"All stories are made of both truths and lies, what matters is the way that we believe in them."
"I believe there are far more possibilities than happily ever after or tragedy. Every story has the potential for infinite endings."
Don't be mean, don't be mean, don't be mean...
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This reads like Bella Swan fan fiction of her being body swapped into a Disney princess' body/world, brainwashed to a sunnier disposition but retaining her toddler with zero self-preservation and even less sense roots - seriously, put a harness on this idiot, and written by someone who has numerous Pinterest boards just for fairytale outfits to suit every run head first into danger situation that their TSTL heroine face-plants herself into in every single fucking chapter - prettily, of course, how would she have every "supposedly" hot man in all the kingdoms panting after her is she was stupid but not hot? - but forgetting entirely that plot and world-building kind of have to coalesce, not jostle awkwardly against each other for naming rights to "Most Twinkly", and neither winning.
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SIGH.
I made a vow, a troth, a covenant, if you will, that I would no longer force myself to review things I didn't enjoy. I would stop haranguing my brain into having opinions on works of fiction I'd rather mark as read and thusly purge from my memory banks. I promised myself I wouldn't let the completist gremlin in my brain win, I wouldn't permit the little fucker to bully me into having thoughts I simply don't have the time or bandwidth to commit to paper, keyboard, screen, whatever.
It's killing me, because I'll blame the gremlin but it's all me, entirely me, I'm the gremlin, here, but here goes, this all I'll say about Once Upon a Broken Heart:
It's kind of a mess; the characters have slightly more depth than a drop of condensation; the world building is at once both beautifully realised and more confused than me attempting to do mental arithmetic (so fucking confused); the endgame love interest is obvious from the off and painfully rote, his only saving grace being he isn't AI generated (sorry, Jacks, but for a deity, you're basic af); the narrative bumps along atop a glittering, cobbled street at high speed with no water breaks for the horses, and a handy dandy solution to all problems laid at the MC's dainty ballerina feet whenever her latest moronic decision lands her in self-imposed danger.
And for all these offences, it offers absolutely nothing new. Nothing of substance, nothing I didn't see coming, and one of the most fickle-minded heroines I've encountered in a while. I almost feel sorry for the blander-than-the-health-food-aisle-heroes of this story, that they're lumbered with a heroine who falls in and out love with each and every one of them at the drop of a hat without even slapping a break-up Post-It on their "carved from marble" chests before fluttering away to "fall" for her next unsuspecting victim.
Even basic bitches deserve better than this, Evangeline Fox, you mercurial waste of print.
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I might read the next one, though.
Perhaps the whole trilogy.
Don't ask me why, I don't make the rules here; maybe I just want to see what this confetti-brained, manic pixie dream girl muppet will do next.
Two tween shitheads with an uncanny ability to make bank take over their local pool's Snack Shack, shilling home brew and "fuck" dogs to feral goblin children, whilst lose their collective minds over the new girl in town, and subsequently making a gigantic fucking mess of everything.
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I loved this.
My summer's may never have looked this way, but damn, the nostalgia slapped me upside the head and handed me a cold one.
Highly recommend if you want to laugh, cringe, and feel things.
It took eighteen years, but the third in the best zombie franchise in the fucking world (factual; don't argue) finally landed last year, and after reading so many "meh" reviews and responses to it, I wasn't expecting much.
Thank you, early viewers for setting my bar so goddamn low, because Danny Boyle's tertiary trek into the undead apocalypse blew me the fuck away.
This isn't the same world we started in when Jim woke up from his coma to discover a desolate, ravaged Britain, running for his life with London smog flapping up his hospital gown; it's a new era where anyone left alive knows the rules now, knows to keep quiet, to aim for the head, and that if you get the infected's blood in your system, you're cooked. There's now an odd serenity to the quarantined inhabitants of good ol' Albion, a surety that this is their island, as fucked as it may be, and they know how to survive it - explicitly witnessed in the opening scenes of Aaron Taylor-Johnson's character taking his pre-teen son out from their causeway-protected island (Lindisfarne) onto the Newcastle mainland for his very first zombie hunt. It's playful, almost; a treat to initiate his offspring into the purging fold, teaching him the lay of land, how to aim his bow just right and land the perfect shot. With the overgrown forest setting, lush with an abundance of greens and expansive herds of deer running unimpeded, you can almost view this new world as some sort of utopia, free from politics, technology, and the every day restrictions of contemporary life. But, of course, all that verdancy is merely the pretty mask concealing the ugly scar actively twitching across the landscape to eat your face off. And very quickly, without much fanfare, Danny Boyle throws father and son back into the chomping fray, which is bloody, erratically paced, and downright terrifying at times. So much so that you don't actually remember holding your breath but when you finally take your first sip of air in five minutes, it feeling like a blessed relief from the terror. Unlike the first movie, however, the fear may be ever present but the franticness of survival in a confusing new world is replaced by a deeper story of a boy's love for his ailing mother (Jodie Comer) and the journey he takes to seek aid for her from a nearby doctor, delightfully played by Ralph Fiennes.
