Assembly of Dust

You know, I like Assembly of Dust. Maybe a little too...earnest, while at the same time a bit prone to glib consonance like “A swerving nerve that came to serve you.” But they’ve got a nice warm sound, and some of the songwriting is pretty good.

But, really, you’re doing a New Year’s Eve show, you count down to midnight, and then you break into “Champagne Supernova”? Even if this band did irony, which I think that the guy who sings “Behold before you stands a man, I wanna live my life and find a wife so kind” doesn’t really do, there exist none of our infinite number of parallel universes in which playing “Champagne Supernova” is even funny. It’s just terrible. Why would you do that, when your mother has worked so hard? Just hang up your rock-and-roll underwear and scurry away into the night. I mean, really.

Hot Fuzz

I need to track down a British person who’s seen Hot Fuzz. There’s a lot of surveillance in the movie, and to an American--at least, to a privacy-conscious American who’s a bit worried about the nanny-state surveillance society we’re barreling towards--it was present to an almost shocking degree. The idea of a whole room at the local police station dedicated to all the town’s surveillance cameras (and being watched over by a civilian neighborhood watch type, although I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse) was unsettling. I wonder if it registered with the average British moviegoer, or if it just seemed par for the course. Of course, there are such rooms in some American police stations, but on the whole we’re not quite as watched-over as they are, yet. It seemed as strange to me as a cop who didn’t want to get near a gun, which the movie also featured.

Also worth noting: the vile neighbo(u)rhood watch association in Hot Fuzz goes by the rather self-evident acronym of NWA. I couldn’t tell if they were actually going for these laughs, but seeing Brits yell back and forth about who NWA is out to get is true comedy.

28 Weeks Later

I find the concept of a politically relevant zombie movie...well, a bit of a stretch, usually. I’ve seen a couple George Romero movies, and I seem to remember finding the “message” kind of grafted on. And, really, that’s fine. We’re there for the zombies. Lay out your twist, and then just try not to be too dunderheaded about it.

What I liked about 28 Weeks Later was that the shrinking cast of protagonists wasn’t even fighting zombies half the time: they were up against their own government’s* arguably rational, if harsh, reaction to the zombie problem. They’re repopulating London, and the military’s big guns are on a hair trigger against The Sickness: anything goes wrong, and the military gets real killy, real fast. Shockingly, something goes wrong, and it leads to what are frankly some of the most disturbing scenes I’ve seen put to film. I’ve seen any number of atrocities committed in movies, but the just-following-orders aspect of modern-day American troops firing indiscriminately on their own civilians is jarring.

* Well, a US-led NATO force in London, but a body to which they had presumably submitted upon their return to the UK.