NEWS OF THE WEEK: Justin Bieber: ‘Conflict is part of relationships'
The 31-year-old singer lashed out at an unidentified friend as he shared a heated text message exchange on social media on Sunday evening. 'I will never suppress my emotions for someone. Conflict is part of relationship. If you don't like my anger you don't like me.' He also shared a message declaring the friendship was "officially over" after the unnamed pal accused him of "lashing out'. Justin then insisted he had plenty of other good friends who would "respect" his boundaries and asked the mystery person to leave him alone.
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ABC News
2 hours ago
- ABC News
28 Days Later kickstarted the zombie revival, now its back for another bite
Welcome to Cheat Sheet, where we give you all the intel you need about iconic shows and films. In honour of its new addition, this time we're looking at the film franchise that revived the zombie genre, 28 Days Later. Have you ever heard of a movie trailer so popular that it forced a studio to re-release a 23-year-old film? That's what happened at the end of 2024, when fans got a first glimpse of the third film in Alex Garland's revolutionary 28 Days Later zombie series. Chillingly set to Rudyard Kipling's poem Boots — itself about the horrors of war — the teaser for 28 Years Later quickly broke the record for most-viewed trailer of 2024. Soon after, it became the second-most-viewed trailer of all time (just behind 2019's It: Chapter Two). The demand from fans was so thunderous that, two days later, Sony announced they were re-releasing the original film — which hadn't been available digitally for years due to rights issues. But 28 Years Later wasn't done gathering steam just yet. After a single day on sale, the film broke the record for most advanced tickets sold in the US for a horror film this year. Here's what you need to know. The concept of the animated undead has been lurking in cinema for almost 100 years, and has been terrorising folklore for centuries more. George A. Romero's influential 1968 flick, Night Of The Living Dead, gave silver screen zombies the reputation of being slow-moving and dim-witted — threatening because of their numbers or lack of personal protection. But the zombies in 28 Days Later presented a curious alternative. Inspired by the relentless ghouls in Japanese video game series Resident Evil, writer Alex Garland envisioned a different kind of zombie: agile, angry and lightning fast. But Garland still yearned to rid zombies of their "magic". Enter Trainspotting director Danny Boyle, who infused Garland's script with the concept of rage. Instead of being supernaturally reanimated corpses, the zombies in 28 Days Later are actually infected with a "rage virus" unwittingly released onto the British population after a test monkey escapes his lab. With a refreshing concept and a minuscule $US8 million budget under their belts, the team gathered a cast of then-unknowns and began filming in mid-2001. Beyond briefly explaining how the virus was unleashed, 28 Days Later has little interest in the lore of the infected, instead capturing the human reaction of societal collapse. Bike courier Jim (Cillian Murphy, 20 years before his Oscar win) wakes up from a coma 28 days after the initial outbreak to an empty hospital. After wandering around London, Jim eventually stumbles upon a handful of fellow survivors. They then must battle not just hoards of infected, but also the ruthless leaders who have survived by brute force. The production was consistently hounded with monetary issues. Christopher Eccleston, one of the only actors on the cast with a name, agreed to take an emergency pay cut for his work. Until one day it all caught up. "I just had to say one day, 'We haven't got any more money,' and we packed up and left. We didn't finish the film," producer Andrew Macdonald said. They soon returned to cobble together some sort of an ending; after showing the studio their efforts, they ponied up for one last reshoot. Released in the UK at the end of 2002, 28 Days Later became an unexpected hit, quickly breaking even and then eclipsing its budget with ticket sales. The film then became a sleeper hit in the US market, pulling down $US45 million despite an initial limited release. By the end of its original theatrical run, the movie had made back its small budget ninefold, grossing $US72 million worldwide. It was praised by critics for the political analogy hiding behind the blood and gore. Filmed while the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred and released just a year after, Boyle says the film grasped onto a larger uneasiness in a seemingly less safe world. "The film was the first one out of the blocks that touched — not directly, but aesthetically and morally — some of the residue of what 9/11 had done to us," he said in 2018. "And, in our particular case, it made cities, which feel so immense, suddenly, they were utterly vulnerable." Many commentators point to the critical and commercial success of 28 Days Later as one of the catalysts for the zombie revival of the 2000s and early 2010s. The boom saw the release of other familiar undead fare: 2004's Dawn of the Dead remake; Spanish-language Rec (2007) (as well as its 2008 US remake, Quarantine); and World War Z (2013). But, just like a mutated virus coursing through a corpse's veins, the boom also opened the door for zombie sub-genres. There were zombie comedies like Shaun of the Dead (2004), Zombieland (2009) and Black