Viagra Boys - Therapy II

Mitski - I'll Change for You

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

The second part of a planned trilogy, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, from director Nia DaCosta and screenwriter Alex Garland, arrives hot on the heels of its predecessor, 28 Years Later, forgoing the customary leap forward in time to stay settled-in with the cast of characters that were introduced in this previous instalment. We are, very briefly, presented with a small, croft settlement of brand new survivors at one point but these creeping foragers scarcely amount to much more than superficially detailed victims for Jack O'Connell's devil-worshipping Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, and his mob of track-suited tearaways, to brutalise. The Bone Temple then isn't particularly interested in these kinds of perspectives - the barely sketched people who allow the filmmakers to burn minutes in repose while offering up a repetitive sense of discovery. And why would you be, when you have Ralph Fiennes on call as the iodine-stained Dr. Kelson? 

The interlaced inferno of 28 Days Later flash froze a specific moment of post-millennium anxiety, one that prodded at that era's mounting sense of horror that the endless prosperity predicted in the 1990s might not, actually, materialise. That, in actual fact, the human race was becoming unstuck and reverting back to patterns of behaviour that are more outwardly violent and base. The rage virus that galloped through these British isles brought that country to a screeching halt, trapping its surviving citizens inside a pantomime performance anchored to the thoughts and feeling of a receding century. The United Kingdom was, essentially, pickled. So, not only does O'Connells' cult leader behave like some nightmarish recollection of a disgraced light entertainment personality but cottage-dwelling fathers dote on their children, singing lullabies about a world in which fascism has, definitively, been vanquished forever. Their world may have collapsed in on itself but, barring any contradictory transmissions beamed in from the outside world, somehow the UK's immolation seems to have righted the sinking ship that we, in reality, have all found ourselves on. 

These strange, nostalgic pangs for the comfort and certainty promised by history's end extends to the aforementioned GP, a job role that is itself now a deliberately diminished position within modern, British communities. Kelson, unburdened by the slashed funding of austerity or orders to direct the sick and needy to privatised care, is patient and delicate in his dealings with the damaged people that come before him. He sits with them and listens, getting to know them and tailoring his therapies to the individual rather than fobbing them off with a one-size-fits-all treatment path. His serene, non-judgmental demeanor is itself a potent tonic; enough to dispel all manner of simmering anger. Unusually then, Bone Temple rejects any of the fantastical underpinnings of this specific zombie virus to examine how a valorous doctor might attempt to provide treatment for such unapologetic, mutative violence. Danny Boyle's first instalment may have ended on the promise of bewigged nutters somersaulting over the camera in a Super Sentai flurry - a mode of action that, funnily enough, the much younger DaCosta has no interest in replicating here - but this Bone Temple is instead a sort of inverse of Aleksei German's Hard to be a God. Specifically, a film premised on the idea that a knowledgeable man steeped in (now) deeply foreign art and technologies can be a force for radical change in this sunken world. 

Iron Maiden - The Number of the Beast

Eagle No. 279 by José Ortiz

Duran Duran - Ordinary World

Spider-Man by Sal Buscema

Paul McCartney - Take It Away

About a Place in the Kinki Region

It probably sounds absurd to describe a film in which terrified journalists are visited by their bleeding, mutilated doppelgangers as cosy but writer-director Kōji Shiraishi's About a Place in the Kinki Region is so steeped in curated creepiness and abandoned, old-world rhythms that it cannot help but evoke these strange notes of comfort. When a writer for the Japanese equivalent of Fortean Times goes missing with an important deadline looming, freelancer and friend to the departed Chihiro, played by former pop idol Miho Kanno, is brought in to complete the ailing magazine's centrepiece feature. This salvage job demands Chihiro sink into a well-stocked basement and rummage through notes and dusty physical media, each containing fragments of apparently unconnected paranormal phenomena. Cinematographer Futa Takagi's camera then returning, again and again, to beatific images of CD-Rs adorned with post-it notes and VHS tapes that clatter into video cassette recorders connected to rolling, blue screens. In an era of algorithms and high-definition streaming, where all the world's horrors feel so close and instantly (or unwittingly) attainable, that these short, eerie episodes - the viewing of which accounts for a significant portion of this film's first half - are physically constrained and therefore denied that kind of free-flowing accessibility actually feels unusually comforting. This case unravels in such a way that our snooping leads have to deliberately access each individual breadcrumb if they are to advance to the next stage of this haunting, implicating and endangering themselves by the specific act of trying to understand any overarching objective. With that in mind, Kanno's Chihiro is the perfect character to centre this kind of story around - a fearless reporter who is not only unusually determined to see this story through but behaves as if she is, actually, completely immune. 

