AMC zombie series from Frank 'Majestic' Darabont - The Walking Dead

stretch to call the conversation a "detective drama", but bear with me

yeah well deconstruction is a critical approach and trying to find evidence of a critical approach in a work of art is a good way to drive yrself mad

"if you want to criticize a film make a film" - jean-luc picard

what is the point of this exercise

staying fit and trim until the next episode of the walking dead airs

any film that tries to expose the internal conflicts of genre or of film itself could said to be involved in deconstruction

my favorite example is two-lane blacktop, a racing film where the participants end up drifting away, physically and psychologically

I haven't heard so much talk of deconstruction since Project Runway.

or since top chef

Zombie Voltaggios

The zombie movie version of Funny Games would have a five minute shot of zombies graphically eating someone slowly, after 45 minutes of slow shambling and long shots of flies taking off and landing on flesh.

suppose you could say that depalma deconstructs the relationship between film and its audience, in that he's constantly interrogating "looking at" and "listening to" in his films (watched dressed to kill last night). it seems more like an artistic obsession than an intellectual investigation, but i'm not sure that's a make-or-break distinction when discussing works of art.

anyway, looking forward to ep 2 of walking dead, which i probably won't see for several weeks. wonder if it will ramp up or slack off in the inventive gore department.

that's where it gets sketchy - the line between the director being a critical intellectual and supporting an aesthetic goal can get mighty thin. depalma got all his voyeurism steez from hitchcock anyway.

xp

The zombie movie version of Funny Games would have a five minute shot of zombies graphically eating someone slowly, after 45 minutes of slow shambling and long shots of flies taking off and landing on flesh. the hero had shot all the zombies in the head and the director ran the film back to let them have a second crack at it.

I thought "Buffy" was a pretty good deconstruction of vampire mythology, for example. Like, its characters are fully aware of vampire mythology, even as the vampires don't always adhere to said mythology. And when the most mythological of all vampires shows up, the other vampires make fun of him for being a showoff.

In some ways, something like "The Devil's Rejects" is a deconstruction of ... something. Especially the way it wallows in pure "horror" for so long, only to briefly flip your sympathies when the antagonists are treated to the same torture and general unpleasantness as they formerly treated the ostensible protagonists. It twists the usual us vs. them dynamics into a nihilistic ambivalence

"Beetlejuice" is, I suppose, a clever deconstruction of ghost stuff, played for laughs.

Granted, I'm going by my own internalized definition of "deconstructed," wherein the characters are aware of genre conventions (at least Buffy and Beetlejuice) and generally use them to their advantage. Devil's Rejects I guess is just more generically subversive.

I stick to my statement above - "I don't think you can call anything that's meta or self-referential deconstructed" - deconstruction involves giving a genre a real acid bath, pointing out internal conflicts, forcing it to break down, and not just "hey I'm a vampire killer who knows about vampire movies".

something like buffy is postmodern and hyperaware of its own conceits but if you use deconstruction as a description of aesthetics, I imagine it as producing something more aggressively antithetical to the viewer's needs and expectations

the fourth indiana jones was way deconstructive in that case

guess I needed to throw an "intentionally" in there

depalma got all his voyeurism steez from hitchcock anyway.

dislike this criticism of depalma (no offense). he owes a lot to hitchcock, sure, but in films like blow out, dressed to kill, body double and femme fatale, he takes that voyeurism steez and runs so far over the horizon with it that it becomes something distinctly his.

I AM OFFENDED

tbh I like depalma more than I like hitch

agree with edward III here. films like buffy, beetlejuice and the devil's rejects don't deconstruct their genres. they're merely explicitly aware of them and/or subversive about them. i mean, what does buffy have to say about vampire mythology (other than that it's silly and fun)? what does it attempt to show us about the guts of the genre that we didn't know going in? nothing. therefore it isn't really a deconstruction.

me too (xpost)

oh hey super-primitive deconstruction: man with a movie camera

so I reread the beginning of the thread and these 3 ominous premonitions sum up everything I didn't like about the show

The admittedly small number of issues I read didn't seem to either add anything significant to zombie mythology or have particularly interesting characters.

― A brownish area with points (chap), Thursday, October 14, 2010 7:02 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

zombie apocalypse is a great canvas for right wing/nra/libertarian types to express their i-told-you-so-liberal-faggits wish fullment on and i thought the books veered close to this territory too often for my reading comfort.

