In a frontier town in the old west, a criminal drifter comes into town and promptly gets shot in the knee and arrested. By morning, the criminal, the deputy sheriff, and the doctor who spent the night in the jail are missing. The only clue is an arrow made from a human bone. Now the sheriff, the deputy sheriff, a town official, and the doctor’s disabled husband must journey five days into the desert to recover the missing citizens from a tribe of non-verbal cannibals preying on settlers.
What I’m not loving is reliving the problematic horror tropes of my formative years with the genre. I’ve been doing content warnings here for a good while now. I think it’s responsible media criticism. I’ve made videos about it. I’m alarmed by how often I have to repeat certain warnings. It feels like excusing some insidious issues with the genre.
For the uninitiated, Hamilton is the 2015 Broadway musical by writer/composer/star Lin Manuel Miranda about Alexander Hamilton. Act I deals with the Revolutionary War; Act II deals with the foundation of the US government and the succession of the presidency. Told with an iconic hip-hop score and cast with a diverse company mostly comprised of performers of color, Hamilton is meant to tell the founding of the United States from the voices of people all too often ignored and erased from the history books.
Rebound is an indie psychological horror about a young woman, Claire, trying to restart her life. She walked in on her boyfriend cheating on her, dumped him, and kicked him out of the apartment. Still everywhere she looks, she can’t get his image out of her head. She chooses to drive cross-country back to her family in Chicago. Too bad her car breaks down outside a tiny town barely on the map.
In the near future, privacy no longer exists. Everyone’s memories are public record as every detail of a life is accessible like a computer. Police can play back footage to see what really happened at a crime site. A woman convinced of her partner’s infidelity can request access to whatever her partner was thinking about. The system works fine unless people learn how to live outside the system. One woman has learned how to hack herself out of existence as soon as she is seen, making her an unstoppable assassin incapable of being remembered.
