Directors, even legendary ones, can still say anything they want about movie stars and zombie films. But that doesn’t make ‘em right.

James Toback liked Robert Downey Jr. better when he was messed up

George Romero doesn’t like The Walking Dead. Or what he thinks is The Walking Dead. He obviously doesn’t actually watch it.

 

James Toback used to direct movies. Like, back in the nineties. He even made three with Robert Downey Jr. when he was in the midst of his drug addictions and bad behavior.  The last of those was Black and White, made almost 15 years ago, about hip-hop music. (Yeah, let that roll around in your brain for a while: Robert Downey, Jr. and hip-hop music, written and directed by a very white guy. It also starred Claudia Schiffer).  It, like his other two outings with Downey, were made at a time when Downey was in terrible shape, drinking and drugging like it was an Olympic event, getting arrested and publicly humiliating himself so often they built whole news programs around his sad escapades. In fact, it wasn’t until the mid-2000’s that he got his shit together, right around the time of Gothika. For most of the first five years of the century, he couldn’t be in movies at all. (Fun fact: do you know who paid for his bond in Downey’s first comeback film, The Singing Detective, so he could start working again? Mel Gibson, back before his own sad downfall. Which is why Downey defends the guy even today.) …

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Downey went on to make good, bad, and very successful movies (regardless of quality, in some cases). While Toback … well, he kind of stopped making fiction entirely. In fact, he didn’t make much of anything except a little-seen documentary about Tyson, and even that was years ago.

But now he’s getting electro-ink all over himself with quotes about how Downey is “not the same person anymore.” He had an interview with HuffPost where he says Downey is “clearly under some influence which has flattened him out, He’s not, apparently, doing any drugs. He’s not going up and down. He’s on an even keel, and he’s become the most successful robotic cartoon character in movie history. He’s a one-man brand franchise. I think it requires him to be a person who doesn’t resemble the person he used to be.”

For what it’s worth – which ain’t much – Toback blames Downey’s wife Susan for making him “something else.” The bitch. How dare she force him to become a reliable and successful person who provides an example of redemption and hope to millions. Loser.

What bothers cultists (not Downey cultists, but popcult cultists) about his is that Toback not only embodies sour grapes – “That Downey gut thinks he’s so great!” – but he misrepresents Downey’s post-binge work as well. Ignorance? Or just being obtuse?

Look: Iron Man is not ‘robotic.” He’s a real, live man in a suit of high-tech armor, and he acts like it. He’s not from a cartoon. He’s from a comic – not a far stretch, I admit, but still. And as successful as he is, Iron Man has company as “the most successful” of his ilk “in history.” Batman and Superman and Spider-Man would gang up to beat the crap out of you for saying such things. As for the character — actually, the best part of all the Iron Man movies isn’t the flying around and blowing this up (though, come on, admit it, that’s cool.) It’s the irreverent, funny, tragic and brave character of Tony Stark – who, given the actor’s well-known personal history and long-time public persona, is little more than Downey himself writ large. Right down to the legendary father.

But Toback gets worse. After trashing Downey’s work and home life, he says the Downey he knew “is either dead or in the parking lot under three layers of concrete and cars.” Toback said. “That Downey, which I found fascinating and addictive and alluring, was not financially feasible and not pharmacologically feasible.”

Addictive. Pharmacologically feasible. Glib ways of saying, He was a lot more fun when he was fucked up. Those were the days.

Let’s skip the part about the guy saving his own life; let’s trash his wife instead of talking about the redemptive power of the love of a good woman. And let’s re-emphasize the lie that people who do drugs and pee themselves in public are really just cool and rebellious and fun to be around.

Toback is an ass. And the publication of his idiot grumbling is just a symptom of the twenty-four news cycle that has to talk about something, for Chrissakes, something, regardless of its validity or worth.

Seriously: there are times even the Huffington Post should know to say STFU.

 

George Romero doesn’t like The Walking Dead. Or what he thinks is The Walking Dead. He obviously doesn’t actually watch it.

Why does the father of all zombie flicks hate America? Or at least hate the thoughtful and well-intentional episodic adventure The Walking Deadi?