Sheep (2006). Films like Warm Bodies (2013) even gave the zombie rom-com a crack. The zombie craze leaked into TV as well: 2011's The Walking Dead features protagonist Rick Grimes waking up in a deserted hospital. Reverberations of Boyle and Garland's fast and infected creatures can even be felt in 2023's The Last of Us, which features an unknown fungal infection that transforms the world's population into surprisingly fast monsters. In the midst of it all, Boyle and Garland (now acting as producers) had another bite at the apple with 28 Weeks Later in 2007. Following a different family caught up in the devastation, the film tracks the slow attempt at rebuilding and sinks deeper into the political ramifications of an apocalypse. Then, in 2020, 28 Days Later had a cultural resurgence no-one saw coming. One of the earliest tableaus in the original film sees Jim, disoriented and clad in hospital scrubs, stumbling around the eerily empty streets of London. It was an arresting image at the time but as cities around the world emptied due to COVID-19 lockdowns, many recognised the similarity between what Boyle captured and their current reality. Speaking to the BBC, Boyle said the world's collective experience with COVID made 28 Years Later "feel possible". Set nearly three decades after the original, 28 Years Later shows a UK that has been quarantined by the rest of the world. The action shifts from cities to a small surviving community who have barricaded themselves in their island home, following strict, traditional rules to keep the peace. "In the last 15 years, the world has become regressive and it's very preoccupied with looking backwards. It's all about making things great again," writer Alex Garland told The Screen Show's Jason Di Rosso. "So [this film] is something to do with a misremembered past and what things survive, what notions survive, what things are lost." Like its predecessors, 28 Years Later uses the still-ravaging hordes of infected as catalysts for emotional pathos, as 12-year-old villager Spike (Alfie Williams) is taken to the British mainland for the first time by his blood-thirsty father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Boyle's affection for unusual camera rigs has also returned. Parts of 28 Days Later were filmed using a small digital video camcorder, which gave the film an almost home-movie look. This time around, Boyle turned to iPhones, binding eight, 12 and 20 phones together. "We used [the rigs] for the violence … you could whip inside the action almost like in a 3D way, or pause it, or go back on it, startle with it. That's what we were trying to do, put beauty and horror together, which is a great combination for this kind of movie," Boyle told The Screen Show. "It also gave us a chance to keep a light footprint in the countryside — we wanted it to look undisturbed." Although not acknowledged in the title, 28 Years Later is actually the first part in Jamie and Spike's story. A sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple — which will see a heavier focus on mysterious cult leader Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell) — will be released in January 2026. A third, untitled, reportedly final film is currently in the works. 28 Years Later is in cinemas now.
ABC News
3 hours ago
- ABC News
The moral injury of The Pitt is no fiction. Healthcare workers deserve to be heard
It's sickening to watch a healthcare worker trying to help someone, to save a life even, whilst lacking the right tools, or resources to do so. Not enough blood, donor organs, equipment, beds, staff. There are some moments in The Pitt, a 15-part Max series spanning a single 12-hour workday (with three extra hours of overtime following a mass shooting event) in an emergency room in a Pittsburgh hospital, which are gruelling to watch. Patients, shot in the heart, losing blood too quickly to replace, a young girl dying because she fished her sister out of a pool but couldn't save herself, the crimson underpants of a miscarriage. Bellies bulging, skulls slicing, flesh oozing, veins spurting. The hospital staff are peed on, punched in the head, splattered in blood, startled by rats that escape from a patient's clothing, blamed for unavoidable deaths. It's brutal. And still, they come to work. In a closing scene, the lead character, Dr Michael "Robby" Robinavitch, played superbly by Noah Wyle, says to the assembled staff, who are wired, exhausted, relieved and devastated: "This place will break your heart." He tells them to be proud of what they did, of the lives they saved, but that it's also okay to cry: "It's just grief leaving the body." The social problems blaze like flares through the episodes: fentanyl, homelessness, gun violence, custody battles, lost young men, junior doctors struggling to pay their own rent, a crowded emergency room that never empties. Underpinning it all is the trauma of the most senior doctor, Dr Robby. This day is the fifth anniversary of the death of the former head doctor, Dr Adamson, from COVID-19 complications, one that has weighed on Dr Robby ever since, as he was forced to eventually divert sparse resources from Adamson to a younger patient in need. Both died. They didn't have enough resources then, and are understaffed now. The moral injury is clear, and it is what grabs your heart throughout the show. Moral injury is generally defined as "the psychological, social and spiritual impact of events involving betrayal or transgression of one's own deeply held moral beliefs and values