The phrase “died suddenly” started to appear sometime after the first Covid-19 vaccines were administered when some of those who received the injections suffered a fatal adverse reaction to them – sometimes within hours of getting the shot. This is a controversial subject for obvious reasons but the phrase has appeared constantly in the news and on television. A cursory Google search containing the phrase “died suddenly” lists several news articles about the unexpected deaths of athletes, news presenters, doctors, teachers, students and even young children.
Died Suddenly is the name of a movie released by the Stew Peters Network on November 21, 2022. It explores the fatal adverse reactions to the Covid-19 vaccines and was produced by two award winning filmmakers, Matthew Skow and Nicholas Stumphauzer and can be watched for free here.
The official Twitter handle for Died Suddenly appears here.
The movie had mixed reviews with some calling it a conspiracy theory and others saying there is truth to what the movie portrays. One critical review published on Distractify.com says the movie is “anti-vaxx propaganda that tries to link real-life tragedies to the COVID-19 vaccine via baseless claims and erroneous information” (Cadorniga).
This blog reports on words and phrases that have entered our lexicon since the beginning of the pandemic and any creative content associated with these terms.
Google Trends: “died suddenly” has always been around because some people do die suddenly either in their sleep or whilst engaging in some activity. However, the popularity of the term spiked during the last week of October 2021 which was some months after the Covid-19 vaccine became available to the public. It peaked during the first week of November 2022 when the movie Died Suddenly was released.
“We’re so conditioned to achieve things and to find the perfect mateand then the world shuts down.”
Alone Together is a romantic comedy directed by Katie Holmes who also plays the leading character June. The movie is set in March 2020 around the time the pandemic began. June is a food critic and lives in New York City which is just starting to shut down due to Covid-19. Looking to escape city life for a while, June plans a romantic getaway to upstate New York to meet her boyfriend, John, at an Air BnB. After a series of mishaps involving her journey there, June ends up taking Lyft to her accommodation only to find out it’s been double booked and a man called Charlie is staying there. As pandemic restrictions start to kick in, the couple are forced to live with each other for a time and John is unable to make the journey there due to taking care of his parents. The unlikely couple share aspects of their life with each other and soon grow close.
The New York Times gave a thumbs up to the movie and said its “strongest appeal is in the resonance between what the characters experience and what the world looks like now. But Holmes also finds grace notes as a director. She stages painterly angles for upstate interiors and keeps the mood mellow, allowing her characters to converse without pushing for laughs or sentimental theatrics. Her film is a quiet achievement: a movie that isn’t running from reality” (Bugbee).
The movie had a limited theatrical release in the United States on July 22, 2022 and was available for streaming on July 29, 2022. It’s available to rent on Amazon Prime Video (IMDB). Click below to watch the Alone Together trailer.
courtesy of YouTube
Social Media Trends as of August 7, 2022
Facebook #alonetogether: people are posting about this.
7 Days is a romantic comedy of the pandemic genre that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 10, 2021.
Ravi and Rita are two young Indian-Americans on a pre-arranged date organized by their strict parents who are very traditional. Ravi is boring, repressed, lacks confidence in girls and gets his advice from his mother whom he is very close to but he does good character impersonations. He is looking for a traditional Indian girl and wants three children. Rita is the exact opposite. She eats meat, drinks alcohol, prefers her own company and has no interest in getting married. What initially started off as a failed date ends up with both of them getting closer as a result of Covid-19, lockdown and shelter-in-place orders which forces the two of them to live together for seven days.
One movie reviewer says the film “is a good reminder that characters don’t have to like each other a whole lot for their actors to have great chemistry…7 Days has an overall sweetness that keeps it charismatic for its 85-minute runtime [and] joins the limited ranks of Good Covid-Era Cinema, and applies certain anxieties about the period of shelter-in-place creatively, without manipulation. That is no small feat; neither is making some movie magic out of two actors dancing around the question that, when just elusive enough, always makes for a good story: Will they or won’t they?” (Allen).
Production began during 2020 and filming took eight days. The movie was directed by Roshan Sethi and stars Karan Soni and Geraldine Viswanathan. It won “Best Narrative Feature awards at the San Diego Asian Film Festival and the Coronado Island Film Festival” (Wikipedia). You can watch the trailer below:
courtesy of IMDB
Social Media Trends as of July 16, 2022
Facebook #7daysfilm: people are posting about this Instagram #7daysfilm: 30 posts
Happy Blursday to all my readers! This term entered the lexicon soon after lockdown began. My office was closed in March 2020 and everyone was told to work from home for two weeks till the pandemic had run its course. Well two weeks turned into two months and then two years. Everyday was the same and like many other people who worked remotely, I started to lose track of the days. Was it Thursday or Friday? Sunday or Monday? With no daily commute, every day felt like yesterday, especially under lockdown when we couldn’t go outside except to go shopping or for a solitary walk around the block. Time seemed to pass quickly and the days went by in a blur.
