...I did find myself feeling a little bit dissatisfied with Nightcrawler's ending. Why? I'm not 100% sure - the climax is exciting and unsettling. But I think maybe I wanted Bloom to have risen higher up in the corporate hierarchy by the end. Bloom obviously has huge ambition, and the film obviously is trying to say something about corporate culture as a whole and not just local news, so why end with him just heading his own small news business? Why not give the film the epic sweep of something like The Godfather or Fight Club and end with Bloom as a big-shot billionaire CEO?
I think verisimilitude precludes anything that sweeping from happening at the end. The film takes place over a very short (though undefined) amount of time, no more than a few months. Bloom doesn't know thing one about the news industry when he first starts out, and at the film's opening he's just a petty thief and conman. In a few months, he becomes a producer at a news station and starts his own enterprise with multiple employees and vans; that's a pretty sharp rise for a guy whose only skill is being manipulative. If we were to see Leo Bloom in a few years from now, it wouldn't surprise me a bit to see him as the head of the news station or in a prominent role with CNN or network TV.
Finally got some time away from baby to just sit and watch movies in peace so gonna try and catch up on all this stuff this week.
Anyway, @Thomamelas put me down at the end of the list for Chronicle and I'll do a write-up. Been thinking of doing something about it anyway, so I figure wtf. But I'll need a bit of time.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
Well, I was going to do The Blair Witch Project, but Netflix seems to have pulled it, because why would you want to watch a scary movie during October alsdkfjdsuf
alright, I'm doing eXistenZ @Thomamelas and if Netflix takes that from me, fuck it, Human Centipede
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BlackDragon480Bluster KerfuffleMaster of Windy ImportRegistered Userregular
alright, I'm doing eXistenZ @Thomamelas and if Netflix takes that from me, fuck it, Human Centipede
I'd pay money for the bolded.
And to be on topic, I have six more days of vacation left and have been meaning to get in on at least the discussion in one of these threads for awhile (doubt I'd be up for a write up this go round) so I plan on hitting at least all 6 of the films done so far over the next few days. Will post my thoughts as I process them, tomorrow I believe I'll start with Nightcrawler.
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
Well, I was going to do The Blair Witch Project, but Netflix seems to have pulled it, because why would you want to watch a scary movie during October alsdkfjdsuf
alright, I'm doing eXistenZ @Thomamelas and if Netflix takes that from me, fuck it, Human Centipede
Human Centipede series triple bill or you are just chickening out.
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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
Please recall I reserve the right to invoke The Love Guru rule.
...I did find myself feeling a little bit dissatisfied with Nightcrawler's ending. Why? I'm not 100% sure - the climax is exciting and unsettling. But I think maybe I wanted Bloom to have risen higher up in the corporate hierarchy by the end. Bloom obviously has huge ambition, and the film obviously is trying to say something about corporate culture as a whole and not just local news, so why end with him just heading his own small news business? Why not give the film the epic sweep of something like The Godfather or Fight Club and end with Bloom as a big-shot billionaire CEO?
I think verisimilitude precludes anything that sweeping from happening at the end. The film takes place over a very short (though undefined) amount of time, no more than a few months. Bloom doesn't know thing one about the news industry when he first starts out, and at the film's opening he's just a petty thief and conman. In a few months, he becomes a producer at a news station and starts his own enterprise with multiple employees and vans; that's a pretty sharp rise for a guy whose only skill is being manipulative. If we were to see Leo Bloom in a few years from now, it wouldn't surprise me a bit to see him as the head of the news station or in a prominent role with CNN or network TV.
Sure, but I don't see a reason why the film couldn't have spanned years or decades instead of months.
The room-within-a-room is situated on an upper floor, its bulkhead-like walls surrounded on all sides by open-plan office and rows of secretaries’ desks. Passing through the thick door that leads inside, the room is small - maybe twenty-five feet long by twelve feet wide - and dominated by a long, mirror-polished boardroom table flanked by rows of small, uncomfortable-looking chairs and a lone, slightly-larger chair at the narrow end opposite the door. The room has the ugliness of pure function; exposed, baby-food-colored soundproofing covers every inch of the inner surfaces of the walls, and the sole concessions to human aesthetics or comfort are an antique brass timepiece, its workings exposed, and a decanter of brandy sitting on the table. A single matte-black rotary phone perches on one corner of the table like an intruder.
This is the heart of the Circus, the center of British intelligence in the 1970s, and though the room only appears three times in the film - once at the very beginning, once in the middle, and once at the end - it is in some ways also the central feature of the film, and tells us in a clear visual language what to expect: a spy movie stripped of all surfaces, the workings exposed, a story where the most important things that happen are conversations over drink, and the deadliest hi-tech spy gadget is a telephone.
The head of the Circus is Control (John Hurt), and he shares this table with the five most senior men in the service: Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), an impatient, overbearing Scotsman who wants to overhaul and modernize the service; thoughtful, charismatic Oxford graduate and head of European operations Bill Haydon (Colin Firth); Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds), a hard-bitten war veteran; the nervous European social climber and head of the technical services division Toby Esterhase (David Dencik), and, lastly, Control’s trusty second in command, the silent, watchful George Smiley (Gary Oldman).
Control knows, or thinks he knows, that one of these men is a spy, passing along information from the highest levels of British intelligence straight to “Karla” - the code name for the anonymous head of the KGB. A high-ranking Hungarian general is offering to defect to the West and reveal the name of Karla’s mole, so Control dispatches trusted agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) to Budapest to meet the general and get the name.
Things go terribly wrong, though, and the agent is shot, creating an international spectacle. Control and Smiley are forced to take early retirement, and Percy Alleline takes over the Circus, armed with his new top-secret intelligence program code named WITCHCRAFT - a mole at the top of the KGB, feeding information back to London.
Months pass. Control dies of drink and disgrace, and Smiley settles in for a restless, discontented retirement with his somewhat estranged wife. But then he receives a desperate phone call from a missing Circus agent - long-gone and presumed rogue - named Ricky Tarr (Tom Hardy), claiming that Control was right all along, and there really is a double agent at the top of the Circus. But is Tarr telling the truth, or have his Soviet masters sent him to disrupt Operation WITCHCRAFT? Who is playing whom? Smiley recruits rookie agent Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch) and slowly, methodically, and with infinite patience sets about his own private investigation, and that, twenty minutes in, is when Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy really starts.
The movie is based on the classic novel by John le Carré, pen name of David Cornwell, who really did work for the SIS during the 1950s and 1960s before writing such novels as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Tailor of Panama, and The Constant Gardener, and in an era where James Bond and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. dominated our conception of the spy trade, le Carré made his name by trading in verisimilitude, depicting intelligence work as hard, dull, fraught with office politics, and deeply unglamorous.
Le Carré’s stories have been adapted many times before - including a very well-regarded 1980 miniseries of this story starring Alec Guinness as Smiley - but director Tomas Alfredson gives what is perhaps the best translation of the le Carré style to film, letting his camera linger over pitted, pockmarked streets, peeling wallpaper, cracked glass, nicotine stains, and bits of period-specific tastelessness (the mutton-chops, the combovers, the jackets the color of strained carrots). The visual world of the film feels like a place where the wounds of war have just barely scabbed over, where oily rain falls endlessly from grey skies and where the rare moment of warmth and comfort is found almost exclusively in memory rather than the present.
Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman as Smiley.
Into this cold place steps George Smiley, a man whose own coldness seems almost a match for it. Smiley is a man of few words in book and TV series alike, and Oldman pares him back still further, reducing much of his communication to the barest flicker of voice and gesture - a gaze from beneath half-lidded eyes, a minute adjustment of the eyeglasses. A gentle clearing of the throat. In many ways, what drives him, and what’s on his mind from moment to moment, are as much a mystery as the international intrigue he’s been charged to solve.
But that mystery is gradually solved as we watch, and it’s an enormous pleasure, and the larger mystery is solved too, and that too is an enormous pleasure. That’s the witchcraft that Alfredson and his cast have woven: this is a story about cold people set in a bleak world that is not itself entirely cold and bleak.
