2025-06-22 13:31:21
I’ve seen 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, and I liked them both fine, but never considered myself a fan of the franchise. I thought the second one was more or less forgettable, and the thing I found most memorable about the first was seeing young men in the audience of the theater absolutely losing their shit at having to see a penis on screen.
So I wasn’t sure I was even going to see 28 Years Later, and definitely wasn’t expecting to enjoy it that much. It very much benefitted from seeing it in a theater, more for the sound than anything else. I saw it at an AMC with rumbling seats (not to keep inadvertently advertising for AMC, but their version is called “Prime”) and I highly recommend seeing it in that format if it’s possible in your area.
The thing I found most remarkable about the movie is the editing and sound design. I haven’t seen a Danny Boyle movie since Slumdog Millionaire, and I’d forgotten how many stylistic flourishes he uses. There are so many bizarre choices, especially in the first half, that seem like they shouldn’t work at all, but it’s brilliant. It gives everything an energy that I never would’ve expected from a dire post-apocalyptic story.
There are a ton of disorienting super-quick cuts, which I’d expected, but I’d expected them to be during the rage virus attacks. Instead, they’re spread throughout the relatively action-light opening, in which a boy accompanies his father to “the mainland” (not the continent, but from their island home onto Britain) for his coming-of-age first kill of one of the infected.
What’s remarkable is that they’re almost all non-diegetic. Occasionally there’s a quick cut to show something happening from a different perspective, or suggesting an oncoming threat. But they’re also interspersed with shots from older movies showing English longbowmen prepping their bows or launching a volley of arrows into the air. Along with cuts to a tattered English flag, it sets up the idea of these survivors being part of a centuries-old history. Not exactly patriotic, but more like respect for England itself being able to survive an apocaylpse.
That’s furthered by later scenes of the characters seeking shelter in ancient ruins, surrounded by statues that seem to have been standing guard against dangers for thousands of years before zombies I mean infected.
There are lots of production photos out there showing multi-camera rigs circling one of the infected (the entire movie was shot on iPhones, apparently), generating the bullet-time-like shots of an infected being pegged with an arrow, of which there are many. But they somehow never seems gratuitous, or more accurately, they’re so completely surrounded by gratuitous flourishes that they just feel like the language of the film.
There are also more subtle uses of the quick cuts, flashing to a character’s distorted memory, a quick shot of an English neighborhood and then the same neighborhood in ruin, so that you’re never quite sure what’s “real” and what’s not. Combined with scenes of the English countryside, or characters running from danger against a beautiful night sky, it almost makes it seem like a modern fantasy. And also as if there’s an inherent beauty to this place that will survive long after all the humans have died off.
The sound design is disorienting as well. Music choices seem completely inappropriate for a scene, but somehow end up working perfectly. And there are powerfully loud BOOMS and buzzes that punctuate tense scenes, driven home especially hard by those aforementioned rumbling seats.
The recitation of the poem “Boots,” which forms the tense and surreal basis of the trailers, is also in the movie, but it’s also non-diegetic. Just adding to that mood of suspense and relentlessly driving forward.
It’s all surreal and exciting, and even though I had little interest in the story and don’t care for post-apocalyptic stories in general, I kept being struck by how beautiful and artful it all was.
Most surprising of all, at least to me, is that there are multiple moments of genuine comedy. Even if I’d expected the energy driving this movie, I would never have expected it to be anything other than humorless. But by that point, you’re so used to all of the wild tonal shifts and stylistic shifts, and moments of quiet followed by sudden horrific brutality, that it feels like the jokes are warranted.
I can’t say I’m interested in ever watching 28 Years Later again, but it’s so stylistically weird and confident that it feels like virtuosic filmmaking. And without spoiling anything, I thought the ending was so unexpected and so delightfully bizarre that I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing whatever comes next.