― MAX NOT FOR MOD (Roberto Spiralli), Thursday, October 14, 2010 8:43 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Why do people hate the comic but expect this to be good? Should I not even ask?

because i'm pretty sure kirkman has no idea how human relationships work, and everything reads like teenage melodrama. any writer would be an improvement.

― the parking garage has more facebook followers than my band (Jordan), Thursday, October 14, 2010 10:46 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark

Man you guys have been *busy*!

many xxposts (since deconstruction is well covered lol) for contenderizer: re the question of wtf run down old hospital exterior with modern interior...this is a pretty common US phenomenon. Heck, it's a common Australian phenomenon too. Retrofitting is pretty commonplace, especially in older cities or places with old buildings. Sacramento for one. Was it more the type of building vs the interior that you're driving at?

Also I had hoped for a zombie horse myself when the zombies started feasting on deputy dawg's horsey, but alas, I guess the world isn't ready for that.

Was it more the type of building vs the interior that you're driving at?

yeah, this. inside, it looked like a proper modern hospital. outside, it looked like some collapsing warehouse that they'd (lightly) dressed as a hospital so save money. discontinuity was striking. more bored nitpicking than a real complaint though.

question:

why did the zombies not eat him when he was lying prone in the hospital

i was bothered by the hospital exterior too, like "damn, i guess that hospital was abandoned years before the whole zombie thing"

xpost Because the hospital zombies were all locked in the DO NOT DEAD INSIDE room.

That is a very interesting name for a room

he was in a coma and wasn't making any sound

xxxp

and the zombies failed in their attempts to organize a room-by-room search

oh yeah, DON'T DEAD ENTER INSIDE

Just out of curiousity, what "significant additions to zombie mythology" would ppl like to see added? That they're all secretly good at volleyball? That you can't feed them after midnight? That zombies on Bizarro Planet walk quickly and spit up body parts?

yes that's exactly what we were thinking

I'd like to see zombies done more like vampires; lucid predators who can plan and trap running prey etc

That they can dance in formation imo

also I want to read zombie poetry, as I'm sure it would be very touching

SPOILER (skip me)

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thought the bit abt the guy trying to get up the nerve to shoot his zombie wife was very well done

I'm not being flippant -- it's a serious question! (xpost thank u Dan)

Not to go all meta-Capt. Rhodes/Day Of The Dead here, but they're fuckin' dead! Your options for "mythology" are pretty limited, to "How does one become a zombie?", "Can it be cured?", "How quickly do they move?", "Can they think?" and "How do you kill them?"

Well, like I noted above, "World War Z" and I suppose "Land of the Dead" are the only two zombies stories I can think of that take place well after an outbreak. It'd be interesting to see a zombie movie about rebuilding/starting over. But I guess the dramatic narative might be too difficult to suss out.

i dont want any fuckin clever twilight-style twists on what a zombie is tbh

"clever"

ya ha

"clever" = "mormon"

How about zombies that start out slow, shambling monsters that eat flesh, but if they go too long without eating any their zombie metabolisms rev up, making them move faster and jerkier until they explode, infecting any living animal their effluvia touches? If they catch and eat something, it sates their systems and they cycle back down into slow shamblers.

dunno about significant additions, but i would really like to see someone make a smart, gory zombie-plague movie that doesn't just use "it's a zombie movie ffs!" as a justification for whatever ridiculous shit the genre seems to demand. don't know that i've seen one yet. 28 days later came closest, but seemed to want to operate outside the genre in a way that bothered me.

suppose you could expand the mythology at this point by dropping all the bullshit pseudo-medical justification and going back to the supernatural.

Zombies are reanimated spirits trapped in their decaying bodies who cannot be freed until they devour their loved ones.

I posted a list of recent films that have done something interesting with or expanded on the zombie apocalypse shtick, there's a lot of room to do interesting stuff if you don't slavishly limit yourself to the ground everyone else has thoroughly shambled over

les revanants - what if everybody who was dead came back to life, and they didn't want to eat us?

pontypool - language is a virus from outer space

deadgirl - two teenage boys find female zombie chained in basement of abandoned building, bad decisions ensue

the signal - a variation on the crazies-type apocalypse movie, but is way funnier and scarier than your average zombie flick because you don't know what to expect next

the end of the line - ditto