The Walking Dead season 3

[Ele'ill]

pretty depressing

[Jesus Saves Gretzky Scores]

Yeah, it's kind of boring too lately.

[Jimmie Higgins]

pretty depressingAgreed. Also just been fucking distractingly groass this season. I'm a fan of horror, gore doesn't really bother me, but when it's overused it begins to distract me and take me out of the movie. I go from seeing people scared of zombies and getting caught up in the tension to - splat - wondering what percentage of CGI done in Hollywood is just animated blood splatter or whatnot. It's become like explosions were in action movies in the 1990s.

Anway as far as depressing: the comics are in sort of the exact opposite place thematically with the survivors now thinking that community and cooperativness is actually the key to a strong society and defense against both the dead and bandits, not just groups of induviduals gathering for "safty in numbers".

When will a radical write a post-apocalyptic zombie saga? "Occupy Death". I guess "Land of the Dead" is the closest we'll get for now.

I want to see how inequality and government neglect help make the zombie outbreak worse, a post-Katrina, post-Sandy zombie movie. I'd also love to see an urban zombie movie - all the appartments in my neighborhood have bars on the windows, so we'd be ok on day 1 until food began to run low - there's also a number of weapons floating around the neighborhood. Would people form street-gangs against the dead? Make barricades? Liberate themselves collectivly from the zombie siege?

The suburbs would probably be the worst place in a zombie apacalypse because everyone is seperated and there are still large populations and you probably have to go pretty far to get supplies. Urban areas would have their own problems - specifically larger populations and potentially larger numbers of zombies...

I'm going to stop there because I just crapped-out way too much geek just there.

[Ele'ill]

Regarding it being boring or slow a friend mentioned how Rick's son being shot and recovering was unnecessarily lengthy and I guess I could agree with that type of stuff but I think the show's strong point is the suspense involved in their adventures and the things they discover and them always being on edge and the quality of the episodes starts to crap out when it gets to heavily focused on massacring zombies it just isn't macho or scary or adding anything worth while. I know that it is following the graphic novels and everything but whatever.

Something else to note, fast zombies are way scarier than slow zombies.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Agreed. Also just been fucking distractingly groass this season. I'm a fan of horror, gore doesn't really bother me, but when it's overused it begins to distract me and take me out of the movie. I go from seeing people scared of zombies and getting caught up in the tension to - splat - wondering what percentage of CGI done in Hollywood is just animated blood splatter or whatnot. It's become like explosions were in action movies in the 1990s.

Anway as far as depressing: the comics are in sort of the exact opposite place thematically with the survivors now thinking that community and cooperativness is actually the key to a strong society and defense against both the dead and bandits, not just groups of induviduals gathering for "safty in numbers".

When will a radical write a post-apocalyptic zombie saga? "Occupy Death". I guess "Land of the Dead" is the closest we'll get for now.

I want to see how inequality and government neglect help make the zombie outbreak worse, a post-Katrina, post-Sandy zombie movie. I'd also love to see an urban zombie movie - all the appartments in my neighborhood have bars on the windows, so we'd be ok on day 1 until food began to run low - there's also a number of weapons floating around the neighborhood. Would people form street-gangs against the dead? Make barricades? Liberate themselves collectivly from the zombie siege?

The suburbs would probably be the worst place in a zombie apacalypse because everyone is seperated and there are still large populations and you probably have to go pretty far to get supplies. Urban areas would have their own problems - specifically larger populations and potentially larger numbers of zombies...

I'm going to stop there because I just crapped-out way too much geek just there.

Land of the Dead was pretty bad. Not subtle with it's commentary at all.

Sometimes I wonder if George Romero thinks can pump out any crap he wants and have audiences lap it up, just cuz he's Romero and he created the Dead trilogy.

[Le Socialiste]

I think this season's been off to an amazing start.

Lori and T-Dog's deaths, while expected (if one reads the graphic novel), came out of nowhere for me, raising the show's quality in my mind. It's also better paced than last season, which was agonizingly slow (but that had more to do with production issues than anything else). Of course, this series is more about social interactions between people than zombie killings - another plus.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Land of the Dead was pretty bad. Not subtle with it's commentary at all.And "Dawn" was? Zombies aren't subtle - (except in my zombie fiction where zombies return from the dead to mindlessly keep working at their old jobs or doing things like mowing the cut lawn over and over. not really.)


Sometimes I wonder if George Romero thinks can pump out any crap he wants and have audiences lap it up, just cuz he's Romero and he created the Dead trilogy.Yeah while I enjoyed Land, the other two weren't too thrilling.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Zombie films vary in their amount of overt political commentary. If you watch the "Dawn of the Dead" remake, for example, there are some slight nods to the original's "social commentary", but it's mostly just an action/horror film. In "Cemetery Man" there's a lot of deep commentary; in "Monster Man" there's none. Whereas in certain other zombie films, like "Land of the Dead", the political overtones are really overbearing, plus I thought the characters in that particular film were two-dimensional and boring. It did have a zombie killing dominatrix, though.
http://www.moviefancentral.com/images/pictures/review74591/argento.jpg

[Os Cangaceiros]

Thinking more on the topic, there is actually a lot of variation in the zombie subgenre...surrealist zombies, like some of the films of Jean Rollin...humorous zombies, like in "Re-Animator"...zombie romantic comedies, like "Dead Alive"...I'm sure there's at least on zombie drama out there...

