This week on British Cinema

We watched zombie movies. Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later, both films I actually own. We didn't entirely finish 28 Days Later, and apparently we may or may not finish it next week, though I hope so. We were just getting to the good bit. So, clearly I like them both even though generally speaking I'm not a fan of zombie films, and even less a fan of the horror genre as a whole. But Shaun of the Dead is as much comedy as anything else. And what's scary about 28 Days Later is not the "Infected" but the survivors.

I'll be interested to see what the professor says in the discussion next week about these films. The first part of this week we were talking about last week's film Sexy Beast which was a gangster film. It was an interesting discussion about how misogynistic British culture can be, which is a sweeping generalization as that doesn't apply to any of the British people I know. But you see it in a film like Sexy Beast where the women - of which there were only 2 out of more than a dozen speaking roles - were so oppressed that they were entirely dismissed. The heart of the film was not the actual heist that finally gets committed, but the power play between the pip-squeak, middle man crime lord and the want to be retired heavy. Can Ben Kingsley frighten Ray Winstone into returning to London for one more job? The answer is yes, but he doesn't actually win. The women barely even register.

So Sexy Beast ended up being more interesting to watch than I was expecting, but I wouldn't recommend it to you. And I was much more entertained by what we watched tonight.