The movie does ask you to pay attention. Important names and plot facts are told to you - the movie plays fair - but they’re told to you one time and once only. But you’ll be fine if you just do what Gary Oldman does here: lean in. Speak softly. Watch everything. It’s a puzzle both intellectual and emotional that ramps upward in intensity as it progresses and rewards our patience with a climax that feels genuinely explosive and cathartic despite featuring no explosions and one single, solitary gunshot.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
@Thomamelas and everyone else - Three Days of the Condor apparently got delisted sometime recently, so this is my spy movie substitution.
I can't even remember what won the Oscar the year this came out but it was a goddamn travesty that Tinker didn't walk it. An incredible movie, ending with what is probably my favourite ever musical montage sequence.
The movie is, I think, exemplified by the shot of the fly in the car. Three men in a car, shot from behind, as the car is being driven somewhere. One man swats at the fly with strong, clipped movements, one wafts airily, and the other calmly observes the fly, and then opens the window and allows it to leave. Three pieces of character development in a single shot with no dialogue and no faces. Glorious.
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
I can see why Oscar didn't love it for Best Picture: it's tricky, quiet, and there are very few women. Of course, none of that actually means it wasn't the best picture of its year, but a distressing number of professional critics couldn't or wouldn't expend the energy to keep up with it (I saw a lot of reviews in the vein of "Gary Oldman gives a great performance in this movie but the plot makes no sense!"), so I can totally see the Oscar voters snoozing through it or talking loudly through it like someone's perpetually baffled mother: "Who's that guy? What is he - I thought he was a good guy? Why is he doing that? Wait, wasn't she dead?"
But it really is great. It's a dream cast - Oldman, Hurt, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Tom Hardy, and Benedict Cumberbatch all in the same movie?! - and even the people with only one scene manage to really light up the screen for their brief stay.
I can see why Oscar didn't love it for Best Picture: it's tricky, quiet, and there are very few women. Of course, none of that actually means it wasn't the best picture of its year, but a distressing number of professional critics couldn't or wouldn't expend the energy to keep up with it (I saw a lot of reviews in the vein of "Gary Oldman gives a great performance in this movie but the plot makes no sense!"), so I can totally see the Oscar voters snoozing through it or talking loudly through it like someone's perpetually baffled mother: "Who's that guy? What is he - I thought he was a good guy? Why is he doing that? Wait, wasn't she dead?"
But it really is great. It's a dream cast - Oldman, Hurt, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Tom Hardy, and Benedict Cumberbatch all in the same movie?! - and even the people with only one scene manage to really light up the screen for their brief stay.
There's a lot of great moments where something is NOT said, but you derive so much meaning from it. The scene where Benedict Cumberbatch's character is told to settle things because shit's about to go down, there isn't much dialog, but you can derive the meaning from the brief moments and words spoken off-screen. The aforementioned fly scene, too.
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, especially in retrospect when I thought back and "Wait, did I just watch a bunch of British guys in office rooms just talking?"
I can see why Oscar didn't love it for Best Picture: it's tricky, quiet, and there are very few women. Of course, none of that actually means it wasn't the best picture of its year, but a distressing number of professional critics couldn't or wouldn't expend the energy to keep up with it (I saw a lot of reviews in the vein of "Gary Oldman gives a great performance in this movie but the plot makes no sense!"), so I can totally see the Oscar voters snoozing through it or talking loudly through it like someone's perpetually baffled mother: "Who's that guy? What is he - I thought he was a good guy? Why is he doing that? Wait, wasn't she dead?"
But it really is great. It's a dream cast - Oldman, Hurt, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Tom Hardy, and Benedict Cumberbatch all in the same movie?! - and even the people with only one scene manage to really light up the screen for their brief stay.
There's a lot of great moments where something is NOT said, but you derive so much meaning from it. The scene where Benedict Cumberbatch's character is told to settle things because shit's about to go down, there isn't much dialog, but you can derive the meaning from the brief moments and words spoken off-screen. The aforementioned fly scene, too.
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, especially in retrospect when I thought back and "Wait, did I just watch a bunch of British guys in office rooms just talking?"
I'm not sure if it's the one you are talking about but the scene where Cumberbatch has to break off his relationship is amazing. It's well acted, well shot and just so heartwrentching and does it all with so little.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
I can't even remember what won the Oscar the year this came out but it was a goddamn travesty that Tinker didn't walk it. An incredible movie, ending with what is probably my favourite ever musical montage sequence.
The movie is, I think, exemplified by the shot of the fly in the car. Three men in a car, shot from behind, as the car is being driven somewhere. One man swats at the fly with strong, clipped movements, one wafts airily, and the other calmly observes the fly, and then opens the window and allows it to leave. Three pieces of character development in a single shot with no dialogue and no faces. Glorious.
Even better, IIRC it's a bee, not a fly, that's come along with them after they pick up the retired guy who in his retirement was an amateur beekeeper. Layers!
knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
That figures, Hollywood loves wanking to movies about itself.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
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SurfpossumA nonentitytrying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered Userregular
So I gave this a watch tonight because (I think) @desc mentioned it and then later when I tabbed back to jacobkosh's review it turned out to be about it as well, and two mentions is my criterion for movie selection.
It was really enjoyable, I would even say savory, in the way only a slow but skillful movie can be. I think the aforementioned bee scene was exemplary, and Peter's breakup, but I was also struck by the scenes of violence: very brief, but very bright, at least in contrast to the rest of the movie. Small red spatters punctuating a huge and life-altering or -ending event for one or two people involved, but presented matter-of-fact with a calm indication: here, and here, and here.
It kind of makes me think of Bill's line, about being a man who left his mark. Events so big and so important in our lives, but a tiny red spot of punctuation on a single page in history.
I kind of wish I'd read up on it beforehand, because I have a very Primer feeling that I'll need to watch it again sometime while keeping an eye out for more details.
Two minor notes: 1) when the captions say the general's friend should turn up any minute, he actually says I can take you to him now, 2) Colin Firth's Hungarian accent is ridiculous but all the others were quite good.
One of my favourite bits you only really catch on your second viewing is the importance and origins of the picture Smiley is starring at in his house at the start of the film. You think it's just a random picture when you first see it, but it's not. It's such a nice little detail other films would not even include or would draw attention to.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
At twilight's end, the shadow's crossed, a new world birthed, the elder lost.
Yet on the morn we wake to find that mem'ry left so far behind.
To deafened ears we ask, unseen, which is life, and which the dream?
Allegra: You're stuck now, aren't ya? You want to go back to the Chinese restaurant because there's nothing happening here. We're safe. It's boring.
Ted: It's worse than that. I'm not sure... I'm not sure here, where we are, is real at all.
David Cronenberg's eXistenZ came out in 1999, but with the advent of the Oculus, augmented reality, and the gamification of modern life, the film is relevant once more and will only get more relevant as these technological and social trends continue--the way The Fly will be become relevant once we invent teleportation and the question of what to do with Brundleflies becomes an important political issue, and the way Videodrome will become relevant as soon as we invent the VHS.
I chose this film somewhat reluctantly from Netflix's Instant library because I wanted to do a horror film for October, and I didn't remember eXistenZ being scary. Upon a rewatch, however, I realized that that's not at all what it's going for. The film wants nothing less to shake your confidence in your own reality. The dominant emotions are uneasiness, as the film carefully orchestrates technique to refuse you the sense that you fully understand what is happening and why, and dread, as the film's spiral narrative structure brings you again and again to a moment of betrayal, denouncement, and assassination. Like the score, the plot is always descending but never arriving, forever walking down the Penrose steps.
