Weekly rewind: February 7
BY MICHAEL SMITH World Scene Writer
Thursday, February 07, 2013
2/07/13 at 5:01 AM
A brief review of a recently released film. For expanded review, visit tulsaworld.com/movies.
"Warm Bodies"
Rating: 
(on a scale of zero to four stars)
In "Warm Bodies," the "boy meets girl" concept becomes dead-boy-meets-girl. When a zombie is the star of your romantic comedy, do you call it a zom-rom-com?
Call it what you like as long as you call "Warm Bodies" a warm-hearted, witty movie about finding love and acceptance and changing the world for the better - in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse.
Isaac Marion's genre-bending novel is in the right hands with Jonathan Levine writing and directing. Levine has a gift for finding romance in odd places in his movies, like his excellent "50/50" cancer comedy starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, one of 2011's best pictures.
Levine has done it again, in what must be the sweetest, most relatively gore-free PG-13 zombie movie ever made. This is not "The Walking Dead."
Note to parents of teen girls desiring to attend: I realize that the subject matter makes you think "Over my dead body." But "Warm Bodies" was made for your daughters and women of all ages who can appreciate an off-kilter date movie.
This is more in the "Twilight" vein, but with no potentially morbid sexuality to worry about. This is a movie in which holding hands is a gesture of great passion between a boy and a girl.
The film opens in the blue-gray color-scheme existence of a big-city airport, with corpses in varying degrees of decomposition shuffling about, bumping into one another and moaning.
This is where we meet our protagonist, R, a young zombie whose hilarious inner monologue tells us of his lonesome existence, his wish to do something more with his non-life and his wit.
"I'm lost," the wandering soul says in a deadpan voice. "No, really, I'm lost. I've never been in this part of the airport."
Clothed in jeans, a red hoodie and a gray T-shirt that nearly matches the color of his ashen skin, R is a self-deprecating joy and clearly not quite like all the other grunting, skin-falling-off zombies.
Associated Images:
Not even death can keep R (Nicholas Hoult) from finding love with Julie (Teresa Palmer) in "Warm Bodies," a sort of "Romeo and Juliet" tale where Romeo is a zombie. Summit Entertainment/Courtesy
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