And so ends Zombie Week

Well, it's been fun, but it is time for Micah World's Zombie Week to come to an end. Apparently, y'all enjoyed it, as well, because I hit 25,000 visits this past week (but that was due in large part to numerous searches for "Starbucks frappuccino girl" - look out Most Popular Search "Lindsay Lohan too skinny"!). A few odds and ends to tie things up:

-Land of Dead took in an estimated $10.2 million this weekend. Hopefully it will break even (movie's budget: $15 million), so that more zombie flicks will be made. DVD sales should be huge, so that probably won't be a problem. Reviews have been pretty positive, so that also bodes well for the perpetuation of the genre.

-There's a George Romero interview here. It validates some critics' likening of the Kaufman character to Bush, but I still don't really see it. Much of their basis for comparison has been tied to one statement the character says - "We don't negotiate with terrorists" - but that has been US policy way before W came into office.

-You knew it was going to happen: a zombie blog. For some reason, I find it endlessly humorous that each post's title is "Brains."

-Here's a fun short film titled When Zombies Attack. It gives a "Cops" take on the genre and follows a routine night in the life of the P.M.A.C. (that's the Post Mortem Animation Control). "Zombie tipping" - hey, you gotta love it.

-While writing a screenplay, comedian Patton Oswalt exposes how the zombie movie fits into the Nerd Trifecta in his always hilarious blog:

So, this thing I'm trying to finish is number one in the three-card deck of the Nerd Movie Tarot. The first card being the Future Dystopian Action Flick. This is where you've got heavily-armed scavengers wandering through a war-blasted desert, fighting other scavengers and mutants. Nerds - especially teenage nerds - love this card because, when you're a teenage shut-in like I was, you have so thin a grasp on how the world works that it makes writing easier if you simply wipe out civilization with a Long-Ago Nuclear Holocaust, and then have dudes galloping around shooting one another.

The trick to the Future Dystopian Action Flick is, you've got to really work out where you think the future will go wrong, and then how that'll affect human behavior. You've also got to remember, a Future Dystopia probably won't seem like a Dystopia to the people living in it. I mean, show anyone from 1905 - fuck anyone from 1945 - our present, and they'll think several apocalypses happened. Which puts me in a double-bind, as far as my pathology, to wit: it's bad enough to have whatever I'm writing affect my ongoing life - but now I'm mapping out how it will affect my future. Or, at least, this is how I think of it in my diseased brain.

(By the way, the other two cards in this deck? The Zombie Flick and the Space Opera. Future Dystopian Action starts with our present world long reduced to cinders. With a Zombie Flick, you've begun to realize how the world and the people in it work, but you've decided you want them killed by the walking dead. And, by the time you hit Space Opera, you've decided you can actually depict how the real world works - but it bores the living shit out of you, so let's go to Planet Zoomba and fuck a 30-foot woman with nine boobs).

So, there you have it. This week has been fun. Any ideas for future theme weeks?