The story begins on level one of the reality staircase, a landing to which it will return: Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is introduced at a unique video game testing event, the unveiling of a virtual reality game called eXistenZ ("Small 'E', capital 'X', capital 'Z'. It's new, it's from Antenna Research, and it's here... right now."). eXistenZ and games like it are downloaded from fleshy, bulbous, organic "game pods" directly into the user's spinal through "bioports." (Microsoft take note.) These games are enormously popular, and the ability to truly be someone else for a while is a transcendental, almost spiritual experience to some people. (A gas station attendant argues at one point that thanks to these games he is now only a gas station attendant "on the most pathetic level of reality.") As the top creative in the industry, Geller is revered, more saint than celebrity, and it's fitting that this test takes place in a church. But some in this society, Realists, believe that the ubiquity of perfect simulation damages the human connection to reality, and are willing to use violence to further their cause--after sneaking a weapon into the test through security, one of them attempts to assassinate "the demonness Allegra Geller", and soon Allegra is on the run with Antenna Research marketing trainee Ted Pikul (Jude Law), seeking a place to hide from her enemies and a way to test the integrity of eXistenZ.
David Cronenberg has a long and fascinating filmography as one of the finest horror directors alive (although he seems to have given that up in the past decade in favor of thrillers and psychological dramas). A true auteur, his obsessions are consistent across decades: body horror, psychology, technology, sex, the translation of emotions into physical (often surreal) form. eXistenZ may be his most thematically rigorous work; every aspect of its creation is carefully aimed at proving that reality (or at least cinematic reality) is indistinguishable from a perfect simulation of reality, and all of Cronenberg's lifelong interests are aligned to that purpose. You have body horror and the vaginal metaphor in Ted's bioport (which Allegra explicitly treats like a sexual orifice she'd just love to get her probe into) and his fear of it getting infected; you have the mixture of the biological and the technological in the recurring bone-gun and the game pods (which are living, breathing, pulsing creatures that one operates by rubbing and stroking--kind of the way you turn on a PS4, actually); you have the meta-perspective of the film continually evaluating its own entertainment value ("You know, my accent in the game was so thick that I could hardly understand myself"); and then the psychological headtrip not just of confusing reality and simulation but the way both become expressive of the emotions, concerns, and sentiments of the players involved--just as a film inevitably takes on the personality and interests of its creator.
What's most fascinating about the film is the way it uses the sci-fi notion of advanced virtual reality gaming to comment on itself, not only through philosophical asides and the confusion of our newbie perspective character Ted, but by running this semi-satirical vision of the future through multiple variations, each of which is an unknown number of steps away from reality. The technology shifts on each level to entirely new designs the reflect the same mix of organics and electronics, and each sequence takes on a tour of a new aspect of the social ramifications, from video game repair techs who act more like veterinarians to the "factory" where gamepods are constructed from mutated amphibians to a whole range of zealots, adherents, spies, and corporatists, each reacting in different ways to the fundamental feeling which Ted describes of perfect virtual reality: "I'm feeling a little disconnected from my real life. I'm kinda losing touch with the texture of it. You know what I mean? I actually think there is an element of psychosis involved here."
It's not just the characters who lose their ability to distinguish reality from simulation; we the viewer have a much more difficult task, to distinguish one level of simulation from another. This is all just a movie, but which part is the movie and which part the game within the movie and which part the game within the game within the...? Cronenberg obfuscates the truth by filming the ostensibly real segments in a manner less real than the ostensibly false segments. An early driving scene, for instance, is supposedly reality but makes heavy use of obvious rear projection (an outdated technique in which driving scenes are simulated by placing a car on a soundstage in front of a screen onto which is projected a shot of the moving road); we're distracted, if we notice, or simply unnerved, so that it's hard to believe in the plot. In contrast, later sequences we're told take place in the game feature much more elaborate production design, lots of extras, real stunts and fire/explosion effects--all elements that are achieved practically, and thus are more "real" from the perspective of evaluating a film's production. Other techniques align all scenes across the film as feeling the same, whether we're told they're real or not, from the plain, even lighting schemes ("real") to the odd, off-kilter performances ("unreal"). Elements that would otherwise seem to be flaws are probably deliberate attempts to confuse and mislead, like the way Jude Law is fundamentally miscast--no matter who he is supposed to be here, he never seems to quite fit the part.
And the plot moves forward like a video game no matter what's happening (a video game that often resembles those by David Cage, or Bioware RPGs, or the new Deus Ex). Character interactions are portrayed like puzzles (say the right thing to trigger the next sequence, or convince them you're "friendly"), environments are presented structurally like video game levels with their own rules and objectives, and Allegra and Ted find themselves compelled to take those actions which will move the story along, even if those actions are irrational. At one point Ted hits pause, ascending to what is apparently reality--only Allegra and Ted immediately start making out, something she previously characterized as in-game behavior meant as a cheap ploy for audience interest. It's possible that the "real" game doesn't even have a pause function, that there is no real way to tell what's truly happening. The only thing for sure is that the game is never over, and you've already lost. Death to eXistenZ. Long live the new flesh--whatever that flesh may be.
....I feel like I’ve heard this sentence a lot recently. And I get it. Maybe in the past you used to love zombies, but now you’ve seen too many mediocre, derivative, zombie movies. Your heart’s been callously ripped out of your chest and eaten too many times - not to mention your liver, intestines, and spleen – and you’re afraid to love again.
But now it’s time.
Turn down the lights. Pull up the covers. And maybe don’t sit so close to that window.
It’s time to fall in love with zombies all over again.
It’s time to watch one of the greatest horror movies of all time.
It’s time for...
(Fan art by me!)
Where to Watch
For some reason the movie has been pulled from Netflix, but luckily it’s in the public domain and pretty easy to find elsewhere. Here it is on archive.org!
I specifically recommend the remastered HD version. And yes, don’t worry - the 4:3 aspect ratio is correct. And no, you are not allowed to watch the widescreen version that's also on there. The film was shot in 4:3 and you're gonna watch it in 4:3, or so help me...
They're Coming to Get You, Barbara!
One thing I love about this movie is how it can sneak up on people. I remember as a teenager I showed it to a friend – and he wasn’t the watching old black and white movies type, or the watching horror movies type, so I had to cajole him a bit to get him to watch this thing.
It was one of those situations where you’re all excited – not only are you showing a friend one of your favorite movies, but you’re watching it at the exact perfect time. It’s a brisk autumn day around Halloween, and the sun is setting…so you’re going to be watching the daylight scenes in daylight, and the night scenes at night….
“Oh boy,” you say. “This movie is so great, you’re gonna love it!”
And meanwhile your level of enthusiasm is, you know, not exactly matched by your friend. “Sigggh, fine I guess, let’s watch it”.
And then as you’re watching the movie he’s being a bit of a spoilsport – trying laugh at it and make fun of it. “Ohoho they think this bumbling old guy is scary? What a joke!”
But then, thankfully, as the tension in the movie heated up, he stops talking…
And by the end, to your delight, he is quaking.
After the movie was over he told me he couldn’t sleep in our guest room.
“Why?” I asked.
“Too many windows, man!”
The movie sneaks up on you like a shuffling, bumbling zombie.
It seems innocuous until it’s ripping out your throat.
On the Appeal of Zombies
I think part of the appeal of the zombie – well, some flavors of zombie – is that a single zombie often isn’t really that much of a threat on its own. Sure, if you’re not careful, a singular zombie can get the jump on you – but overall they aren’t that smart or that fast, and a single zombie is easily dealt with. Zombies are scary not because they’re individually scary but because there’s an infinite amount of them, and no matter what you do they just keep coming.
Perhaps you can think of zombies as a personification of death – not just the walking dead, but death walking. Death is easy to laugh off, but always slowly shuffling toward you. Death isn’t evil, and death isn’t smart or conniving, and, sure, you can evade Death, for awhile…
…but sooner, or later, Death always gets you.
I also think a big part of the appeal of NotLD and other apocalyptic media is it taps into a deep fear that this whole civilization thing is a house of cards that's going to come crashing down. Civilization is a pretty recent invention, after all. Are we sure it's not just a fad? Just flip on the news and listen to all that stuff about war and refugees and global warming and mass murder...
Deep down, I think we're all scared we're going to go right back to where we started - cavemen with torches, huddled in the dark, assaulted and afraid.
