The Walking Dead

George Romero defined the zombie film. And in that he perhaps did his job too well.

Very few zombie movies, hell zombie works in any medium, have pushed past Romero’s films, either narratively, stylistically, or thematically. The greatest deviation from the text thus far being the staggering idea, “Well what if the zombies… were like… fast?”

Virtually all Zombie movies end at the same point, with the last vestiges of civilization crumbling and our remaining heroes (if any there be) running off into the wilderness. (Two major exceptions being Danny Boyle’s nominally happy ending to 28 Days Later. Which along with Shaun Of The Dead tell me that though Brits might be cynical about a lot things, their trust in their government's ability to handle an outbreak of zombies is absolute). And Romero’s own criminally underrated Land Of The Dead. Some would argue that Dawn Of the Dead qualifies, but the mall is so insular I don’t think it counts. Had the film followed the bikers, then sure.) Were they go from there and what happens next has not been a question filmmakers have been particularly interested in asking.

Even movies like 28 Weeks Later which pointedly take place in the aftermath of a zombie disaster seem more or less dedicated to taking things to square one.

In the word’s of Henry Jones Sr. “They leave just as they’re getting interesting.”

There is of course one major exception to this rule, which would be Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. The secret to Kirkman’s Zombie opus, now Frank Darabont’s as well, is that it’s not really about Zombies at all. Though it makes fantastic use of them they’re really just one hell of a macguffin. The book could be about anything that forces society to rebuild itself. One suspects that Kirkman could have written his book about the aftermath of a plague, or a war, or an alien invasion. It’s all about the interruption of societies continuity. And what happens afterwards.

Or as Kirkman himself so succinctly put it on the back of each Walking Dead trade.

“When is the last time any of us really worked to get something we wanted?

How Long as it been since any of us really Needed something that we wanted?

The world we knew is gone. The world of commerce and frivolous necessisty has been replaced by a world of survival and responsibility. In a matter of months society has crumbled. No government. No grocery stores. No mail. No cable TV. In a rule ruled by the dead we are forced to finally start living.”

That last line may be a bit on the nose. But there is simply no escaping the fact that Kirkman’s underlying message is that mankind would be much better off with a 99% of it’s trivial bullshit mercilessly and completely swept away.

And he makes a compelling case, despite the parade of horrors he’s shown.

Romero, who always tied his ghouls into specific aspects of social satire (Racism, Consumerism, Militarism, Neo Cons, Social Media Solipsism, the er Irish?) never came as close to obliterating the system in it’s totality.

This is in all fairness at least partially due to the fact that Romero had to tell his story in two hour chunks, while Kirkman has the luxury of at this point literally thousands and thousands of pages.

I’m certainly, not meaning to dig at Romero, who I admire immensely as a filmmaker, and not just because of his zombie pictures. And I certainly don’t think that Kirkman ever would have made Dead without Romero. All I’m saying is, that Kirkman, unlike just about every other person who has tackled the zombie in the past forty years, took the baton that Romero was waving and actually ran forward with it.

And if you haven’t experienced it yet, either in it's original form, or the Show which premiered on TCM last night. then brother you’re cheating no one but yourself.

The show begins, with a scene not in the book. With Rick our hero, wandering through the ruins of modern society, into what was apparently an attempt to set up a camp similar to our heroes. It’s that second tier that really makes it haunting. First one thing fails, then the response to it does. Then after a brilliant tease Rick is forced to shoot a little girl in the face. It should become clear at this point that “Fucking around.” is not on Frank Darabont’s list of things to do.

And indeed in no aspect of the production does Darabont fuck around. Everything from the naturalistic dialogue, to the genuine epic sweep of the visuals.




To the gore (mostly practical thank God). Indeed the gore made even me raise my eyebrows. Quick anecdote; a few weeks ago I was hanging out with at a friend's and we happened to watch Friday The 13th Part 3 on AMC, but quickly changed the channel, when it became clear that AMC was cutting out all of the gore gags. After watching Grimes literally stumble on a woman whose midsection is nothing but some vaguely recognizable lungs and intenstines, I can’t imagine why. This stuff would give Tom Savini nightmares.

(Zombies apparently don't fear the FCC)

Right now one of the big discussions going on, is the fact that TV is doing movies job. Jim Emerson has been a big proponent of this, and like with most of what Emerson writes I disagree.

TV is a serialized medium, and Movie's are for the most part not.

A long running film series, like say just for a point of example, Sam Raimi's Spiderman, is lucky to last 3 movies. Break it down, that movie tells "a story" over about seven hours, and five years.

