Zombieland: the best use for a banjo

*** Zombieland
Directed by Ruben Fleischer. Written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. With Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin. (R)

There are, more or less, two distinct sub-genres of zombie movies: the siege picture, in which the interest is chiefly in seeing how a group of people function (or don’t) while barricaded in a building besieged by zombies (Night of the Living Dead, most of Shaun of the Dead); and post-apocalyptic road pictures like 28 Days Later, in which a group of survivors forms a new family while exploiting the advantages of everyone else being dead. (Dawn of the Dead marries both subgenres by having the survivors hide out from zombies in a shopping mall.) Two indispensable stops in a zombie road movie are the supermarket and the abandoned mansion, both of which are made in the knowing zombie satire Zombieland.

Our guide through Zombieland is Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) a nervous, anxiety-plagued 20-year-old virgin (was Michael Cera unavailable?) who has managed to survive a zombie holocaust with a long list of rules that are displayed, in a visual conceit that never gets old, on pavement, cars, or just hanging in the air. Trying to hitchhike home to Ohio he meets Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson, sending up his role in Natural Born Killers as a psychotic zombie hunter), and in the aforementioned supermarket they run into grifters Wichita and Little Rock (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin), with whom they spar all the way to Los Angeles, where they end up crashing in the mansion of a very famous movie star thanks to one of those maps of the stars’ homes. (For more of that very famous movie star, stick around through the closing credits.)

Even in a genre that thrives on characters having really bad ideas like partying in a graveyard, the girls’ destination, an amusement park, is particularly implausible. Like most horror films these days, Zombieland is more interested in grossing out its audience than scaring it, and a little suspense would have gone a long way. But if you’ve ever wanted to see the kid from Little Miss Sunshine shooting zombies, here’s your chance.

**1/2 Coco Before Chanel
Directed by Anne Fontaine. Written by Anne Fontaine and Camille Fontaine with Christopher Hampton, loosely based on Chanel and Her World by Edmonde Charles-Roux. With Audrey Tautou, Benoît Poelvoorde and Alessandro Nivola. (PG-13)

The hoary clichés of the “Young” biopic (Young Tom Edison, Young Winston, etc.) are gleefully on display in Coco Before Chanel, Anne Fontaine’s look at the designer’s early days. See young Coco discover tweed! Quilted fabric! Striped fishermen’s sweaters! If much of this is ahistorical, never mind — such are the slim pleasures of this listless biopic, which follows Gabrielle Chanel from the convent of her youth through her years as the kept woman of a wealthy racehorse owner and his younger, better-looking friend. Both men would stake her first design businesses, although only the latter does in the film.

Such are the liberties taken in this oversimplified story, which never engages the most salient contradiction of Chanel’s life — that the designer who liberated women from the corset was herself a former prostitute whose business was bankrolled by her lovers. Like a Joan Collins antiheroine in an ’80s TV movie, Chanel would continue to serve only herself throughout her life — during World War II she became the mistress of a Nazi officer — but I suppose a film that got into that would not have had access to the actual designs of the Maison Chanel, so movingly displayed in the final fashion-show processional.

Audrey Tautou plays Chanel with a chip on her shoulder and a monotonous scowl, as if to erase memories of Amélie, but the script gives her little to work with, her sole tasks being to observe her surroundings for future inspiration and show her contempt for women who overaccessorize. Benoît Poelvoorde makes much of his role as Etienne Balsan, the aging playboy whose house she refuses to leave, while the usually reliable Alessandro Nivola seems to be coasting on his looks as Arthur “Boy” Chapel, whom the film posits as the love of a life that would thereafter be lived in widow’s weeds, although that was hardly the case. Next up, also from Sony Classics, will be Jan Kounen’s bluntly titled Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, a dramatization of the designer’s alleged affair with the Russian composer during his years in exile in Paris. Perhaps this Coco After Chanel will be more eventful.

** The Burning Plain
Written and directed by Guillermo Arriaga. With Charlize Theron, Kim Basinger and Jennifer Lawrence. (R)

A trailer is consumed by flames in the desert. A woman sitting in bed in a northern clime, her back to the camera, barks at her lover, “Get out!” What could be the connection between these seemingly unrelated stories? That’s the game played by Guillermo Arriaga, whose screenplay trilogy of Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel purported to do nothing less than take on “the consequences of modern life.” The consequences of Arriaga’s game, when the plotting is as unbelievable as it is in his directorial debut, The Burning Plain, is that the characters become mere cogs in the screenwriter’s machinery.

Let’s start with that woman with her back to the camera. She’s Sylvia (Charlize Theron), a glamorous restaurateur who will recommend a reserve Bordeaux to her VIP guests, go out back to cut herself, and then go home with one of her customers. And then there are Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence) and Santiago (J.D. Pardo), a couple of teenagers in New Mexico who start dating days after their parents Gina and Nick (Kim Basinger and Joaquim De Almeida), who were having an adulterous affair, die in that opening fire. And then there’s a pilot, dying in his hospital bed, who instead of sending a telegram to Sylvia has his young daughter (Tessa Ia) and his best friend Carlos (Jose Maria Yazpik), who doesn’t speak English, fly north to tell her the news. Carlos stalks Sylvia for several days, not even saying why he’s come when she tries to have sex with him, because someone has tipped her off that this movie is about blondes having forbidden sex with Mexicans. No, Carlos waits until the next day, when he has suddenly learned English, and after she refuses what he’s offered he sticks around in a motel anyway, even as his best friend lies dying, because Sylvia will suddenly change her mind the next day. Such are the idiocies of The Burning Plain.