Zombies, Social Commentary, and Dawn of the Dead

 

Some critics claim that the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake lacks social commentary.  That it's just another mindless, money-making action-disaster picture.

That sells the film short. True, it doesn't push the sophomoric, mindless-zombie-as-consumer angle. Not much, anyway.

That doesn't mean there's no message. In fact, it has a much more potent, frightening one than the fear we're brainless automatons buying unneeded lavalamps at the behest of Machiavellian advertisers. That theme was always flip at best. A joke for Foucault. Honestly, people oversell this aspect of the zombie genre.

After all, medieval peasants would drool in awe at the most modest of our modern consumer palaces. Products commonly available to ordinary people year round were once only available to royalty, if then. Fruit in winter? Fresh meat? Cloth? Lighting? Gortex? Medical care? Antibiotics? Not to mention reliable electrical appliances. Magic by their standards! I like being able to go to the mall and I have a modicum of willpower. I don't buy shit I don't need. Well. Generally. Still can't explain why I have a vinyl figure from Yellow Submarine on my desk.

The remake of Dawn of the Dead touches on something far more frightening than being a brainless consumer, the dread fear of ennui hobbled university undergraduates everywhere. I know. It's a wonder they can sleep at night.

Can you guess what it is?

You can see it in the opening credits, in one short but explicit scene that depicts a reporter in Baghdad being ripped to pieces... by zombies.

At the time of the film's release, Iraq was in dire straits and descending into bloody anarchy. Neighbors were turning against neighbors, just as they did earlier in Bosnia-Herzegovinia and Rwanda, as society unravelled around them. That is what Dawn of the Dead is really about: social collapse. The exact opposite of a fear of being a spoiled consumer, it's the fear that our privileged existence will break down into mass murder. The fear that our neighbours may turn upon us.

Zombies running about what was once a peaceful, idyllic paradise (or consumerist nightmare, depending on your point of view) and ripping people's throats out is far more frightening to me than the fear I'll buy crap I don't need.

Just how far are we from social collapse? Three meals, is the common refrain. Now THAT is a scary thought.

Human society is more fragile than most of us really want to accept. People who have lived beside each other for decades can, and on occasion do, turn on their neighbours and hack them to pieces with machetes. On a subconscious level, we can't help but wonder if such collapse could happen here.

And that fear, to me at least, is what Dawn of the Dead is really about.

And I'll take The Mall over the ethnic/religious strife ridden Baghdad of 2005 any day of the week.

Call me crazy.

Top Ten Comedy Films

Like to giggle? Enjoy a good side splitting guffaw that bruises your innards? These may help:

10. There's Something About Mary (1998)
Ridiculous and wonderfully vulgar, this film was a breath of fresh air when it debuted. No one goes to Santiago twice in one year.

9. Annie Hall (1977)
Woody Allen being more contemplative. So much witty banter, you don't miss the slapstick.

8. The Princess Bride (1987)
A whimsical and light hearted fairy tale, it has a devout cult following and set pieces that will live forever in your memory. Eminently quotable. Wallace Shawn is priceless as Vizzini. Inconceivable!

7. Animal House (1978)
John Belushi. Toga party. Enough said.

6. Sleeper (1973)
From Woody Allen's early slapstick period, Sleeper is an underrated comedy that nearly bust my gut when I was a kid. Follow Allen on a romp into the far future, where smoking is good for you, jello can kill, and the world is ruled by a disembodied nose. Awesome.

5. Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
The only other film on the list with a real point, it's also the darkest. Features Peter Sellers in no less than three different roles on the brink of world destruction. Has some of the most outrageous lines ever written. Initially not intended to be a comedy, but the material was too insanely bleak to take seriously. The War Room set was designed by the remarkable Ken Adam, whose work made the early James Bond movies so visually distinctive. If you need a volcano lair for your giant laser, you'll want to give Adam a call.

4. Young Frankenstein (1974)
Mel Brooks' best comedy, Young Frankenstein bubbles over with the enthusiasm you'd expect of a mad scientist. Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman have never been better.

