Train to Busan
Who'd of thunk it, but a week or so ago the Dalai Lama, not Dolly Llama, the llama accessory queen of the midwest, or D'Ali L'Ama, some random Saudi-Italian dude, but the actual head of Tibetan Buddhism, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, said that he'd be open to a female successor, but the bitch better be hot.
Sure, he said it with a touch more tact, but the message was clear, and the PC Police didn't waste a second getting all up in the Dalai Lama's biznatch. The fucked up thing is that science supports the holy man. Study after study has shown that the more attractive a person is the easier they have it in life, and that includes wooing new followers to your religion.
South Korea is a relative hop, skip, and jump from Tibet, and its Train to Busan is one of the neck-bitingest best zombie flicks of the past few years. It makes The Walking Dead look like Sesame Street. It's on Netflix. It sat in my queue for many moons, and it's only by the sweet pussy scent of luck that I finally pressed "play."
Foreign films are windows into other cultures. Sometimes they're windows into an outhouse or abortion clinic dumpster, but waddaya gonna do? If Train to Busan is any indication, South Korea shares a fuckload with American culture. A divorced dad who works too much . . . to support his nastyass ex and their precocious 8-ish year old daughter . . . agrees to accompany the kid on a train to (guess where) to visit her mother. Dad is presumed evil because he's got a Gordon Gekko-esque finance job.
No sooner do dad and daughter board the train then the zombie apocalypse strikes Seoul. One of the zombies makes it onboard, and seeing as how these are the fast, 28 Days Later, five-minutes-from-bite-to-biting type zombies, pretty soon the train is overrun with the undead. With some help from a bickering couple that, natch, consists of a pregnant wife and a salt of the Earth husband who hates white collar types, dad and daughter try to survive.
Amazingly, everyone in the movie, most times even after they've turned into flesh-craving ghouls, is attractive. I wonder if that helped them get the gig?
July 12, 2019