Maybe it’s because his own relentless attempts to retake his crown as King of the Zombie Movies  really hasn’t gone that well.  He’s directed three zombie movies in the last ten years – Land of the Dead (’05), Diary of the Dead {’07), and Survival of the Dead (’09) – and none of them did very well; in fact, the last one was barely seen at all. And since then…well, there’s been the occasional tribute and sincere thank-a-thon, and not much else.

But given all that time on his hands, you think he might as least watch The Walking Dead with an open mind. In a recent interview with a British magazine, The Big Issue,  he revealed that the folks at AMC actually asked him to direct a couple of episodes of the show, but “I didn’t want to be a part of it.” Why not? Because “Basically it’s just a soap opera with a zombie occasionally. I always used the zombie as a character for satire or a political criticism, and I find that missing in what’s happening now.”

Let’s touch only lightly on the suggestion that the original Night of the Living Dead was a vehicle of “political criticism.” Whuuuh? Except for the ironic murder of the black ‘hero’ in the last few frames, there’s not even a hint of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (or perhaps As Dinner) in the rest of the “trapped-in-a-house with idiots” film. And meanwhile, if he’d actually watched the The Walking Dead with anything resembling an open mind, he would have seen commentaries on democracy vs. totalitarianism in the whole “Governor” sequence, the role of a secret government in the end of the world in the “Atlanta” sequence in Season 1, and the effects of leadership on personal ethics, responsibility and even sanity in the continuing evolution/devolution of Rick Grimes from the very beginning to now. It’s a friggin’ essay on the dark aspects of leadership, with free zombies included Seriousl, it’s there – at least as much or more than you’ll find in, say, Day of the Dead.

Maybe he’s just feeling ripped off. Like Bram Stoker pissin’ all over Stephen King after he wrote Salem’s Lot. The poser.

But George isn’t done. He pretty much tars the entire community of young whippersnapper zombie-directors. “I guess Zack Snyder started that with the remake of ‘Dawn of the Dead’ — fast-moving zombies — but the zombies in World War Z’ my God, they’re like army ants!” We actually agree that “fast zombies” are fundamentally different than the shambling babe in the nurse outfit with the axe in her skull that George himself created…but again, if you’re saying Zack Snyder created the fast zombie, you kinda-sort missed Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later more than ten years ago (and pretty much every ‘outbreak’ zombie movie since) – something that came out before World War Z. And otherwise…who cares if anybody called it “a zombie movie” when the word (or its initial anyway) is in the title, and it’s based on what is arguably the best-known zombie novel of recent years? (For further information, looked up “Picking, Nit” in your online dictionary).

But Romero’s not done yet. He says he never referred to his zombies as zombie at all. “I never thought they were zombies. To me back then, zombies were those voodoo guys who were given some sort of blowfish cocktail and became slaves. And they weren’t dead, so I thought I was doing a brand new thing by raising the dead.” No, George, sorry, we’re pretty sure “zombie” was attached to the idea of “shambling dead-brainer raised from the dead” all the way back in 1932, when the Halperins made White Zombie. Yes, there was voodoo involved, but even if that poor young woman’s ‘death’ was a sham – which is possible – she was still pronounced dead and still put into a tomb before she ‘rose’ and shambled out into the world of the living. So … yeah. That happened. About 35 years before your first ‘zombie movie that didn’t you the word.’

But the biggest problem, as with Toback above, is the notion of bad-mouthing other creators based on the misstatement or misrepresentation of fact. Calling Walking Dead “a soap opera with a zombie occasionally” may be pithy but it’s wrong on the face of it. The big-emotions, human relationship stuff does take much more of a center stage in WD than it has in many other zombie apocalypsi (though not all: viz. 28 Days Later), but ‘occasional’ zombie? Please. Put a clock on it. Five minutes doesn’t go by in even the most talky episode of WD (and we know, there have been plenty) before a horde of Greg Nicotero masterpieces show up and start chewing. You’re criticizing a show that isn’t there, for something it’s not doing. You want to use that comment, go crap all over Warm Bodies. You might have a point.

In both cases: you’re allowed to have your opinions, guys, no matter the motivation. But number one: if they’re such good opinions, why do you have to bolster them with selective memory and misrepresentation, and number two: you have to consider the source. ‘Cause even from this distance, sour grapes have a very distinctive odor.