#59: 28 Years Later's big-dick zombie is invited to Pride
Death By Consumption
6/17/25 - 6/23/25
(Is the word "dick" in the subject line going to send this to spam? We're about to find out!)
It is the surface of the sun outside, which means Cuomo voters should stay inside and practice self-care. Imagine the embarrassment if you died of heat stroke while trying to elect a serial groper to lead a city he loathes and only wants to use as a way to leapfrog to higher office. It's not worth it! Stay in, stay cool, and get ready to enjoy the beautiful, bountiful city Zaddy Zohran is about to build for you. 😎
28 Years Later (2025) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park
Finally, we have zombies with huge dicks. That’s just one of the many ways Danny Boyle once again pushes a stale genre forward with 28 Years Later, a movie I don’t even know how to categorize. It’s not scary, but it can be intense, and it’s not funny, but it does have silly moments. But more than anything, it’s beautiful and exhilarating and surprisingly emotional. It’s also, most importantly, fun as fuck.
Set, no surprise, 28 years after 28 Days Later, a quarantined-off UK is the perfect place to explore the many ways we deal with crises and horrors. Clearly, the rest of the world is okay leaving the UK to die and forgetting about the people stuck there (doesn’t sound familiar to anything we’re doing to another small, trapped group of people, right?) And even within the quarantined UK, we see different ways people are coping — many try to get back to some semblance of “normal,” while others have gone absolutely crazy with grief and horror. And actually, once you see the horrors, the ones who go crazy seem like they’re having the most sane response.
Far too often, horror or genre films try too hard to be about Big Ideas by beating you over the head with them, but 28 Years Later is too clever for that — its messages are subtle and open for interpretation, if you care to look. It could be about Gaza, or it could be about Covid, or it could be about Brexit, or it could be about racism, or it could be about all of that. Or it could just be about zombies, some of which happen to have enormous penises.
There are enough elements and styles that carry over from the first movie, but with more than enough new ideas that it acts in the way the best sequels always do: it respects the first film, but pushes into new, exciting territory. (And it is a sequel to the first movie, not the second. We don’t talk about 28 Weeks Later.) (Unless we’re talking on the Jeremy Renner app.)
There are so many wild choices Danny Boyle makes in this that had me sitting up in my seat, like: you can do this?! It brings to mind the moment in 28 Days Later where, for no real reason at all, the landscape they’re driving through becomes an oil painting. 28 Years Later has plenty of that — it's truly bursting with original style — with more than a few shots and stylistic choices that I knew immediately would be stolen by other directors. And they'll be right to do it!
The ending was, I will say, a bit psychotic, but by that point the film has earned it, and it has me eager for (spoiler alert?) the sequel. I can't wait for all of it: to see where the story goes, what the next soundtrack is like, and what sort of new visual tricks Boyle has up his sleeves. Will the zombie dicks be even bigger?! We're oversaturated with directionless and pointless franchises that exist purely for money grabs, so it's unbelievably refreshing to get one that has new things to say, in new ways.
Ripley's Game (2002) — on Criterion
At first, John Malkovich playing Tom Ripley felt weird to me — Ripley isn’t bald (no shade to men of balding experience). But rather quickly, my thoughts shifted to: wait, Ripley is kind of the role Malkovich was born to play? He’s sort of straight, but sort of gay, sinister but silly, and always able to play a self-interested sociopath who can smoothly convince you he’s on your side, even when you know he’s up to something else. What's more Ripley than that?
Ripley’s Game was maybe my favorite of the Ripley book sequels, and the movie adaptation mostly captures why. In it, we see a more grown-up and settled Ripley, now settled down with a wife (lol ok sure, Tom) who might have ideas about him but is clearly comfortable turning a blind eye to whatever he's up to. He’s somewhat out of the scamming-and-killing game, but when an old associate (Ray Winstone, charmingly gross as ever) shows up with a job, Ripley can’t resist — seemingly just for the fun of it. Together they rope in Ripley’s next door neighbor, a family man who might be dying of cancer, and convince him to become an assassin. What I’m saying is: Patricia Highsmith invented Breaking Bad.
The plot is kind of silly but moves quickly and efficiently, and a young Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister!) gives a lot of emotional heft to a pretty thankless “wife mad at her husband when he comes home” role. But you’re mostly here for Malkovich as Ripley, who absolutely delivers — he brutally murders people without a second thought, but he also rides a bike while wearing a jaunty scarf! The eternal duality of Ripley.
This movie — alongside last year's surprisingly great Ripley series on Netflix — convinced me that Tom Ripley should be America’s James Bond. Give us a big-budget Ripley movie every couple years, and then every 3-4 movies swap him out with someone new. I'm telling you, this is a zillion dollar idea. Think of all the things a modern Ripley could get up to! I want to see what kind of scams Tom Ripley could pull on the crypto community. Ripley stealing Bitcoin wallets, bribing politicians, having an AI girlfriend — the possibilities are endless. Let us watch Ripley strangle a Proud Boy with his own CPAC lanyard, you cowards!
