This weekend was chock full o' movie goodness. On Friday, we saw...
"Hollywood Homicide" - A good, no-brainer, eye-candy movie. Typical old-grizzled-cop-partnered-with-young-fireball-cop movie. Funny subplot about Harrison Ford's character being a realtor on the side. A qualified thumbs up, as long as you don't think too much.
On Saturday afternoon we saw...
"28 Days Later" - This was one of the best, scariest horror movies I have ever seen. It wasn't overly gory, and certainly not a slasher/zombie pic. It was intelligently written, honest, and extremely suspenseful. I loved it, but I will not be watching this movie again for a long time!
Ok, here's the premise: animal rights activists "liberate" from a lab animals infected with a bloodborne virus that causes extreme rage in people, rage so profound that the infected cease to act human in any way, seeking simply to kill any non-infected. They aren't the slow-moving, plodding zombies of the "Night of the Living Dead" films, either. They are hyper, manicial, sprinting dervishes of pure anger. Our hero is a bicycle courier that was in a coma while the virus was released, waking up to a deserted hospital in a deserted London. Well, deserted except for the infected. He meets up with a few other survivors, and....well, you'll just have to go see it.
It also completely wigged both of us out for about eight hours. After leaving the theater, we both had a profound need to be around people. Thank God that this was the weekend for the Des Moines Art Festival.
One of the cool tricks of the director is that you never really see a clear view of what the infected look like, leaving many of the details up to your imagination. Perhaps that's one reason I was so wigged out: my imagination is far more vivid than any director could possibly put onto film.
An enthusiastic, horrified double thumbs up. Just don't watch it alone at night.
On Sunday, we saw...
"Alex and Emma" - A "chick flick". Not bad, but not overly romantic, either. Had the movie ended as did the book the main character was writing, it would have been much better, ending bittersweet instead of diabeticly sweet. A hesitant, unenthusiastic thumbs up.
Comments by YACCS
