George Romero’s Diary of the Dead opens tonight. In an interview with him at Sundance, our eyes were opened to what an eloquent artist he is. We watch Night of the Living Dead to examine the origins of the zombie genre and compare it to Diary. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Karina Longworth gets personal with the loneliest movie going experience ever: Watching Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness.

 

 FilmCouch 57 [29:40m]: Play Now | Download

(Subscribe to FilmCouch in the iTunes store and an episode will download each Friday)

FilmCouch 57

Night of the Living Dead, Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness

Michelle Morgan and Shawn Roberts star in George Romero’s latest zombie romp, Diary of the Dead. The film follows a group of film students whose efforts to produce a zombie movie are thwarted by an actual undead apocalypse. They quickly turn the cameras on themselves, documenting their struggles to survive, uploading their videos to the internet whenever possible. As with many Romero films, the campy delights of exploding zombie heads are lovingly blended with social commentary, this time about the ineptitude of mainstream media compared to “bloggers and hackers” self-publishing their experiences. In this interview stars Michelle Morgan and Shawn Roberts talk about the mood on set, not knowing if their characters will undergo zombification, and their favorite zombie flicks.

 

 Morgan and Roberts Interview [3:21m]: Play Now | Download

You can check out the Diary of the Dead trailer on the film’s MySpace page.

Morgan and Roberts

• Laszlo Kovacs, the Hungarian-born master cinematographer who shot Paper Moon, Easy Rider and Ghostbusters, has died. A documentary about Kovacs and his friend and fellow cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond is currently in the works. Above: a clip from one of his most visually stunning works, Martin Scorsese’s batshit-insane 1977 musical New York, New York, via YouTube.
• The Telluride Film Festival has invited Edith R. Kramer to serve as guest diretor of the 2007 festivities. Kramer served as lead curator at UC Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive for two decades, and as Telluride’s Tom Luddy notes in this press release, “Her international reputation will result in Kramer bringing movies to Telluride that nobody else could get from archives.”
• George A. Romero’s latest will debut in the Midnight Madness program at the Toronto Film Festival. The director promises that George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead is “not a sequel or a remake, it’s a whole new beginning for the dead.”