MidPoint - Time

The Olympians - Strawberry Kiwi

Red Sonja

Although executed as a feature film, director MJ Bassett and screenwriter Tasha Huo's take on Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith's Red Sonja plays like a couple of episodes of mini-series television stapled together. A midpoint break, in which Matilda Lutz's horse-girl turned gladiator strikes a status quo altering blow against a slave master, played by a gleeful Robert Sheehan, feels oddly conclusive, as if the film had suddenly come to an end fifty minutes sooner than expected. This conceptual or structural oddness crops up elsewhere in the film too. Rhona Mitra's Petra, an old hand within the film's arena setting (a position that reflects the actress's familiarity with the action-fantasy genre) is very quickly organised away from the mentor role she seems primed to fulfil. A move that, if anything, underlines the human wastefulness that really should be associated with something as terrible, but reflexively deployed in sword and sandal films, as big screen bloodsport. Elsewhere, an injury suffered by Sonja - before she's had a chance to vanquish her foes - registers as grievous and alarming, rather than simply the kind of wound that forestalls climax. This note perhaps sharpened by Lutz's presence, an actress who, in Coralie Fargeat's Revenge, was subjected to all manner of grisly and sustained abrasion. In comparison to its Brigitte Nielsen starring predecessor, this Red Sonja suffers and thrives in opposite ways then. The production looks distinctly underfunded, especially when compared to the cut-rate opulence provided by Danilo Donati in the mid-1980s but, while Nielsen was eclipsed by her Austrian co-star, this red-headed barbarian is only ever upstaged by infrequent appearances from an extremely well-trained stallion named Vihur. 

Kim Gordon - Not Today

Madara 1000 - ıןןosıouǝ dǝɹɟɟǝʇɐ

Optimus Prime by Daniel Warren Johnson

Gorillaz - The Hardest Thing // Orange County (Feat. Tony Allen, Bizarrap, Kara Jackson, and Anoushka Shankar)

Space Warrior Baldios

Space Warrior Baldios, directed by Kazuyuki Hirokawa and Hisayuki Toriumi, was the The End of Evangelion of its day, a feature-length, big screen release designed to tie up the loose ends for an early 80s television series that had attracted a small but dedicated following. Hacked together from 30-odd TV episodes and capped with material rearranged from unaired instalments, Baldios may trudge moment-to-moment but the plotting covers enormous ground, picking up on a seemingly alien planet choked with pollution and ending on an Earth facing a similarly destitute future. In this telling, Baldios seems notable for being a version of a super robot show that barely features its gleaming mechanoid. Although extraterrestrial sorties and transforming spacecraft are frequently deployed, the story's despondent destination means our heroes are always presented as being on the backfoot - assailed by a dimension-hopping civilisation, originating from the dead planet S-1, who will stop at nothing to claim Earth as their prize. As the conflict grows to include nuclear detonations and city swallowing tsunamis, leaders on both sides of the conflict tune into this apocalyptic death spiral, completely unwilling to take stock or exercise restraint. This mania is complimented by the film's two main characters: the S-1 refugee Marin Reigan, who fights on behalf of Earth and Aphrodia, the adopted daughter of the invading Fuhrer. Although clearly lovestruck from the second they meet, this strange pair bicker across a canvas of human extermination, constantly inventing reasons to prolong, but never consummate, their demented flirtation. 

Black Marble - Far

Khruangbin - White Gloves ii (Live)

Lensman

A fast and loose animated adaptation of EE 'Doc' Smith's science fiction novels that is, really, best understood, contextualised and appreciated through the enormous success of another work that drew significant inspiration from the series, George Lucas' Star Wars. Cyberpunk supremo Yoshiaki Kawajiri's feature-length debut, co-directing alongside Kazuyuki Hirokawa, seizes on this antecedent work - originally serialised in the magazine Astounding Stories beginning in 1937 then concluding in 1948 - and reimagines it using the Campbellian shorthand so beloved of Lucas. Lensman's Kimball Kinnison then is, accordingly, transformed from a plucky service cadet to, like Luke Skywalker, a farmhand with a knack for daredevil aviation. Although Kinnison is thinly sketched here, really only a blank surrogate for young audiences yearning for adventure, Lensman actually does do a better job of describing his hotshot pilot credentials than the earliest passages of A New Hope. 

If anything Kinnison's impressive ability to seize control of a decaying star cruiser and safely land its crumbling body anticipates a similarly entertaining setpiece from 2005's Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. As Lensman reaches further and further out into space, Kawajiri and Hirokowa's film applies a grungier, biomechanical aspect to its planets and alien lifeforms - the villainous Boskone Empire are, seemingly, formless energies trapped in shell-like carapace; heroic alien Worsel is the spitting image of Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill's Nemesis the Warlock, so much so that you wonder if odd issues of 2000 AD actually made their way to Japan. Together, Worsel and Kinnison find themselves key players in a galactic theatre of war that combines fleets of spacecraft locked in battle; the rescue of an endangered loved from the clutches of a formless monstrosity; and a worker's uprising on a planet choked with mining machinery. Obviously, again, this tiered action is a storytelling technique clearly patterned after Lucas' blockbuster episodes but Lensman does at least deliver on the suggestion of a slave uprising, a concept thwarted by reflexive drag racing in Lucas' prequel chapters and teased, then abandoned, in the more recent Disney sequels.