3. A Shot in the Dark (1964)
Peter Sellers at the top of his game. Inspector Clouseau comes into his own and assumes the lead role in the Pink Panther franchise. In the first flick he was secondary to David Niven. Perfectly paced by director Blake Edwards, it was based on the play L'Idiote by Marcel Achard. Nobody does The Full Idiot like Peter Sellers.

2. Airplane! (1980!)
Packed to the gills with exuberant zaniness, this ZAZ effort (writers Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker) Airplane is a non-stop flight into hilarity. Way, way better than my faux quote line (If they want to use it for marketing, they're welcome to it). Before you can stop laughing from one gag they've plastered you with a dozen more. The film's a gag gatling gun. Be prepared.

1. Life of Brian (1979)
Backed by The Beatles' George Harrison, LoB pokes merciless fun at religious pomposity. Could not be made today, given the push to ban 'defamation' of religion at the UN. In fact, it almost didn't get made in 1978. After finally reading the script, the original funders backed out three days before shooting was to begin. Audacious, dangerous, subversive, and courageous, it has social value far above the other films on this list, with the exception of Dr. Strangelove. LoB makes a statement. Several, in fact. And you'll laugh through every one of them.

Review: Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

"It's not enough." -- Walt Bishop (Bill Murray)

Filmmaker Wes Anderson knows quirky, and pushes it to the limit with Moonrise Kingdom. Accessible in a way that Cosmopolis isn't, Moonrise follows the 1965 antics of loveable oddballs on a quaint east coast island. 

Discontent with his lot in life, young Sam goes AWOL from Scout Camp and runs away with his female counterpart (Suzy) to frolic in the wilderness. A bemused search by ostensible adults ensues, and everyone strives to escape the emotional prisons they've constructed.

Anderson employs one point perspective throughout the film, virtually every shot, and it's absolutely striking. The characters seem to be flitting across super realist Christopher Pratt paintings. Stanley Kubrick used the same technique in several films (see example video here), but never quite to this obsessive compulsive degree. 

The art direction is the tightest I've ever seen. Every colour choice has been carefully considered, every shot precisely composed, every object placed just so. The excessive stylization is initially endearing, but becomes distracting as the film goes on. Narrative must compete with ostentatious style for attention.

The Darjeeling Limited, The Royal Tenebaums, and Rushmore were all funny ha-ha. The Fantastic Mr. Fox mildly so (but so breathtakingly beautiful it didn't matter). Moonrise is just exceedingly quirky. While the framework and staging are wonderful, the content seems lacking. Anderson tips too far into style over substance.

Even so, a gentle sense of understanding permeates the film. Empathy for the plight of the myriad characters comes through powerfully, even as the artificiality of the direction keeps them at a distance. This is not a malicious filmmaker. 

As Sam Shakusky and Suzy Hayward, Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward hold their own with their far more experienced elders. Bill Murray seems half asleep, but can do what he likes. 

He's Bill Murray. 

As for Anderson, he's undeniably innovative. A pioneer deploying the most distinct voice in Hollywood today, even more so than Quentin Tarantino. Quite an accomplishment in an industry where 'different' can be a four letter word. When you see an Anderson film, you know you're in for an experience, and one you will not soon forget. His movies stick with you. Larger than life, dream like. Iconic lines and striking compositions settle comfortably into your memory. Even flawed, his movies remain must see cinema.
 
He's willing to experiment, take chances, and push the boundaries in directions no one else even considered. 

Kitsch or genius? 

You decide.

Top Ten Action Films of All Time

Looking for films that kick ass? Need to fill your eyeballs with explosions, gunfights, and kung fu? Look no further. Have I got a list for you...

10. A Fistful of Dollars
The Man With No Name wanders into a town that bears a passing resemblence to Capua, where two warring families struggle for supremacy. By the end, only Clint Eastwood and bullet riddled bodies are left.

9. Aliens
James Cameron transfers the Alien series from horror to the action genre in this breathless entry. Ripley, conned into joining an expedition of cocky, can-do Space Marines, heads back to the planet were it all started. Bad move. Needless to say everything goes horribly, horribly wrong--for them, resulting in an entertaining thrill ride for us. Vietnam meets Jaws in space. Ewoks done right, with lots of teeth. They'd have made more sense if they were like the little blue guys in Galaxy Quest.