occurring in high stakes situations." The term was first used to described soldiers returning from war, who felt their moral code had been burned in some way. These were "transgressions that involve[d] people doing or failing to do things themselves (deliberately or unwittingly); and being exposed directly or indirectly to transgressions on the part of someone else (betrayal, bearing witness to grave inhumanity)." This can lead to a grief, shame, and a range of mental consequences, including depression, anxiety, lack of belief in people, justice, or particular moral causes. It was during the overwhelm of COVID that many first began to become aware of moral injury, and the literature on it has mounted rapidly in the past five years. A guide to moral stress among healthcare workers during COVID-19 was produced in 2020 by Phoenix Australia, Centre for Post Traumatic Mental Health. It describes moral stress as a spectrum: "In the context of COVID-19 a severe moral stressor would be, for example, a healthcare worker having to, due to lack of resources, deny treatment to a patient they know will die without that treatment." More common and less severe moral stressors would include "being unable to provide optimal care to non-COVID-19 patients, and concern about passing the virus on to loved ones." When there are systemic problems, shortages of staff, lack of money, insufficient organ donors, delays in treatment, and over-burdened medical systems with long wait times in or out of emergency systems, doctors and nurses can feel it deeply. Sometimes they are unable to help in the way they have been trained, and sometimes, they are too exhausted. It's the difference between saying: "We did all we could" to a patient's relatives, and saying "We did our best with the resources available, but it wasn't enough." This is why it is recommended that in ICU settings, triage staff, who assess priority of need, are separated from clinical staff. Studies have shown nurses also experienced post traumatic growth after COVID-19, with greater gratitude, a sense of their own competence and insight. But burnout of health care workers even before the pandemic has been well documented, and it is only recently that moral injury is being factored in. Around the country, doctors, nurses, midwives and specialists like psychiatrists have been resigning, signing group letters and protesting in the streets in recent years. This is often portrayed simply as a bid for more pay. This is part of it. But it's also a cry for recognition of the pressures they and the medical system are under. In January, 200 psychiatrists resigned from NSW's public health system, arguing that they were unable to care properly for their patients due to systemic decline. Professor of psychiatry Pat McGorry told the ABC: "It's like working in a third world sort of environment, to be honest — the moral injury of turning away seriously ill people every day and not being able to provide the care that people need and could benefit from." What is needed, he said, is for the NSW government to "commit to a plan to rebuild". A December 2023 survey by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists found 94 per cent Australian psychiatrists said the workforce shortage negatively impacted patient care, and 82 per cent said these shortages were the main factor contributing to burnout (which seven in ten reported experiencing symptoms of). In April, NSW hospital doctors walked off the job for three days, citing chronic understaffing, low pay and impossible workloads. Nurses and midwives have protested for better staffing, as have Victorian mental health workers. Let's remember, too, that doctors in war zones and third world countries wrestle with this in far more extreme, horrific circumstances. Imagine being a doctor in Gaza now, struggling to care for kids with blasted limbs and dead parents, lacking basic equipment and supplies. An MSF survey found 40 per cent of those who died of injuries there were under 10. We read reports of medical teams fainting from fatigue, heat and lack of food, of mobile hospitals waiting to gain entry. The accounts of Gaza's most senior doctors are hellish. When qualified, experienced people leave the medical system, we all suffer. Even watching The Pitt, when the long serving charge nurse of the ER, Dana, says she wants to leave after an angry patient gives her a black eye, you gasp at the thought that her obvious skill and expertise might be lost. If you snuggle under blankets with a cup of tea at night to watch compelling dramas like The Pitt, to worry about the pain on doctor's faces, the tears in nurse's eyes, the broken people slumped in emergency room chairs, just know that this is no fictional tale and the people who sign up to serve us deserve to be heard. Juila Baird is an author, broadcaster, journalist and co-host of the ABC podcast, Not Stupid.
News.com.au
7 hours ago
- News.com.au
NEWS OF THE WEEK: Justin Bieber: ‘Conflict is part of relationships'
The 31-year-old singer lashed out at an unidentified friend as he shared a heated text message exchange on social media on Sunday evening. 'I will never suppress my emotions for someone. Conflict is part of relationship. If you don't like my anger you don't like me.' He also shared a message declaring the friendship was "officially over" after the unnamed pal accused him of "lashing out'. Justin then insisted he had plenty of other good friends who would "respect" his boundaries and asked the mystery person to leave him alone.
