You can tell I'm gearing up into film fest mode

[petronia]

The other day I was watching the BBC footage of Jay-Z at Glastonbury when it occurred to me that the place would make a great setting for a zombie movie. Wouldn't it?? FANTASIA BLURB TREATMENT: a Wiccan ritual gone awry causes a disturbance in the ley lines running under the Eavis farm, but with all the excitement surrounding the music festival, the fatal imbalance goes unnoticed until a young girl collapses of alcohol poisoning - only to resurrect as the ravening indie undead! Soon the tents are overrun by an army of zombie hipsters, shambling dazedly through the mud in their rain boots [Ed.- how can you tell?!]. Of course, the only way to lay the forces of darkness to rest is to ROCK OUT, using the mystical guitar pick handed down by Joe Strummer on his death bed for this very foreseen purpose... a pick so powerful, the sonic wave it generates instantly causes ZOMBIE HEADS TO EXPLODE...

My impression being you wouldn't even need a CG budget, by the end of the festival everyone will look ghastly enough as is. And you can rope in celebrities for zombification purposes. Peeps like Lily Allen or Arctic Monkeys would probably jump at the chance. Also, whenever somebody in the media speculates about a Libertines reunion I always think, "Not until some calamity occurs - LIKE IF ZOMBIES INVADED ENGLAND," while picturing this perfectly serious fic scenario a la 28 Days Later. A drug addiction handicap would make a good twist/metaphor on the usual survival horror tactics as well, come to think of it (wasn't there the one Japanese console game), but I like the Wild Zero-esque take better. XD; Pitched it to G today and he said it's been done. It does seem as if someone should've come up with it before; I'm not even much of an aficionado of the genre.

***

Tonight was my first Fantasia screening of the festival; it was not a zombie horror movie. Rather it was a Takashi Miike flick called Sukiyaki Western Django (AFAICT the Bebop/Champloo nod is entirely intentional), which is basically a conflation of Heike Monogatari and A Fistful of Dollars. Think of it as being to Miike what Ada is to Nabokov, only instead of North America = Russia, Japan = Nevada. XD;; The director in shiny crowd-pleaser mode. My favorite part was when Kiyomori decided he was going to be Henry VI instead as [sentence completion left as an exercise for the reader]. And Quentin Tarentino's best line, which was quite the extended setup.

[trailer]

Comments

[reynardine.livejournal.com]

Sukiyaki Western Django was brilliant. Weird, but brilliant. Having the Japanese actors phonetically learn their lines in English was kinda a ballsy move, but it just added to the film's odd charisma.

And yes, I love the Henry VI reference as well. What's really funny is that when you actually read Henry VI, at the end, the house of York (white) is actually winning, not the house of Lancaster (red), as Kiyomori claims. Lancaster does eventually win the War of the Roses, but not in that particular play. ;-D

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I thought the actors did really well - like, the way it was described I assumed it'd aim for a Brechtian alienation effect, but they were just speaking English like they would if they'd been hired to play in a Hollywood movie. XD; I mean, they were better than Lucy Liu's Japanese in Kill Bill.

In retrospect it was sort of hilarious that they were the "Heikes" and the "Genjis". What, because "Taira" and "Minamoto" would've made less sense?