Foreshortening. Nyah, that candy cane isn’t nearly that big.
It’s bigger -!
Kicking off the Christmas movie marathon (isn’t that everyone’s task for today) is Anna and the Apocalypse (2018), which we fully expected we wouldn’t finish.
We were wrong. In fact, we watched all the way through the credits, hoping for an Easter egg – no spoiler alert, you’ll have to watch for yourselves.
Part way through, my Arts Editor turned to me and said, I’m surprised. This doesn’t suck. It gets off to a slow start, feeling like a teenage angst movie, with rebellion against parents and all that sort of thing. But then it goes after the Glee[1] vibe, intertwining juvenile lyrics with well-composed and performed music; my Arts Editor is a particular fan of the rap song.
As the story progresses, though, the students find that reality is destroying the semi-fantasy that is high school. Children are disappointments to their parents; parents are disappointments to their children. Boy toys disappoint the ladies, and the guys keep hoping to be noticed. How to progress beyond it is a puzzle that everyone must solve for themselves.
Music is its own little world.
And then things go boom, and it’s a race for their lives, watching friends & family die as the world crumbles around them, even as the songs continue to pop out, but ever more darker, and when the survivors win through, it’s not a Hollywood ending.
At least we can be thankful that the zombies never sang.
Well acted, well sung, with an enticing hint of madness in the air as our shared view of what is breaks up, revealing the chaotic swirl in which we may really live, we were very surprised at the quality of both the story and the production. Some of my enchantment is a reaction to how superior the movie was to expectation, so I won’t place it in the Recommended category, but if you do run across this, or are in the mood for a cross-genre story which felt quite organic, you only need to endure ten or so minutes of the opening before events take an interesting turn. Be warned, though, there is a touch of violence.
Merry Christmas!
1 A successful TV show concerning a high school glee club, featuring a lot of singing, sort of a musical about growing up in television format, now terminated.
