David’s Ramblings

Review for “Land of the Dead”
Overall score- 2.9π out of 900º

Land of the Dead is a zombie movie. Not everyone’s cup of tea, I’m sure, but I think it’s a classic story of a man eat man world where only the strongest and the richest survive. Almost brings a tear to your eye, don’t it?

Don’t let me fool you with my exaggerations though, this movie is truly interesting. The main character in Land of the Dead isn’t some guy or some chick. It’s a zombie. They’ll try to tell you different, but really, the story falls apart without the main zombie we don’t even get a name for. (A main character who’s never even named! How novel!) Of course, when your entire vocabulary is “uuuuuunnnnnggghhhhhhh” it’s probably hard to have a name, so lets just call him Einstein from now on.

The plot is simple enough. You see, Einstein and his buddies have this problem: Humans are good eatin’, but there’s been a recent drop in supply. All of theirs have been eaten because they live in some tiny town. Out of frustration, they occupy their time honing their musical talents, but really they just want to take a bite out of some human dumb enough to hang around. Is that too much to ask? They don’t think so, so they keep playing it cool and waiting for their dinner to come to them.

Cue bad guy in gigantic half-tank-half-bus. He decides to roll in there and bust the heads of the poor zombie people. He and his buddies walk into town like they own the place and start stealing zombie food, water, beer, and even dirty magazines. The zombies are rightfully a little perturbed, so they decide they’re going to do something about it – something any sensible zombie would do – groan and stumble towards you. You want a beer, that will be one finger please.

The humans tend to be unreasonable though. They blow the heads off of any zombie who tries to get in their way. The zombies… well… let’s just say their not playing with a full deck. In fact, they’re probably just playing with the jokers, so they just continue to walk towards the humans and get their heads blown off.

This is where Einstein comes in. He invents brilliant duck and cover maneuvers that would have won WWII. The humans leave, and then Einstein has a chance to invent something else new to zombies… revenge. He leads the charge on toward the human base and hilarity ensues, resulting in a nice family movie suitable for all ages. As long as all ages like seeing zombies ripping out intestines in a victory feast of human.

Oddly enough, this movie would have been totally over if they had just killed Einstein in the first two minutes of the movie, but that’s okay. How were those humans supposed to realize that this zombie was going to have more cognitive reasoning than their entire task force?

When it comes down to it, Land of the Dead was just a chance to show zombies chasing people around. It was kind of cool in that aspect, and it did okay at portraying a world where these zombies are around, but it just seemed to lack the umph to get a true climax in. Altogether, I give it a 2.9π out of 900º. If you’re into the zombie scene, maybe you’ll want to see it, then again, maybe you should just wait to let your friend rent it.

I’ve concluded that Airline Flights are an extreme form of torture. Forget Gitmo. If you want to talk about cruel and unusual punishment, airplanes are your answer.

It’s not the flying thing that’s so bad, it’s the prolonged time in cramped spaces. I’m not a big guy by any means, but I’m having to bend all sorts of ways to do anything in this plane. Typing would require the skills of a contortionist to get anywhere near comfortable. I’m having to bend my neck to the right while bending the rest of my body to the left and holding my hands what should be straight out in front of me, but isn’t with all the turning I have to do to fit.

Obviously, the answer is to not type, but reading requires the same amount of dexterity, as does watching the in-flight movie from the window seat. It’s a no-win situation, really.

Speaking of reading, I went and dropped a large sum of my remaining money on three new books: ‘Everything Bad is Good For You’, ‘One Nation Under Therapy’ and ‘Cracking the Million Dollar Code’.

I’ve already started into the first one, which tells how our modern ‘junk’ culture is actually leading to increased complexity in thinking. The author proposes that escaping into the world of video games is actually helpful for our thinking processes, not a waste of time. It’s not a bunch of mirrors and smoke either. His point does have merit and is presented very well. I’d recommend this book to anyone.

