The Movie Club 2005

Each year, film critics gather in Slate's "Movie Club" to kvetch about the year in movies. This year, Slate's David Edelstein is joined by Scott Foundas (LA Weekly), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader), and A.O. Scott (the New York Times).

Who Are These People?

Thanks, Scott, for reminding me of the obvious. It was remiss of me not to point out that George A. Romero's Land of the Dead is the fourth part of the ultimate revenge-of-the-American-repressed horror series, and that the Sam Hamm/Joe Dante Homecoming pushes the conceit into even more wildly political territory. Land of the Dead came a little too close to being a John Carpenter movie for my taste, but its geographic layout—a mall/skyscraper/condo for the wealthy surrounded by (and barricaded against) an underclass manipulated to be forever at one another's throats … which in turn is separated from a countryside teeming with zombies (now into the process of forming social units)—is an example of the kinds of truths that outlandish genre movies can depict that naturalist movies can't. So here's hoping the horror genre moves away from dexterous artful exercises in sadism like Wolf Creek and The Devil's Rejects (sorry, David Poland, for cheekily lumping in Irreversible) to explore what really ails us.

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