Dance Across the Rio Grande

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026) - DaCosta Okay. Any movie that features Ralph Fiennes playing Duran Duran records and dancing and singing along is worth the admission. I admit that. But is this sequel to the projected trilogy of the 28 franchise worthwhile, other than Fiennes' presence? The thing is, Alex Garland is a terrible writer. I always hated his over-dramatic, yet simple world view. I hated the ending of 28 Days Later, which started the whole franchise. I always thought the Boyle/Garland combo is bad news - no amount of style is gonna make up for its terrible, shallow premise.

Garland has shown time and time again that he is incapable of making an entertaining film. His attempts at Hollywood action movies are marred by his extremely limited and stupid world view - it doesn't matter whether he is adapting from another source, his writing always ends up clunky, awkward, full of sound and fury that signifies nothing. But now with The Bone Temple, it's Nia DaCosta, a prominent and highly capable director behind The Candyman reboot, which I enjoyed a lot.

Seeing this is the second film of the planned three, the clunky plot is somewhat forgivable. And DaCosta handles it well with the visuals. The Bone Temple begins promptly where the previous one left off. Our young protagonist, Spike (Alfie Williams), is now one of the Jimmys in the ruthless Jimmy Gang, headed by track suit wearing, parkour practicing, satan worshipping Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell, last seen as a hick vampire in The Sinners). Growing up watching Teletubbies and believing his pastor father was a satan who foresaw the zombie apocalypse, Jimmy with his handful of feral little Jimmies, runs around the zombie ravaged the countryside of northern England and kills bunch of survivors in the most gruesome way BECAUSE HE IS A SATANIST.

ON THE OTHER HAND, WE HAVE DR. KELSON (Fiennes), who is a sage-like survivalist who builds towering open air ossuaries to remember the dead and believes the virus infected zombies are curable. SO THOSE ARE THE TWO CHOICES YOU HAVE IN POST ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE. GET IT??! AND OF COURSE, THERE WILL BE A CONFRONTATION OF THE TWO! All you have to do is say the premise of this franchise out loud and hear how ridiculously stupid you sound. See, this is why I hate Garland's writing.

There's always unintentional campy humor in Garland's writing. Fiennes goes along with it and makes the most of Dr. Kelson's eccentricities: his rendition of pumped up satanic rockstar act while blasting Iron Maiden is gold. But then again, we had to content with our young hero being reduced to a passive wimp throughout the whole film. Why do zombies not attack each other if they see uninfected as monsters? However scientific it pretends to be, The Bone Temple is not the movie that explains these gaping holes in the premise, but punches some more new holes instead.

Wildly uneven, but ten times better than its predecessor, The Bone Temple only exists to serve as a stepping stone for the third movie that links back to its original which came out in 2002, which made Cilian Murphy its breakout star. But this is all Ralph Fiennes. Me, an unabashed Fiennes fan, have no complaints.

Goes Up and Down Again

28 Years Later (2025) - Boyle Not quite 28 years have passed since the first of 28 series, 28 Days later (which came out in 2002), Danny Boyle, Alex Garland and DP Anthony Dod Mantle reteam for the 3rd, and the first installment of a planned trilogy, 28 Years Later. While stylistically similar to the first one- shot with iPhone 15, instead of Mini DV of the first one, to keep up with times, and frenetic editing, there is no coherent narrative thread carrying over from the previous ones in the new one. It is stated in title cards that Continental Europe has eradicated the rage virus but the islands of England and Ireland are permanently quarantined and monitored by NATO patrol boats.

28 Years Later's setting is a self sufficient community in a small northern island off of the mainland, accessible only by a walkway that only opens in low tide. It is an ideal situation after the apocalyptic events: communal living where everyone is taught to have a role and contribute and share resources. These are all shown in Boyle's fast paced montage sequences. The meat of the plot is kind of a coming-of-age story of Spike, a 12 year old boy going to the mainland to hunt the infected, along with his father. It is a ritual of sorts for the surviving villagers. He has a terminally ill mother and there is no doctor on the island. The legend has it, there is a mad doctor who lives on the mainland.

