We’re just done watching the two seasons of this South Korean television series and naturally we’re only watching a Korean show because it’s really a zombie show. Setting a zombie outbreak in a period Korean setting is just an inspired decision and I especially appreciated how this is a relatively grounded show in which the characters actually try to understand the nature of the plague. It seems likely that there will be more but the first two seasons already tell a complete story, so no worries about this being a show with no end in sight.

I’ve learned how pointless it is to say that this next one might be the last Hitchcock film I need to watch and someone always has something interesting to say about one of his work that I’ve yet to watched. This is an early one that is set entirely on a single lifeboat in the middle of the ocean. The script was written by John Steinbeck but apparently it was Hitchcock who came up with the initial idea. As usual the great director makes it work and despite the limited nature of the setting this wasn’t a cheap film to make either as filming on water is notoriously expensive and some of the stars were rather expensive.

This is the final installment of the trilogy that began with L’Auberge Espagnole and this time Xavier’s adventures in life brings him to New York. There are many film trilogies of course but it’s hard to think of many that are about the lives of the same group of people over real time, the best known example being of course the Before trilogy. This one is unfortunately nowhere as great but the sentiment of passing time as we watch the aging actors play familiar characters remains a powerful one. This last film is particularly good as well, comparable to the first one and far better than the forgettable second one.

It’s been a while since we had a variant of the Groundhog Day formula on film and this one actually manages to be rather good. It is a romantic comedy as well but changes things up by having both people being included in the loop and that allows this to be a far less solipsistic experience. At the same time it feels much more science-fiction with characters who experiment to find out the limitations and boundaries of the loop they are trapped in.

Here’s another zombie movie, this one from Canada. The unique twist here is that the events are centered around a community of First Nations Indians who are all immune to the zombie virus. Of course they must still deal with the other perils of a full blown zombie pandemic. Unfortunately while there is some promise early on here and there is some attempt at a deeper theme, it suffers from a weak follow-through and ultimately feels like a comic book movie. Visually it even tries to look like a comic book movie with some animated frames to illustrate some scenes.

It’s kind of hard to judge this Brazilian film. At first it seems strange but very promising with what looks like a near-future dystopia setting. Then when we learn of the plot by the evil Americans, I feel like it takes a sharp dive in quality. But then when we see the villagers’ response, things get awesome again. Wikipedia classifies its genre as Weird Western, one of the more unusual classifications, and it sounds about right to me.

It might be tempting to dismiss this as just the latest of the innumerable nature documentaries David Attenborough has narrated, but it would be a mistake. He means it when he says that this is his witness statement and so this is his personal observation of how much the world has changed since he was a boy. More significantly, you can say that this is where he takes the gloves off and lays into the real causes of the climate disaster and what needs to be done to turn things around.