Can you feel the winds of progress caressing your face?

If there’s a breeze at your back, you need to turn around! Post-haste! Hurry up, goddamn it, or else you’re goin’ to miss it! No, not the future — the future’s already old news. Passé. The stuff of anthropology. Hell, every average seventeen year old possesses a single electronic device that can be used to make phone calls, research vast informational databases, watch movies, listen to music, and navigate via GPS.

And that average seventeen year old also wants the newer model.

But rather than letting these futuristic winds whip our backs, let’s trudge forward. Scratch that — let’s sprint. `Cause the fact of the matter is that it’s easy to spin our wheels here in the future. Hell, how could it not be? We’ve got everything that our parents and grandparents could’ve ever imagined. But if we hold our heads high, welcome alien gusts that tussle our hair, and keep movin’ ahead, we could go to some incredible places.

Let’s go beyond the future.

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Thanks for tuning in to the Monday Morning Commute! As per custom, I’m goin’ to show you the various bits of entertainment and brain-rot that I’ll be using to get through the workweek. After scoping out my pile of fun-detritus, hit up the comments section and tell us what you’ll be doin’ this week.

Time to party.

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British filmmaker Ben Wheatley gave audiences a look behind the suburban crime curtain with his strong 2009 debut Down Terrace. Wheatley’s latest film, Kill List, takes another look at the delicate intricacies of domestic life then burns the house down. By the time the end credits started rolling I was reeling – damn near suffocated by the smothering atmosphere of pure dread. Over its 90 minutes, the Kill List shifts from a Mike Leigh-style family drama to terrifying folk horror that left me shivering. You’ll never guess how it ends as the film’s beginning is made up of the marital bickering of middle class Englanders Jay (Neil Maskell) and Shel (MyAnna Buring).

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The setting of a “post-apocalyptic” world is a great tool for movie mayhem. The problem is it’s been done to death. Classics of the genre like the Mad Max series and (one of my personal favorites) A Boy and His Dog exploit the theory that following the total breakdown of society, man will devolve into hyper-violent, insatiable savages. And hey, I agree. Add vampires to the mix and you’ve got Jim Mickle’s Stake Land. Initially the premise sounds like Zombieland meets The Road, but Stake Land is entirely its own monster: a convincing and fiercely human take on survival horror.

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