LA Times Today: Patt Says: COVID movies
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It’s the last thing you’d want to see right now … and in any case most theatres are closed … but if the year of COVID were a movie, would you want to watch it?
Now our COVID saga can’t ever be a single movie … no more than the manifold nature of World War II could be told in a single film.
Every director would bring something different to bear.
If COVID were a Marvel movie, a super-heroine wearing a big spandex V for vaccine would fly in and kick butt on an evil twin character also wearing a V -- for virus.
Director Alfonso Cuaron would give us parallel tales of COVID-afflicted families – one rich enough to self-isolate and think itself immune – only to find that its privilege could not keep its family safe from itself … and the other, a poor, struggling family, having to go out to work to keep the rent paid and the kids in Zoom school and everyone together but apart.
Rob Reiner would make a mockumentary about a hapless gang of covidiots and Q-Anonsters who find themselves traveling together in a comically disastrous caravan to a massive anti-mask rally that had been canceled, but they didn’t believe that announcement because it’s all fake news, right?
Ava DuVernay would direct an ensemble hospital drama about the heroics of the myriad people of color … doctors, nurses, researchers, medical technicians … working themselves to tatters every day to save lives … and then having to persuade their own communities, their own families, skeptical of the history of racism in medicine, to get the vaccine.
Scott Z. Burns, who directed the film “The Report,” about the CIA’s torture files, would give us a political thriller where, as usual, the scientists see some impending catastrophe and say, this is what we have to do NOW, and as usual, the politicians say naaah.
Then the catastrophe arrives and the politicians come begging for science’s help. If they’d listened to the science in the first place, there’d be no movie, and maybe no Covid disaster.
And Steven Spielberg would deliver the bio-pic of Doctor Anthony Fauci, starring, of course, Oscar winner and Covid survivor Tom Hanks.
But there is only one director who could do justice to this year of horror and suspense. And that man is …
Now our COVID saga can’t ever be a single movie … no more than the manifold nature of World War II could be told in a single film.
Every director would bring something different to bear.
If COVID were a Marvel movie, a super-heroine wearing a big spandex V for vaccine would fly in and kick butt on an evil twin character also wearing a V -- for virus.
Director Alfonso Cuaron would give us parallel tales of COVID-afflicted families – one rich enough to self-isolate and think itself immune – only to find that its privilege could not keep its family safe from itself … and the other, a poor, struggling family, having to go out to work to keep the rent paid and the kids in Zoom school and everyone together but apart.
Rob Reiner would make a mockumentary about a hapless gang of covidiots and Q-Anonsters who find themselves traveling together in a comically disastrous caravan to a massive anti-mask rally that had been canceled, but they didn’t believe that announcement because it’s all fake news, right?
Ava DuVernay would direct an ensemble hospital drama about the heroics of the myriad people of color … doctors, nurses, researchers, medical technicians … working themselves to tatters every day to save lives … and then having to persuade their own communities, their own families, skeptical of the history of racism in medicine, to get the vaccine.
Scott Z. Burns, who directed the film “The Report,” about the CIA’s torture files, would give us a political thriller where, as usual, the scientists see some impending catastrophe and say, this is what we have to do NOW, and as usual, the politicians say naaah.
Then the catastrophe arrives and the politicians come begging for science’s help. If they’d listened to the science in the first place, there’d be no movie, and maybe no Covid disaster.
And Steven Spielberg would deliver the bio-pic of Doctor Anthony Fauci, starring, of course, Oscar winner and Covid survivor Tom Hanks.
But there is only one director who could do justice to this year of horror and suspense. And that man is …
