Movies
The Girl with all the Gifts
The Girl with all the Gifts is probably the closest film adaptation to the story I Am Legend I’ve ever seen and the character Glenn Close plays of Dr Caroline Caldwell is probably the closest we’ll ever get to the novel version of Robert Neville even though the story of I Am Legend has been the basis of three films since it was written by Richard Matheson in 1954.
And I mean “closest” in a great way.
In The Girl with all the Gifts, it’s an unspecified time after a virulent fungal plague has swept the planet and turned those affected by it into green, flesh-hungry zombies. The UK military has abandoned the cities and has retreated to bases in the country in order to study the outbreak and come up with a vaccine lead by Caldwell. Enter a group of kids born after the plague including Melanie (Sennia Nanua) who have the infection but haven’t turned into blood-crazed ghouls and seem to be the key to finding a way to end the apocalypse.
But when the base is overrun and the survivors, including Caldwell, Melanie and a few soldiers lead by Sgt Eddie Parks (Paddy Considine) go on the run across a ruined landscape, the question is will they find the vaccine in time or is it already too late?
In many ways The Girl with all the Gifts reminded me of the movie 28 Days Later as well. I’m sure some of that comes from the fact that both movies take place in the UK and a lot of the action around London. But there’s also the idea of a few soldiers being left behind after things fell who are still working and fighting the hungries as well as a group of survivors having to trek across a apocalyptic country dodging the flesh-eaters to try and find a safe refuge. It seems as if most US based zombie stories are about groups holding up in some refuge which is something that happens a lot in the genera creator George Romero zombie films. In Night of the Living Dead it’s a farmhouse, in Dawn of the Dead a mall, in Day of the Dead a military complex and Land of the Dead a walled-off city. But in the UK zombie stories from 28 Days Later to 28 Weeks Later and even in Shaun of the Dead much of the action takes place with character on the run out in the open and very exposed
And this Caldwell/Neville character connection –– not to ruin things too much, but much like with Neville, Caldwell is so focused on coming up with a solution to reversing the apocalypse that she can’t see that a new order has started to emerge which is changing the balance of power on the planet.
Unfortunately, The Girl with all the Gifts comes at a time when we seem to have reached “peak zombie” with there being zombie movies like World War Z and TV series like The Walking Dead to name a few. So any new zombie movie like The Girl with all the Gifts has to somehow stand out from what’s come before to get noticed. Which I don’t think the movie did very well. How can it when it’s competing with nearly 50 years of zombie history with most of that created in the last 15 years? Unfortunately, The Girl with all the Gifts only made a reported $2.6 million at the box office, meaning good movie or not I don’t think we’ll ever see a sequel to The Girl with all the Gifts.
While I thought that The Girl with all the Gifts did a good job of changing enough things with the well-worn zombie genera to make that movie different to the stories that have come before, there was one part of it that made me laugh. At one point one of the soldiers is off scrounging for food when he comes across a rack of nudie magazines which he begins pursuing. “Oh no,” I thought, “this guy’s dead for sure.” Since in horror movies the quickest way for a character to get killed is by having sex I figured that by this soldier reading a nudie mag that was probably the closest thing to sex this movie was going to get so I put two and two together and… Well, you know the rest.
Lucky Logan trailer
TV
The Carmichael Show
The third season of The Carmichael Show premiered on NBC last week. It’s a show very much like a Community or Arrested Development that gets a lot of critics talking about it and a lot of praise but is a series the network doesn’t know what to do with since that praise doesn’t equal viewers. With The Carmichael Show we get a series that had a first season premiere at the end of August 2015 for six episodes then a second seven months later in March and now a third more than a year after the end of the second at the end of May and has constantly changed nights and times along the way.
The Carmichael Show is very interest, and good, in that it’s a sitcom that’s actually about something. It seems like most sitcoms these days are about nothing whatsoever and after a viewing they’re quickly forgotten. But not The Carmichal Show that started this season with an episode about rape and then one about whether or not soldiers are great simply because they’re soldiers, or if they can be just as bad as regular people too.
I think because The Carmichael Show focuses on some serious subject matter that harkens more back to the sitcoms of the 1970s than the 21st century and doesn’t end each episode on an “awww, isn’t family great?” moment that seems to be a prerequisite for each and every modern sitcom is why The Carmichael Show is such an overlooked show. Maybe in a world where where our day to day reality can be somewhat bleak at times, to have a show like the The Carmichael Show say, “yeah, the world might be bleak but that doesn’t mean we can’t make fun of it,” turns some people off who’d rather be watching reruns of The Big Bang Theory on TBS while wearing their “Bazinga” t-shirt.
The Deuce TV spot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2pXEzIQnUs
The Gifted TV spot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYT-SxInt64
Books
Planet of the Apes: The Original Topps Trading Card Series
I had no idea there was ever a card series based on the Planet of the Apes movie series, but apparently there were at least three sets released over the years. One for the original Planet of the Apes movie, one for the live-action TV series and one for the Tim Burton movie. All of which are being collected in this new Planet of the Apes: The Original Topps Trading Card Series book due out this week.
