Besides “The Day After Tomorrow” and “An Inconvenient Truth”, there haven’t been a lot of films about climate change, and even then “An Inconvenient Truth” is meant to be a documentary. Am I missing any? I feel like I must be missing some.

“The Last Winter” is a new horror film set against a background of global warming. Starring James LeGros and Ron Perlman, it takes place in the arctic region of Alaska, and of course as the environment warms and the permafrost clears, something horrible rises out of the formerly-frozen ground.

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Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” has won many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, and was boosted by being a selection for Oprah’s book club. McCarthy is notoriously publicity-shy, but Oprah was able to lure him out to do an interview as well.

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Ain’t It Cool News has an early review of the best kind of zombie film - the George A. Romero kind, with underlying social commentary and flesh-eating acid.

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Strange but true: “Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” is a mere fifteen days older than I am.

One of both Peter Sellers (back in the days when he might play half the characters in a film) and Stanley Kubrick’s greatest films, Dr. Strangelove is the ultimate send-up of the cold war mentality and the old “they can’t beat us if we wipe out all human life first!” mentality. While I didn’t see the film until I was in college, I was raised with plenty of cold-war “the Russians are going to bomb us all into oblivion” and “there might be a Russian sub off Long Island right now!” and air-raid drills in elementary school, all of which I’m sure goes a long way to explaining my fascination with the apocalypse.

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“Southland Tales” isn’t the only apocalypse targeting Los Angeles… “Right at Your Door” also concerns a Los Angeles apocalypse.

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It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned zombies. And, in fact, I’ve been a little zombied out. While the world hasn’t changed enough to no longer be in need of acute zombie political commentary, it seems like everyone and their Aunt Petunia has been jumping on the zombie bandwagon the last couple of years. Which reminds me that “Fido” never did play in our area, and it looked to be “Shaun of the Dead” good.

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When some of the first words you hear in a film are David Cronenberg telling you that he’s calling for the gas company, which will do its best to keep the gas flowing until the very end, that this isn’t a traditional end-of-the-world film. In fact, it’s a film that doesn’t really get into the nitty-gritty of how the world ends, and isn’t going to have Bruce Willis show up to protect us all at the very last moment.

Instead, “Last Night”, written, directed by and starring Don McKellar - who later won an Oscar for the screeplay for “The Red Violin” - the film has other familiar faces in Sandra Oh (“Sideways”, “Under the Tuscan Sun”, “The Princess Diaries”, “Grey’s Anatomy”), Callum Keith Rennie (“Memento”, “Battlestar Galactica”, “Blade - Trinity”) and Genevieve Bujold (“King Of Hearts”, “Dead Ringers”, “Coma”).

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I’ve been looking forward to the film “Sunshine” since I first heard about it. It had a great pedigree - Danny Boyle directed it, and I’ve loved some of Boyle’s previous films (“Shallow Grave”, “A Life Less Ordinary”, “Trainspotting”, “Millions”, “28 Days Later”). Its writer, Alex Garland, wrote “28 Days Later” and the slightly less successful (in my opinion) “The Beach”. And the cast was appealing - Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne (who seems to be in every other thing I’ve watched this summer).

There have been so many disappointing science fiction films over the years - “Event Horizon” being the one the generally comes to mind first (“Supernova” usually comes second) - and it’s so easy to become excited about a new film before it runs - that I was worried about expecting to much from “Sunshine”. And in fact, I’m also worried about overselling it here - it’s a really good film, and it’s a really good science fiction film in particular - but it doesn’t make up for the past sins of other films, nor should it have to.
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The comic “Y: The Last Man” certainly deserves an apocablog writeup all its own, and some day I’ll get around to it. The story in “Y” starts out with all male mammals on earth dying, except for its titular hero, Yorick Brown, and his pet monkey, Ampersand. Mostly the story concentrates on dealing with the social and logistical circumstances of the situation, but the question of “what happened” certainly runs under it.

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Richard Kelly’s apocalyptic new film “Southland Tales” finally has a release date: November 9, 2007. Kelly’s previous film “Donnie Darko” became a cult favorite and would likely have been a hit had it not had the misfortune of portraying an airplane accident so close to September 11th.

Southland Tales stars Sarah Michelle Gellar (who you might remember from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” , Seann William Scott and “The Rock” in a near-future US which has suffered a pair of nuclear attacks and which is damaging the “fabric of space and time” with new power generators (some articles say it takes place in 2008, some in 2005).

The original 164 minute cut was poorly received at Cannes; the final release cut is 137 minutes and will hopefully find a good audience.

I’m really looking forward to Southland Tales… Donnie Darko was a huge surprise and confounded me throughout the film. I hope that someday the original cut becomes available as well as the theatrical version; I’d love to see the original.
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