8. The Matrix
Known for Keanu Reeves kick-boxing with cascading code while defying gravity and wearing sunglasses. The alternative lifestyle set rebels against our New Machine Overlords in the far, far future, and more importantly look stylish doing it. Competing priorities. Still knocks socks off, with Neo representing faith and Agent Smith cynical, nihilistic intellect. Like Aliens, does double duty as a top sci-fi flick.

7. From Russia with Love
Stylish with a side serving of ruthlessness. 007's second outing is one of his best; the stunts are at the limit of believability but not yet outside of it. Take that, Moonraker! The classic train fight sequence started a trend and has become a Bond staple. Revisited multiple times over the years, for good reason, this one's still the best. Robert Shaw sizzles as the cold blooded psychopathic killer Grant, and Krebs is disturbingly creepy for a former ballerina.

6. Lethal Weapon
Mel Gibson playing batty before he went batty, the film portends what is to come with maniacal glee. Crazy Cop joins Weary Cop a week before Weary Cop is going to retire, and they get caught up in cocaine coated Shizz. Or something like that. Began a series of buddy movies that lasted through the nineties. Still one of the best. Busey (playing batty while already batty) and Gibson go mano a mano in an intimate kick boxing climax atop a lawn sprinkler.

5. Kill Bill Vol. 1
Uma Thurman dices her way through this flip, hip, blood spurting revenge flick. More limbs are lopped off in this film than in any other, including Lord of the Rings. The Bride would make mince meat out of Aragorn. Tarantino merges music, violence, and snappy quips into the coolest, hippest of action pics. A stylish music video with a story.

4. The Road Warrior
Mel Gibson does Clint Eastwood: he wears one expression for the entire film, which is harder than it looks without Botox. He's super serious Melwood, and it's easy to understand why, given the setting: a road trip across the wastelands of post-apocalyptic Australia in search of gas. I'd frown too. Made the leather, hockey padding, and mohawk look cool, and spawned a series of cheap knock-offs that just made the art direction in the original all the more impressive. A classic.

3. The Bourne Identity
Quick cut fight scenes and a deadly amnesiac hero puzzling together the mystery of his past make this a must see. Matt Damon does bewildered so well you'd think it was Keanu Reeves. Updates the Bond formula for the 21st Century with hand held cameras and a European aesthetic.

2. Die Hard
Bruce Willis faces off against the diabolical Alan Rickman in Ten Little Terrorists in an Office Tower. Poor terrorists seize a building only to find an unkillable Monster Cop lurking in the air ducts, waiting to pick them off one by one. They say an action film is only as good as its villain, and Rickman is the best as he leads his group of doomed Eurotrash terrorists against the unstoppable but casual, barefoot Willis.

1. Raiders of the Lost Arc
A return to the cheap serials of the Thirties, only this time with a big budget, great effects, and real locations, all set to a magnificent musical score. Harrison Ford rocks as the affable action-hero professor criss-crossing the globe in search of lost artifacts. Made archeology seem exciting; a pulse-pounding occupation filled with danger, poisonous spiders, deadly tombs, murderous Nazis, and ghosts. Probably raised their insurance rates, too. Certainly put me off it as a career option.

Honorable Mentions: The Bourne Ultimatum, Last of the Mohicans, Goldfinger, Romancing the Stone, The Raid: Redemption, District 13.

Review: Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

Better titled The Evil Queen, the Huntsman, and What's-Her-Face. Charlize Theron steals the movie as the conniving, misandrist Ravenna, who revels in punishing men and looking at her own reflection. Sometimes both at the same time. Like her character in Young Adult, only empowered by black magic. Can't help but feel bad for the peasants who went to Medieval High with her.

Is this a trend for Theron? Will she play Elizabeth Bathory next? She's certainly enjoys playing the bad girl, and Bathory is one of the baddest.

Ostensible leading lady Kristen Stewart, who plays Snow White, fades into the scenery, hopelessly overshadowed by Theron's malicious queen bee. You tend to forget she's even in the movie.

Chris Hemsworth (The Huntsman) provides the requisite muscle bound heartthrob, caught between the two lovely ladies.

The film opens with the apporach of a mysterious phantom army, setting up high expectations. It then drops them like a granite block.