This is where the movie really excels, not to say the horror of it all isn't outstanding - it is, but it's in Fiennes' surprisingly upbeat and optimistic, kooky physician building skull towers as memento mori to those lost and workshopping a cure; it's Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the highly capable, pally father who loves his kid desperately but cheats on his clearly dying wife; it's Jodie Comer breaking hearts with her voice, her expressions, her dementia-like performance that kicks you in teeth and gathers you close; and it's most especially in Alfie Williams as their son, Spike, who if this movie had been made twenty odd years ago would've certainly been played by Jamie Bell. They share the same doe-eyed innocence, masked by guts, gumption, and having to grow up way too fast. Williams is a truly wonderful guide through this overgrown dystopia, on a par with his older peers he maintains a fiercely maintained reverence for every threat thrown in his path, nothing inured in his first plunging into danger, but a quick learning curve from boy to killer. It's wonderful and devastating to see that naivety lost, as it opens new narrative avenues for the horrific landscape Danny Boyle created all those years ago. One that's still an embarrassment of riches for cinematography, scoring, and performances.
My bloody cup runneth over.
The only thing I'm slightly worried about going forward is Jack O'Connell (Cookie in his horror era is *chef's kiss*) and his band of maniacal Power Rangers. It's giving Alex deLarge and the Droogs in the zombie apocalypse, and honestly, that could either be the best thing ever or a hackneyed shit show.
I'm going to keep my fingers crossed for the former.
D'you know what I think about whenever I'm watching an apocalypse movie?
This fluffy maladjust:
He's cute, right? A green-eyed, adorable ball of regal fuzz?
Sure, but he's also an abominable fucking tyrant with no social skills, an acute touch taboo that when activated results in sword-paw slaps, is possibly the creator of the bombastic side eye, and quite generally the meanest fucking animal to have ever roamed the earth.
I swear to you, not even being hyperbolic, he's a demon on vacation who got trapped inside his cat-host's body and has made it his life's mission until he can find the secret zipper and return to the bowel's of hell, aka. his hometown, to torture any human who enters his orbit with incessant demands for food but reject everything, to be let in and out at all hours of the night (because lord and master can't figure out the cat flap), and sprawl his pitch dark carcass across darkened hallways for the unsuspecting servants to fall over.
He is the worst.
And I love him to the bottom of my fucking heart, which is why I spend the duration of all disaster movies (zombie, climate, alien, etc.) pondering how the hell I'd rescue this recalcitrant little fucker.
He won't even let me pick him up! How the hell am I supposed to transport him to safety?!
This thought plagues me.
And I know, I just know, that if the alien invasion happened à la A Quiet Place, this motherfucker, who I'd take a bullet for, would saunter up a tree (he likes to climb, he just struggles with the down part) and quack out that smug chirrup noise he loves to make a few thousand times a day, just to see me get torn to bloody pieces by noise-sensitive extraterrestrials.
He'd probably even lick my corpse afterwards, he's that unrepentantly evil.
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All this to say, I spent the duration of A Quiet Place: Day One half paralysed with fear for Lupita's cat - even though, duh, of course he'll be fine - and half bitter as fuck because my cat would be off making himself the aliens' new ruler and forcing them to buy three different types of crunchies because he's a contrary dickhead, while I contemplated from the heavens why for the love of all that's unholy I'm still worrying about this be-furred see you next Tuesday.
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The life of an arsehole cat owner, an essay.
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BTW this was so good, I don't know how Krasinki keeps doing this.
It's like I always (almost never) say: don't fuck with nature because it'll fuck you right back. Twice as hard. No lube.
Thus why I cannot watch any iteration of Jurassic Parkwith an ounce of sympathy; what did you think was gonna happen, science monkeys?! Teatime with the dinos at noon? Flying lessons with the pterodactyls right after? Mitten knitting with the T-Rexes?! Just more evidence that smart people are very, increasingly, and perpetually stupid as fuck. Jeff Goldblum totally deserved to pull a self-inflicted gooey Gregor Samsa; Fifield should've known touching the phallic alien entity would result in his deep throat demise; and yes Dr. Frankenstein, if you build a man out of random body parts without showing him an iota of human kindness, then you quite rightly deserve to die miserable, alone, and full of regret.
And the same goes for Dan Stevens as Herr König, nature fucker extraordinaire. Just because you like birds, you demented German weirdo (his accent is terrible, I love it, he should only ever do speculative movies, he's oddly great at it for my fave Edward Ferrars), doesn't mean you should cross-pollinate.
Just saying.
It does, however, make for a compelling, unnerving, tension-filled ninety minutes of Hunter Schafer (actual elven goddess woman, how is she even real? Someone cast her as Zelda, ffs) being hunted and punted by a bird lady with a wicked throat infection and a lust for sticking her cuckoo spit uninvited up other people's... nests, shall we say.
I'm not well, really just not well at all, and it's entirely their fault:
Maybe one day I'll be able to talk about this show without immediately dissolving into giddy squeals of unhinged delight, but today is for real not that day.
So, here, take a look at my emotional support fanart in the meantime; I'll be watching m'boys yearn and fall in love for the seven millionth time while you peruse:
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