The First Zombie Movie
It’s hard to overstate the influence of Night of the Living Dead.
It is, first of all, the first modern zombie movie.
Now, it’s true that it’s not the first movie to have creatures rise from the dead. It’s not even the first movie to use the word “zombie”. In fact, if you notice, the movie doesn’t use the word zombie at all! The term, which comes from Haitian voodoo, was first used in a Bela Lugosi movie called White Zombie. But in that movie, and other early “zombie” films, the zombies are brainwashed henchmen of an evil magician. They’re not really modern zombies.
…It’s also true that the film’s story is apparently heavily inspired by the book I Am Legend (to the point that the author of the book apparently quipped, about the movie: “ ‘Homage’ means I get to steal you work.”) I actually haven’t read the book or seen any of the movie adaptations (I know! I’ll get around to it), but as I understand it, the average person would be more likely to call I Am Legend a (spoilers?) vampire story, rather than a zombie story.
Anyway, Night of the Living Dead is the first movie that has what we think of when we think of “zombies” – rotting, shambling (well, now sometimes running) reainamated corpses that eat the flesh of the living, and that can only be killed by destroying the brain. NotLD is the ancestor of so much zombie media – plenty bad, no doubt, but plenty good, too. Without this movie we wouldn’t have Resident Evil or The Last of Us or The Walking Dead or 28 Days Later or Shaun of the Dead, etc.
The First Cult Film
Perhaps more important than NotLD's status as the first modern zombie film, though, is the fact that it's an early example of a successful indie movie made on a shoestring budget. It was made for a paltry $100,000...and then made $30 million at the box office. Back in the 1960s this was friggen unheard of. And it was made in Pittsburgh to boot - “the armpit of the world” - far away from Hollywood or even New York City.
And then, on top of that, apparently it was the first ‘cult’ film, with enthusiastic midnight screenings.
This movie paved the way for other successful indie/cult/transgressive/low budget films and filmmakers - Eraserhead and The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Slacker and Blood Simple and Holy Mountain and Evil Dead and Hedwig and the Angry Itch and The Blair Witch Project and Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers and Spike Lee and Kevin Smith and Richard Linklater and John Waters and Todd Solondz and Peter Jackson all owe a debt to George Romero and his zombies.
Oh God, Mother! Blood! Blood!
NotLD is influential, too, in its use of violence and gore – I remember Romero saying, in the Dawn of the Dead DVD commentary track, that movies usually to tastefully cut away when something violent happens, and his idea was, well, what if we don’t do that?
There’s a direct line between Romero and the kind of brutal, frank violence you see in, say The Godfather, or Taxi Driver, or Kill Bill, or a million other films.
(Night of the Living Dead and The Godfather)
On the Benefits of Not Having Any Money
No filmmaker is ever gonna say, "what I really need is less money". If a studio offers a director $20 million to make a film, no one is going to come back with: "$10 million and that's my final offer!"
...and yet this movie isn't just good in spite of being low budget, it's good, in part, because it's low budget.
Actually, its low budgetness is so intwined with the film that you can't really even ask what it would be like if they had a bunch of money to work with - because this movie wouldn't even exist. The whole concept for the movie came from the filmmakers trying to think up a good concept that wouldn't cost much money to make.
Plus, the fact that the film cost so little and was largely self-financed gave the filmmakers more creative control than they otherwise would have. The more money people give you, the more hands you have in your pot.
It's easy to imagine hand-wringing execs nixing the film's brutal violence and unhappy ending and morally ambiguous characters. Never mind that in an era where horrific images and stories were pouring in from Vietnam, the tameness of Hollywood was probably starting to feel a little quaint. And you can just imagine execs fretting about the black lead - "oh, you don't want to scare off white audiences" - never mind that in the era of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement the lily-whitness of Hollywood was probably starting to feel quaint, as well.
The lack of money helped in other ways too. For example, the filmmakers wanted to shoot in color, but ultimately shot in black in white because that's what they could afford. But black and white fits the film perfectly! It gives it the feel of news footage. It's also easy to imagine color making the gore look faker and giving the whole film feel less bleak.
Also the fact that the film largely takes place in one location was probably influenced by the budget - and that fact gives the film a wonderful feeling of claustrophobia.
Black and White
Julie Taymor said, regarding her all-black Broadway production of The Lion King, that the show wasn't about race, and yet it was. And you can say the same thing about Night of the Living Dead. Ben isn't the first ever black protagonist in a film - Sidney Poitier was already a big star. But at that time, if a film was going to have a black protagonist, it was usually going to explicitly about race relations. See: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and The Defiant Ones. And then on top of that, black protagonists were really rare. I mean here's a list of the top grossing films of 1968:
Good year for film! (2001 is probably my favorite movie of all time.) But, glancing through the films of that list, I'm not seeing major black characters in any of the films, except Night of the Living Dead. In spite of the civil rights movement that was going on, in spite of the large percentage of the population that was black, Hollywood was awkwardly white.
One interesting thing about the movie is that Ben actually wasn't written as black - the filmmakers thought of the character as a white, uneducated truck driver. Duane Jones just happened to be the best actor among the filmmakers' circle of friends so they hired him, and they didn't change the story or add any dialogue about the character being black. (But Duane Jones did change his dialogue so the character talked more like the actor did in real life and sounded more educated. For example, the original script has Ben say: "Ahm outa gas. Them pumps over there is locked." But in the movie he says: "The truck is out of gas. The pump out here is locked.")
The way that Ben went from white to black is a bit like what happened with Ripley from Alien, who famously was originally conceived as male, but then the filmmakers decided the part should be a woman and didn't change any of the dialogue.
Anyway, it's interesting how Ben's race informs our interpretation of the film, even though Ben wasn't conceived as black. For example, even though the film ended the same way when he was white, it's hard not to think - would he still have been shot, if he was white? I mean did centuries of the dehumanization of black people make it easier for the shooter to see Ben as non-human? And does Ben's race have anything to do with how much Harry buts heads with him - is Harry racist?
Allegory Schmallegory
Is this film about Vietnam? Again, it is and it isn't. George Romero and the other filmmakers like to say that they weren't really trying to be allegorical or make any political statement - but every good work of art reflects its time. And it's pretty hard not to see some Vietnam parallels in a movie where the characters are embroiled in a hopeless, inescapable, violent nightmare with no help from an ineffectual government.
John Russo, the film's co-writer, at one point took a dim view of people who tried to read deep meanings into the film, saying: "A lot of the critics have jumped off the deep end in likening the ghouls to the silent majority and finding all sorts of implications that none of us ever intended....they're full of shit."
But regardless of what the film's about or isn't about or what was intended or not intended - I think the reason Romero's Dead films have endured for so long is that they do feel like they're about something. They feel like they have something to say. There's a reason you come out of them wanting to talk about Vietnam and race and consumerism and the media and government and war and civilization, and meanwhile when you come out of one of the Saw movies, there doesn't seem to be much to say...except maybe 'oh man that one death trap was totally brutal man'
This Ain't No Place For No Hero
One thing I love about this movie is how the characters feel like real people - the way Ben starts to angrily snap at Barbara when she's being hysterical, then quickly composes himself and starts talking to her sympathetically. The way when, after several people die in a senseless, preventable, accident, he tries to remain stoic but you can see how shaken he is.
And another thing I love is how this movie doesn't really have heroes, or villains. Everyone's human, nobody's a saint or a mustache twirler. Early on in the film there's an argument between Harry and Ben about whether it's better to help someone in need or look out for #1:
Harry: "We lock up into a safe place, and you're telling us that we gotta come up here and risk our lives just because somebody might need help, huh?"
Ben: "Yeah, something like that."
In that scene, it seems like the film is positioning Ben as the heroic and noble character, and Harry as the selfish asshole character. And yet, the film, to its credit, refuses to delineate the characters so neatly. Ben is often noble and heroic, and yet early on he hits a woman. Later, he shoots a scared, unarmed man in cold blood. And while Harry is often a prick, sometimes he can be surprisingly cooperative, and surprisingly human.
