johnke.me
Does so much with so little. The songs are forgettable and unexciting but the visuals and the playfulness of the language are pure Seuss. Like as close as we’ll get to a live-action Oh The Places You’ll Go. And Hans Conried’s voice is perfect as Dr. Terwilliker. He’s having so much fun hamming it up as the cartoon baddy and his enjoyment is infectious.
Demented. And I loved it.
Not so much a zombie film as much as a coming-of-age film dressed in folk horror clothing, and it’s no less effective for it. Newcomer Alfie Williams does a really impressive job as Spike, a 12 year old who born into an infected world, and the action takes up as his father brings him on his first hunting trip to the mainland. He’s given a complicated emotional arc and he portrays it heroically, with a wonderful, nuanced performance.
I’m a sucker for this kind of speculative setup. What does the world look like for the next generation after the initial film? Questions that made the recent Apes films so interesting. But once we get outside of this, the story of 28 Years Later doesn’t really take us to any surprising places and a lot of it can feel screenwriter-formulaic (oh you’re going to hit us with the duality of birth and death? Cool cool cool. Samson and Delilah? Oh wow). But one thing I love about Danny Boyle is how he is capable of elevating the blandest trash. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the final act: a wonderful, ecstatic celebration of life and death and mortality that hit me so hard.
But the coda. Yeesh. I didn’t realise this was already planned to be a trilogy, so the final minutes felt like a giant fuck you to Sony, daring them to use this tonally awful, morally misjudged bullshit as the starting point for the next film. But apparently the sequel has already been filmed? Like I said, yeesh.
There’s no question about the greatness on display here, but even by 80s standards, the opening of this is a problematic watch in 2025.
Hits all of the anecdotes and essential events through a series of incredibly brief, sometimes barely-connected vignettes. I know it’s going to be divisive but I personally like how sometimes the film can’t figure out a “show, don’t tell” way of highlighting the importance of a moment, so it will break the fourth wall and have characters pop out of a scene to talk about what we’re seeing. It’s cheap but it feels very 90s and very comforting. Also feels like it maybe could have benefited from a slightly better budget? This is especially true of the needle-drops (although Burnin’ Down the House to close out the film is an all-timer).
More entertaining than it should have been.
Every week, I listen to Kevin Roose and Casey Newton’s podcast and I’m flabbergasted by the complete lack of incredulity these two bring to the world of technology, so it’s great to read a thorough dunking like this:
And I was thinking about Kevin Roose, serially and with apparent enthusiasm donning each next pair of gigantic clown shoes handed to him by this or that Silicon Valley titan, and dancing in them long past the point when everybody else figured out it was all on behalf of a grift.
But this paragraph also resonated with me, after a week of reading so many “Nintendo Switch 2 vs Steamdeck” arguments:
My suspicion, my awful awful newfound theory, is that there are people with a sincere and even kind of innocent belief that we are all just picking winners, in everything: that ideology, advocacy, analysis, criticism, affinity, even taste and style and association are essentially predictions. That what a person tries to do, the essential task of a person, is to identify who and what is going to come out on top, and align with it. The rest—what you say, what you do—is just enacting your pick and working in service to it.
Spot on.
CW: existential dread at the vastness of space as depicted through individual pixels on a screen.
I put this on because it was father’s day and someone said this was one of the great dad movies. Ehhh, not really. Better to describe it as a great American dad movie. Full of heroic martyrs and grizzled men weepily saluting the American flag and a logic that doesn’t bear any kind of scrutiny (first time I’ve ever seen a Trebuchet Ex Machina). Gandolfini’s delightfully scummy performance injects a bit of fun and saves it from being a complete boot-licking hagiography of Redford’s dickhead manipulative General Irwin.
Also, needed WAY more Lindo.
Following Sue Jackson’s Big Book Summer Challenge, I’ve been reading Wayne A. Rebhorn’s translation of The Decameron. It’s a surprisingly breezy translation! And the individual stories are short enough that it always feels like I’m making progress.
My Switch 2 arrived and it’s been great! Except it only really has one game released so far, Mario Kart World, and the high-level play on this has already left me behind, so I’m going through old Switch games I missed first time around. Right now, I’m playing Jenny LeClue, a lovely fun cozy mystery.
I recently upgraded my pizza oven into one with a much more spacious opening, so I’ve been trying to up my pizza game. As I type this, I’ve got 8 dough balls in the fridge on a 72 hour ferment. The last batch I made came out great, except note to self: the opening of the oven remains suuuuper hot even after the heat has been off for a while. Gave myself a pretty solid second-degree burn the last time I made pizza.
Faye Wong is easily in the running for top 10 most adorable characters of the 1990s but even by rom-com standards, her behaviour here is absolutely unhinged. Love how well the film comes together in the last 10 minutes.