Producer and director Michael Bay released the trailer for his new feature, Songbird. The first feature filmed in Los Angeles since quarantine, which has sparked criticism as a tone-deaf movie about an ongoing horror that America and the world is still experiencing.
For months, experts have hammered home a critical point: the US’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic the testing debacle, the politicization of mask wearing, a new surge of infections sweeping across the country was inevitable.
But to cynical observers what was perhaps inevitable was that Hollywood executives would try to wring the collective trauma of Covid-19 for entertainment purposes and big bucks.
Songbird, directed by Adam Mason and produced by Michael Bay – aka the guy known for directing bombastic blockbusters including Transformers, Pearl Harbor and Armageddon – portrays a love story between Nico (KJ Apa) and Sara (Sofia Carson) during America’s 214th week of lockdown in 2024, as a late-stage version of “Covid-23” mutates to infect people’s brains.
In the trailer, a Los Angeles billboard ticks up to 8.4m deaths, infected Americans are forced into quarantine camps, and sanitation “police” raid homes for suspected patients. Watch below:
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The film appears to extract the worst of the past six months, strip it of sensitivity and then paint it on doubly thick in big-budget, Hollywoodized, exaggerated style.
This shoehorning of a real and ongoing tragedy which has killed 229,000 Americans and counting has not gone down well with some still in the grips of the pandemic, which is to say: the American public outside of Hollywood.
SOURCE: The Guardian
