I Don't Get...

...zombie movies.

I'm only saying this because one of the movie websites I read noted that George Romero showed his latest, Diary of the Dead, at the Sundance Film Festival. Probably some synergy there, as Sundance often seems filled with the kind of robotic critics and writers who say "film" instead of "movie." And they do so in such a way as to make clear that those four letters are more important than the Ten Commandments, Hammurabi's Code, Magna Carta, U.S. Constitution and Einstein's theory of relativity combined. Or at least they are to people who are intelligent enough to "get it," which seems rarely to include folks like you and me.

Where was I? Oh, zombie movies. OK, so the dead start walking and they attack the living. Used to be, in order to get to be a zombie, you had to die, but recently you've been able to become one by contracting some kind of virus or disease. Zombies also used to be afflicted with arthritis, too, based on the way they walked and moved, but apparently they have all found some kind of zombie-Aleve that lets them move really, really fast. But they still want to eat people.

And that's it. That's the premise of every silly zombie movie ever made. Directors and writers dress them up by supposedly showing how people deal with a world turned upside down by the zombie phenomenon and this or that aspect of the human condition blah blah blah. But in the end, what you have is a legion or so of the great unwashed -- excuse, me, undead -- who mindlessly try to attack the few living, breathing people who still have enough brains to truly grasp the world around them.

If that's not a metaphor for how the lion's share of our modern entertainment industry views itself and the people who buy its product, I don't know what is.