Everyone's favourite seven dwarves have little to do and are more of an afterthought. They don't appear until much later in the movie. Not hunky enough for the Tween audience. Too short, perhaps.

To keep the boy's attention, a second battle occurs at the film's climax. Special effects are deployed, blood is spilled, and What's-Her-Face goes mano a mano with Charlize Theron.

Good prevails and all is well in the kingdom, but by this point who really cares?

Buttons

I like making buttons from time to time. 

Review: Outpost II: Black Sun (2012)

The original was a surprisingly good and gruesome nazi zombie movie, a genre where low expectations are a given. Outpost II: Black Sun doesn't rise above them.

The first film saw a team of mercenaries enter a haunted house (bunker) and rouse slobbering Nazi zombies from their extra-dimensional slumber. Or something. Mayhem and slaughter ensued. Created by quantum field experiments at the end of World War II, the zombies were not only unkillable, but could slip in and out of reality at whim. Effectively they could teleport. Doesn't make much sense, but neither does quantum physics. Unfortunately, that feature undermines the drama, as it makes it difficult for the heroes to take effective action.

This time round the zombies don't flit about subspace, and screenwriter/director Steve Barker adds ways to permanently kill them. Like that. Adds spice.

The film begins the same way as the last, with a doomed team of mercenaries entering the dread bunker. While their employer watches via webcam, the soldiers piss of the undead National Socialists and get ripped to pieces. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure how ideological these drooling horrors really are. They just like killing people. Once riled, they go about it with great zeal.

The stakes are raised as the roaming area of the zombie storm-troopers increases exponentially, threatening the entire region.

Nazi-hunter Helen (Catherine Steadman), hunting the mad scientist Klausener, hitches a ride into the maelstrom with action hero physicist Wallace (Richard Coyle), a kind of Indiana Jones meets Stephen Hawking. Inevitably they team up with a group of mercenary cannon fodder and work their way towards the bunker. Throw a stick in the Balkans and you'll hit a mercenary. Good to know.

The climax seems like a parody, and the lightning effects that accompany it are subpar, which doesn't help.

Still, the Outpost series remains far above anything else in this cheesy, guilty pleasure genre.

They're already at work on Outpost III. Let's hope the third one is the charm.

Lessons from Television: Borderline Nihilism and Boardwalk Empire

Every good story has a message, if not a moral. An underlying idea that permeates the text, giving meaning to the narrative. Shape. It can be touchy-feely banal ('Love conquers all'), or cutthroat cynical (Chinatown's 'Being rich lets you get away with murder'). 

Happiness writes white on a page, so entertainment delves deep into dysfunction. Yet underneath the surface struggle there's still that little meme nugget, the driving message. It can offer light at the end of the tunnel.

So what's the message of shows like The Wire, Breaking Bad, True Detective, and Boardwalk Empire? What meaning are they peddling?

HBO's The Wire, one of the most difficult and rewarding shows ever shot, depicts institutions being as flawed as the basket case humans that created them. Good work gets done only by persevering through absurdity and infuriating dysfunction. Most politicians are inveterate, venal liars, cops careerists more concerned with making their statistics look good than actual policing, and criminals are just businessmen out to make a buck in a difficult world. Selfishness both holds them back and propels them forward, abliet by the smallest of increments, when interests overlap. It's civilization through baby steps. A million mile walk on your knees, sans knee pads.

Even the motivations of the protagonist, ornery cop Jimmy NcNulty (the fabulous Dominic West) are laid bare as being utterly selfish. He fights crime to gratify his ego. Prove he's better, smarter, than the crooks. It's a profoundly libertarian view. You'd think the show was written by Milton Friedman. In The Wire, government provides solutions only when wrapped in massive amounts of waste and incompetence. The best person to look out for you is... you. 

Creator David Simon has described it as an angry show: "The Wire is making an argument about what institutions -- bureaucracies, criminal enterprises, the cultures of addiction, raw capitalism even -- do to individuals."  It's not a show that puts corporations or big government in a positive light. Still, and this is key, Simon leaves the door open for hope. Institutions are not entirely irredeemable. The problem is more one of inefficiency, cross purposes, and ineptness than outright malevolence.

It's nowhere near as angry or dark as Boardwalk Empire.

