(no subject)
Jul. 11th, 2003 01:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aslanti am baking a peach & blueberry pie. it is starting to smell quite nice. i got to use the rolling pin that i bought at the antique store in wheeler, texas. ahh...domesticity on a rainy, lazy friday.
k and i went out to dinner last night at a bertucci's in harvard square. oh dear god it was the worst meal of my life. disgusting. i thought at least a chain restaurant would have passable clone dishes of normal food, but my pork chops were covered in a hardened, red, oozing layer of tomato sauce and was surrounded by "garnishes" that had obviously all come out of cans since they all smelled tinny. the lighting was awful and the booths were uncomfortable and the waitstaff were either very new or very bad. caveat gustator.
then we went to see '28 days later', which was a very difficult film to see. i had not read any critics' reviews about it, and i only vaguely knew what it was about, before. it is shot in low res-feel digital and some of the effects they were able to acheive with it was amazing. i appreciated the camera work, which avoided horror movie cliches like showing the attacker's-eye view; the audience was mostly as surprised as the characters were, in that there was never truly a manipulative moment in which the camera made obvious to the audience an attack on a character in one of those long, manipulatively suspenseful "don't go down that hallway!" moments. the rage virus that emptied out england in the movie made all the infected people move very very fast, which in this film was even scarier because it seemed they were moving faster than the film could capture, although if there were any digital effects to achieve that, they were subtle to the point of invisibility. visually, it was beautiful in its spare, apocalyptic feel, although the content scared me very badly. it is very brutally violent, and there was a subplot involving rape (although it never happens) of an underage girl that was frightening. it was generally unpredictable, plot-wise, which was nice. this is not a date movie. i had to bury my face in k's shoulder at several points, but the chaotic and brutal subplot about rape made me not want to be touched ever, ever again. it is probably the first movie i have seen that made me want to leave the theater, but i couldn't get out of my chair because the visuals were too stunning.
i do think it was grossly misrepresented by the tv trailers. the trailers tried to reframe some key shots & scenes in a very american-horror-movie fashion, using jump cuts and sudden bursts of sound in a way that was totally uncharacteristic of the movie's actual content: it was effective precisely because it was not produced or filmed in an american movie world - the vague familiarity of london and the strangeness of something as simple as a grocery store made it all infinitely more intriguing than it would have been if it had taken place in an american city. i highly recommend it - i loved 'the ring' but i thought '28 days' was even better. it was nice to see a scary movie for once that does not involve a manipulatively creepy child skulking around (the ring, the others, sixth sense, et al). the post-epidemic world was very realistic, i thought, and the plot manages to handle both the fighting-off-zombies aspect and the how-will-we-reconstruct-the-world aspect of its fictional world.
.
k and i went out to dinner last night at a bertucci's in harvard square. oh dear god it was the worst meal of my life. disgusting. i thought at least a chain restaurant would have passable clone dishes of normal food, but my pork chops were covered in a hardened, red, oozing layer of tomato sauce and was surrounded by "garnishes" that had obviously all come out of cans since they all smelled tinny. the lighting was awful and the booths were uncomfortable and the waitstaff were either very new or very bad. caveat gustator.
then we went to see '28 days later', which was a very difficult film to see. i had not read any critics' reviews about it, and i only vaguely knew what it was about, before. it is shot in low res-feel digital and some of the effects they were able to acheive with it was amazing. i appreciated the camera work, which avoided horror movie cliches like showing the attacker's-eye view; the audience was mostly as surprised as the characters were, in that there was never truly a manipulative moment in which the camera made obvious to the audience an attack on a character in one of those long, manipulatively suspenseful "don't go down that hallway!" moments. the rage virus that emptied out england in the movie made all the infected people move very very fast, which in this film was even scarier because it seemed they were moving faster than the film could capture, although if there were any digital effects to achieve that, they were subtle to the point of invisibility. visually, it was beautiful in its spare, apocalyptic feel, although the content scared me very badly. it is very brutally violent, and there was a subplot involving rape (although it never happens) of an underage girl that was frightening. it was generally unpredictable, plot-wise, which was nice. this is not a date movie. i had to bury my face in k's shoulder at several points, but the chaotic and brutal subplot about rape made me not want to be touched ever, ever again. it is probably the first movie i have seen that made me want to leave the theater, but i couldn't get out of my chair because the visuals were too stunning.
i do think it was grossly misrepresented by the tv trailers. the trailers tried to reframe some key shots & scenes in a very american-horror-movie fashion, using jump cuts and sudden bursts of sound in a way that was totally uncharacteristic of the movie's actual content: it was effective precisely because it was not produced or filmed in an american movie world - the vague familiarity of london and the strangeness of something as simple as a grocery store made it all infinitely more intriguing than it would have been if it had taken place in an american city. i highly recommend it - i loved 'the ring' but i thought '28 days' was even better. it was nice to see a scary movie for once that does not involve a manipulatively creepy child skulking around (the ring, the others, sixth sense, et al). the post-epidemic world was very realistic, i thought, and the plot manages to handle both the fighting-off-zombies aspect and the how-will-we-reconstruct-the-world aspect of its fictional world.
.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-07-11 11:00 am (UTC)and The Ring was great but didn't scare me too much. maybe this one will. ;)
28 Days Later...
Date: 2003-07-23 11:56 pm (UTC)it was generally unpredictable, plot-wise, which was nice
Only if you haven't read The Day of the Triffids (novel by John Wyndham, whom the screenwriter of this movie acknowledges as an influence), as 28 Days Later feels very much like a condensed, sexed-up version of Triffids, without the Triffids themselves.
Re: 28 Days Later...
Date: 2003-07-24 05:30 am (UTC)watching the movie, i was intrigued because i honestly couldn't see the logical next step. it didn't seem inevitable that the guy would be able to get back into the soldiers' house, or that the soldiers wouldn't execute him in the woods. most movies, you sort of have an idea where it's all going, because it's all talked about beforehand. in a movie like 'the ring', for example, you pretty much know that eventually they'll find out who the little girl is, and where the video was shot, and etc. in '28 days', there was no obvious quest or destination, other than following a pre-recorded radio message to a burned-out manchester.
i don't know. i think the writing was brilliant, whether or not the screenwriter intentionally built off the triffins story.
Re: 28 Days Later...
Date: 2003-07-24 10:24 am (UTC)That's the sort of thing Wyndham specialised in writing, and which you can find in The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, Web, Chocky (to a certain point), etc. All excellent novels.
The plot of 28 Days Later, from the moment its hero wakes up in an eerily silent hospital, the encounter with a self-reliant woman, the escape from London and the journey outside of the city into the country to find a safe place to live, and the encounters with rogue military factions, and the adoption of a little girl, follows the one in The Day of the Triffids very closely, but with more violence and a different McGuffin: contaminated people doing the job of both the blinded human population and the preying Triffids on the loose. The movie is good on its own, but it's a thin, albeit colourful, retelling of the book, in comparison. It definitely stands in the tradition of British post-apocalyptic storytelling. (See also Survivors (http://uk.imdb.com/Title?0072572) and The Last Train (http://uk.imdb.com/Title?0195471).) How tall it stands, however, is up to personal opinion.