Three Films Make A Post: He's in all of us.

Jungle Cruise (2021): Leave it to the wonderful/wondrous Jaume Collet-Serra to turn the adaptation of a Disney ride with The Rock and Emily Blunt into: a very weird sequel to Werner Herzog’s Aguirre; also a film with various heartfelt and honest feeling scenes about the difficulty and joy of being different; a semi-reworking of moments from African Queen; a weird rip-off of elements of the Pirates of the Carribean movies (rides collide) ; a generic blockbuster that repeatedly breaks all the blockbuster rules only to reaffirm them in the very same scene, and then break them again; one damn thing after another; also, a film that would really rather like to be the Fraser/Weisz Mummy. Then imagine how he managed to actually get Disney to pay for the whole thing.

Is the result a good film? I still have no idea. It is, at the very least, one worth watching, gawking at, and pondering as a perhaps productive but certainly not boring aberration.

Two Trains Runnin’ (2016): Very different, and much easier to wrap one’s head around, is this documentary by Sam Pollard that concerns the parallel quests of two groups of white college boys from the North going to Mississippi to find country blues legends Skip James and Son House, respectively, as well as their quest’s curious intersection with the phase of the Civil Rights movements happening in Mississippi at the very same time. There’s much love and thought for the two great (and complicated) old men and their haunting music the kids eventually found, a thoughtful but not judgmental approach to the racial politics of the musical affairs, and a quiet anger about the larger political world (in which Mississippi – or really, the deep South as a whole functioned as if they were not part of the rest of the country at all). It’s told (as narrated by Common) in a mix of talking heads, period photos and film, charming animation, and an excellent choice of musicians covering appropriate songs, doing the complicated business at its core as much justice as any eighty minute movie reasonably can.

Dead Man’s Shoes (2004): Shane Meadows’s film about a soldier coming back to his home town to kill the men responsible for the death of his learning-disabled brother is stylistically much closer to mumblecore than I can usually stomach. But in its case, this approach doesn’t feel like an attempt to signal authenticity by pretending to be inartistic but provides grounding in life to a story that has elements that feel like a comment on the slasher, on all sorts of vengeance movies and the concept of vengeance itself, and as cruel folklore come to life but is not, and doesn’t want to be an exercise in genre deconstruction.

It’s much more a film about the poisonous way the past can shape the present, of pain and destruction becoming nearly living things, or ghosts, but also one that suggests another way out, at least for some.

In short: The Girl with All the Gifts (2016)

I didn’t actually expect to encounter a rager/infected style zombie movie (or any zombie apocalypse movie at all, really) I’d find worthwhile any time soon, but Colm McCarthy’s adaptation of Mike Carey’s novel, with a screenplay by the author, is a pretty damn great movie.

This is a genre movie which clearly knows its audience does by now have a clear idea of the what, wherefore and why of a zombie apocalypse, so it keeps exposition to a minimum, explaining the differences between its own zombie infection and the usual ones in short bursts and expecting its audience to understand what its talking about. As a story, the film is mostly interested in its characters, the question of the ethics of species survival, and a bit of zombie business that feels more properly science fictional than is typical of a lot of the genre. And, given the skin colour of our protagonist, it does have some thoughts about “race”, too.

That doesn’t mean The Girl is a slouch when it comes to standard zombie scenes: there are a handful of vicious attack sequences, one of the few “sneak through the zombie masses” scenes that isn’t getting Shaun of the Dead wrong by being unintentionally hilarious (I’m looking at you, The Walking Dead), and some wonderfully eerie shots of what’s left of London. While all this certainly isn’t original, McCarthy approaches these sequences as if they weren’t in every other zombie/infected/whatever movie made in the last twenty years, looking at them with his own eyes and making them interesting again.

There’s also the wonderful script that only falters a little quite at the end when a bit too much plot seems to be packed into too little time but otherwise knows about the power of taking its time. Add to that some fine acting by excellent child actress Sennia Nanu, Gemma Arterton, Glenn Close (whose character most films would play as a villain but this one treats like an actual human being without making her less dangerous) and Paddy Considine, and you’ve got yourself a treat in form of a film that opts to treat the generic, its genre and its audience with respect.