Zombieland

Zombieland (2009)
Directed by Reuben Fleischer
Written by Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick
Starring Jesse Eisenberg (AK to Leila A poor man's Michael Cera), Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin

Synopsis
Semi-first-person account of a dude living in a world overrun by zombies.  The movie starts out with him alone as he goes through a subset of the list of rules he's developed as he's survived.  Eventually he becomes a member of an entourage and they go through some other amusing setpieces and arguments and double-crosses until they're all a happy family and (spoiler alert!) the end.

The Woman
this was acceptable. i think i was expecting more laughing. this is because i should know better than to believe the majority. when someone raves, i should approach with skepticism. don't get me wrong, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't awesome either. the " big b.m." joke made me laugh out loud, but i think that was it. listen. any movie with bill murray gets a thumbs up from me. it broke the zombie movie mold, by just accepting zombies being a part of the world. there was no trying to defeat the zombies they were all about surviving. that jesse eisenberg kid bothers me. he does in every movie. he fails at what michael cera is so awesome at: the lovable paranoid nerdy guy. woody harrelson played a good character, i can dig a guy who relishes violence in a creative and most destructive way.

good love story, romantic comedy. they get a few points for throwing some zombies in there for good measure.

MOster
This was another acceptable use of 90 minutes.  Much like the Simon Pegg zombie movie the filmmakers knew they had to maintain the humor in order for anybody to really give a shit about another one of those things.  Couple that with the fact that the fact that (real spoiler alert?) there's been no change to the zombie-filled nature of the world by the end and you've got a halfway-decent hook for a movie.  I do think that it could have been more than halfway decent had the script gone through a couple of rounds of pumch-up.

With all that in mind, the acting was just fine.  Woody Harrelson ate every piece of the production which wasn't nailed down, and everybody else took it with maybe a little more seriousness than was necessary.  There was a terrific, film-stealing, cameo by Bill Murray.  Technical was pretty good.  Directing and production were mostly seamless, but the effects and editing worked together to show you how everything was going down.  The text of his rules was sometimes not immune to the action on screen--which is by no means a new trick, but it was still used to positive effect.

So, yeah.  Not stellar but fine.