2025-06-18 11:27:07
Book
William by Mason Coile
Synopsis
Henry is a robotics expert living in a refurbished Victorian house with his pregnant wife Lily, a genius programmer and tech company CEO. Their marriage has become strained, mostly because of Henry’s crippling agoraphobia that keeps him trapped inside the house. Out of loneliness, he’s been going into the attic to work on a secret project: a highly-advanced, self-aware robot named William. But he suspects that something has gone horribly wrong with his creation, as William is cruel and manipulative, as if he’s been possessed by some dark, nihilistic force of destruction. When Lily brings some of her work colleagues to meet Henry, the four soon find themselves trapped inside the high-tech house with the evil robot and whatever dark entity wants all of them dead.
Notes
This is a very quick and easy read with short, propulsive chapters; I sped through the first several chapters one night and finished it on a short plane flight the next day.
Unfortunately, the dialogue is clunky and amateurish, the characters are extremely shallow, most of the conversations are frustratingly circular since the author doesn’t want to give too much away, and the events are still almost completely predictable. After less than 50 pages, I’d already predicted everything that was going to happen, and I was about 95% correct.
There are a couple of good horror story moments, and I was compelled to reach the ending without ever being tempted to abandon it. On the whole, it feels like the novelization of an episode of a Syfy Channel horror anthology series that almost certainly never existed.
Verdict
A quick but disappointing read, with just enough forward momentum, and just enough of an interesting concept at the end, to keep it from feeling like a waste of time. It’s too bad that so many of the concepts are so familiar that it becomes completely predictable. People have been doing smart-house-out-of-control stories since at least 1999, and of course evil robot stories for far longer, but the idea of combining them with ghosts and demons is a premise that might’ve worked if the execution had been stronger.
2025-06-18 10:51:33
Book
Unruly by David Mitchell
Synopsis
The comedian goes through the history of the British monarchy, from the beginnings of post-Roman rule through the reign of Elizabeth I, devoting a chapter to each monarch and a brief description of their rise and rule.
Notes
How much you enjoy this book depends on how much you like David Mitchell. In case that seems obvious: I’d been expecting this to be structured like a history book, covering a subject I knew (or remembered?) very little about, but given a lighter touch to keep it from being so dry. Instead, it’s a bit more like having Mitchell go off on tangents, personal anecdotes, peevish observations about modern life in the UK, and his opinions on the concept of monarchy, while hovering generally around the topic of the monarch in question.
Which isn’t necessarily bad, because he does manage to deliver exactly what’s promised by the book’s premise and cover. And to Mitchell’s credit, while he doesn’t go into much depth about the monarchs — or more accurately, he’s inconsistent in how deep or shallow he goes within each chapter — it’s highly unlikely that I would’ve remembered the details if he had. I’ve already forgotten the names of most of the Anglo-Saxon rulers, and I still can’t remember the difference between the various Henrys, Edwards, and Richards.
I’m not sure who exactly is the target audience, though, besides fans of David Mitchell. Everything seems to be written for audiences in Great Britain, since there are frequent mentions of areas of England, or personalities, politicians, or stores, with the assumption that they don’t need to be given any more context. It also seems to assume that some parts of English history or some monarchs are universally known, to the degree that I wonder whether he’s expecting too much of non-English readers, or if I simply wasn’t paying attention in European history classes. I felt dumb for not knowing that William the Conqueror was the first Norman king of England, and I’m still not sure whether I should feel dumb or just feel American.
However, it did finally give me a high-level understanding of the differences between Britons, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Plantagenets, and Tudors; as well as an extremely high-level understanding of the overall timeline and where events like the Magna Carta, the Hundred Years War, and the War of the Roses fit in.
Verdict
Does exactly what it says on the cover, and if you’re a fan of David Mitchell, you’ll probably enjoy it a lot. For me, it was slow reading (but excellent for helping me fall asleep!) and even without being bogged down with too many dates or location names, still managed to have a lot of info that I’m sure I won’t retain. What I will retain, probably, is the equivalent of what British children learn in their first couple years of history classes.
