no zombies here

I'm a little whistful, thinking of those packed shelves in Hamburg, laden with German craft beers.  Oh sure, there are German beers available in Madrid, but they all have that solid Teutonic calm about them, knowing they're just fine and not being too interested in taking risks with flavors and ingredients.  Oh, that's not a reference to anybody's film industry, is it?  In any case, there are some seasonal offerings, like Ayinger Frühlingsbier.  I haven't actually checked, it might be available all year, but it has a suitable name.

A little spluttery to open, but not too foamy when poured.  Light straw color, almost rosy gold, clear and with a moderate snowy white head.  The scent is a little off-putting actually, a sort of sour graininess that you get with a number of German blond beers, but the taste is quite different from the smell.  Not sour at all, mostly sweet in a clean and "natural" sort of way, just a hint of bitter underneath.  It's very light and practically evaporates in the mouth, a real spring-like beer.  Warmed up there is a little perfume poof, but it's pretty subtle and doesn't distract from the overall cleanness of flavor.

Supplier: La Birratorium
Price: €2.90

spoilers ahead!!


There is no classic film this year, which grieves my heart a little, but there have been past years without it and it's come back.  I'll try to be patient and optimistic.  There does seem to be a theme of apocalypse though.   Lots of last people on earth and stuff.  The first film did have zombies, although they aren't a super huge part of the story.  Endzeit involves two women who sneak out of one of the last cities on Earth to get to another one, where the zombie disease is being treated instead of having everybody infected killed immediately.  They're the typical tough girl and not-so-tough girl, and do not appear to be getting to be good friends through most of their interactions, even though the tough girl saves the soft girl from a zombie or two and the soft girl fixes the tough girl's camera.  Both of them are haunted by the people they let die in the initial outbreak, although the tough girl is haunted by a crowd of strangers she locked out of a building while the soft girl is haunted by her own little sister.  The soft girl actually wants to find her sister and have some closure, while the tough girl was scratched by a zombie at some point and is going to see if she can be cured.  They irritate each other and separate, and we see the soft girl get stalked by a zombie they had run into before, but she is saved by a sort of Mother Earth.  This woman, whose face is half vegetation, tells her that the disease was always with us but we made the conditions right and the loss of most of humanity is simply natural.  The tough girl ends up buried in Mother Earth's garden and the soft girl pleads for her remaining life, which Mother Earth grants, although she says there's no hope.  The tough girl leads the soft girl off, even though she had promised to stay with Mother Earth, and eventually they get attacked by a huge herd of zombies.  The tough girl sacrifices herself after closing a fence behind the soft girl, who runs off and ends up in a seemingly abandoned mansion.  She wanders around looking for food and comes across some candy and a book in braille.  Then the zombified owner of the house shows up, blind as he was in life.  He tracks her to the attic and they fight because she isn't graceful enough to sneak away and not strong enough to fight him off - at first.  One of her eyes gets gouged out by a rack of antlers she tried to defend herself with and that gives her enough adrenaline to push the zombie off her and smash his head in with a shovel.  She bandages her eye and leaves the house, leaving a sad dog loyal to his owner even beyond the grave behind.  She ends up in a wild place where she finds the body of a young girl in a red swimming suit, like she remembers her sister wearing.  The body is long dead and she lies down beside it to die herself, perhaps, but grass and other plant life begin to grow on her and she "wakes up".  She leaves her sweater with the body and goes on to find the other city.  As she looks at the fence and the city behind it, she realizes somebody is watching her, and she turns to find the tough girl, who is probably a fresh zombie, but certainly not alive.  The soft girl says the people in the city won't accept her and the two walk off hand in hand.

The movie is based on a graphic novel and it does have that typical color scheme for graphic novel-zombie movies, with everything kind of washed out.  The soft girl has red-dyed hair and in some scenes it's a very bright red, almost like her sister's swimming suit, and her clothes are a dark, bright blue in some early scenes.  The synopsis implied that there was some kind of ideological reason for the women leaving, some anti-patriarchy sentiment, but the movie doesn't show that explicitly.  At first the tough girl clutching her abdomen in private makes it seem like she's hiding a pregnancy instead of a zombie wound, which is a normal symbol of women escaping The Man's control by taking control of their own bodies, but it's also pretty normal in a zombie movie for somebody to be secretly infected and only slowly transform for dramatic effect.  The soft girl tries to kill herself in the bathtub and is cured by a shadowy figure who says, "You'll be needed again tomorrow," which is pretty creepy, but not quite Gilead-like.  It's not a bad zombie movie, although the typical fan of such things would probably be disappointed by the sweetness of the ending.