Compare that to the average Television show that last five years. That show if you break it down to forty minutes an episode, twenty two episodes a year is going to have seventy three hours to tell its story. 



Now that is both a blessing and a curse, as even the greatest TV show is going to have some weak points (Anyone remember the "Cast Of The Sopranos argues with Indians about Columbus Day" episode?)

The grey area, it seems to me, comes on DVD. To take The Sopranos as the example again, there is no way you can tell me that David Chase didn't look at the extended multi episode dream sequence that opened Season 6 and say "Eh, It'll work on DVD." 

That's where I first saw it, and I think it worked pretty damn well, but people to this day still bitch about it because they saw it over the course of three weeks rather then three hours. 

My point is, there may not be a huge amount of difference in how TV and Film is made. But there is a HUGE amount of difference in how they are processed.

That being said, if anyone is taking advantage of the new found porousness between the mediums it’s Frank Darabont. Able to transfer his Television crew from The Shield to shoot the down and dirty The Mist and able to effortlessly give The Walking Dead a sense of cinematic grandeur. Right down to the Drew Struzan poster.

(C'mon, that's fucking cool)

Darabont makes plenty of smart moves in the adaptation. He’s able to take concepts Kirkman didn’t think about until later (such as the consequences of Gun Fire) and introduces them as the rules of the world from Day 1. At first I have to admit I was a bit worried that the first arc of Walking Dead would be too slim to sustain a season of television. After all Kirkman tells the story in just one hundred and forty pages. But comic books are tricky, it’s not enough to tell a story in the thousands of pages a long running series can get, you have to be able to tell a story every twenty four pages as well. What Darabont does is expand the story without really adding any extraneous filler material. Where Kirkman had to be ruthlessly concise Darabont can stretch out a little. Taking scenes like Rick’s escape from the hospital, characters like the man who saves Rick, and relationships like Rick’s with Shane, all almost throwaways in the book, and expands and deepens them. It’s like being able to glance at what happens just before and after the various panels. The Walking Dead stands as an example of adaptation that is damn near perfect.

I may not agree that Television is supplanting movies. But I will gladly agree that The Walking Dead is scary, better made, and more human then any of the pathetic offering we horror fans got this October.

If the show remains this good, and its source material has laid down an excellent road map to it doing just that (provided that they keep the prison to just one season) I think we’re looking at a serious classic of the genre.

Boardwalk Empire

How fitting, just the other day I announce my intentions to watch ever film Martin Scorsese ever made and in a Christmas in July bit of serendipity, a new one fell right into my lap.

Now yes, I know that Boardwalk Empire isn’t "really" a movie, it’s just a pilot for the new HBO series Scorsese is producing. About the empire of Nucky Thompson a city councilman and general “power behind the throne type.” Who found himself the perfect middleman between the gangster’s of New York and Chicago, and the vast thirsty market that was the Eastern Seaboard.

There are a few moments that unmistakably perform the business of setting things up for an ongoing series, most notably Michael K. William’s agonizingly brief appearance. And the digital backlot screams “high end TV” even though Scorsese makes it all magic hour dream light. But make no mistake bookended the opening and closing irises is a complete artistic statement in the way that something like “Mirror Mirror” just isn’t.

No matter how good or bad the rest of the series is (And I’m guessing it’s going to be pretty fucking grand) this stands both intricately connected and completely apart. A seventy three minute movie about a man staring responsibility in the face.

The film can be summed up with the contrast between two scenes. In the first, Steve Buscemi as Nucky Thompson, sits patiently in the audience of a woman’s temperance movement as a stereotypical old dowager reads a hysterical (in every sense) poem “Owed To Liquor.” Nucky gets up, relates an even more sanctimonious and shameless anecdote, then excuses himself from the proceedings, laughs off the dowagers, takes a hearty sip from his flask, and that night at the raucous party being thrown in celebration of Prohibition he lifts his glass and toasts, to “Well meaning morons.”

Nucky laughs. We laugh. It’s funny, Boardwalk Empire is perhaps the funniest thing that Scorsese has ever directed (“Stop calling me cowboy.”)

But later, Nucky is confronted by the poem, in much less cheerful circumstances. As he learns of the terrible consequences brought about by a half assed act of charity, furthered by an ill timed act of rage, and fueled by yes as ridiculous as the upright citizen brigade looks, his liquor. The one soft point we’re aware that Nucky has is exploited, terribly. And we know from the shattered look on Buscemi’s face, that no matter how terrible the fallout is it won’t erase the stain of his guilt.

We’re in Scorsese territory after all.

Oh and for the record, the fallout is fucking terrible.