2025-06-17 11:50:02
We just got back from an extended weekend trip to Edmonton, Alberta. We were there for Game Con Canada, where I was tagging along with my husband as he helped out at the Logomancy Media booth. They’re a group of content streamers who do a lot of TTRPGs and related videos and podcasts, fundraising for charities like Make-a-Wish and the Trans Lifeline.
It was my first time ever in Canada, and two things I really appreciated about a nerd convention there: the opening ceremony included a land acknowledgment by a performer named Dallas Arcand Jr, and the tag-line for the show was “Bring Your Eh-Game.”
The first night in Edmonton, we went to a bar where every screen was playing the game in the Stanley Cup final between the Oilers and the Florida Panthers. At least 2/3 of the people in the bar (and throughout the city) were wearing Oilers jerseys, and asking me what I thought of that 2nd period, eh? (I had to admit that I know even less about hockey than I do about most sports).
When the Oilers won that game, it was the best thing, possibly the highlight of the trip for me. The entire bar seemed to erupt, and previously mild-mannered guys were now screaming and hugging each other. The bar sound system started blasting “La Bamba” — along with “Informer” by Snow, which didn’t make sense to me until I found out Snow was Canadian — which became the Oilers’ victory song to pay tribute to locker room attendant and fan Joey Moss, who loved the song, after his death.
I realize that forming an opinion about Canada based on a single weekend in Edmonton would be kind of like forming an opinion about the whole of the United States after a few days in Des Moines, but overall my impression was that Canada was like the US if everything were about 10-15% better. It’s not a magical, perfect, paradise, but there’s just a baseline level of kindness and sanity that hasn’t been rotted away by the last couple of decades of fringe groups in the US throwing absolute tantrums whenever anyone proposes making things better.
And I admit I already had a positive impression of Canada, at least as far back as working on the Kim Possible project at Epcot. We were working out of the Canada pavilion with a bunch of cast members from Vancouver and Alberta, and there was just a relentlessly good vibe through the whole project. I admit I still like to linger around the Canada pavilion to listen to the background music loop, which contains a flute-heavy instrumental version of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot. It’s corny, yes, but it never fails to bring back great memories of good people working on a very special project.
2025-06-11 02:00:00
Hey now, wooo! Look at that! It’s a full-on ass crack from one of the Duran Duran guys1, right there smack in the middle of the screen in the video to “Rio.” All these years I guess I’ve been too distracted by the model winking at me to notice how deliberately that shot was composed, and now I feel foolish.
Other things I didn’t really remember or fully appreciate: how much of the video is the guys doing slapstick, and how much of the song is Nick Rhodes2 going nuts on the keyboard. I hope he was using an arpeggiator, or the poor guy must’ve been exhausted by the end of it!
The keyboards are such a big part of the sound of “Rio” (and also “Hungry Like the Wolf,” where they’re a little bit more prominent) that it seems odd that I’m only really noticing them now. But in my defense: 1) I can’t overstate how ubiquitous this album was at the time, and it gradually just became like background noise; and 2) I was more distracted by how much the video was stressing how heterosexual these guys were by having them cavort with supermodels, vs how not-heterosexual the video made me feel overall.3
It was also reminding me of another song that I couldn’t quite place. Eventually, after several fruitless Google searches for “pop songs with arpeggiators” I suddenly remembered it was “There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)” by Eurythmics. I’ve always been conflicted by that song, because there’s so much of it I 1000% genuinely, unreservedly love, like how Annie Lennox manages to stretch the word “bliss” across like a dozen syllables, and how the video says “what the hell, it’s the 80s, let’s just put everybody in drag,” and how it somehow still feels timeless despite the cheesy drum pads.
But I hate the harmonica solo, and I always hate harmonica solos, even when they’re by Stevie Wonder. I do genuinely wonder whether it has the same connotation for other people that it does for me, where it immediately makes me think of lower-budget live action family movies and Hanna Barbera cartoons from the late 1970s, where everything felt brown and cheap and dirty, and was just begging for the 1980s to come in and make everything clean and modern and brightly-colored again. Largely by artists like Duran Duran and the Eurythmics, now that I think of it.
