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By Cole Smithey
‘Bug’
Movie Trailer
William Friedkin ratchets up
suspense and terror to an almost
unbearable level with his adaptation
of Tracy Letts’ award-winning
2004 off-Broadway play “Bug,”
about a couple of outsiders consumed
by paranoia. The psycho-satiric
dramatic material is like a Sam
Shepherd play amped up on a steroid
and amphetamine cocktail that
Friedkin mixes with cunning potency.
Without the benefit of make-up,
Ashley Judd chews scenery and
spits it out as Agnes, an ordinary
lower-class loser holed up in
a desert motel room where she’s
a sitting duck for her abusive
ex-husband Jerry (Harry Connick
Jr.), recently released after
two years in prison. Emotionally
damaged by the disappearance of
her young son some years ago,
lonely Agnes welcomes the live-in
romantic attention of Peter, a
self professed Iraq war veteran
(circa 1990), magnificently played
by Michael Shannon in the role
he created onstage in London and
New York. Between earsplitting
hovering helicopters and threatening
visits from Jerry, Peter discovers
“bugs” he calls aphids that he
believes were planted under his
skin as part of a military medical
experiment. It isn’t long before
the tiny mechanized insects also
invade Agnes’ physiology, and
the couple descends into a bizarre
reality consumed with a panic-stricken
fear scratching at them from their
insides out. Sure, it’s a film
based on a play, but this little
movie kicks like a “Motherbug.”
“Bug” is a disorienting story
because of its rudderless characters,
whose suggestibility to conspiracy
theories pulls them down a path
of excruciating suspicion of a
Government-programmed infestation
of robot bugs. It’s no accident
that the term “bug” is synonymous
with surveillance devices, or
that similar such aphids are referenced
in Philip K. Dick’s “A Scanner
Darkly.” Tracy Letts’ play is
a micro-microcosm of an American
reality that could be played out
in any urban living room or suburban
kitchen where people turn their
paranoid attention inward. Agnes
works as a cocktail waitress at
a roadhouse bar where her lesbian
best friend R.C. (Lynn Collins)
also works. R.C. clearly has the
hots for Agnes, but knows that
Agnes isn’t willing to make such
concessions even if she has sworn
off men. So R.C. introduces Agnes
to Peter, a shy drifter who seems
harmless enough for all of his
geeky Boy Scout charm.
We know from the way Peter talks
that he is a damaged person. He’s
dismissive of sex as a compartmentalized
act that he’s not interested in,
when the subject comes up. Peter’s
low self-esteem painfully leaks
out when he tells Agnes that he’s
“not good for much.” But after
a nasty yet thankfully brief visit
from Jerry, Agnes is happy to
have Peter’s passive aggressive
male presence around. One of the
film’s juiciest scenes comes when
Jerry tries to use his bulk and
macho attitude to intimidate Peter
whose slight build and obsessive
disposition belie his unnerving
ability to put Jerry off balance
with an adamant description of
the bug infestation that consumes
the motel room. Harry Connick
Jr. makes for a respectable bad
guy, and it’s a neat reversal
when, near the end of the story,
we are brought around to hoping
that Jerry will use some of his
meathead brawn to rescue Agnes.
Nevertheless, Michael Shannon
is the revelation here. The established
stage actor who played the unhinged
soldier that rescued survivors
in Oliver Stone’s propaganda puff
piece “World Trade Center” gives
a carefully modulated performance
that speaks directly to the trauma
of returning soldiers. Letts’
script magnifies the ambiguity
of a world where suspicion is
the only currency. CV
‘28 Weeks Later’
Movie Trailer
Audiences hoping to experience
similar thrills to director Danny
Boyle’s original virus-infection
shocker “28 Days Later” would
do better to re-watch that flawed
film rather than endure this committee
produced half-hearted follow-up
from newbie writer/director Juan
Carlos Fresnadillo (“Intacto”).
Seven months have past since the
last Rage Virus victim died of
starvation in London. The U.S.
Army controls the empty city’s
quarantined district where adolescent
siblings Tammy (Imogen Poots)
and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton)
are reunited with their father
Don (Robert Carlyle) after his
narrow escape from a marauding
band of diseased zombies that
ostensibly took the life of the
children’s mother Alice (Catherine
McCormack). Nevertheless, of the
500 survivors populating Britain,
Alice endures undetected thanks
to a genetic immunity that may
provide an antibody against the
insidious rage microbe. Enormous
plot holes, indistinct swipes
at social satire and a wayward
emphasis on feeble child characters
contribute to the film’s tedious
clinicism. This isn’t just a bad
movie. It’s a cut-and-paste example
of how movie sequels are predictably
inferior to their ancestors.
There’s a notable lack of urgent
discovery in the beginning minutes
of “28 Weeks Later” in spite of
its thundering musical score of
goth metal. Fresnadillo makes
no attempt at matching the fast-twitch
blast of graphic energy that exploded
from the first film’s opening
sequence where contaminated lab
monkeys broke free of their cages
to wreck unthinkable havoc. Here,
a group of civilians hide quietly
around a dinner table inside a
boarded-up rural farmhouse. Don
and Alice retreat to an upstairs
bedroom when viral automatons
invade the dark crevices of the
house to bite and spew blood on
the uninfected civilians. Don
jumps out of a second story window,
abandoning his wife in the process,
before escaping in a motorboat
whose blades chew at the tainted
flesh of his spastic attackers.
The lead-up seems to promise
an omega man perspective of one
man’s individual attempt to escape
an inevitable doom. Instead, the
plot veers off into a militarized
London overseen by U.S. Army commander
General Stone (Idris Elba) where
Don’s children join their traumatized
father in a refugee compound that
seems more like an internment
camp. Never mind that the children
effortlessly skip out of the U.S.
Army’s secure zone to gather possessions
from their home where they discover
their mother alive, if unwell.
The movie doesn’t care about believability
or cohesion. “You want a sequel
— we’ve got a sequel,” is the
prevailing attitude here.
The most visually arresting
moment comes in the form of an
exceptionally gory climatic scene
that seems lifted from Quentin
Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s
“Grindhouse” where a helicopter
pilot uses his chopper blades
in a literal sense to make minced
meat of an approaching group of
zombies on the ground. The helicopter
tilts at a 125-degree angle before
slicing heads, torsos and limbs
a go-go. It’s an unfortunate parallel
that points out the lesser quality
of “28 Weeks Later” as compared
to “Grindhouse” where at least
there’s an atmosphere of cinematic
pleasure present.
A turning point finally comes
when Army Ranger Sergeant Doyle
(Jeremy Renner) disobeys General
Stone’s order to fire on civilians
after the quarantine is broken.
Doyle leads a small pack of survivors
away from the American soldiers
and zombies who coincidentally
line up on the same side of the
law, or lack thereof. Although,
by this time it doesn’t matter
who the villains are or if there
is any hope for humanity. The
audience is simply being baited
for a third continuation of more
of the same. Judging from this
psychology, humankind really is
staring into an abysmal future.
Enjoy the decline. CV
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