A Constant Visual Feast

I have fond memories of sitting in my dorm room watching Shaun of the Dead on my region-free DVD player with an audience of friends and dormmates, a couple of months ahead of its U.S. theatrical release. Most people remember the ragers (or don’t, I guess) or prom dances; I remember watching Dylan Moran getting his guts ripped out on a loop, because every time that happened in the movie, we would hit “rewind” and watch it again*.

So it’s jarring to think of the movie as an object half my age, meaning an object that has been with me half of my life, meaning a piece of popular culture that has had 20 years to shape culture itself. Naturally, I had to get in there and pore over its impact on the movies and on, surprise surprise, Japanese art installations. 

You can read the full piece over at Cool Material.

*I couldn’t say if this is because of a collective implicit admiration for the effects work, or a collective implicit hatred of Moran.