Right At Your Door (2006)

Dir. Chris Gorak. There's a bunch of bombs that go off in LA! They have dirty-ness in them, some undefined disease! (I thought dirty bombs were supposed to have radium in them, or something, but maybe I was wrong?) There's a couple, and the husband stays at home because he's an unemployed musician, and the wife, a real ball-breaker, goes to work in her convertible, and ends up stuck in the middle of the melee. When she comes back to the house, the husband has already sealed it up with plastic and lots of duct tape, like Tom Ridge told him to do, and he refuses to let her in. I thought that a lot of the movie was supposed to involve them debating their relationship and its flaws, but there's really only a second or two when they actually do that. Mostly they're crying and trying to figure out what to do.

The movie's major flaw is that it doesn't have enough budget to show the destruction of LA in proper apocalyptic style. Instead of real visions of destruction, we get exposition about the whole scene from media outlets or from the wife ("I went to the hospital! They weren't letting anyone in and people were jumping into the windows from parking lots nearby!" Nick said, "That would be really cool, if you showed it!") The "destruction" that's on this poster never actually shows up. Instead there are a couple of shots from the couple's house toward the street of what looks like smoke from a smoke bomb set off by a production assistant a couple streets over.

This wouldn't matter as much if there weren't major holes in the plot, like when you find out at the end that the husband is the one who's actually screwed because he sealed himself into the house with a particularly deadly strain of the virus—yet, he hasn't been at all sick, while the wife, who's been outside the whole time, has been coughing to beat the band.

I still teared up when she talked on the phone to her brother, though, but mostly because I have been playing phone tag with my own brother for two months and I miss him.