Zombieland (2009)

Techies love "The Social Network". It's practically the holy grail media piece of Bay Area startup culture. And I often see people glazing Mark Zuckerberg, but honestly? Sure, he's smart and agentic and all, but his actor has a much better face. I mean, there are entire TikToks dedicated to analyzing how Zuck's glowup (new hair and all) was inspired by Jesse Eisenberg. So obviously, instead of watching the movie (I don't watch good movies alone, because a good movie is a good experience, and spending time with friends/loved ones is a good experience, so watching a good movie alone is limiting the highest potential of the experience.), I watched Jesse Eisenberg tiktoks instead, and decided I wanted to watch one of his movies.

"Now You See Me" seemed interesting, so for the same reasons as "The Social Network", I decided to put it off. That left me with some movie about a summer camp, and a zombie movie. I'd actually seen an edit of the zombie movie, so obviously, I open up a Github issue I'm working on for Tech@NYU dev team, and attach my iPad as a second screen, and pull up Zombieland (2009) on some shady piracy site. Actually, I went on Netflix first, but after 8 years of using my middle school friend's account, Netflix finally enforced anti password-sharing by checking if all devices share the same home wifi...Netflix you're such a

For the record, I probably would get Netflix if I actually watched more than like 2 hours of English media every few weeks...but since I don't it's just not worthwhile. When I get back into [favorite show, redacting because if an opp finds this they might SPOIL it for me and then i will have to do bad things...], i will subscribe, but that aside, no.

Actually, I don't have much to say about the movie. I thought the intro would be funnier. It seemed really stupid. There were like no stakes. No relevant backstory to the characters. Oh this guy is from Columbus, Ohio. And he has all these rules for how to survive the apocalypse, but he never gets into a situation in which these rules need to be used meaningfully. Like there's no thematic takeaway. At the start, his goal is to find his family, but oh no Columbus, Ohio is a ghost town apparently, which means they're all dead, and this leads to like 1 second of sadness before they move on, and the plot continues to give me a feeling of "so that's happening, sure why not".

It was basically a comedy movie. It's all about Jesse Eisenberg's character's quest to pull women basically. I mean it's a "quest for survival", but the plot is about him and women. There are like two. One dies in the first like 5 minutes and the second one keeps stealing his truck from him but he chases after her to get it back and somehow they get together, idk

Also the kiss at the end was really awkward. I could see it coming, so I didn't watch it. Not because I'm Puritan or anything, it just didn't feel like they established the emotional build-up enough. Can movie directors STOP making movies with a male MC, and putting a woman in the "main character group", and automatically assuming the presence of a man and a woman is enough to imply/establish a romantic subtext? ugh! you guys are all lazy and don't know how to write real emotional connection and this is what is wrong with the modern world...

PS: the tiktoks
PPS: they automatically open in a new window, muted. make sure to unmute for the full experience
Jesse Eisenberg - Zombieland (2009), Sladko
Jesse Eisenberg - Zombieland (2009), Pumped Up Kicks