In a lesser film, when Harry is recruited to help on the mission to retrieve the truck, the film would've had him refuse or sabotage things or whatever, but instead he performs as he's supposed to. And in the scene where Ben shoots Harry, in a lesser film Ben would've been forced to shoot him - Harry would've been trying to kill Ben - it would have been self defense. Instead, the film does something much more interesting and tears you in two directions at once: it makes you hate Harry, it makes you relish Ben killing him, and then, at the same time, it makes you feel guilty that you wanted that, and it makes you realize that ultimately, shooting Harry was wrong.
Nobody's a hero. Nobody's a villain.
Even the zombies aren't villains - not really. They're too stupid to be villains. They aren't malicious. They're just doing what they're programed to. And in later films they get more human and more sympathetic - in Day of the Dead, Bub the zombie is absolutely the most interesting and sympathetic character.
The militia that shoots Ben aren't cackling villains, either. They're just trying to do their jobs. They just made a mistake.
Holy Friggen Crap It's 7 In The Morning
I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of this movie. I could keep talking forever. I haven't mentioned the wonderful cinematography - note how much energy it has - note how the film often puts objects between the camera and the people, to give a sense of claustrophobia - note how it shoots at low and odd angles. Or how the black and white, often hand-held, guerilla filming style gives the film a wonderful sense of documentary realism.
I haven't talked about this interesting Roger Ebert review of the movie, where he talks about how appalled he was by how much the movie was horrifying kids: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-night-of-the-living-dead-1968 (I bet a lot of those crying kids went on to be lifelong fans of the movie. I know I often wind up loving stuff that traumatized me as a kid!)
I haven't talked about how the film became eerily prophetic when MLK was shot a few months after the film was done shooting.
Or about how after they shot the film the dead literally rose from their graves - a tornado hit the graveyard that's in the film, and lifted hundreds of bodies out of the ground!
Or about how the filmmakers accidentally lost their copyright and the film entered the public domain because they changed the title at the last minute and they forgot to put a copyright notice on the new title card.
Or about...no, okay, I've been hacking away at this thing for a long time and I think it's time to put this thing to bed and get some sleep before I turn into the living dead myself.
But here's the thought I want to leave you with: as bleak and depressing as the film is, to me, there's something wonderfully heartwarming about it too, just because of how it was made. I've been reading a behind the Night of the Living Dead Filmbook and I can't help but grin when I read about the meeting where Romero and his friends nervously, giddily, finally decided to throw caution to the wind and follow their long-head dream of making a movie, even though they thought it was crazy, even though they barely had 2 nickels to rub together.
Reading stuff like that makes you go: man, I could make a movie too!
And you can! It's way easier to make a movie now than it was then. That phone in your pocket? It's a great video camera. Your laptop? It has a free movie editor built right in. What about distribution? Upload it to to Youtube - bam - free distribution. You can do tons of cool stuff for not much money.
How much do you think it cost me to make that silly fan poster up there? The main thing it cost me was my dignity, when the grocer at the check out line pointed to the New York Post and People magazine on the conveyer and asked if they were mine, and I had to sheepishly admit that they were.
Life may be bleak, brutal and meaningless, and death may be inextricably shambling toward us, but that doesn't mean we can't follow our dreams.
Posts
I think verisimilitude precludes anything that sweeping from happening at the end. The film takes place over a very short (though undefined) amount of time, no more than a few months. Bloom doesn't know thing one about the news industry when he first starts out, and at the film's opening he's just a petty thief and conman. In a few months, he becomes a producer at a news station and starts his own enterprise with multiple employees and vans; that's a pretty sharp rise for a guy whose only skill is being manipulative. If we were to see Leo Bloom in a few years from now, it wouldn't surprise me a bit to see him as the head of the news station or in a prominent role with CNN or network TV.
Anyway, @Thomamelas put me down at the end of the list for Chronicle and I'll do a write-up. Been thinking of doing something about it anyway, so I figure wtf. But I'll need a bit of time.
alright, I'm doing eXistenZ @Thomamelas and if Netflix takes that from me, fuck it, Human Centipede
I'd pay money for the bolded.
And to be on topic, I have six more days of vacation left and have been meaning to get in on at least the discussion in one of these threads for awhile (doubt I'd be up for a write up this go round) so I plan on hitting at least all 6 of the films done so far over the next few days. Will post my thoughts as I process them, tomorrow I believe I'll start with Nightcrawler.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
Human Centipede series triple bill or you are just chickening out.
I'm legit pretty poor at the moment, so, Will Review Movies For $$
I wouldn't make poor Thomamelas watch 'em though, that's just cruel.
2011, directed by Tomas Alfredson
http://www.netflix.com/title/70202128
The room-within-a-room is situated on an upper floor, its bulkhead-like walls surrounded on all sides by open-plan office and rows of secretaries’ desks. Passing through the thick door that leads inside, the room is small - maybe twenty-five feet long by twelve feet wide - and dominated by a long, mirror-polished boardroom table flanked by rows of small, uncomfortable-looking chairs and a lone, slightly-larger chair at the narrow end opposite the door. The room has the ugliness of pure function; exposed, baby-food-colored soundproofing covers every inch of the inner surfaces of the walls, and the sole concessions to human aesthetics or comfort are an antique brass timepiece, its workings exposed, and a decanter of brandy sitting on the table. A single matte-black rotary phone perches on one corner of the table like an intruder.
This is the heart of the Circus, the center of British intelligence in the 1970s, and though the room only appears three times in the film - once at the very beginning, once in the middle, and once at the end - it is in some ways also the central feature of the film, and tells us in a clear visual language what to expect: a spy movie stripped of all surfaces, the workings exposed, a story where the most important things that happen are conversations over drink, and the deadliest hi-tech spy gadget is a telephone.
The head of the Circus is Control (John Hurt), and he shares this table with the five most senior men in the service: Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), an impatient, overbearing Scotsman who wants to overhaul and modernize the service; thoughtful, charismatic Oxford graduate and head of European operations Bill Haydon (Colin Firth); Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds), a hard-bitten war veteran; the nervous European social climber and head of the technical services division Toby Esterhase (David Dencik), and, lastly, Control’s trusty second in command, the silent, watchful George Smiley (Gary Oldman).
Control knows, or thinks he knows, that one of these men is a spy, passing along information from the highest levels of British intelligence straight to “Karla” - the code name for the anonymous head of the KGB. A high-ranking Hungarian general is offering to defect to the West and reveal the name of Karla’s mole, so Control dispatches trusted agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) to Budapest to meet the general and get the name.
Things go terribly wrong, though, and the agent is shot, creating an international spectacle. Control and Smiley are forced to take early retirement, and Percy Alleline takes over the Circus, armed with his new top-secret intelligence program code named WITCHCRAFT - a mole at the top of the KGB, feeding information back to London.
Months pass. Control dies of drink and disgrace, and Smiley settles in for a restless, discontented retirement with his somewhat estranged wife. But then he receives a desperate phone call from a missing Circus agent - long-gone and presumed rogue - named Ricky Tarr (Tom Hardy), claiming that Control was right all along, and there really is a double agent at the top of the Circus. But is Tarr telling the truth, or have his Soviet masters sent him to disrupt Operation WITCHCRAFT? Who is playing whom? Smiley recruits rookie agent Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch) and slowly, methodically, and with infinite patience sets about his own private investigation, and that, twenty minutes in, is when Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy really starts.
The movie is based on the classic novel by John le Carré, pen name of David Cornwell, who really did work for the SIS during the 1950s and 1960s before writing such novels as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Tailor of Panama, and The Constant Gardener, and in an era where James Bond and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. dominated our conception of the spy trade, le Carré made his name by trading in verisimilitude, depicting intelligence work as hard, dull, fraught with office politics, and deeply unglamorous.