[brigadista]

michonne....:):)

[Jimmie Higgins]

Zombie films vary in their amount of overt political commentary.Of course, that's not in question. I just didn't think that Romero's heavy-handedness in regards "Land's" themes of how our society's inequality and class divides make (un)natural disasters worse is no more heavy-handed than a satire of consumerism in "Dawn". "Dawn" was a much better movie IMO not because of any thematic reasons, but because it was more suspeceful, cleverly written, and in "Land":


the characters in that particular film were two-dimensional and boring.

Lack of character depth and development in "Walking Dead" has been my biggest issue with the show - too many characters have only been defined by recent tramatic events (My character is that I'm sad because my sister died; my character is that I am worried that my daughter might be dead), rather than feeling like real 3-dimensional people put under the stress and disorientation of these tramatic events. I was a big Lost fan and that show was also pulpy and fantastical and the characters were more soap-opera/pulp characters than naturalistic characters. But still within the genere conventions, what I enjoyed about that show's characters is how they changed radically but these changes tended to feel natural (at least in the first few seasons): it was the interplay between who the person was and then having to deal with radically unusual and fluid situations (and the different ways that different people would interpret and view the situations) that was both fun and grounded fantastical events on the show. You didn't have to believe there was a polar bear on a tropical island, but you could believe how differnet people reacted to it. It was a very dialectical show IMO.

I think this is why in the 2nd season of Walking Dead some of the more internally-focused episodes dealing with relations between the people in the group tended to drag. It wasn't that the questions and situations weren't interesting, but it was like a bunch of people "representing" certain generic viewpoints ("be compassionate" or "be selfish") rather than their reactions beeing rooted more in who that character is. So Dale was just the "compassion guy" and Rick was the "leader-guy" and the other cop was the Ayn Rand guy of the apocalypse. Actually I thought the other cop was actually more fully developed throughout that season.

I think right now they may be in the process of trying to get rid of characters who have no real role, other than just some survior and that's why they killed the people the recently did. I also think now the prison storyline might slow down and the "town" storyline will become more action-oriented... so I hope they do give a treatment of the prison that's a little more interesting than just being a practical place to hide under those conditions... it's so thematically tantalizing to have bunch of survivors in a US prison that it would be a missed opportunity by the writers to treat it as mearly a place with big fences and scarry corridors.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Thinking more on the topic, there is actually a lot of variation in the zombie subgenre...surrealist zombies, like some of the films of Jean Rollin...humorous zombies, like in "Re-Animator"...zombie romantic comedies, like "Dead Alive"...I'm sure there's at least on zombie drama out there...

I think "Return of the Living Dead" is an excellent horror-comedy and I love the sort of "contamination" treatment of the undead in that: trying to just get rid of the symptoms of the problem will infect you and only make the problem grow. Obvious parallels to nuclear issues at the time and the environmental anxiety and problems which like zombies in that movie have only gotten to be a bigger problem.

"Re-Animator" is also great.

There was a French zombie movie I saw - that I can't remember the name of - and it was a "zombie-drama" I guess because the zombies were just dead people who were suddenly alive again and visiting their living relatives.

There's an indie-film zombie movie (indie as in "art house" genra not, just an independant low-budget horror) called "Pontypool" which is surreal and scary in a intellectual way - I don't think you even see any zombies for 95% of the movie, it's all just reports of zombies by people over the phone and the characters don't know if it's a prank or mass-hysteria.

[KurtFF8]

Agreed. Also just been fucking distractingly groass this season. I'm a fan of horror, gore doesn't really bother me, but when it's overused it begins to distract me and take me out of the movie. I go from seeing people scared of zombies and getting caught up in the tension to - splat - wondering what percentage of CGI done in Hollywood is just animated blood splatter or whatnot. It's become like explosions were in action movies in the 1990s.

Anway as far as depressing: the comics are in sort of the exact opposite place thematically with the survivors now thinking that community and cooperativness is actually the key to a strong society and defense against both the dead and bandits, not just groups of induviduals gathering for "safty in numbers".

When will a radical write a post-apocalyptic zombie saga? "Occupy Death". I guess "Land of the Dead" is the closest we'll get for now.

I want to see how inequality and government neglect help make the zombie outbreak worse, a post-Katrina, post-Sandy zombie movie. I'd also love to see an urban zombie movie - all the appartments in my neighborhood have bars on the windows, so we'd be ok on day 1 until food began to run low - there's also a number of weapons floating around the neighborhood. Would people form street-gangs against the dead? Make barricades? Liberate themselves collectivly from the zombie siege?

The suburbs would probably be the worst place in a zombie apacalypse because everyone is seperated and there are still large populations and you probably have to go pretty far to get supplies. Urban areas would have their own problems - specifically larger populations and potentially larger numbers of zombies...

I'm going to stop there because I just crapped-out way too much geek just there.

I felt that World War Z was loaded with political commentary. For example Cuba was the one place that did well after the outbreak.

It will be interesting to see if the film does that commentary justice (although I won't hold my breath of course)

[Le Socialiste]

Okay, I know it's a little late to be talking about this, but can we please talk about the midseason finale? Holy shit that was intense.

It's basically a given that the Dixon brothers will escape from their current predicament, what with previews for Feb.'s episode. I can't decide whether this marks a turning point for Merle, who's been spurned by the Governor, or if the entire final scene was staged. If Merle goes back to the prison with Rick and the others, perhaps he'll end up being something of a Trojan horse for the Governor and his men?