Shaviro has a great review of G Romero's new Zombie flick, "Diary of the Dead"....

one awesome passage from his review:

"Such is the antinomy on which the film ends, and I think that it is a profound one. We have moved from being a “society of the spectacle” to being a society of participatory and interactive media. And Diary of the Dead is thinking about this change — not to say that the new media regime is either better or worse than what came before, but to try to delineate just how it is different. The great unitary spectacle of which Guy Debord wrote has been shattered, and replaced by new forms of distraction and activity in what Deleuze called the “society of control.” We are no longer passive, voyeuristic spectators; instead, we actively both give ourselves over to surveillance, and eagerly surveil (is that a word?) both others and ourselves. We fragment, multiply, and network both ourselves and whatever we encounter. This no longer falls under the dipolar schema of subject and object; but rather has the form of a network in which everyone and everything is a node. This also means that we have moved on from representation to simulation: instead of trying to capture the Real via mimesis, we actively produce bits and pieces of a reality that is directly composed of images, rather than merely being captured or reflected in images. The regime of simulacra is not an “extermination of the real” as Baudrillard claimed; it is rather a state in which the real is effectively being micro-produced and virally disseminated. In consequence, the real and the imaginary have become, as Deleuze puts it, “indiscernible”: reality pushes toward a “point of indiscernibility,” as a result of “the coalescence of the actual image and the virtual image, the image with two sides, actual and virtual at the same time” (Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 69). Every imaginary simulation becomes altogether real, even as every reality is dissolved in simulacral multiplication."

read on....

Shaviro sells me again.
i have to see this movie now.

also: see his review of There Will Be Blood. as usual, you can re-watch the movie all over again and he'll give you a whole new way of loving it. that's why i love that guy.

(see prev dot first)

okay, apparently i've never read the New Statesman before, and this explains my surprise that they are completely conservative reactionaries.
cause they are and that's their thing, see?

this 'condemnation of postmodernism tout court' is one of the most ridiculous shrugging-offs of an entire generation of thought i've ever seen.

"When Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari say we should all become schizophrenic, when the gay Michel Foucault embraces the murderously homophobic Ayatollah Kho meini, when Zizek suggests a return to Leninist terror - these very positions are admissions that postmodernism is merely an unserious confection by intellectuals. It leads nowhere except to demoralisation and disaffection."

aww this hurts my ears more than an introductory class in existentialism from warnek.
ughhh.

Quoted: Johann Hari * The star philosopher Slavoj Zizek commits intellectual suicide in ...

I'm interested in tracking down some translations of epstein's film theory, and it's relation to time. anyone studied this stuff before?

I'm really looking forward to the chance to do a close-read of the Cinema 1 + 2 volumes, coupled with a long long movie marathon that will follow the key films and directors he navigates in them. hmmm, this would actually be a really cool ongoing group. like a one-night-a-week thing....read a chunk of the book, and watch the films.....ME LIKEY THIS IDEARRR!!!! anyone down? we could do it independently and converse either by phone or in text, and in chi-town we could rope in people who wanted to come over and watch with us...
takers?

this is an awesome situationist film. it detourns an old karate movie and makes it into a marxist narrative of proletarian revolution.
it's totally hilarious at the same as it's doing something important and worthwhile (i think) as a piece of politicized art.

my favorite review of lost highway, by Shaviro