Having pushed the living dead taking over the world in each previous zombie film — Night, Dawn, Day and Land — as about as far as it could go, Romero returns back to his roots. Once again we’re in the countryside surrounding Pittsburgh and the dead are only just beginning to return to “life.” The opening sequence recalls the beginning SWAT team invasion of a housing project in Dawn of the Dead. While the ’70s film was a thrilling, action-jammed sequence of bullets and chomping teeth flying everywhere, the new flick only features two corpses walking around feasting on flesh, and while guns are fired, the main weapon of choice is a TV news camera on which the action is captured.

The conceit here is that we are told via narration that everything we are going to see is the product of student filmmakers. That TV news footage has been allegedly downloaded off the Internet and incorporated into the students’ film. Most of the plot has us hanging out with these kids. Jason (Joshua Close), the main “director,” is shooting a mummy movie in the woods with his fellow students when they learn about the growing crisis via a radio news report. So, they hop in their trailer and head back to campus to find Jason’s girlfriend, Deb (Michelle Morgan). Once they pick her up, they drive all over Pennsylvania to find their families.

Jason, we learn, actually wants to be a documentary filmmaker, so he keeps his camera running for the entire trip. Mostly, the conceit works. Jason comes across as a putz who would rather hold his camera than save his girlfriend from being eaten alive.

As the kids and one of their professors try to stay alive to reach their destinations, we’re also continuously presented with the “official” version of the dead rising via different newscasts and more downloaded Internet video. Some of this is faked by Romero and some of it is actual news stories mixed in. While the handheld camera conceit can offer easy comparisons to that other “handicam flick” Cloverfield, there’s also similarities to the recent Rambo. For that film, director Sylvester Stallone set up the backstory by using actual footage of Burmese soldiers slaughtering Karen freedom fighters. Romero, to show mass panic, confusion and devastation, clearly uses footage of the Hurricane Katrina debacle.

Through dialogue and narration, Romero keeps hammering home the point that we the people need to break though the “official” bullshit and record “the truth.” However, as the film goes on and the kids keep recording their experiences, what’s left unsaid is even more insidious: these kids are not the solution. They’re almost a worse problem.

While Jason is continually harangued by Deb and the other students for filming so much, all of them are pretty much solipsistic little twerps concerned with only their own well being. When they learn that others are in trouble, they never think to go pitch in and help out, particularly in one scene in which they hear anguished cries over a radio and they don’t even try to lend assistance. They continue on their merry way to save their own lives. The footage that Jason and the others shoot is never really going to tell “the truth.” It’s all just more noise to add to the cacophony of images. These little bastards needed a Capt. Rhodes from Day of the Dead to kick their asses into shape.

While most of the film is concerned with its message about the media, there is still some good zombie gore in the film and Romero has come up with extremely creative ways to off the living and the dead. However, most of the gross stuff is done with CGI these days. While that can free Romero up to film previously unimaginable grotesqueries, it has the effect of sanitizing the gore to a degree, so that bullets tearing through flesh, brains melting, heads splitting open heads, etc. just doesn’t have the charm of Tom Savini practical effects.

Thus, Diary of the Dead is never really that scary. This is less of an outright horror movie and more of a thematic meditation and a drama. But because of that, it’s a fresh addition to Romero’s zombie oeuvre and, in many ways, more thrilling than the over-the-top path the living series was degenerating into.

Although it’s been about 20 years since John Rambo has starred in a film, this latest installment of the franchise looks as if no time has passed since the previous bloodbath in Afghanistan. Oh, Stallone looks much older, but that’s about the only difference. As a director, Sly made a bold choice to wallow the ’80s exploitation movie era, exemplified by the use of a grainy film stock. There’s nothing remotely slick or high-tech about this endeavor. I could be mistaken, but I believe some CGI was put into effect, whether it’s the flies buzzing around the piles of corpses or holes in bad guy’s body cavities as bullets go whizzing through them. But none of the effects draw attention to themselves and are barely noticeable. I think I only noticed because I was desperately looking for anything modern appearing in the film. And, given their simplicity, the modern effects look anything but modern in this still old-looking flick.

A good Rambo flick promises great bloody havoc, but Stallone startles us with starting this new film with very real and gruesome atrocities committed by Burmese soldiers against the Karen (pronounced Kar-inn) independence freedom fighters. Showing these scenes of actual death has a two-fold effect. One, it immediately grounds the villains in the film as inhuman monsters. But, at the same time, it sets the audience on an uneasy ground. I mean, we’ve come to watch this film to cheer on death and destruction. However, when we’re confronted with the real thing, you know it doesn’t really make you feel so good.