Spike and his father's first outing introduces the bloated, slow moving, crawling zombies and scary, fast zombies alike, all naked and very cavemen-like. The chase sequences provide some good adrenalin rush. Disillusioned by his father's deception, Spike sneaks out to the mainland with his mother in order to find the mad doctor, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes). He and his mother run into a Swedish Nato soldier mired in the mainland alone after his boat sank. Then there is zombie birth - how? Zombies have sex? The baby is not infected? Negates all the gene mutation theories of 28 Weeks Later? Then he finds Kelson, who wears iodine all over his body (that wards off the infected - according to him), and lives among the pile of human skulls and bones. He has crematorium and pyre burning day and night and has a very Buddhist view on birth and death.

Boyle and Garland is not really up to making a blockbuster here, even though 28 Years Later is extremely Spielbergian- full of sentimentality with half-assed philosophizing. The super tight trailer with Rudyard Kipling's creepy WW1 poem promised an exciting summer blockbuster ride. But Garland's fuzzy writing in this - referencing unintentionally hilarious medieval war footage that looks like a skit from Monty Python and equates that to surviving zombie wars and isolationism while saying very little about either, zombie baby birth and track suit wearing "I kick ass for Jesus!" religious cultist, is too scattered and lacks cohesion, as usual, just like the icky third act of the original.

As it clumsily sets up for the sequel by the end of the film, I am hoping that Nia DaCosta, who is slated to direct the next one, will take us into another direction and leave this silliness behind.

Giving Another Dick Billionaire a Pass

Steve Jobs (2015) - Boyle

The first question is: do we really need another Steve Jobs movie? Then, what merits does the life of the billionnaire co-founder of Apple have, to prompt 3 movies about him within 2 years? Yes, Apple product is cool, but what else is there to talk about?

I have to admit, that I've been an Apple user all my adult life. It's not because of brand loyalty, but because I inherited a Mac Classic II from my ex-girlfriend in college. Since then I rarely used PC other than some odd office jobs I've briefly held. I was too young to have seen the famous 1984 Apple commercial and has never been a good consumer who would grow feeling of attachment with inanimate objects, to be honest.

The new Steve Jobs movie, called Steve Jobs, is based on Walter Isaacson's biography, scripted by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Danny Boyle, is as exciting as a production of a High School play. This ill conceived film stars Michael Fassbender as Jobs, an innovator of series of Apple products, Kate Winslet (in her annoying Polish accent) as his trusty long time marketing director Joanna Hoffman and Seth Rogen as Steve Wozniak as the disgruntled engineer and co-founder of Apple. For the next breezy two hours, we go from one launching event (the launch of the original Macintosh computer in 1984) to another (NeXT in 1988) to another (iMac in 1998), signifying 3 phases in Jobs's career.

It is Seth Rogen who steals the show as Wozniak though. Forever not credited by ungrateful Jobs for creating Apple II which was bread and butter for the company for a long time, he is the only one who show some real emotions in the film, demanding Jobs to mention him and his team in all three launching events. His cuddly presence also balances out the dead-eyed, angular Fassbender and their antiseptic surroundings. Jeff Daniels cakewalks through the screen as John Sculley, a Pepsi executive turned CEO of Apple who fired jobs from Apple but was apparently a father figure for Jobs.

No one disputes Sorkin's penchant for snappy dialog and just like in The Social Network, Steve Jobs is full of it. So much so, you wonder, if casting these esteemed actors were really necessary, when they are just mouthing the great Sorkin dialog when there is so little drama. In The Social Network, however artificial Fincher's filmmaking generally is, there was movement, fluidity, breath and scope. Jobs, boxed in convention halls and other indoor spaces, one can't escape the feeling of watching a play.

So meat of the story is this: whatever chips he has on his shoulders, Jobs wouldn't recognize Lisa (played by Makenzie Moss and Perla Haney-Jardine, respectively) as his daughter. There is 28 percent of all man in the country can be her father, according to his algorithm). Her no-good mom Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston) keeps asking him for money. He is also ruthless and egotistical leader who is never wrong. Would he find his way to admit that he is not perfect?

This trend of 'giving a billionaire dicks a pass in life because they are only human and have flaws' storyline is getting on my nerves. Sorkin hit it big with the young, hip demographic (under 25, white, college educated) with The Social Network but his HBO series The Newsroom was only viewed and appreciated by my mother-in-law. His street cred is gone. Steve Jobs is a massive waste of talent and money and Danny Boyle is not the director who is up to the challenge of making gold out of nothing, which Steve Jobs is.