I've been trying to decide if I want to see Zombieland or if I want to be a zombie-snob and insist that the golden age of the undead is behind us (by "golden age" I mean "time of troubles"). Last week Tor.com ran an interview with the director, praising the movie more than I had anticipated, and quoting him as saying "Well, I really think the thing that informed it most was my music video background." Hm. I have yet to decide how I feel about that. We can all name some directors who do have done innovative work in both music videos and feature length films: Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry, etc. I wasn't sure, however, what Ruben Fleisher's "background" entails. So, in the spirit of research, If found the following:
1. Fleisher is responsible for a number of commercials, including one of those creepy Burger King ads in which a plastic-faced king delivers someone a whopper on a silver platter. Probably a good history for someone interested in the consumer culture tendency to slap -land to the end of something and start selling tee shirts. Also, I think the title Zombieland is funnier than I gave it credit for. It seems to me a little bit more honest than Land of the Dead. As much as Romero may have wanted to slam consumer culture, zombies are the new franchise, and, frankly, Romero's cultural critique is about as plastic and marketable as counter-culture thinking gets.*
2. Fleisher's music videos are extremely concerned with vintage and kitsch, drawing extensively on American pop culture. "Vintage" here especially means old AV technology (hand-held cameras, manual focus, boom boxes etc.), and pulp media (print ad culture, the formulaic music videos of the 60s, cartoon-y reinterpretations of late-80s/early 90s street culture):
3. Fleisher has some short videos that seem to be in response to army ads, and which are pretty sarcastic about the military. That seems good for mocking the extreme survivalist bent of a lot of zombie movies. Bad for those sort of serious about post-apocalyptic survival. Which, I mean, isn't us obviously.
4. He says he grew up in DC, but I'd bet $10 he grew up in northern Virginia.
5. He's uses a lot of color. I like that.
So I think he's the perfect person to make a movie like Zombieland, I'm just not sure I'm the perfect person to like it. I like the meta-media stuff he does in his videos, but I don't always like how clever his videos think they are. I'm afraid Zombieland will be the sensory-overload answer to Shaun of the Dead--less funny and less watchable. I fear Fleisher will become another director to overlook the lesson of Romero: the yammering, shopping masses are funny until they vote you their beloved leader.
All that said, I don't normally pre-review, and I'm looking forward to seeing how solid my predictions are. I will see it, and trusting Tor I've decided to see it in good faith.
*I concede, there are some possible exceptions.
4 comments:
First of all, I'm very much in favor of (p-)reviewing movies. Jump the gun! Pass judgment! Judge a book by its cover!
Second, I've sort of been assuming that people who like Zombieland would be people who don't like zombie movies. Which, okay, that's fine.
I do like that Jesse Eisenberg went from Adventureland to Zombieland so quickly. I hope his next movie is I'm-done-playing-the-same-exact-pensive-teenager-land.
Can we start a sister blog in which we judge books by their covers? And never read them.
Does it help your argument if I admit to wanting to see this film?
I don't want to commit to an argument, so let's just say we'll see this film.
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