Showing posts with label The Apostle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Apostle. Show all posts

Sunday, October 14, 2018

2018: October 14th



I had not heard of Prospect previous to encountering the trailer on Bloody Disgusting earlier this weekend. Looks pretty good. I think Annihilation paved the way for more of this type of Sci Fi film getting major theatrical releases, and that's a good thing.

Zeal and Ardor absolutely killed it last night at the Roxy. Having seen them about a year ago at the Hi Hat, a smaller venue, this band proved it is going nowhere but forward. Very little talk between songs, except to express gratitude and joy at their 100th show and such an awesome turnout (if it wasn't sold out it was close), the ripped through pretty much everything you could ask them to. I was especially happy to hear Waste live, and they closed with a new song called Baphomet, which was fantastic. Also, like I may have mentioned a few months ago when I saw Windhand there, the Roxy really does a good job maintaining their beer taps. The Lagunitas Pils was exceptional.

Here's a video of Baphomet from Lowlands in August:



31 Days of Horror continued with the Director's Cut of Land of the Dead. I liked it about as much as I did the theatrical version back in 2005 on opening night, which is to say not very much at all. Recently, George A. Romero's widow announced he had left behind a lot of scripts. Now, not all of them are necessarily zombie movies. However, I've always been kind of bummed that George A. did such an amazingly cerebral take on horror - while creating a new monster/genre* with the zombie film, no less - devolved into the pretty straight up action film Land and then he re-booted the continuity with Diary and Survival of the Dead. I've not seen those last two, but as soon as I heard he was no longer continuing the original timeline, I was out.

Why?

I want to know what the world we were introduced to in Night of the Living Dead looks like 6 days down the line, 6 months down the line, 6 years down the line, etc. Romero deftly continues the evolution of that world in Dawn and Day, the former being, in my opinion, the best zombie film of all time, and the latter, despite some questionable acting and directing choices (Jamaican accent?), a great continuation of that evolution, for both the "monster" and the concept, but what's next? This is why I've always loved The Walking Dead comic series: the evolution of the world where this apocalypse has come to pass. Incidentally, I read once that Robert Kirkman's original title for The Walking Dead was Night of the Living Dead, or that the intention was to set it in Romero's universe (it's public domain).

31 Days of Horror:

10/01) Summer of 84
10/02) Rope
10/03) Dreams in the Witch House
10/04) Crash
10/05) The Fly
10/06) Re-animator
10/07) Night of the Demons
10/08) Species
10/09) The Roost
10/10) The Convent
10/11) Killer Klowns from Outer Space
10/12) George A. Romero's Day of the Dead
10/13) George A. Romero's Land of the Dead
10/14) The Apostle

And yes, at the time of writing this I've already watched today's movie, the just-dropped new film by Gareth Evans, Netflix's The Apostle. The articles I read about this describe it as somewhat Lovecraftian. Man, that is one over-used term these days! There is nothing Lovecraftian about this film. That said, I enjoyed The Apostle, however it has an odd pacing that feels a bit over-stuffed at times. My guess is this was originally supposed to be a series, then while filming the pilot someone decided to make it a film, and they shot enough to complete it. The film handles its multiple storylines well, however it just feels like the first season of a show streamlined into a 2 hour and 20-something minute movie. Not a bad thing, but makes for a little bit of cumbersome viewing. Cumbersome might be too harsh, so let's just say it doesn't flow the way a film like this seems it should.



Playlist from yesterday:

Joh Corigliano - Altered States OST
John Carpenter - Lost Themes II
Windhand - Eternal Return
Zeal & Ardor - Stranger Fruit
Tom Vek - Luck

Card of the day:


Confirmation of the dark side? Entering the night, exploring the darker aspects... of myself? Or something I'm writing? No real frame of reference for this one today.