Well, I don’t think I will be cruel enough to my body to put it through another paragraph, so we’ll just leave it at that. Airplane rides suck. I’ve got another two hours to go…

So… the final day of the trip. It’s about damn time. Disney World is as boring as all get out. So is the hotel. It’s all been boring, except for our stop at Universal Studios which was only semi-boring.

Today was spent grabbing our luggage and move it into the room for holding it until our flight leaves. Then we wandered aimlessly through the hotel grounds, and caught a ferry that went to Disney World and back. On the ferry we made plans for our new theme park, which will be a parody of the Epcot Center.

In “New Epcot” there will be many modifications. “New Epcot” will have Mexico and the US sitting right next to each other, with a border patrol in between. Mexico will have children running around trying to sell you chiclets and fake American products for sale.

Germany will be Nazi-era, with random people sent into the concentration camps. Japan will have a Japanese story-teller like in the original Epcot, but he will have a voice over actor behind the curtains talking for him (way off sync, of course). China will have Tiananmen Square reenactment every hour, as well as Chinese secret police.

There will be an Axis of Evil alley where all those countries reside. North Korea would have an illegal nuclear test ride. There would be an island in the middle where Cuba resided on one side and there was an adults-only Guantanamo Bay prison club on the other that was one of those bondage sex club type things.

It just sounds better and better. There would be countries like Iraq and Vietnam in place of countries nobody cares about like Norway, Morocco and France. It’d be the most fun place on Earth.

Anyway, after setting out the plans for that, we just need some investors. Maybe we’ll find some on the plane ride home.

Day 6 wasn’t very great. It was very boring.

It started with sleep. Sleep’s always the highlight of my day. In fact, I slept right through a voting meeting, which was of course not worth going to anyway. However, I hear I missed out on a pornographic children’s book reading. “See Dick come. Oh oh oh. Jane is on top…” Stuff like that. Why this was read in an FBLA meeting is beside the point.

The rest of the day I just sat there watching TV and reading. Then there was the awards ceremony where no one I knew got an award. I wasn’t expecting to get one anyway, because the Java Programming test was anything but a test of programming. The Java test was more of a vocabulary test. I’d be surprised if half the people who won can actually program in Java. One who was competing said he did C++ but had been studying Java out of a book for a week.

After that ceremony, the obvious thing to do was to sleep some more to be ready for my flight the next day. Sleep is good.

Today is Sunday, and marks the final day of competitions and such. That means that tomorrow will be the awards and then we will be able to go home. I’m glad that it’s almost over.

Today was an enjoyable day however. We slept in as late as we could, watched some of the Law and Order: SVU marathon, and then went to Universal Studios. Universal Studios has better rides than any part of Disney’s attractions. My personal favorite was the Hulk roller coaster, which is quite fun.

When we got to the park, our first stop was the Hulk roller coaster, followed by the 3d Spiderman ride. We moved on around the park but, unfortunately, the other good roller coaster called the Dueling Dragons wasn’t operating. We decided to go get soaked on the Popeye rafting ride and then walked around the park a bit more.

After a bit of walking, we both realized we were exhausted so we decided to catch a movie. We walked out of the park and headed for the theater on Universal’s Citywalk. Unable to watch ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’ within time to catch our bus, we decided to settle for ‘Batman Begins’, a choice which I’m glad we made.

‘Batman Begins’ outclasses all the old Batman movies and makes Batman a much more believable character. It’s less shitty costumes and effects (see that one with Arnold as the ice dude) and more believable, gritty action. If you liked the Batman movies a bit but hated how hokey they seemed, this one will do you good.

Anyway, enough with the movie review. We were soaked from our water ride before the movie so we ended up shivering by the time the movie was over. We got bused home and now I sit in my hotel bed in a change of dry clothes, writing this before hitting the sack. All-in-all, a rather more successful day than yesterday, I would have to say.