BEFORE: Just a daytime game for the New York Liberty today, that's all and I should be home in time for dinner. Anything is easier right now than working five days at the Tribeca Festival, that took a lot out of me. I've got another day off tomorrow before I'm scheduled at the theater again on Tuesday. Today should have been the last day of the Tribeca Fest, so somebody got stuck with breakdown and resetting the theater, and for once it wasn't me. It's technically a holiday today, just Flag Day, which is not really a holiday too many people still celebrate, and it's not one I tend to program a film for.
Anna Chancellor carries over from "Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London". I'm staying in the same country, too, with this World War III film set in rural England, I think.
THE PLOT: An American girl, sent to the English countryside to stay with relatives, finds love and purpose while fighting for her survival as war envelops the world around her.
AFTER: The end of the world is rather a nebulous thing, we've been seeing movies about it for quite some time, different spins on how it's going to happen, or more to the point, when. And what form will it take, will it be a nuclear war or environmental disaster or the most ironic of all, a new Ice Age after we get a handle on global warming? My cat thinks it's the end of the world every time she hears fireworks or thunder outside, and with the Knicks winning and a storm tonight, we've had both and I probably won't see her until morning again, she's hiding in the basement. For her, it's a perfectly reasonable response to the perceived threat, so I'm allowing her to hide, clearly she's been triggered due to something that happened to her before she moved in. And to a certain degree, this is how we all live, we remember our past traumas and they guide our responses to things in the present.
Our generation made it through the pandemic - well, most of us did, I suppose - and that colors our responses to things now. We hear about an outbreak of Ebola or monkey pox and we wonder if this is the next thing that's going to spread across the globe and make us all miss work for the next 2 years without, you know, really MISSING work. I rebuilt my whole career again from the ground up after COVID, I only lost one of my animation jobs directly as a result, but let's say I lost the other one indirectly, even though one studio re-opened it was never quite the same after that. So I got jobs in movie theaters when they re-opened and there was a hiring wave of sorts, they really couldn't turn me down because they needed people desperately or they could not re-open for business and make that sweet sweet cheddar. Sure I kind of miss my old life, running Comic-Con booths and arranging complicated director travel and festival traffic, but I'm an events guy now, responsible for managing complicated screenings with a lot of moving parts, also selling beer to basketball fans. I contain multitudes, and I didn't know for sure I could do either thing until I started doing them.
This is probably a roundabout way of coming at "How I Live Now", a film about a teenage girl visiting family in the U.K. during a tense political time, and just as she's starting to feel a bit comfortable there, and she's fallen into a relationship with her oldest cousin (umm, eww, but we'll have to deal with this in a bit...) her whole world gets turned upside-down with the start of the war. Nobody SAYS "World War III" outright, but come on. It's based on a book from 2004 and the film came out in 2013, set in the future, so, umm, now-ish? Things start with news reports of a bombing in Paris and then a bit later terrorists set off a nuke in London, killing tens of thousands. Well, keep calm and carry on, as they say over there, or institute martial law, whatever you think is best. Someone from the American consulate visits the family farm and offers Elisabeth safe passage back home, but, well, she's been fighting with her dad back in the U.S. and also, as previously stated, she's fallen in love with her cousin. (Again, ewww...)
The three cousins, Elisabeth/Daisy and a family friend are left alone, because Aunt Peg is some kind of government adviser and has been called into service, the kids determine that if the order comes to evacuate, they'll just move into their barn up on the hillside and there, that should do it. But the soldiers come and they find the barn and they separate the boys and girls, sending them to different parts of the country. Eddie tries to fight back and tells Daisy to return to the farm as soon as she can.
Daisy and her cousin Piper are sent to live in the home of a military officer and his wife - their son has gone off to fight in the war and probably isn't coming back, but hey, who knows. Daisy and Piper work on a farm harvesting vegetables and they find that family friend, Joe, working on the same farm. But Joe gets killed when he stands up to the terrorists, which was probably not a good idea. Harvesting vegetables isn't really Daisy's cup of tea, so she plans an escape with Piper and they spend the next few days walking back home, during which time they witness soldiers mistreating (enemy?) prisoners and also find the results of a massacre at the camp where the boys were taken. Or maybe the boys were taken there to be killed, that's a bit unclear - I don't know why the soldiers would kill their own countrymen, but maybe there's a food shortage or something and they can only feed the girls? Cousin Isaac is found among the bodies, but not cousin Eddie, so they keep heading toward the old family farm.
Just as they're ready to give up, they see Eddie's pet hawk and realize they're close. Once they find the family home again, they learn the troops that stationed themselves there have also been killed, and only their pet dog remains. But the next morning Daisy follows the dog into the woods and they find Eddie there, he's unconscious and scarred, but they take him home and nurse him back to health - sort of, he'll probably have PTSD for the rest of his life, which is another case of past trauma coloring our future responses to things. That's it, that's the film, though it's really a bit of a bummer. But at least the war is over (umm, who won?) and a new UK government forms, the country starts to recover but the radiation will probably be around for a few thousand years. And then maybe a couple decades after that, they start up the Hunger Games, so they've got that to look forward to...
Directed by Kevin Macdonald (director of "The Mauritanian" and "Whitney")
Also starring Saoirse Ronan (last seen in "I Could Never Be Your Woman"), George MacKay (last seen in "Ophelia"), Tom Holland (last seen in "Stan Lee"), Harley Bird, Danny McEvoy, Corey Johnson (last seen in "September 5"), Darren Morfitt (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi"), Jonathan Rugman, Stella Gonet (last seen in "Spencer"), Des McAleer (last seen in "Angela's Ashes"), Sophie Stanton (last seen in "Shadowlands"), Natasha Jonas (last seen in "Attack the Block"), Nav Sidhu, Amy Dawson (last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Mark Stanley (last seen in "Hellboy"), Paul Ronan (last seen in "The Boxer").
RATING: 4 out of 10 fighter jets flying overhead
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