The Collins Dictionary has “blursday” listed as a new word suggestion: “humorous word for any day of the week that feels not much different from the one before” (Melony).
The Urban Dictionary has a couple of entries for “blursday,” one dating from 2007, so this isn’t a new term:
Defintion #1: “When you’ve been sheltering in place for so long because of a global pandemic you have no idea what day it is as they all blur together.
-I got so drunk on Friday. I slept in all blursday but Sunday I went to brunch” (J4432).
Blursday appears in a number of online publications. An article published for WebMD on May 7, 2020, entitled “Today is Blursday: How Lockdown Warps Time,” describes the feeling “of your internal clocks melting as your stay-at-home days drone on” and that many people all over the world report that their perception of time has been distorted because of the effects of lockdown. Most feel that time is speeding up but others say their days have slowed down to a crawl (Goodman).
Some people got creative during lockdown and produced journals for sale like this cool notebook from Amazon described as a “Funny notebook for the shelter in place self-quarantine phenomena where the days blur together” (Lit Notebooks).
Blursday is the name of a movie released in June 2021 which was directed by Vincent Soberano, an award winning actor and filmmaker, and tells the true stories of three couples in their apartments during lockdown. The IMDB entry describes the movie as “a unique and profound story about loss, love and pregnancy during confinement.”
An article published for Broadway World on May 29, 2021 quotes Soberano’s reasons for making the movie: “On Blursday, I wanted to produce a time capsule film, detailing a journey through THE FIRST 100 DAYS of the global pandemic. Following the global theme of “we are all in this together”, I created a couple of cinematic rules: To be performed by three couples around the world and to be captured inside their own apartments using computers and phone cameras.” The movie was filmed at each of the couples’ apartments in Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Buenos Aires, “shot via Zoom and in person” (Wild). Watch the trailer below:
image submitted by Piscine26
Social Media Trends as of May 7, 2022
Facebook #blursday: 2,400 people are posting about this Instagram #blursday: 6,081 posts TikTok #blursday: 828,000 views YouTube #blursday: less than 100 videos and channels
Google Trends: blursday first appeared as a blip in February 2009 and didn’t really take off in popularity until March 2020 when lockdown arrived in the United States. The term peaked in April 2020 at the peak of lockdown and then tailed off for a pit, spiking again in November 2020 (as some states reintroduced lockdown after previously lifting them) before returning to where it was in 2009.
While movie production sets were shut down everywhere during the pandemic, there was one exception for the movie Songbird. It was the first movie to be filmed in Los Angeles during lockdown.
Songbird is a dystopian romantic thriller set in the year 2024 and is based off the Covid-19 pandemic. The world is in its fourth year of lockdown and the virus has mutated into the Covid-23 variant. Those infected have a high rate of mortality but there are some who have natural immunity and are allowed to move about freely without restrictions. The story takes place in Los Angeles and is about Nico, a courier, who is immune to the virus and tries to save his girlfriend Sarah from being forcibly admitted to a quarantine camp known as a Q-Zone by the LA Department of Sanitation. (Wikipedia).
The idea for the movie was conceived in March 2020 just as the pandemic arrived in the United States. Its timing could not have been more controversial and critics accused the producers of being tone death. Production began in July that year and filming wrapped up on August 3, 2020. The film was released on December 11, 2020.
I enjoyed watching the movie and felt the futuristic aspect of it was quite good and realistic but the plot was weak in parts and it felt like there were gaps missing. Overall, it scored 9% on Rotten Tomatoes and the general consensus of the movie was “muddled, tedious, and uninspired, Songbird‘s gimmick never coalesces into a meaningful story about pandemic lockdown.” According to IMDB the film grossed $620,836 worldwide and the movie soundtrack was Leap of Faith written and performed by Lila Sugarman.
An article for TheLos Angeles Times published on December 10, 2020 explains why producer Adam Goodman felt it was the right time to make this movie: “We’re living in a scary time, and the reason the movie is sparking conversation is because it resonates with what we’re experiencing today. The reason why the movie is called ‘Songbird’ is it’s about hope. It’s about resilience. It’s about the strength of the human spirit” (Rottenberg).
Click the YouTube link below to watch the official Songbird trailer. Enjoy the movie, and remember to “stay safe, sane, and sanitized.”
