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Giving you something to read on the toilet since 2009.

"The mistake lies in seeing debate and discussion as secondary to the recovery of meaning. Rather, we should see them as primary: art and literature do not exist to be understood or appreciated, but to be discussed and argued over, to function as a focus for social dialogue. The discourse of literary or art criticism is not to recover meaning, but to create and contest it. Our primal scene should not be the solitary figure in the dark of the cinema but the group of friends arguing afterwards in the pub."
-Don Fowler (1996) "Even Better Than The Real Thing"

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Zombieland - Timothy Johnson


The cold months of the year are always more suitable for horror films:Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Ring and all six Saw films were released in the month October. However, the recent surge in zombie and post-apocalypse films cannot even be explained away by statistics: Pontypool, The Road, 9, The Book of Eli, and now Zombieland.If anyone can think of a reason why we are becoming more obsessed with the end of the world, please tell me. Could it be the climate change discourse?
The fact that films about the undead don't have to be scary has already been proven by Shaun of the Dead. As I only watched the latter a few weeks ago and did not like it, I had serious doubts whether I could enjoyZombieland. For all I knew, a spin-off of a mediocre movie would have to be even less funny. I was wrong. It is 81 minutes (that go by like 18) of laugh-out loud slapstick comedy. While killing zombies in every conceivable way, Woody Harrelson reminds us of how charming a Texas dialect can be - two years after No Country for Old Men made me want to talk like a backwater yokel.
The story is gripping, ingenious - and complete hogwash. A human adapted form of mad cow disease has spread throughout the planet and turned everyone into zombies. These can run pretty fast (considering they are half-dead) but also pretty dumb so it is easy to kill them with a baseball bat, banjo or -in one instance- a piano. We watch Woody Harrelson as he travels with three kids, the last survivors, through the post-apocalyptic USA. Two sisters are looking for an amusement park, because the younger one "has missed out on youth" and a teenage boy, Columbus, is looking for possibly surviving family members. What Tallahassee (Harrelson) is looking for we aren't so sure of, but it appears to be a Twinky. I shouldn't be telling you this because, well, the story is just not that important. What is important is that there are far more and better laughs than the trailer promises, something films like Men who stare at Goats could learn from. There are amazing (really,really-)slow-motion shots that look more like high-resolution photographs. The soundtrack is so appropriate that at times I caught myself headbanging in my seat to the tunes of Metallica, The Raconteurs and Van Halen. The film also makes you feel like you know the characters really well after only a few minutes. This is vital for a comedy because half the time we aren't laughing about the exact words said, but about the way they relate to the character who mouthed them. Zombieland even gets away with some cheesiness at the end that we are willing to forgive because it doesn't overdo it and -let's face it- is still a Hollywood film. Besides, director Ruben Fleischer makes up for this cheesiness by ensuring that truckloads of artificial blood are shed.
When asked about the film, Harrelson declared that in real life he doesn't carry guns, drive humvees AND does not like Twinkies. Be that as it may,Zombieland takes us back to his trigger-happy days of Natural Born Killers, appeals to action, comedy and horror fans alike and to me is the comedy film of the year.

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