Empire, another HBO original, goes farther, painting a mercilessly negative picture of American society and culture, a nihilistic canvas of corruption and murder. Steve Buscemi plays Enoch "Nucky" Thompson, the corrupt treasurer of Atlantic County, based on real life political boss and racketeer Enoch L. Johnson. Affable ol' Nucky and his scheming political peers are either on the take or outright criminals. Elections are rigged. Political offices for sale. Prohibition is exposed as a tragic, well meant joke that facilitates the construction of crime empires, many of which are still with us today. Hello, Joe Kennedy and Samuel Bronfman. 

The police are even worse than the politicians. Better known as Murder Inc., they kill citizens on the whim of their political masters and actively protect organized crime. They're thugs with guns, irredeemable and amoral, without exception. It's so negative it feels like caricature.

The FBI is represented by a bat shit insane Christian fundamentalist, Nelson Van Alden (played with disturbing effectiveness by Michael Shannon), and his partner, a treacherous Jew, Eric Sebso (Erik Weiner), who kills his own prisoner for cash. I kid you not. Eventually Alden turns on Sebso as only a madman can. Then he shacks up with a prostitute and fathers her baby. You can hear the screenwriter's cackling. Alden makes Fox Mulder look like a choir boy.

The existence of the cesspit known as Atlantic City is credited to a ruthless thug known as The Commodore (Dabny Coleman), who's even worse than Nucky. Realpolitick is his only way. Life's a ruthless, bare knuckled struggle to the finish. That's how things work in Boardwalk Empire. Not exactly what they teach in public school today, is it? Not every criminal gets a prize for participation.

And what makes Nucky better? Where is virtue here? You guessed it: love of family. That's the redeeming virtue. Everything begins and ends with kin. Nucky takes care of his own, to be sure, which is why he's seen as admirable by the show's erstwhile moral centre, Margaret Schroeder (the fantastic Kelly Macdonald). Initially a Prohibitionist, she throws her ideals to the wind like soiled diapers before the first season ends.

And if you aren't one of Nucky's chosen, watch out. He'll do what's necessary. Get in his way? Bang! He accepts his flawed, selfish nature and acts upon it without reservation. The greater political system is just a cash cow to be milked and manipulated. He'd make a great dictator.

Obviously a globalized world cannot function effectively with such limited circles of trust. Rather than good acts flowing out from the stable family unit, good is sucked in and ravenously devoured. The mere existence of a relatively prosperous American middle class (admittedly now buried in debt) suggests that this series tilts too negative. Faith in the political system has not yet been entirely annihilated.

The best thing that can be said for Nucky is that he's willing to engage in positive sum exchanges with neighbouring crime cartels. Trade rather than war. Great stuff. Good thinking for the long term. Prosperity will no doubt ensue. Unfortunately, being television, instead of stronger, mutually beneficial bonds, these arrangements weaken and collapse into gruesome bloodshed.

Nucky's flawed, magnificently so. The show's real trick is to make him sympathetic, and that it achieves handedly. Like Tony Soprano, he's the alpha male who won't live by society's rules. Ethical concerns? Ethical what? Please. So long as you protect your immediate family, you can ice anyone you want. Only Game of Thrones has more gruesome murders. And that's set in a fictional fantasy land mired in medieval thinking and open warfare.

Now, Boardwalk takes pains to show Nucky's enemies as nastier than he is, making extrajudicial execution just. The baddies are abusive. Poor family men. Mean to kids. Kick puppies. It's a lazy but standard screenwriter trope, a means to justify otherwise reprehensible behaviour and make unsavory characters sympathetic, if not outright heroic. Plenty of nasty people justify their actions this way. It's called propaganda. Read a history book.

So the show coalesces around Nucky and Margaret Schroeder, whose (natch) abusive husband Nucky (nobly) had murdered and dumped in the Atlantic Ocean.

The message?

'The system', such as it is, does not work. It's hopelessly corrupt. Due process? Forget it, darlin'. The law? A fool. To paraphrase Mao, justice flows from the barrel of a gun. Kill or be killed; so get a gun and fortify your house. Murder your enemies. Might makes right. True, law ultimately depends on force, but most democracies have built in safeguards and protections for citizens. It's been relatively tamed. Boardwalk Empire scorns niceties such as due process as contemptible and impractical foolishness.