Le Carré’s stories have been adapted many times before - including a very well-regarded 1980 miniseries of this story starring Alec Guinness as Smiley - but director Tomas Alfredson gives what is perhaps the best translation of the le Carré style to film, letting his camera linger over pitted, pockmarked streets, peeling wallpaper, cracked glass, nicotine stains, and bits of period-specific tastelessness (the mutton-chops, the combovers, the jackets the color of strained carrots). The visual world of the film feels like a place where the wounds of war have just barely scabbed over, where oily rain falls endlessly from grey skies and where the rare moment of warmth and comfort is found almost exclusively in memory rather than the present.
Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman as Smiley.
Into this cold place steps George Smiley, a man whose own coldness seems almost a match for it. Smiley is a man of few words in book and TV series alike, and Oldman pares him back still further, reducing much of his communication to the barest flicker of voice and gesture - a gaze from beneath half-lidded eyes, a minute adjustment of the eyeglasses. A gentle clearing of the throat. In many ways, what drives him, and what’s on his mind from moment to moment, are as much a mystery as the international intrigue he’s been charged to solve.
But that mystery is gradually solved as we watch, and it’s an enormous pleasure, and the larger mystery is solved too, and that too is an enormous pleasure. That’s the witchcraft that Alfredson and his cast have woven: this is a story about cold people set in a bleak world that is not itself entirely cold and bleak.
The movie does ask you to pay attention. Important names and plot facts are told to you - the movie plays fair - but they’re told to you one time and once only. But you’ll be fine if you just do what Gary Oldman does here: lean in. Speak softly. Watch everything. It’s a puzzle both intellectual and emotional that ramps upward in intensity as it progresses and rewards our patience with a climax that feels genuinely explosive and cathartic despite featuring no explosions and one single, solitary gunshot.
The movie is, I think, exemplified by the shot of the fly in the car. Three men in a car, shot from behind, as the car is being driven somewhere. One man swats at the fly with strong, clipped movements, one wafts airily, and the other calmly observes the fly, and then opens the window and allows it to leave. Three pieces of character development in a single shot with no dialogue and no faces. Glorious.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
But it really is great. It's a dream cast - Oldman, Hurt, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Tom Hardy, and Benedict Cumberbatch all in the same movie?! - and even the people with only one scene manage to really light up the screen for their brief stay.
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, especially in retrospect when I thought back and "Wait, did I just watch a bunch of British guys in office rooms just talking?"
EDIT: Also, this story amused me. Gary Oldman had to hire a voice coach to "relearn" an English accent for this movie.
An upgrade!
Even if I like Three Days of the Condor, TTSS is sublime. It's like Joubert became an entire movie.
I'm not sure if it's the one you are talking about but the scene where Cumberbatch has to break off his relationship is amazing. It's well acted, well shot and just so heartwrentching and does it all with so little.
Even better, IIRC it's a bee, not a fly, that's come along with them after they pick up the retired guy who in his retirement was an amateur beekeeper. Layers!
My favorite of the nominees is probably The Tree of Life, my favorite movie from that year is probably Melancholia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/84th_Academy_Awards
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
It was really enjoyable, I would even say savory, in the way only a slow but skillful movie can be. I think the aforementioned bee scene was exemplary, and Peter's breakup, but I was also struck by the scenes of violence: very brief, but very bright, at least in contrast to the rest of the movie. Small red spatters punctuating a huge and life-altering or -ending event for one or two people involved, but presented matter-of-fact with a calm indication: here, and here, and here.
I kind of wish I'd read up on it beforehand, because I have a very Primer feeling that I'll need to watch it again sometime while keeping an eye out for more details.
Two minor notes: 1) when the captions say the general's friend should turn up any minute, he actually says I can take you to him now, 2) Colin Firth's Hungarian accent is ridiculous but all the others were quite good.
David Cronenberg's eXistenZ came out in 1999, but with the advent of the Oculus, augmented reality, and the gamification of modern life, the film is relevant once more and will only get more relevant as these technological and social trends continue--the way The Fly will be become relevant once we invent teleportation and the question of what to do with Brundleflies becomes an important political issue, and the way Videodrome will become relevant as soon as we invent the VHS.
I chose this film somewhat reluctantly from Netflix's Instant library because I wanted to do a horror film for October, and I didn't remember eXistenZ being scary. Upon a rewatch, however, I realized that that's not at all what it's going for. The film wants nothing less to shake your confidence in your own reality. The dominant emotions are uneasiness, as the film carefully orchestrates technique to refuse you the sense that you fully understand what is happening and why, and dread, as the film's spiral narrative structure brings you again and again to a moment of betrayal, denouncement, and assassination. Like the score, the plot is always descending but never arriving, forever walking down the Penrose steps.
The story begins on level one of the reality staircase, a landing to which it will return: Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is introduced at a unique video game testing event, the unveiling of a virtual reality game called eXistenZ ("Small 'E', capital 'X', capital 'Z'. It's new, it's from Antenna Research, and it's here... right now."). eXistenZ and games like it are downloaded from fleshy, bulbous, organic "game pods" directly into the user's spinal through "bioports." (Microsoft take note.) These games are enormously popular, and the ability to truly be someone else for a while is a transcendental, almost spiritual experience to some people. (A gas station attendant argues at one point that thanks to these games he is now only a gas station attendant "on the most pathetic level of reality.") As the top creative in the industry, Geller is revered, more saint than celebrity, and it's fitting that this test takes place in a church. But some in this society, Realists, believe that the ubiquity of perfect simulation damages the human connection to reality, and are willing to use violence to further their cause--after sneaking a weapon into the test through security, one of them attempts to assassinate "the demonness Allegra Geller", and soon Allegra is on the run with Antenna Research marketing trainee Ted Pikul (Jude Law), seeking a place to hide from her enemies and a way to test the integrity of eXistenZ.
David Cronenberg has a long and fascinating filmography as one of the finest horror directors alive (although he seems to have given that up in the past decade in favor of thrillers and psychological dramas). A true auteur, his obsessions are consistent across decades: body horror, psychology, technology, sex, the translation of emotions into physical (often surreal) form. eXistenZ may be his most thematically rigorous work; every aspect of its creation is carefully aimed at proving that reality (or at least cinematic reality) is indistinguishable from a perfect simulation of reality, and all of Cronenberg's lifelong interests are aligned to that purpose. You have body horror and the vaginal metaphor in Ted's bioport (which Allegra explicitly treats like a sexual orifice she'd just love to get her probe into) and his fear of it getting infected; you have the mixture of the biological and the technological in the recurring bone-gun and the game pods (which are living, breathing, pulsing creatures that one operates by rubbing and stroking--kind of the way you turn on a PS4, actually); you have the meta-perspective of the film continually evaluating its own entertainment value ("You know, my accent in the game was so thick that I could hardly understand myself"); and then the psychological headtrip not just of confusing reality and simulation but the way both become expressive of the emotions, concerns, and sentiments of the players involved--just as a film inevitably takes on the personality and interests of its creator.
What's most fascinating about the film is the way it uses the sci-fi notion of advanced virtual reality gaming to comment on itself, not only through philosophical asides and the confusion of our newbie perspective character Ted, but by running this semi-satirical vision of the future through multiple variations, each of which is an unknown number of steps away from reality. The technology shifts on each level to entirely new designs the reflect the same mix of organics and electronics, and each sequence takes on a tour of a new aspect of the social ramifications, from video game repair techs who act more like veterinarians to the "factory" where gamepods are constructed from mutated amphibians to a whole range of zealots, adherents, spies, and corporatists, each reacting in different ways to the fundamental feeling which Ted describes of perfect virtual reality: "I'm feeling a little disconnected from my real life. I'm kinda losing touch with the texture of it. You know what I mean? I actually think there is an element of psychosis involved here."
