The Parking Lot Movie

Directed by Meghan Eckman (2010)

Man.

Not all documentaries are able to show humanity or American society so well, and be so funny.  And it is so funny, but in a really fascinating way.  The Parking Lot Movie is about the attendants at the Corner Parking Lot in Charlottesville, Virginia, situated behind several bars.  The attendants are described as social outcasts and well educated at once, several of them attending the nearby University of Virginia.

Not all documentaries do I want to watch twice, let alone in the same night in order to show my friends.

Man.  This documentary.

If you put over-educated men into a service job where they do nothing, they have plenty of time to think about the job, as a former attendant points out early on.  Often these guys come from departments like the Anthropology or Philosophy, sometimes as grad students and often get the job because they’re friends with other attendants.  They make wall art within the booth, decorate and re-decorate the gate, all making observations about the job.  And they love it, and respect it, but also admit that this job can drive you insane.

I don’t want to generalize the attendants much, since they’re so different, but there are some patterns that appear in the position.  As much as they are educated and in a service job, they love it, but they hate the people who use the parking lot.  The criticism from all of them is intense: Hate the frat boys,  hate the sorority girls, hate SUVs, hate alumni– but it is justified.  These people are jerks, which the attendants make abundantly clear.  The attendants will run after cars that will not pay, often becoming violent with the customers.

Contrast that with the zen perspective offered at times, how doing nothing in at this job will lead to a better understanding of self.  That’s fantastic.

It’s also funny as hell, whether the interviewees realize it or not.  Their comments are often spot on, and while revealing the sometimes ugly parts of the job, they’re still laugh out loud funny.  As one former attendant remembers that a classmate wouldn’t pay a $0.40 ticket, he finishes it up by recalling that this classmate’s father was also a jerk.  “Fuck that guy!”  Between the philosophical and the angry, the way these stories are presented makes them hilarious.

It was a successful screening when I showed it to my friends and I’ve been recommending it all over the place.  The Parking Lot Movie: It must be Movie-Love.

Night of the Living Dead

Directed by George A. Romero (1968)

Starring: Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman, Keith Wayne, Judith Ridley, Kyra Schon

Ah,  horror movie love.  It’s not something I’m terribly familiar with, to be honest.  I don’t really get the fans of Red Box Horror or the ladies who line up for midnight screenings of the Saw franchise.  But what I do get is a love of the Zombie Movie Genre, and the modern incarnation all begins with the grainy 35mm Pittsburgh epic.  My immediate reaction to Night of the Living Dead was movie-love, pure and simple.

Barbara (O’Dea) and her brother Johnny visit their father’s grave on the night when radiation from a satellite effects the recent dead, causing them to reanimate and crave human flesh.  When Johnny is killed, Barbara is able to escape to a farmhouse nearby, where she is joined by other survivors, including Ben (Jones).  Ben takes care of Barbara as he fends off the approaching corpses.  She has gone catatonic, only speaking occasionally as she follows Ben’s orders.

Ben is by far my favorite character.  Not only does he have a take-charge attitude, but he recognizes how the situation has messed up Barbara and approaches everything with a clear head.  In contrast, the five others in the house with them, especially Harry (Hardman) who is too stubborn and prejudiced to agree to Ben’s plans.

Meanwhile, our heroine is the opposite of these focused zombies and Ben.  She’s helpless, which riled up my feminist side, but as I understand it, they had altered the script to O’Dea’s performance.  In fact, it seems like Night of the Living Dead never had a set script, but instead moving along with a general plot and changing elements when necessary.  When put in that context, it seems like a different creative work.  Rather than some magnum opus, it can breathe and adjust itself as necessary, without losing much in terms of terror, and probably gaining more in subtext.  Honestly, it just seems so appropriate for the American Independent Horror to have such a thrown-together production.

As much as the characters are trapped in the farm house while the dead stumble outside, they’re not cut off from the world.  There’s a radio that Ben sets up, and eventually they get the television working.  The news gives some explanation towards why the dead are reanimated, related to radiation from a satellite, but the explanation is largely unnecessary.  It just gets thrown in as an easy explanation.  The news broadcast then shifts to the local situation, showing that it’s quite easy to kill the risen dead. Just aim for the head.

Not like that advice helps, when there are so many outside the farmhouse.  The attempt to escape ends horrifically, though it was caused by human error rather than the undead.  It was surprising to see how crafty the undead act and how determined they are to get to the humans.  For zombies, they’re pretty damn intelligent.

And it is damn scary, forty-three years later, in a gritty way that many have tried to replicate, but never quite match.