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lizardman posted:As for film, it's not quite a remake, but Japan has their own alternate Paranormal Activity 2. There's also a Japanese version of Sideways as well as a Chinese remake of What Women Want (this is available on Netflix Instant the last time I checked!). To be a stickler, Tokyo Night is called PA2 because it's a sequel to the original, not because it's a remake of PA2. It's much more similar to PA1.
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Jun 6, 2014 15:54
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Though merely an element, wouldn't that strengthen that particular motif? I mean "consumers as mindless zombies" is a surface level observation, but there's a lot more going on textually, as you say.
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Jun 17, 2014 16:11
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I don't think it's an arbitrary reading at all, because the European/Argento cut is fundamentally and noticeably different to anyone who watches it. The main reason that I dislike it is that it cuts around the jokes but I don't think they're just frivolous little asides. The eclectic carnivalesque of Romero's cut with less Goblin and more library music is much sillier but also much more apocalyptic, there's a real exuberance a lot of similar films don't have (just as many post apoc Road Warrior ripoffs would never allow their hero to do something so uncool as eating dog food). The anarchic license to take lives is the primary source of thrills for a lot of characters in Dawn of the Dead, and it's filtered by acculturation. In some cases, it's a duty, in others, a wild, undisciplined urge - we have tribes of cops, bikers, city folk, good ol' boys, slum dwellers, etc. seeking different ends in an orgy of slaughter. That's something that gets lost when talking about this movie, it comes from a social milieu that is in upheaval, specifically post-industry Pennsylvania, blighted by urban shambles and ever encroaching suburbanization: remember that a mall in this film is so new that the characters aren't even familiar enough with the concept to be colloquial about it. There's a specificity about the setting that none of his other Dead films (besides his last two, oddly) don't have. I'm gonna homage you and quote myself: quote:Dawn is an independent film explicitly set in Pennsylvania, a weird state that is an awful lot like Appalachia with big East Coast cities in it, a big part of the chain of cities from Gary, Indiana all the way over to Jersey City, NJ that make up the charmingly squalid "Rust Belt". On top of that, it's the late seventies, a decade past the major race riots, right in the middle of a horrendous decline in American industry - whole cities are now teeming slums. Woolie, a tuned-up SWAT grunt, possibly ex-Vietnam, possibly ex-steel worker or something, is working urban poor, a nice reminder that white flight didn't include all whites, because blue collar workers got hosed over just the same.
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Jun 17, 2014 21:46
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Subtlety be damned, IMO.
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Jun 17, 2014 22:43
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