It's not just the characters who lose their ability to distinguish reality from simulation; we the viewer have a much more difficult task, to distinguish one level of simulation from another. This is all just a movie, but which part is the movie and which part the game within the movie and which part the game within the game within the...? Cronenberg obfuscates the truth by filming the ostensibly real segments in a manner less real than the ostensibly false segments. An early driving scene, for instance, is supposedly reality but makes heavy use of obvious rear projection (an outdated technique in which driving scenes are simulated by placing a car on a soundstage in front of a screen onto which is projected a shot of the moving road); we're distracted, if we notice, or simply unnerved, so that it's hard to believe in the plot. In contrast, later sequences we're told take place in the game feature much more elaborate production design, lots of extras, real stunts and fire/explosion effects--all elements that are achieved practically, and thus are more "real" from the perspective of evaluating a film's production. Other techniques align all scenes across the film as feeling the same, whether we're told they're real or not, from the plain, even lighting schemes ("real") to the odd, off-kilter performances ("unreal"). Elements that would otherwise seem to be flaws are probably deliberate attempts to confuse and mislead, like the way Jude Law is fundamentally miscast--no matter who he is supposed to be here, he never seems to quite fit the part.
And the plot moves forward like a video game no matter what's happening (a video game that often resembles those by David Cage, or Bioware RPGs, or the new Deus Ex). Character interactions are portrayed like puzzles (say the right thing to trigger the next sequence, or convince them you're "friendly"), environments are presented structurally like video game levels with their own rules and objectives, and Allegra and Ted find themselves compelled to take those actions which will move the story along, even if those actions are irrational. At one point Ted hits pause, ascending to what is apparently reality--only Allegra and Ted immediately start making out, something she previously characterized as in-game behavior meant as a cheap ploy for audience interest. It's possible that the "real" game doesn't even have a pause function, that there is no real way to tell what's truly happening. The only thing for sure is that the game is never over, and you've already lost. Death to eXistenZ. Long live the new flesh--whatever that flesh may be.
what!
what!
How is this even possible, the movie's in the public domain!
(edit: but looks it is on the internet archive and plenty of other places, which should be legal, because, again, public domain)
....I feel like I’ve heard this sentence a lot recently. And I get it. Maybe in the past you used to love zombies, but now you’ve seen too many mediocre, derivative, zombie movies. Your heart’s been callously ripped out of your chest and eaten too many times - not to mention your liver, intestines, and spleen – and you’re afraid to love again.
But now it’s time.
Turn down the lights. Pull up the covers. And maybe don’t sit so close to that window.
It’s time to fall in love with zombies all over again.
It’s time to watch one of the greatest horror movies of all time.
It’s time for...
For some reason the movie has been pulled from Netflix, but luckily it’s in the public domain and pretty easy to find elsewhere. Here it is on archive.org!
I specifically recommend the remastered HD version. And yes, don’t worry - the 4:3 aspect ratio is correct. And no, you are not allowed to watch the widescreen version that's also on there. The film was shot in 4:3 and you're gonna watch it in 4:3, or so help me...
One thing I love about this movie is how it can sneak up on people. I remember as a teenager I showed it to a friend – and he wasn’t the watching old black and white movies type, or the watching horror movies type, so I had to cajole him a bit to get him to watch this thing.
It was one of those situations where you’re all excited – not only are you showing a friend one of your favorite movies, but you’re watching it at the exact perfect time. It’s a brisk autumn day around Halloween, and the sun is setting…so you’re going to be watching the daylight scenes in daylight, and the night scenes at night….
“Oh boy,” you say. “This movie is so great, you’re gonna love it!”
And meanwhile your level of enthusiasm is, you know, not exactly matched by your friend. “Sigggh, fine I guess, let’s watch it”.
And then as you’re watching the movie he’s being a bit of a spoilsport – trying laugh at it and make fun of it. “Ohoho they think this bumbling old guy is scary? What a joke!”
But then, thankfully, as the tension in the movie heated up, he stops talking…
And by the end, to your delight, he is quaking.
After the movie was over he told me he couldn’t sleep in our guest room.
“Why?” I asked.
“Too many windows, man!”
The movie sneaks up on you like a shuffling, bumbling zombie.
It seems innocuous until it’s ripping out your throat.
I think part of the appeal of the zombie – well, some flavors of zombie – is that a single zombie often isn’t really that much of a threat on its own. Sure, if you’re not careful, a singular zombie can get the jump on you – but overall they aren’t that smart or that fast, and a single zombie is easily dealt with. Zombies are scary not because they’re individually scary but because there’s an infinite amount of them, and no matter what you do they just keep coming.
Perhaps you can think of zombies as a personification of death – not just the walking dead, but death walking. Death is easy to laugh off, but always slowly shuffling toward you. Death isn’t evil, and death isn’t smart or conniving, and, sure, you can evade Death, for awhile…
…but sooner, or later, Death always gets you.
I also think a big part of the appeal of NotLD and other apocalyptic media is it taps into a deep fear that this whole civilization thing is a house of cards that's going to come crashing down. Civilization is a pretty recent invention, after all. Are we sure it's not just a fad? Just flip on the news and listen to all that stuff about war and refugees and global warming and mass murder...
Deep down, I think we're all scared we're going to go right back to where we started - cavemen with torches, huddled in the dark, assaulted and afraid.
It’s hard to overstate the influence of Night of the Living Dead.
It is, first of all, the first modern zombie movie.
Now, it’s true that it’s not the first movie to have creatures rise from the dead. It’s not even the first movie to use the word “zombie”. In fact, if you notice, the movie doesn’t use the word zombie at all! The term, which comes from Haitian voodoo, was first used in a Bela Lugosi movie called White Zombie. But in that movie, and other early “zombie” films, the zombies are brainwashed henchmen of an evil magician. They’re not really modern zombies.
…It’s also true that the film’s story is apparently heavily inspired by the book I Am Legend (to the point that the author of the book apparently quipped, about the movie: “ ‘Homage’ means I get to steal you work.”) I actually haven’t read the book or seen any of the movie adaptations (I know! I’ll get around to it), but as I understand it, the average person would be more likely to call I Am Legend a (spoilers?) vampire story, rather than a zombie story.
Anyway, Night of the Living Dead is the first movie that has what we think of when we think of “zombies” – rotting, shambling (well, now sometimes running) reainamated corpses that eat the flesh of the living, and that can only be killed by destroying the brain. NotLD is the ancestor of so much zombie media – plenty bad, no doubt, but plenty good, too. Without this movie we wouldn’t have Resident Evil or The Last of Us or The Walking Dead or 28 Days Later or Shaun of the Dead, etc.
Perhaps more important than NotLD's status as the first modern zombie film, though, is the fact that it's an early example of a successful indie movie made on a shoestring budget. It was made for a paltry $100,000...and then made $30 million at the box office. Back in the 1960s this was friggen unheard of. And it was made in Pittsburgh to boot - “the armpit of the world” - far away from Hollywood or even New York City.
And then, on top of that, apparently it was the first ‘cult’ film, with enthusiastic midnight screenings.
This movie paved the way for other successful indie/cult/transgressive/low budget films and filmmakers - Eraserhead and The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Slacker and Blood Simple and Holy Mountain and Evil Dead and Hedwig and the Angry Itch and The Blair Witch Project and Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers and Spike Lee and Kevin Smith and Richard Linklater and John Waters and Todd Solondz and Peter Jackson all owe a debt to George Romero and his zombies.
NotLD is influential, too, in its use of violence and gore – I remember Romero saying, in the Dawn of the Dead DVD commentary track, that movies usually to tastefully cut away when something violent happens, and his idea was, well, what if we don’t do that?
There’s a direct line between Romero and the kind of brutal, frank violence you see in, say The Godfather, or Taxi Driver, or Kill Bill, or a million other films.
No filmmaker is ever gonna say, "what I really need is less money". If a studio offers a director $20 million to make a film, no one is going to come back with: "$10 million and that's my final offer!"
...and yet this movie isn't just good in spite of being low budget, it's good, in part, because it's low budget.
Actually, its low budgetness is so intwined with the film that you can't really even ask what it would be like if they had a bunch of money to work with - because this movie wouldn't even exist. The whole concept for the movie came from the filmmakers trying to think up a good concept that wouldn't cost much money to make.