And I thought George Lucas hated democracy. Too messy and inefficient. The creators of Boardwalk also yearn for a benevolent dictator, an enlightened philosopher-king like Marcus Aurelius. One who holds a baby in one hand (Nucky takes the vulnerable under his wing, justifying his murderous rampages) and a shotgun in the other. The problem, of course, is that Marcus was followed by the mad Commodus; you cannot guarantee virtue in the heir. Autocratic efficiencies ultimately yield atrocities.

The cops of Boardwalk aren't there to enforce law and order but to protect the dominant criminals who have seized legitimacy by winning political office in rigged elections. Killing whenever required, they have no moral authority. That rests, instead, with the crime kingpin. It'd be a morally inverted world if moral orientation here didn't spin with relativism.

Without a husband to support her and living in an age of systematic gender based discrimination, freshly minted widow Schroeder turns to Nucky for protection out of sheer necessity, a hapless waif in a cruel, hopeless world. She must be protected and sheltered by men with guns, who kill to provide. The state is for chumps and suckers, an institution only present to fleece the people and line the pockets of the rich.

It's a great representation of the thinking and self-justification of the criminal class. If the system is completely horrid and there is no justice, then what they do is perfectly moral.

Boardwalk's misanthropic bottom line? Nothing exists above tribalism, except corruption. It's utterly and entirely at odds with traditional liberal points of view. Social Darwinism at its ugliest, life on Boardwalk is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'. Interesting that Matt Damon, a liberal, should be behind it.

It's our society in a fun house mirror: most do not, in fact, live in a medieval hell. The populations of Western democracies are healthier, better fed, more peaceable, better educated and all around better off than ever before.

True, farthest fringes of society are still living in a world of hurt, of brutality and violence and lost hope, but today that's the exception rather than the rule.

In the medieval world, it was the other way around.

Both programs are excellent entertainment value, but have very different messages. The Wire looks down on brutality, murder and tribalism, while Boardwalk Empire celebrates them.

As the French writer Henry de Montherlant said, 'Happiness writes white on a page.'

We're the opposite of moths, endlessly fascinated and enthralled by the dark.

Review: The Avengers (2012)

Cinematic equivalent of bubblegum, The Avengers is tasty fun, but loses flavour quickly. Joss Whedon's signature snappy dialogue and ensemble juggling skills keep the film from going off the rails. Special effects are top notch, outshone only by the megawatt wit and blazing white hot ego of Robert Downey Jr, playing the even more egotistical Iron Man. He's Main Humour Dude, the funny guy, and is only outdone once, when the taciturn Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) confronts Loki (Tom Hiddleston). 

The plot is hardly relevant. It's the usual planet-in-peril stuff. Loki betrays earth to aliens who can only be stopped by the combined forces of Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Black Widow (seriously?), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), yada yada yada, explosions! 

The end. 

You want to go for kinetic spectacle and the interaction between larger-than-life actors having a ball. Ruffalo and Downey stand out here, blurting bon mots.

Writer/director Whedon does his best to give each lead their own action set piece and emo break. Said action sequences are suitably impressive and slathered in money burning CGI, but all the punching gets tiresome after awhile, and just gives you time to think about the plot holes, of which there are a few. Not a surprise given how complex and outlandish the film is, bringing together five different superhero franchises. On paper it sounds unworkable. It's amazing the film is as good as it is and a testament to Whedon's skillz.

The studs look macho and Scarlett Johansson's foxy Black Widow adds some estrogen to the ensemble.

Goes great with pop and popcorn. Don't skimp.

Fan Expo Toronto 2012: Part I

Another great, jam packed show. Sat beside the amazing artist Dave Ross (Spiderman, Star Wars, Necromantic) who can whip up the most complex, anatomically accurate figures on the spot.

And on the right side, a creative powerhouse: storytellers extraordinaire Raff Ienco (Epic Kill), Jim Zubkavich (Skullkickers, Pathfinders), and Adam Warren (Empowered).

Absurdly talented gentlemen, all. An honour to be seated with them.

They even let me finish my sentences. Madness!