2025-06-10 02:00:00
Edge of Tomorrow, directed by Doug Liman and starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, got virtually unanimous praise when it came out, and I immediately put it on my list of movies to watch. That was in 2014 — eleven years ago — which might give an idea how my movie backlog is going.
As it turns out, the virtually unanimous praise was absolutely correct. It’s a great sci-fi action movie, made all the more remarkable when you think of how badly it could’ve gone without the right people making it.
Edge of Tomorrow has all the ingredients of a shamelessly corny, inexcusably derivative, hour and a half of people winking at the camera and dispensing the cheesiest dialogue before heading dutifully into the next completely predictable action movie cliche. But it knows exactly what to do with those ingredients, cleverly combining and remixing everything to keep it feeling fresh, and letting all of the cliched action movie scenes work exactly like they were intended to before they became cliches.
It’s also excellent to see Cruise playing so hard against type for so long at the beginning of the movie. Or rather, playing what he realizes is his public persona, instead of the role he almost always plays in action blockbusters. His character is so smarmy, and he leans into it. You can immediately tell that this guy has gotten where he is by being good-looking and charming, and the script really drives home that he’s all about appearances with no substance. And then it conveniently has him do something awful, so you feel justified in hating him. And you can really savor seeing the shit getting kicked out of him for the next fifteen or twenty minutes.
Of course, any sense of that is more or less undone by the rest of the movie, which has him saving the entire world, but a) of course it does, and b) it gives him a real redemption arc, as opposed to being a super-hero whose obstacles are all external.
They knew that the comparisons to Aliens were going to be obvious, so it was clever to cast Bill Paxton as the master sergeant over a private who’s arrogant and scared shitless. In fact, the familiarity of the whole squad doesn’t seem like a lack of imagination so much as setting us up with the same feeling as our protagonist, that we’ve seen this all before, many times.
I liked that it neither tried to hide all of its various influences, or try to make excuses for them by calling them out. Yeah, it’s like Groundhog Day and Starship Troopers. We know. That’s the premise. It’s so obvious that we don’t even need to mention it.
It feels like there’s a whole sub-genre of time-loop movies at this point, and it’s a sign of how smart the filmmakers are, and how much they seem to trust the basic intelligence of the audience, that the edits are made at all the right places. You see just enough of the repeated material to be able to follow what’s going on, but rarely so much that it’s tedious. The main exception is during the training sequences, but that’s also deliberately repetitious to drive home that he’s spent a lot of time in training. Later in the movie, they do a lot of clever things with dramatic irony, where we only learn along with the other characters that the protagonist has been through this scene already.
My favorite of the time jumps, by the way, is when Cage/Cruise skillfully escapes from the squad by rolling underneath a passing truck… and then is immediately run over. A lot of the first act of the movie seems to be having a lot of fun with the idea of “Ethan Hunt would never!”
Edge of Tomorrow does a great job of establishing its rules, playing within them, and then violating them to introduce the next obstacle. My main criticism is that I wish they’d done a little bit more, even though I can’t imagine exactly what. It was a little disappointing that the movie had been so cleverly remixing and rejuvenating action movie cliches, and then just ended by blowing up the Super Boss Alien. I’d been hoping for one more twist on the whole thing, or one bit of clever manipulation of the rules — instead of just repeating things over and over until they got them right — like Rita/Blunt deliberately getting re-dosed with alpha blood, or learning that there never was an “omega,” or something.
Then again, watching Ballerina and John Wick recently has taught me that sometimes less is more. Adding more “depth” or complications to an action movie can just slow it down, or undermine everything that makes it work. Edge of Tomorrow feels like a movie that uses familiar action movie cliches not because it couldn’t think of any better ideas, but because there’s a good reason those moments are so familiar. They’re satisfying.
︎