This is the closest we’re every probably going to see to an NC-17 Scorsese film. Its bloody, its absolutely brutal, and it has so much sex and nudity in it that I think that every sitting member of the MPAA had a stroke just from this thing playing on the airwaves (if only we were that lucky).

Buscemi stands at the center of it, radiating his own brand of charisma, Scorsese surrounds him with great underused character actors. Including Michael Pitt, Kelly McDonald, Michael Shannon and most of all the great Stephen Graham, playing Al Capone with a mixture of the innocence of a mean little boy and the glee of a sociopath.

Scorsese fills it with set pieces that memorize with his trademark detail, including the obligatory LAT (Long ass tracking shot), two scenes of Buscemi peering through a storefront that have an almost Lynchian intensity, and a wash of mesmerizing period detail.

But all that stuff in a Scorsese film is just that. Detail.

What’s fuels each Scorsese film is that sense of responsibility, of yes Catholic Guilt. The film ends with the old age of the romanticized “Mustache Petes” being blown away (quite literally) to make room for the new tyros fed by the opportunity provided by prohibition. And Nucky. It’s doubtless that before the series ends, he will pay harshly because of that.

Consequences.

Mad Men and Rescue Me: The Great American Novels

(Yar here thar be spoilers! No seriously big ones. If you haven'ts seen these shows. Run.)



It is odd, but perhaps appropriate given our reputations as philistines, that the only place where people are bothering to try and write the great American novel anymore is on TV. This is a distinction of course from great novel’s written in America. I’m talking about works devoted to decoding The American character and what if anything, it means. The subject has never been of particular interest to the post modernists, and the few remaining modernists roaming the land are more concerned with writing stories about how they can no longer get their penises to stand up quite as easily as they once could.

That leaves your David Simons, with his sociopolitical vivesection that is The Wire (“I’m A Free Born Man Of The USA”) that leaves Chase with his head trip through our monstrous id that was The Sopranoes. And that leaves with Mad Men. Draper has as much of the American Character in him as Gatsby. He personifies the idea that it is not only the right of every American to reinvent himself in the image of his choosing, but his duty.

After all why be Dick Whitman, whoreson, dirt poor, and cowardly when you can be Don Draper, Atlas astride the world.

For those five of you who still don’t know, Mad Men follows the lives of several Ad Men working at a Madison avenue agency at the height of that particularly businesses’ prestige, power, and glamour. It’s a world of privilege, of three martini lunches, and secretaries to bang before heading home to the wife. But its also a world whose first cracks are beginning to show, and one that will come tumbling down in the tumult of the sixties.

I’m fascinated by the idea of America as an empire. Mostly because we so manifestly are, and yet so many American’s are so resolutely uncomfortable with that fact and try to deny it so all we end up doing is being an empire about as poorly as possible.

Mad Men portrays that one brief shining moment when it all seemed to come together. When the generation who lived through the great depression and defeated the Nazis, looked around and saw that they where all that was left. A time when American Exceptionalism did not seem at best delusional and at worse actively destructive. But right, self evident. It’s the Pax Romana the one brief moment that it all coalesced before destiny was corrupted by Nixon, Vietnam, over extension, and other acts of general idiocy.

Mad Men lays out this story with a depth of detail and a unity of vision that’s stunning. If the theme of the show is reinvention or self invention, it knows this from the opening frames, a title card giving the origin of the shows title, which is too good to spoil. It has moments of grace and beauty worthy of the great works of the last half century. One of my favorite moments in the show is the image of Don’s by turns fragile and surprisingly strong wife Betty, demurely blasting homing pigeons with a shotgun in her robe curlers and slippers, an image that could cap something by Salinger, Updike, or Heller.

With its fascinatingly human cast, intrigue plot, and weighty articulate themes Mad Men might end up being the most satisfying book I read all year.





Rescue Me, is also a show that’s steeped in history. Albietly accidentally. Rescue Me is the story of a house of firefighters reeling in the wake of 9/11. The thing that makes Rescue Me so shocking, is its raw immediacy, its frankly bizarre to see 9/11 treated as a current event. Its just a happy accident that the show began shooting within two years of the attacks, with 9/11 not ten years out and yet already thoroughly cocooned in history, Rescue Me captured something that could never be redone.

Part of what makes Rescue Me so fascinating, is how unabashedly fucked up they allow Leary to be. Sure he’s still Dennis Leary which means he gets to make a lot of sarcastic quips and call himself an asshole, but he’s also someone falling apart at the seams a broken person, in the midst of a breakdown (He’s seeing the ghosts of those he failed to save ala Bringing Out The Dead), who is always mere moments away from a total personality meltdown.

