Zombieland: Double Tap (2019) - Movie Review

2009’s Zombieland was a pretty big turning point for both the people involved in its production and for its genre. As far as zombie cinema is concerned, its highly self-referential and tongue-in-cheek approach to the running dead makes for one of the bigger splashes the genre has seen this side of the new millennium. And for its production crew, it was the first big break that led to much bigger things: Jesse Eisenberg was on the cusp of his defining role in The Social Network, Emma Stone was on her way to becoming one of the best romantic leads of the modern era, writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick’s first collaboration here would lead to great success with Life and the Deadpool movies, and director Ruben Fleischer… well, I won’t hold Venom against him, but he got a big boost from it too.

August: Osage County (2014) - Movie Review

 

On the surface, it seems that adapting a work of theatre into a movie would be a lot easier than adapting from a different work like a book or a video game, and to a degree it is. But they are still two different media, however similar they may be, and in order to do it right it can’t just be a simple copy-and-paste job.  For a good example of stage to screen adaptation done right, look at 11 Things I Hate About You, a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Taming Of The Shrew: It took what is, in the modern age, the most difficult Shakespeare work to portray due its rather screwed-up gender politics and essentially left only the framework and changed the rest in order to make it work, and for the most part it did. A bad example of this? … Let’s get into today’s film: This is August: Osage County.