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Stay home, damnit! Watch these pandemic thrillers and take notes!

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PANDEMIC THRILLERS

Matt Damon as Mitch Emhoff in the thriller Contagion, a Warner Bros. Pictures release.

Perhaps you want to fight viruses with viruses. Here are some recommendations for movies in which the disease is the star.

Contagion (2011) is Steven Soderbergh’s cautionary thriller, with Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Jennifer Ehle, Elliott Gould and others working together to fight a spreading pandemic. Call it Illness Eleven. (Netflix, Amazon, iTunes)

Pontypool (2008) is a very Canadian horror flick from Bruce McDonald, in which the virus might require everyone to learn French. Equal parts funny and disturbing, or amusant et inquiétant. (Amazon, iTunes)

12 Monkeys (1995), Terry Gilliam’s dark sci-fi thriller, features Bruce Willis as a man sent back in time to stop a virus before it spirals out of control. (Amazon, iTunes)

I Am Legend (2007) is one of several adaptations of Richard Matheson’s end-of-the-world novel (others are 1971’s Omega Man and 1964’s The Last Man on Earth) but worth watching for the blissful first half, in which Will Smith hunts deer and otherwise camps out in a depopulated New York City. It gets messy when the inevitable zombies show up, however. (Amazon, iTunes)

Shaun of the Dead (2004), because the end of the world doesn’t have to be gloomy. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost keep calm, carry on and battle zombies. (Netflix, Amazon, iTunes)

Source: Chris Knight, The National Post

Mike Leigh Calls Netflix and Amazon’s Meddling ‘Totally Unacceptable’

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Director Mike Leigh
Director Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh just made a movie with help from Amazon, but that doesn’t mean he thinks the studio is free from criticism. Speaking to the Guardian, the “Peterloo” director referred to streaming services in general and his benefactor in particular as a “new breed of executives” who micromanage projects in a way that’s more like traditional Hollywood than they’d like to admit.

“I’m not talking about my own experience with Amazon, who backed ‘Peterloo’ and who behaved impeccably,” he was quick to clarify. “The problem really exists for younger filmmakers.”

Leigh, one of England’s most celebrated auteurs, is best known for such films as “Naked” and “Secrets & Lies”; he won Best Director at Cannes for the former, the Palme d’Or for the latter, and has been nominated for seven Academy Awards (all in the Best Original Screenplay and Best Director categories).

“The new streaming services all like to say they don’t work like Hollywood,” he continued. “But, actually, by suggesting a director works with a particular team, or asking why you are not using a female cinematographer, or wondering whether the film should have an upbeat ending, they are behaving in a traditional Hollywood, Louis B Mayer-way and it is totally unacceptable,” he said.

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