Wednesday, October 09, 2019

Bad Times Never Felt So Good

.
Can optimism actually make a difference? If we stop telling the same tired stories of a dystopian apocalypse and try to see other ways of being -- lighter ways, with appeals to decency and kindness -- might that be any help in righting the ship? Giving people an alternate vision a la the original Star Trek where the future not only seems possible but limitless -- where people of all walks of life can come together and build some good shit. Has our Doom been so pounded into our heads that it's become a self-made prophecy -- that we've given up, tossed up our hands and said "Bring on the Bad Shit" instead of allowing for something, anything save total collapse and annihilation?

I don't fucking know. But I do know that last night I walked out of the goofy and unserious zombie-comedy (aka zom-com) Little Monsters starring Lupita Nyong'o -- playing the sunshine bright teacher of a second grade class who get caught up in an undead outbreak and does her ass-kicking damndest to keep all of the kids trauma-free -- with all of these questions rattling around in my big set of brrrrrrrainssssss, and that's not too shabby. 

Lupita, effervescent as ever, plays Miss Caroline, and yes this is the sort of movie that will have the Neil Diamond song "Caroline" sung before it is through. Perhaps my Lupita-loving ass is biased but Miss Caroline should have been the movie's lead -- there would have been a more interesting arc than the one we get, I think, in watching Miss Caroline embrace her own barely-holding-on optimism for the sake of the children. 

What we get instead is a movie about a douchebag slacker named Dave (Alexander England), the uncle of one of the kids, who learns that lesson and inevitably gets the girl way too good for him -- I'd have rather watched my Lupita Version than have been forced to suffer through an entire act of Dave being a dickhead to be honest, even if Alexander England is the real-world boyfriend of one Elizabeth Debicki and therefore clearly knows something about getting women ever so magnificently above his pay-grade.

But the arc does pay out dividends in the end because of how refreshing all of those questions I began this review with are as our pay-off from watching Yet Another Zombie Movie. I've seen The Road and I don't ever need to see The Road again -- let me instead walk out of this week's latest Apocalypse with thoughts of goodness, kindness, and singalongs; let's not be blind and oblivious, but it doesn't cost anything to at the least contemplate the worth of a smile in opposition to this world's hourly atrocities.


2 comments:

par3182 said...

how does abe forsyth get lucky enough to have lupita be in his film and not tweak the script to be all about her? madness

Anonymous said...

I watched this on Hulu last night and aside from Lupita, I thought it was mostly dreadful and way too long. There was a better movie to be had in there.