Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Buddhist Zombie movies
Saying you like Zombie movies for the political subtext is like saying you buy Playboy for the articles--except of course Playboy does have good articles. (Or at least it used to. I have not seen one for a while.)
Dawn of the Dead was a story about zombies eating people, but it is not accident that the survivors are holed up in a Mall. There they create a life for themselves, based on having the whole mall at their disposal. The interesting thing is that they choose not to sustain that life, and they risk life and limb to get somewhere "real."
28 Days Later was a great movie, if you like those kinds of movies, but it seemed to lack the subtext. I am hoping that 28 Weeks Later will do a bit better in that department.
If Buddhism can be summed up in the Buddha's words, "I am awake," zombie movies create a pretty good subtext for how we sleep through our lives. In Shaun of the Dead, the zombies are pretty much the same before and after zombification. Ed just does not change much, except now he plays video games in the shed vs the sofa.
Just a few thoughts.
Dawn of the Dead was a story about zombies eating people, but it is not accident that the survivors are holed up in a Mall. There they create a life for themselves, based on having the whole mall at their disposal. The interesting thing is that they choose not to sustain that life, and they risk life and limb to get somewhere "real."
28 Days Later was a great movie, if you like those kinds of movies, but it seemed to lack the subtext. I am hoping that 28 Weeks Later will do a bit better in that department.
If Buddhism can be summed up in the Buddha's words, "I am awake," zombie movies create a pretty good subtext for how we sleep through our lives. In Shaun of the Dead, the zombies are pretty much the same before and after zombification. Ed just does not change much, except now he plays video games in the shed vs the sofa.
Just a few thoughts.
0
Comments
Palzang
One of my favorite movie scenes period is when Jim wakes up, and starts wandering around London. Between the music and the cinematography, it is breath taking.
I hope 28 Weeks Later is as good.
And I, too, hope 28 Weeks later is as good, or even better. I hope there isn't too much emphasis on the rage virus and more on what's going on with the survivors. There are so many interesting things you can do with characters in situations like these. I want to see something new and different from the old Lord of the Flies and Lost themes. There's more to be explored, unearthed about people in a near catastrophic situation like this.
When the remake of Dawn of the Dead appeared, my daughter reviewed it with two words and an interjection; "Running zombies--ugh!"
Call me a purist, but zombies are DEAD! They cannot run!
The scene referred to in the article was another of my favorite movie scenes--the zombies in the mall, mindless wandering around, much like how I feel everytime I go into a mall.
Again, to get back to the socio-political import of the undead, it is the slow creep of horror that makes zombie movies so scary for me. You can see it coming (much like climate change, or the war in Iraq) and you do small things to fight it, but in the end, the sheer volume can overwhelm you. And you know it is happening. And you cannot do anything about it. It looks so easy to evade, but in the end, you lose your soul, and become "the WALKING dead."
Ok, it is totally appropriate to tell me to get a life at this point.
(Which you really would do if you had heard me mediating an argument between two kids about what would happen if a vampires bit a zombie. What was scary was that they took my word as gospel on it. What was even more scary was that I believed in what I was saying.)