utterly exhausted from the exertion while everyone else was exhausted from laughing so much.

We moved on to the second event. A Ninja Warrior-inspired obstacle course that included a hay bale climb, a balance beam, and a stick attached to an old cherry picker. This last piece was interesting. Essentially you hung on for dear life while being lifted into the air and carried to another platform for drop off. To spice it up, three plastic bottles sat on sticks along the way, and needed to be kicked off for bonus points. Several valiant attempts were made at this with a few victors. During my attempt, my grip gave out while flailing my legs at a bottle and I sliced my hand as I fell. “Impressive!” boomed the fake announcer.

The final event was a rickshaw race. A rickshaw is a small human powered carriage with room for one or two people in the seat. The person in the back had to hold a cup of water steady while the driver ran through a course as quickly as possible. Most everyone took a crack at this, with one team making a particularly daring run with little to no regard for balancing the cup. As they flew around the final corner of a downward slope leading to the finish line, the driver’s legs slipped on the grass. He fell instantly on his face but held his grip, yanking the rickshaw to the ground and sending his poor passenger, whose focus at the time was on balancing the water, tumbling headfirst out of the seat. Luckily no one was hurt, and they even managed to retain a few drops in their cup.

The day ended with dinner followed by a talent show. Most of us slept outside in tents, but before turning in everyone watched Jet Li’s Hero projected onto a sheet hanging on the side of the house. I didn’t stay awake long enough to finish the film, but right before drifting off I took a moment to gaze at the sky. It was a cloudless night, and the last thing I remember thinking was how clear and beautiful the stars looked up and away from the light of the city.

War of the Worldz

"So yeah. Right about here, I think, would be a great point for my shirt to get ripped off?"

Here we are at last. World War Z. The movie adaptation of one of my favorite pieces of zombie literature. So, what did I think?

Goddamn it. Buckle your seatbelts…

First things first. I typically like watching film adaptations because I appreciate the limits and advantages of the medium compared with those of written works. Most of them suck, but a few of them are brilliant. James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential is a rich and expansive crime novel that I thoroughly enjoyed. The 1997 film adaptation was just as much fun because its script took everything dark, intriguing, sexy, and complex about the book and condensed it into a narrower framework that paid homage to its source yet worked beautifully on its own.

I’ll skip the part where I attempt to stand on a flimsy pedestal and seethe over how novels are better than their movie counterparts simply because they are novels. Virtually everyone who’s read the source material of an adaptation will agree that the original content is superior. Yes, books will always be a more effective vessel for exploiting the tool that best scratches our itch for creative satisfaction – that tool being the imagination. Fine and dandy. I watch movie adaptations because I want the visual representation to be distinct. I want it to simultaneously vindicate and surprise my imagination while at least maintaining the flavor of what it’s adapting.

Sadly, World War Z fails in this pursuit and happens to be an average horror/thriller anyway.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t make this point abundantly clear: the film is not actually World War Z. Sure, it shares the same title as the book, but that is quite seriously the only common thread I could identify. This movie is essentially what Sunny Delight is to orange juice. It could have just as easily been titled Zombeez, Zombeez Err’where LOL! and I wouldn’t have sat up in my seat yelling, “Hey! This is the plot to World War Z!” They are completely different experiences. The book deftly and realistically examines what the impact of a worldwide zombie plague would look like through a series of disturbing interviews with survivors of the war. While I would never say it belongs in the upper echelons of American literature, it’s provocative and mature, and gave me plenty to consider once I’d finished it.

The film, on the other hand, jettisons this approach in favor of spectacle and peril. It’s a shallow and ironically soulless movie about U.N. investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), who is tasked with traversing the globe in search of clues to thwart a sudden viral outbreak that is rapidly turning the world’s population into mindless screeching beasts. I don’t really recall the names of any other characters because, frankly, the film didn’t make me give a damn about them. You’ll meet a character, they’ll say or do something to point Gerry in the right direction, then usually die or fade into the background a few minutes later. Its story is riddled with enough horror clichés and bone-headed mistakes by the characters that by movie’s end you’ll likely be shaking your head and chuckling, flabbergasted by their stupidity.

Also, the movie just isn’t particularly scary. Sure there are a few jump scares, but they’re rather cheap, mostly due to the watered down tone of the film in keeping with its PG-13 rating. Whose idea was that? If they were trying to make the movie more palatable then all they succeeded in doing was make it boring. I don’t need excessive gore for thrills, but zombies are brutal and gruesome by their very nature. By making the movie almost entirely bloodless, the filmmakers put a leash on a critical aspect of what makes zombies so horrifying. In my view, this was a mistake. What you’ll mostly see are hordes of zombies running pell-mell at the fleeing populace, pouncing on anyone they find and then sort of slapping them to death. 

"Holy shit, run! They're ferociously tickling everyone in their path!"

It’s frustrating, considering this is pretty much the first highly publicized, big-budget zombie film to be released since Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead.  The ending does leave a door open for a sequel, which makes me equal parts nervous and hopeful that Skydance will somehow improve this mess. And while I’m sure when the day comes I’ll haul myself to go see it in theaters, my expectations will certainly be lower than they were for this film. Which is a shame. But my little heart just can’t handle being broken like that again.  

*sniff*