This weekend saw the release of Zack Snyder’s
Army of the Dead on Netflix following its preceding week-long premiere in Cinemark theaters. We quite enjoyed it. On top of that, R&B musician Abel Tesfaye (aka The Weeknd) was named the Top Artist at the Billboard Music Awards, while
As for us, we watched a ton of great movies and television this weekend, including a pre-Code dramatic comedy, a late ’90’s disaster epic, and prestige appointment television in the form of Barry Jenkins’
The Underground Railroad, Oh, and anime don’t forget about anime! Here are a few of the shows and movies we’re enjoying watching right now, and what you might enjoy watching as well.
AT THE END of the first episode of “The Underground Railroad”, Cora, a woman on the run from enslavement on a plantation in Georgia, stands in a railway tunnel reached through a secret hatch in a safe house. She crouches and feels the vibration of a rail. Then the blazing headlight of a train bears down on her miraculously through the darkness.
As in the Pulitzer-winning novel by Colson Whitehead from which the series is adapted, here the underground railroad a figurative term for the network of clandestine routes and sympathisers that, before America’s civil war, helped escaped slaves flee northwards is a physical reality, a metaphor made track and steam. It is an outlandish conceit. But, Barry Jenkins, the director of the series’ ten episodes, seems to ask, is it more outlandish, all things considered, than the grotesque historical reality that Cora yearns to leave behind? As Ridgeway, a slavecatcher played by Joel Edgerton, says of the fantastical railroad: “Nothing abo