Part 2: Movie Number One – “Midnight Meat Train"

Yes the main character is a photographer. And yes the movies actually does have something to do with his art… in the beginning at least.

The beginning of the film almost immediately greets you with Bradley Cooper and is 35mm Lieca, which is a pretty damn good opener if you ask me!

Cooper plays a struggling street photographer looking for moments to capture better images. He find himself obsessed with photographing a butcher on the subway at night. Soon he discovers what is so captivating about this butcher, and what it is that he actually “butchers”.

The beginning of the movie is fabulous! The walls of the characters apartment are covered with images, and negatives and darkroom equipment. He finds himself a photographic mentor (Brooke Shields) who preaches “the decisive moment”.

It’s almost inspiring how the she explains patience in waiting past the moment you think is “the moment”, because the real image is beyond that.  She demands he wait for the opportune time to snap a photo, and then wait some more.

Even Cooper’s girlfriend encourages him to “shoot what you love”, because the subject you love now may transform into another.

I whole-heartedly believe in these ideals; and strive to follow them. Which is mainly why I was so attracted to the film in the first place.

One of my favorite elements was that the concept of the characters images were replicated in the visual of the film itself. He is a photographer of the city at night, the subway system and its dwellers. So the film itself was cold almost selenium toned, steel, massive amounts of perspective, shallow depth of fields, huge lighting contrasts, lots of shadow, large use of selectively lighting subjects and parts of subjects, massive amounts of symmetry, framing, creative use of color. In fact the only color that was truly shown was red; red lips, red street signage, red blood.

I could go on and on about how wonderfully photographic the film was in almost every aspect, but then the movie turned… and it was not as pretty.

Visually it was still great don’t get me wrong, however I was mildly distracted by the “butcher-ing” and plot which now involved zombies and a killing tradition.

The zombie thing kinda killed the film for me; even the story was neat and interesting – almost to the point where I could believe that I would never take a subway again! Then they wrapped up the film with tales of immortal zombies and flesh eating things, and now Cooper has to “keep the killing tradition alive to save the world” bull-crap.

The beginning of the movies gets a 6/5 star rating…. But the ending gets a negative 50 stars. However, I’d still recommend it to horror/photo lovers… if ever a combination besides myself exists?!