After forcing us to watch real atrocities, Stallone gives us a fictional scenario where Burmese soldiers play a “game” with their captives where they make them run across a rice paddy filled with land mines. While some poor souls get blown to bits — and literally Stallone shows us their bits — the “winners” of the game who make it safely to the other side are shot and killed. The Burmese are shown as completely soulless, killing and torturing monsters. And the main bad guy, the general I suppose, the one we know is going to get the most horrible revenge heaped upon him by Rambo in the film’s final frames, doesn’t even get any dialogue. We know absolutely nothing about this guy during the entire running time. Not his name, not his objectives and if he has more than two lines of dialogue in the entire movie I’d be shocked. In the Rambo universe, evil exists just for evil’s sake.

We first meet our hero hiding out from the “real” world wrangling snakes for a Thailand tourist trap where he’s approached by a group of Christian missionaries who want him to ferry them up the river so they can deliver Bibles to a Karen village. He’s first approached by the group’s male leader Michael (Paul Schulze) in a brilliantly choreographed scene, a simple scene, but one that shows how deep Stallone plans on taking this material. The scene is shot so the two characters talk between glass cobra cages. While Michael implores Rambo to help, the way the scene is shot he ends up talking more to the snake than to Rambo. Thus Michael, by asking Rambo for help with a simple task, is inviting the serpent, i.e. the devil, to enter his clean, Christian life.

But, of course, Michael can’t convince Rambo. It’s beauty, i.e. Juile Benz, who must eventually sway the beast. The back-and-forth between Benz and Stallone was actually the least convincing part of the film. Her dialogue is just some corny speech that at least gets the job done and gets the plot moving. Rambo eventually escorts the missionaries and lots of mayhem is soon to follow. The plot junk here isn’t important. Burmese soldiers obviously kidnap the missionaries and Rambo, with the assistance of some mercenaries, have to go save them.

The nighttime, rain-soaked raid where Rambo and the mercenaries invade the Burmese camp and do their rescuin’ is one highly tense, greatly choreographed sequence. As the missionaries are spread out all over the camp, there’s multiple actions happening at once, punctuated with a gang rape of some female Burmese dancers. This is a down and dirty series of events that is one of Stallone’s best directed sequences of his career. He artfully builds the action in growing increments on several different fronts concurrently into a mission taut with almost unbearable tension and suspense.

The finale, of course, and not to give any spoilers here, is what we’ve all come to watch a Rambo movie for — an all-out, unbelievable splatterfest of gore and mayhem. This is the time when you can sit back and say, “Yeah, I got my money’s worth on this one.” Stallone goes balls-out and comes up with dozens of spectacular ways to blow apart a human body in a shockingly gruesome orgy of mutilation. But by this point, we’ve come to understand that these Burmese villains, while they may be made up of flesh and blood, they aren’t human at all. However, neither is John Rambo. He may be the guy you may want to come save your ass, but war and killing ends up stealing everyone’s soul in the end.

But nothing, pretty much could prepare by how blown away I was by There Will Be Blood. Plus, the opening 20 minutes or so, which plays out without any dialogue whatsoever and chronicles the early tribulations of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) digging out his first oil well is perhaps the best opening to any film I’ve seen in years. You don’t know who this guy is or what his story is, but those opening scenes just grip you with their sheer power and you’re in the Daniel camp — no matter what horrible, disgusting, rotten things he does — until the bitter end. Yes, I was serious above about finding the time to see the film, but while I was watching it, it was over in a flash it seemed and I was emotionally drained by the time the final credits came up.

It’s an extraordinarily complex film with a simple premise, which is basically a war of commerce over religion, both of which are presented as scams. On the commerce side, there’s Daniel Plainview, an unethical oil baron who will do and say anything — and seem completely sincere about it — to get his precious oil. On the God side, there’s Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a preacher in the small town where Plainview wants to drill. Plainview promises all kinds of good stuff to Eli and the town, talking about the prosperity that will follow when black gold erupts from the ground. Of course, the only prosperity he cares about is in his own pockets.

But that doesn’t set up Sunday as the “good” guy. All he says he wants is money to grow his church, but he’s after a lot more than he lets on, too. His preacher is addicted to the power that leading a congregation brings. He’s not quite after money, but he’s after respectability at least. His preaching is the typical charlatan “drive the devil out” type of nonsense you hear from religious con artists. Sunday doesn’t want people to fall to their knees to praise God. He wants them to fall down to praise him.

