First up, American Zombie. It's a 2007 mocumentary by a young Asian woman named Grace Lee. She plays herself in the movie. She, reluctantly, teams up with a crappy film maker named John to make a documentary about the growing zombie population in the US. They interview zombies and visit the zombie convention LIVE DEAD. It was fairly funny at times and sad at others. Zombies in this universe are trying to fit into society. One guy works in a convience store and has a live girlfriend. She only dates zombies. A woman makes funeral arrangements and slowly rots away, worms leaking out of her unhealing wound. Another guy leads a zombie advocacy group. The zombies start fresh after they die. Their past is gone, they don't know who they are. When they re-animate they gain varied amounts of brain function. There are some good running gags, like the void joke and the "are they eating human flesh" joke. There's not much action, it's mostly talking to people. It gets vaguely weird at LIVE DEAD, which is like a dead man's low rent Burning Man. No humans allowed, except for the filmmakers, and a strange trio. It gets weirder and more violent in the last third, but it's never that gorey for the most part. It's a fun piece of work by someone who has seen some zombie films. Her previous film was The Grace Lee Project, it's mentioned in AZ, a look at many of the Grace Lee's out there in the world.
I had seen National Treasure 2 - Book of Secrets before. I still liked it a third time. It's a nice fun piece that has lots of greats sets and scenery. Nick Cage returns as Ben Gates. John Voight, Diane Kruger and Justin Bartha return and they are joined by Helen Mirren as Ben's mother. She hates Ben's dad. The movie starts with Ben telling the story of his grandfather's murder at the hands of Knights of the Golden Circle. Ed Harris claims that his great grandfather has a page from John wilkes Booth's diary that proves Ben's grandfather was a Lincoln conspirator. That bad news starts the race to find Cibola, the City of Gold. There are lots of clues to follow, puzzles to solve and some little bit of danger. I don't mind that the movie isn't all murdering and bloodshed. It's nice you can make a fun action movie for the whole family. I had heard of Cibola before. Scrooge McDuck found it in a 1954 Uncle Scrooge story by Carl Barks. It stayed hidden when Scrooge was done.
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