About midway through the season there’s an episode that opens with Leary having a 9/11 flashback at a stop sign, getting lost in reverie, getting honked at by a pissed driver, and then getting out of the car to beat the honker’s ass. Now here’s the thing, if someone else had been stopped at that stop sign, Leary himself would have been yelling and screaming for that douchebag to move. The hypocrisy in his persona suggests that Leary is much more self aware then I gave him credit for.

Rescue Me isn’t quite as satisfying an experience as Mad Men, it leaves subplots dangling, and occasionally storylines peter out and end with a shrug rather then conclude (two particularly bad cases a black gay Midget who predicts horse races and falls in love with Leary’s uncle, {yes like the Gary Coleman movie} and a subplot involving a victim who ends up stalking the fireman who saved him might as well end with the sad trombone). Its unsure of itself, never quite deciding whether Tommy really is going Sixth Sense or is just completely crazy. In short its rougher and less satisfying then Mad Men, but what it lacks in elegance it makes up for with energy.

And with a cast of characters who are no less fascinating. The cast of Rescue Me constantly surprises you with the depths of both their Amorality and decency. These characters are so vulgarly verbal that they’re able to fool you into thinking that’s all they are. But when there hidden depths are show its never less then organic. Particularly Jerry the chief of the crew who initially comes off as a brutish homophobic, misogynistic asshole, only to slowly turn into one of the series most complex and vulnerable characters without ever seeming untrue to himself.

Rescue Me is a show about desperate people barely holding it together, and for all of its flaws and dead ends its never anything less then fascinating.

Welcome To Dollhouse (Post 100 Bitches)

Dollhouse starts off painfully mediocre. Hampered by a flimsy presence, a lead actress whose a little less then charismatic, and network tampering which is about as subtle as a boot to the face, the first five or so episodes are kind of sort of terrible. And then all of a sudden it becomes something close to a masterpiece.

I’m a Joss Whedon fan. That’s it. Not a raving fanboy brown coat who worships the ground on which he walks, but someone who thinks he creates a quality product, with a strong voice I respond to, and is an engaging an intelligent speaker to boot. He has a Tarantino like preternatural understanding of genre and also the ways that genre can be subverted without breaking what people love about it in the first place. As well as an innate understanding about the engines that drive it. He’s created, four distinct worlds, think about that for a moment and despite Job like setbacks he’s never gotten lazy or self satisfied (well maybe a little self satisfied). He’s a writer of uniquely clear voice and vision.

Which is what’s so startling about the beginning of Dollhouse is how hazy that vision seems. For those unfamiliar with the show, it follows Echo a young woman who works for The Dollhouse. A shadowy organization, led by the insanely great Olivia Williams, that makes custom people for whoever is rich enough to afford them.

It’s like Whedon came up with this concept and had no idea what to do with it. He runs through all the old tricks, mentally disturbed female protagonist (Firefly), slightly sinister British mentor (Buffy), shadowy organizations in the control of young women (Buffy and Firefly), questions of free will, fate (Etc.), the aw shucks nice girl pining for the guy. It all comes out of the playbook. Stuff that Whedon can do in his sleep, and for along time that seems to be exactly what he’s doing.

And then the bombs start to fall. No one can bring the hammer down like Whedon. He’s the master of the exquisitely timed, hinted at just enough to not be a cheat revelation that, that’s just crushing. He does it a couple of times in Dollhouse and each time the affect is simply remarkable.

I hesitate to hype the series sixth episode man on the street anymore then it already has been. But it really is that good. Not just for the way it finally makes the dolls make sense, thanks to a soulful performance by Patton Oswalt, but for the way that it finally brings into focus what the series is about.

Joss Whedon has been writing about the end of the world for along time. That’s kind of his thing. Hell he brought all of existence to the breaking point about seven or eight times on his first show. But this time he’s really writing about the Apocalypse (even before the chilling finale Epitaph 1). Dollhouse is about the day we finally get too clever for our own good, the day our reach exceeds our grasp for the last time and our whole species goes down in flames not even realizing it before it’s too late. It might not be the technology Whedon’s talking about here, but it’ll be something equally impossible. With a writer as smart as Whedon behind this stuff, scary doesn’t really begin to cover it.

Simply put Dollhouse is a great show, and if you’re a sci fi fan and you’re missing it, you’re only cheating yourself. This is Sci Fi of ideas that I’d put on the level of Phillip K. Dick and William Gibson, real solid stuff that your mind can chew on.

Dollhouse might not be as entertaining as Firefly. And it’ll probably never become the phenomenon that Buffy and Angel did. But all the same it just might be Whedon’s masterpiece.