This is about the coolest link I’ve found all week: Night of the Living Dead available as a public domain movie on Google Video. Still an amazingly scary movie. The director, George Romero, filmed the original movie near Pittsburgh, and many of my father’s friends in the local advertising business joined in the production as extras (although to this day I’ve never recognized any of them in their zombie make-up!) The little girl zombie was played by Kyra Schon, who sat next to me in Mr. Yoder’s 11th grade biology class at Peabody High School in Pittsburgh. (No trouble staying awake in THAT class.)

There is a good Wikipedia entry about the movie, its many sequels and spin-offs. Although it indicates Romero felt he was ripped-off when the original fell into the public domain due to an oversight of the original production company, it’s become one of the most downloaded films on the Google site, and that has to be good fuel for the recent sequels ‘Land of the Dead’ and the upcoming ‘Diary of the Dead’ that Romero is creating.

I watched ‘Land of the Dead’ on DVD recently. Each of Romero’s zombie movies reflect a social commentary and this latest has a fun observation of the Bush years. In order to distract the zombies while they loot the countryside, agents of the rich men they work for shoot off fireworks, and the zombies stare at them, mesmerized. But as the movie progresses, a sort of understanding of what is happening emerges among the undead, and by the end of the movie, the fireworks don’t work so well anymore

‘High Fidelity’ by Hick Hornby turned out to be a great read, which surprised me. I really like the John Cusack/Jack Black/Stephen Frears (Dir.) movie version, and my usual experience has been that I’ll like the book or the movie, but rarely both. Notable exceptions to the Rule, ‘Field of Dreams’ and ‘The Natural’, like ‘High Fidelity’ take important liberties with the original story. The movie version of ‘The Natural’ is a New Testament story, and the Bernard Malamud story is an Old Testament story, although the common religion is baseball and both of the stories work. W.P. Kinsella’s ‘Shoeless Joe’ needed to be paced differently to find a good screen version in ‘Field of Dreams’ (not great … some of the casting decisions were completely mailed in). The source of the dramatic resolution in the movie version of ‘High Fidelity’ is modified in a subtle but critical way (although the resolution remains the same … I told you it was subtle), and I think it makes a better story of it. I’m not a big Hornby fan … ‘How to Be Good’ was Bad, and ‘Fever Pitch’ was vapid. But the book is smooth and captures the out-of-gear state of the middle-aged male psyche really well.