Sexy Beast (2000) — on Criterion
We accidentally did a Ray Winstone double-feature, and I’m not upset about it — while he’s good in Ripley’s Game, he’s incredible in Sexy Beast, a movie I had somehow neglected to see until now. More than the Winstone connection, it pairs surprisingly well with Ripley’s Game, as he plays a retired criminal who’s being pulled in — against his will — to one last job by a magnificently unpredictable Ben Kingsley.
The genius of the film is that nearly the entire runtime is focused on the negotiation (let’s call it that) between these two men, with the actual heist taking up basically 5 minutes. This is a heist movie that is about everything other than the heist — it's a simple twist on a well-trod genre that I can't believe I hadn't seen until now. A flawless movie.
See Friendship, by Jeremy Gordon (2025) — library ebook
For most of this book, I thought about giving it up based on the semi-insufferable plot: a Millennial who writes for an online publication is pressured by his job to start a podcast. I know, I know. The only thing that saves the book is the subject he chooses for his podcast: an exploration into the death of his high school friend, who he was told died due to a medical condition, but seems to have died instead from a heroin overdose.
So, while the book is largely about the failed attempts to record a podcast, it's actually about grief and nostalgia. Which are rich, great subjects! It's just... the podcast of it all. There were some relatable, great meditations on the complicated feelings you have about your past — and how your memories may not be as accurate as you think, especially once you start comparing your memories to others' — but any feelings I had would come screeching to a halt every time we came back to the logistics of podcasting.
I can see how the concept of a magazine writer needing to reinvent his career to survive a rapidly shifting media landscape could appeal to author Jeremy Gordon, an editor at The Atlantic, but it's not the most gripping topic to read in a novel. I fear we're mere months away from the first big novel about making TikToks.
And now let's do a TV culture catch-up speedrun:
And Just Like That...
CAN SOMEONE PLEASE GET CARRIE OUT OF VIRGINIA?! I can’t do this anymore!!!!!!! This is not glam, this is not sexy, this is not FUN — I loathe Aidan and his creepy murderous sons, and I truly do not care if one of them gets an Adderall prescription. Leave us out of this, please!!! This show has spent two seasons tracking a secondary character’s race for Comptroller, three seasons tracking another secondary character’s fucking PBS documentary production, and now we have to get regular updates on Aidan’s son’s personality disorder?! I’m going to snap. Where is the laughter? Where is the glamour? Where is the sex? There's only one thing we can do to save this show: BRING BACK CHE DIAZ.
The Valley
Forget about Iran — what I fear most is Jax Taylor getting a nuke. There should be a town crier who travels with Jax everywhere he goes, ringing a bell and shouting a warning that he's coming, so you can shutter your windows and bring your children inside. I can't believe there were a few years where Jax wasn't on TV, because the only reason Satan let him out of Hell was to cause as much misery as possible on reality TV for our entertainment. I can't believe he said the sentence, "I'm just out of rehab, so of course I want to go out!" but why am I surprised? Jax is so much worse than a typical reality TV villain; he feels like the kind of villain Superman would punch into a massive crater and he'd come walking out of the dust, grinning and brushing himself off. I will, unfortunately, follow this man's journey into the apocalypse, wherever he wants to take us. The world ended when Jax Taylor was discovered by Bravo producers, and we're all just living in the ruins.
Love Island USA
The Love Island villa is Abu Ghraib for sexy singles. (Which makes Ariana Madix our Pvt. Lynndie England, taking cute selfies with the tortured prisoners.) The producers are engaged in true psychological warfare, and they’ve found their dream lab rat in Huda, a gorgeous lunatic with one kid and zero self esteem. I’m not as invested or obsessed as I was last summer (I truly only keep watching to track Huda’s unraveling mental health — the woman has been fully walking around the villa looking like the girl from The Ring for 2 weeks). I’m not even sure I’ll make it to the end of this season, frankly! But for now, I guess I'm still hooked.
The Real Housewives of Miami
My girls are BACK. Miami and Salt Lake City are the only two Housewife cities that still really do it for me — they’re the perfect mix of insane and hilarious, like early RHONY. Alexia’s telenovela life is truly wild to behold. This woman opens the season getting a tragically sudden divorce, and by the end of the premiere she’s already back with her ex? Flawless! And Larsa Pippen is, unfortunately, great TV — she’s the dumbest, meanest woman alive, and yet I can't get enough. Marysol and Kiki and Adriana should be full-time Housewives, but they basically are already so I’m not really complaining. In a show that's already given us so many good lines, “What’s good for the hole isn’t good for the soul” was a new level of insane. I’m just having so much fun with these gals! I wish Miami were a real place.