Plus, the fact that the film cost so little and was largely self-financed gave the filmmakers more creative control than they otherwise would have. The more money people give you, the more hands you have in your pot.
It's easy to imagine hand-wringing execs nixing the film's brutal violence and unhappy ending and morally ambiguous characters. Never mind that in an era where horrific images and stories were pouring in from Vietnam, the tameness of Hollywood was probably starting to feel a little quaint. And you can just imagine execs fretting about the black lead - "oh, you don't want to scare off white audiences" - never mind that in the era of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement the lily-whitness of Hollywood was probably starting to feel quaint, as well.
The lack of money helped in other ways too. For example, the filmmakers wanted to shoot in color, but ultimately shot in black in white because that's what they could afford. But black and white fits the film perfectly! It gives it the feel of news footage. It's also easy to imagine color making the gore look faker and giving the whole film feel less bleak.
Also the fact that the film largely takes place in one location was probably influenced by the budget - and that fact gives the film a wonderful feeling of claustrophobia.
Julie Taymor said, regarding her all-black Broadway production of The Lion King, that the show wasn't about race, and yet it was. And you can say the same thing about Night of the Living Dead. Ben isn't the first ever black protagonist in a film - Sidney Poitier was already a big star. But at that time, if a film was going to have a black protagonist, it was usually going to explicitly about race relations. See: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and The Defiant Ones. And then on top of that, black protagonists were really rare. I mean here's a list of the top grossing films of 1968:
Good year for film! (2001 is probably my favorite movie of all time.) But, glancing through the films of that list, I'm not seeing major black characters in any of the films, except Night of the Living Dead. In spite of the civil rights movement that was going on, in spite of the large percentage of the population that was black, Hollywood was awkwardly white.
One interesting thing about the movie is that Ben actually wasn't written as black - the filmmakers thought of the character as a white, uneducated truck driver. Duane Jones just happened to be the best actor among the filmmakers' circle of friends so they hired him, and they didn't change the story or add any dialogue about the character being black. (But Duane Jones did change his dialogue so the character talked more like the actor did in real life and sounded more educated. For example, the original script has Ben say: "Ahm outa gas. Them pumps over there is locked." But in the movie he says: "The truck is out of gas. The pump out here is locked.")
The way that Ben went from white to black is a bit like what happened with Ripley from Alien, who famously was originally conceived as male, but then the filmmakers decided the part should be a woman and didn't change any of the dialogue.
Anyway, it's interesting how Ben's race informs our interpretation of the film, even though Ben wasn't conceived as black. For example, even though the film ended the same way when he was white, it's hard not to think - would he still have been shot, if he was white? I mean did centuries of the dehumanization of black people make it easier for the shooter to see Ben as non-human? And does Ben's race have anything to do with how much Harry buts heads with him - is Harry racist?
Is this film about Vietnam? Again, it is and it isn't. George Romero and the other filmmakers like to say that they weren't really trying to be allegorical or make any political statement - but every good work of art reflects its time. And it's pretty hard not to see some Vietnam parallels in a movie where the characters are embroiled in a hopeless, inescapable, violent nightmare with no help from an ineffectual government.
John Russo, the film's co-writer, at one point took a dim view of people who tried to read deep meanings into the film, saying: "A lot of the critics have jumped off the deep end in likening the ghouls to the silent majority and finding all sorts of implications that none of us ever intended....they're full of shit."
But regardless of what the film's about or isn't about or what was intended or not intended - I think the reason Romero's Dead films have endured for so long is that they do feel like they're about something. They feel like they have something to say. There's a reason you come out of them wanting to talk about Vietnam and race and consumerism and the media and government and war and civilization, and meanwhile when you come out of one of the Saw movies, there doesn't seem to be much to say...except maybe 'oh man that one death trap was totally brutal man'
One thing I love about this movie is how the characters feel like real people - the way Ben starts to angrily snap at Barbara when she's being hysterical, then quickly composes himself and starts talking to her sympathetically. The way when, after several people die in a senseless, preventable, accident, he tries to remain stoic but you can see how shaken he is.
And another thing I love is how this movie doesn't really have heroes, or villains. Everyone's human, nobody's a saint or a mustache twirler. Early on in the film there's an argument between Harry and Ben about whether it's better to help someone in need or look out for #1:
Harry: "We lock up into a safe place, and you're telling us that we gotta come up here and risk our lives just because somebody might need help, huh?"
Ben: "Yeah, something like that."
In that scene, it seems like the film is positioning Ben as the heroic and noble character, and Harry as the selfish asshole character. And yet, the film, to its credit, refuses to delineate the characters so neatly. Ben is often noble and heroic, and yet early on he hits a woman. Later, he shoots a scared, unarmed man in cold blood. And while Harry is often a prick, sometimes he can be surprisingly cooperative, and surprisingly human.
In a lesser film, when Harry is recruited to help on the mission to retrieve the truck, the film would've had him refuse or sabotage things or whatever, but instead he performs as he's supposed to. And in the scene where Ben shoots Harry, in a lesser film Ben would've been forced to shoot him - Harry would've been trying to kill Ben - it would have been self defense. Instead, the film does something much more interesting and tears you in two directions at once: it makes you hate Harry, it makes you relish Ben killing him, and then, at the same time, it makes you feel guilty that you wanted that, and it makes you realize that ultimately, shooting Harry was wrong.
Nobody's a hero. Nobody's a villain.
Even the zombies aren't villains - not really. They're too stupid to be villains. They aren't malicious. They're just doing what they're programed to. And in later films they get more human and more sympathetic - in Day of the Dead, Bub the zombie is absolutely the most interesting and sympathetic character.
The militia that shoots Ben aren't cackling villains, either. They're just trying to do their jobs. They just made a mistake.
I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of this movie. I could keep talking forever. I haven't mentioned the wonderful cinematography - note how much energy it has - note how the film often puts objects between the camera and the people, to give a sense of claustrophobia - note how it shoots at low and odd angles. Or how the black and white, often hand-held, guerilla filming style gives the film a wonderful sense of documentary realism.
I haven't talked about this interesting Roger Ebert review of the movie, where he talks about how appalled he was by how much the movie was horrifying kids: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-night-of-the-living-dead-1968 (I bet a lot of those crying kids went on to be lifelong fans of the movie. I know I often wind up loving stuff that traumatized me as a kid!)
I haven't talked about how the film became eerily prophetic when MLK was shot a few months after the film was done shooting.
Or about how after they shot the film the dead literally rose from their graves - a tornado hit the graveyard that's in the film, and lifted hundreds of bodies out of the ground!
Or about how the filmmakers accidentally lost their copyright and the film entered the public domain because they changed the title at the last minute and they forgot to put a copyright notice on the new title card.
Or about...no, okay, I've been hacking away at this thing for a long time and I think it's time to put this thing to bed and get some sleep before I turn into the living dead myself.
But here's the thought I want to leave you with: as bleak and depressing as the film is, to me, there's something wonderfully heartwarming about it too, just because of how it was made. I've been reading a behind the Night of the Living Dead Filmbook and I can't help but grin when I read about the meeting where Romero and his friends nervously, giddily, finally decided to throw caution to the wind and follow their long-head dream of making a movie, even though they thought it was crazy, even though they barely had 2 nickels to rub together.
Reading stuff like that makes you go: man, I could make a movie too!
And you can! It's way easier to make a movie now than it was then. That phone in your pocket? It's a great video camera. Your laptop? It has a free movie editor built right in. What about distribution? Upload it to to Youtube - bam - free distribution. You can do tons of cool stuff for not much money.
How much do you think it cost me to make that silly fan poster up there? The main thing it cost me was my dignity, when the grocer at the check out line pointed to the New York Post and People magazine on the conveyer and asked if they were mine, and I had to sheepishly admit that they were.
Life may be bleak, brutal and meaningless, and death may be inextricably shambling toward us, but that doesn't mean we can't follow our dreams.
You only live once.
Unless you come back to life as a zombie.
(fan art by Killian Eng)