Movies

Movie Reviews, Movie Roulette

28 Days Later and the Delicious Comfort of Disaster

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Living during a pandemic makes watching movies featuring pandemics particularly weird. Yet, there’s also something, well, comforting for some of us. After all, if you plugged into Netflix a few weeks ago, you might have noticed that Outbreak (1995) was one of the top viewed films. I have to think that people were watching for reasons other than morbid curiosity. And when I put out a call to pick a movie from my DVD collection for me to watch and discuss, a number of people gravitated immediately to 28 Days Later (2002) because of its relevance to the now. 28 Days Later is easily one of my favorite films, horror genre or otherwise. For those who haven’t seen it, the film opens with a group of animal rights activists (Animal Liberation Front without the name) raiding a government animal testing facility, which results in the spread of a deadly virus called “rage.” Flash forward to Jim (Cillian Murphy) some 28 days later, who wakes up from a coma to find himself in an empty hospital and no knowledge of what is going on. We learn pretty quickly that the rage virus has overtaken the UK, leading to mass infections, mass evacuations, quarantine, and the eventual breakdown of society. Jim is rescued from certain death by Selena (Naomie Harris) and her ill-fated friend, Mark (Noah Huntley), and together (sans Mark) they meet up with Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter, Hannah (Megan Burns), who encourage them to drive north to a supposed safe zone lead by Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston; a.k.a. the Doctor). Naturally, things aren’t as they seem there… Not one bit.

SF/F Commentary

Snakes in SF/F/H (Or, Drumming Up Fear from Ignorance)

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As someone who keeps reptiles and still occasionally searches for them in the wild, very few things annoy me more than the way genre films treat snakes.[efn_note]In actuality, I really hate the treatment of most reptiles in genre, but snakes get it worse than most. They used bearded dragons (the inland or central subspecies, Pogona vitticeps) in Holes (2003) even though they’re not from the United States and don’t fan out their heads like some kind of Jurassic Park monster, and there was a recent film called Crawl (2019) set in Florida that was wildly confused about both the way alligators behave and the relationship Floridians have to the creatures. It’s really frustrating, y’all.[/efn_note] In fact, one of my biggest rants on Torture Cinema concerned the sea snake inaccuracies in Sphere (1998). To this day, I find it difficult to watch films which feature snakes of any kind because almost all of them get nearly everything wrong and most of them use snakes as plot devices for fear.[efn_note]All of my examples will be from films. However, I’m sure some of the problems I discuss in this post apply to literature, though probably to a lesser degree because a lot of novel writers are weirdly obsessed about research. :P[/efn_note] There are a lot of problems with the way snakes are portrayed in SF/F/H, especially film. The biggest, however, can be summed up in these three points:

Adventures in Teaching

Academia During a Pandemic: Hunker Down Philosophy 1A

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COVID-19 is upon us in the good old United States of America. Like many totally great countries, we are really prepared for a global pandemic involving a virus for which there is no direct treatment and which kills vulnerable populations a tad too easily. We’re super prepared. Mega prepared. So prepared it’s like this country is run by very competent people. Believe me. Of course, the only true statement in that paragraph is the first one. COVID-19 is upon us. It is upon many people. And it’s here to stay for a while. In my dreams, the world rallies and kicks this ugly virus to the curb, minimizing the loss of life and paving the way for a glorious future where peoples and nations work together in harmony. They’ll build a new United Nations and form a global exploratory and scientific space organization and band together to revert climate change and pave the way for an era of nearly endless prosperity. We’ll discover new worlds, create amazing new technologies and art, and look back on the past as a shameful and pathetic time. Dream dream dream.

Film Lists

Film Challenge: 10 Underrated SF/F Films (1999-2019)

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I have once more (and a very long time ago) been challenged by Ian Sales to join him in our un-named war to come up with the best arbitrary list of films within an equally arbitrarily selected category. You can find previous iterations of this absurdity here, here, here, here, and here. We have, alas, not done this in a long while, which we can both blame on being busy with many other things. But in the interest of rekindling silliness, I have been loosely challenged by Ian to come up with a list of 10 underrated SF/F films from the last 20 years, which is a direct response to this ScreenRant list. Since this list is in response to a link with a remarkably open prompt, I’ve opted to stick to the 10 item list format. Future challenges will go back to our favorite number:  5.

Five Faves

Five Faves: SF/F/M Movies or Shows I Love Because of My Grandma

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A little over a year ago, we lost my grandmother, Merle Crawford. She was a quirky and jovial lady. The kind of person who could meet anyone at a grocery store and turn a chance encounter into a meeting between old friends. You can read a bit more about her life in the obituary I wrote for her in the Mountain Democrat, the local newspaper for Placerville, California. One thing that I often mention about my grandmother is the impact she had on me as a geek. While I certainly watched a lot of genre programming as a kid,1 there are two things that led to my passion for SF/F (and related genres): My mother giving me VHS tapes of Star Wars. The ones with Leonard Maltin’s interviews with George Lucas at the front. My grandmother’s insistence that I watch certain programs. So to celebrate the massive influence my grandmother had on my life in a very specific way, here’s a list of 5 SF/F/M (for mystery) movies and TV shows I love because of my grandma: Let’s be real. A lot of programming for kids is genre TV by default. G.I. Joe and TMNT are both SF/F. Dinosaurs is fantasy. Winnie the Pooh is fantasy. Most Disney films are fantasy. DuckTales is SF/F. Aaahh!!! Real Monsters and The Secret World of Alex Mac and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers are SF/F. A lot of programming for kids also falls under the mystery umbrella. I just don’t think I ever thought about genre when I was a kid. Looking back? It almost seems inevitable that kids born in the 80s and 90s would turn out to be unintentional SF/F nerds in the 2010s. ↩

Star Wars

All the Star Wars

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I was all set to let a blog post slide for the evening. There’s a lot going on today, so it just seemed like a lost cause. And then this happened. What’s that? Here, let me quote it for you:

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