This deluxe collection includes the fronts and backs of all 44 cards from the original 1969 Topps set based on the original film; all 66 cards based on the 1975 television series; and all 90 base cards, 10 sticker cards, and 44 chase cards from the 2001 film. Also included are four exclusive bonus trading cards, rare promotional images, and an introduction and commentary by Gary Gerani, editor of hundreds of trading card series for Topps…
The Reading List
- Inside the plot to steal Soviet planetary data
- Iraq’s Close Encounters With Stealth Fighters
- The Surprising Resilience of Failed Fast Food Chains
This week in pop-culture history
- 1982: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan opens in theaters
- 1984: Gremlins opens in theaters
- 1984: Ghostbusters opens
- 1986: Invaders from Mars debuts
- 1989: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier opens in theaters
- 2014: Edge of Tomorrow is released.
What I find most ironic is that by having Superman appear by himself over and over again on film and the same for Batman those characters have started to change in ways that make them almost unrecognizable from their origins. Over the years in the movies Batman has gone from a brooding yet heroic character, to a dark, brooding and menacing figure cloaked in darkness who’s as likely to machine gun his enemies as bring them to justice. And Superman has gone from the earnest, all-American alien who tells kids to eat their vegetables to another dark and brooding character who also kills his enemies. And I can see why this happens. When only Batman appears in Batman movies and Superman in Superman their characters are never able to really interact with anyone but the bad guys. So writers of sequels do the only thing they can and try to bring new ideas and motivations to the characters and do something different then what’s come before.
And a lot of the time “different then what’s come before” means making the character more “realistic,” which in Hollywood parlance when talking about superhero movies almost always means making the character “dark, brooding and willing to kill.” But that also means that we get two characters like Batman and Superman who are supposed to be at the opposite end of spectrums, dark and light, who have basically become the same character type in recent years which makes for some dark and depressing movies.
It’s because Wonder Woman is who she is that I think might just breath some new life into the DC universe of movies. On the big screen at least, her character is new and fresh and her backstory is relatively unexplored. So this means that we should get a Wonder Woman a little closer to the source material, someone who’s strong and beautiful and is just as smart if not smarter than the likes of Bruce Wayne or Clark Kent.
In all of these movies humanity is still alive and well back on the Earth but the main characters are so separated from us they might as well be the only person alive.
I’d be lying if I said the style of Passengers wasn’t anything that had been put to screen before. The ship of Passengers the Avalon, in and around which all the action takes place, from the inside looks like a 5-star hotel staffed by robots. There are some interesting futuristic bits and pieces here and there, but for the most part style-wise Passengers looks much like every other sci-fi movie of the last five years — very slick and very computer generated. The one thing that is different is the actual design of the outside of the Avalon that looks more like a twisting piece of modern art than a traditional-looking spaceship. But that only goes so far from separating this movie from the pack.
Today, Alien 3 is considered by the fans to be a noble failure. That movie was directed by David Fincher before he was David Fincher, so it’s got all the visual stylings we would come to expect from the director, but something about the movie is off. Alien 3 kind’a tries to return the Alien franchise to its roots — an alien vs a bunch of people sans any real weapons — yet the story is so uneven in places that it never ever is able to “get going” and never takes the audience for the ride we were expecting to go on after Aliens.
Now that I think about it, the craziest choice in Alien 3 is that you’ve got at the time one of the most beautiful and famous actresses on the planet with Weaver who in this film has a shaved head and looks more like one of the ragged male prisoners than one of the most recognizable actors on the planet which is a bold chose to say the least.
Because of all the negative comments I avoided seeing Prometheus in the theater and ended up renting it on digital at home several months later. But instead of hating the movie I came away loving it. To me, Prometheus is a near modern sci-fi masterpiece about what happens when a group of people go off looking for god but instead find something that’s not quite the the personification of evil, but does have bad intents on the human race. Since then, I’ve watched Prometheus several more times and each time I find something new to appreciate about it.
Up until now the Alien movies, and even the Aliens vs. Predator movies too (which should never be spoken of), were all monster movies. Alien is about a monster that attacks the crew of a ship who must fight back and survive. Aliens is about a whole bunch of monsters that attacks a group of marines who must fight back and survive. Alien 3 is about a monster that attacks a group of prisoners who must fight back and survive. And Alien: Resurrection is about a couple of monsters who attacks some scientists and pirates who must fight back and survive.
Prometheus is a horror movie that’s not really a monster movie though there are monsters in it. It’s almost a body-horror movie with characters being infected with something “icky” and being turned into some very weird things and another that has to have one of these things cut out of her. But for the most part, Prometheus is about exploration, and what happens when you assume the thing you’re looking for wants to be found when it really doesn’t.
It sometimes seems like fans of a franchise get upset if sequels are exactly like the first movie and don’t do anything different, but they also don’t like it if the sequel is too different then the original and takes the franchise in a new direction. It’s a tightrope that the creators of movies like Prometheus must walk, and even if they get it right creatively like I think they did they can still be considered a failure in the eyes of the fans if the movie doesn’t unfold they way they think it should.