Sunday and Plainview’s war is the central conceit of the film, but the story is really all about Daniel Plainview. He’s a tricky character. He’s so used to lying to get his way, he seems to lose sight of what he actually believes in. He’s fighting Sunday, but for what? And while Sunday is the main adversary, the core relationship of the film belongs to Plainview and his son H.W. (played for the majority of the film by Dillon Freasier). H.W. isn’t Daniel’s real son although the oil baron adopts him as a baby and treats him as nothing less than his own flesh and blood — although Daniel pretty much treats everyone like scum. Just as Daniel and Sunday war back and forth, Daniel and H.W.’s relationship travels on a rocky terrain. It’s not clear — both to the audience and within Daniel’s own heart — whether the father’s care is genuine or if it’s all just another con. A scene near the end of the film would seem to definitively answer that question, but Daniel has fed so much b-s through his life, how can one trust anything the man says?

Although the film is concerned with the ugly things that man does to one another, it’s really a beautiful movie with fantastic camera work by cinematographer Robert Elswit, who actually shot two Oscar-nominated films this year, both this and Michael Clayton. (Elswit’s nominated for just Blood, though.) The opening sequence is visually very claustrophobic and tense, while when the story eventually opens up, we get really gorgeous shots of the American plains.

Paul Thomas Anderson seems like he really challenged himself to break out of his comfortable milieu and he’s crafted an extraordinarily challenging film.

First off, a lot of the geography of the film bugged me. Not only that, but wherever the main characters seem to go on the isle of Manhattan — surprise! — that’s exactly where the monster shows up. Of course, yeah how else is the script going to go? But when it happens, it’s in the context of not making a lot of sense.They’re having a party downtown? Boom, the monster’s just a couple blocks away. So, they decide to cross the Brooklyn Bridge — even though the Williamsburg would have been closer? Boom, the monster’s under the water tearing it down. (How and why did it get there?) Then, they travel in the subway from SoHo’s Spring Street all the way up to Columbus Circle by Central Park? Boom, the monster’s heading right for them! Thank God they had a video camera to document all this because they were the four or five unluckiest people in all of NYC.

As for that monster, even though it pops up seemingly around every corner, it’s really not in the movie a whole hell of a lot. I would say it has three or five minutes of screen time tops given that it’s seen mostly it’s seen in brief glimpses. While I didn’t mind that approach to the film, would ten or fifteen minutes been too much to ask? Although maybe it would have been because, honestly, it didn’t look all that great. While the destruction of the city is all very realistic seeming and that flying Statue of Liberty head is a great sequence, the monster for the most part (I’m trying to avoid spoiling the ending with some of my vague pronouncements here) looks too CGI-ish. Again, that doesn’t really distract from the fun of the film. The best shot of it is a brief glimpse up at it’s roaring maw as the characters duck into a subway. It was kind of a goofy shot that made me laugh out loud and I wish there had been more moments like that.

And given the credentials of the folks behind the camera, it’s really no surprise that the actual plot is like a left-over storyline from Felicity. The main dude, Rob (Michael Stahl-David), is leaving for a VP job in Japan, so he’s supposed to be, what, in his mid to late 20s? Yet, the whole beginning has everyone acting like teenagers because — oooh! — Rob slept with Beth (Odette Yustman). It just came across as very childish to me and, frankly, when Rob decides to go save his one true love, or I guess Beth’s supposed to be, I really could have cared less and I thought of that main action just as the excuse to have a plot that it was.

The acting overall was pretty ok. The only negative points go to T.J. Miller who’s the guy who holds the video camera for most of the film, so we don’t get to see him much. His wisecrack routine was actually very funny at first and he’s actually the best part of the opening party sequence. I found myself laughing at him a lot. But after awhile he just turned into Hank Azaria from Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla flick. And the real standout in the film is Lizzy Caplan as the depressed, cynical Marlena who really seems to be trying to bring a little more depth to her character than just about everyone else. She’s the person we really know the least about and I tended to care about her the most.

Overall, as I said in the beginning, it’s a fun flick. Did it live up to the hype of the past year? Not quite, but the hype probably did it’s job of getting folks to flock to the theater to check it out, as they should. I don’t feel gypped, but the film didn’t have any real lasting impact on me. I was already questioning it by the time I got to my car afterwards. But it certainly is fun and that counts for a lot when it comes to a giant monster movie.