This post is going out super late, though – like, three days! Sorry

As always, please do leave a comment, if only to say howdy…

The Office 0217 – 0306

We’ve watched an awful lot of “The Office” in the last couple of weeks, and I’ve also, somehow, failed to note it here when it’s happened.

As such, that means that it’d be a hell of a job to recap it all, and what with all the other things I should be doing, I can’t really do any of it justice.

Hey, ho, I will try to write at least one line about each episode:

0217 – Dwight’s Speech: It’s nice to see Dwight’s character getting fleshed out a little bit and given an actual, genuine talent – that will stick with him throughout the show. The way in which the practical joke that Jim plays on him ends up making Dwight a hero among his peers is fun, too.

0218 – Take Your Daughter To Work Day: Watching Michael get himself tangled up around Stanley’s daughter, and indeed watching the whole office deal with the influx of youngsters that are suddenly in their workplace, is only eclipsed by the poignance of Michael’s surprising affinity with the children, and the tragedy of his own childhood. They handle this stuff well, in this show – had the original UK series continued, they would have struggled with the eventual need to humanise Gervais’ Brent, but Carrell et al do a fine job of making you sympathise with this character while at the same time finding him horrid.

0219 – Michael’s Birthday: Perfect for the moment when Michael fails to hide his dismay that Kevin’s cancer scare has derailed his birthday plans, and also for the totally convincing 360 he has when concerned for Kevin later. Also, I sometimes get tangled up when hearing about negative results that are positive, too.

0220 – Drug Testing: Michael’s acting out at the beginning of this episode makes me cringe every time – and not always in a good way. I actually find shows like this quite hard to watch, sometimes – I’ve always struggled with embarassment humour. Seeing the way Dwight and Michael interact in this episode is big fun, but seeing how Jim handles Pam’s challenge is priceless, and brilliantly delivered.

0221 – Conflict Resolution: A great episode, with lots of Toby – one of my many favourite members of the cast – and some great Michael meetings. But really it’s the heartbreaking moments between Jim and Pam that stick in my head from this episode, with Pam’s hurt shock truly upsetting.

0222 – Casino Night: Michael has the most incompetent double-dating farce ever. Plus, you know, more heartbreaking Jim/Pam interaction. Stuff that you’d think would knacker this show’s delicately balanced factors actually just makes it more intriguing…

0301 – Gay Witch Hunt: Utterly awesome season opener, that finds Jim – surprisingly – transfered to a distant branch of Dundler Mifflin, and Oscar outted accidentally by Michael. Admittedly, the beginning of this season is the point at which the show had to grind harder on it’s format to make itself work, and consequently becomes more of a straight-forward sitcom than before.
But this episode begins with a wonderfully funny exchange between Michael and Toby, and is just gag-centric from thereon in.

0302 – The Convention: Some nice Pam moments, as she tries to move on with her single life. Also, Michael, Dwight and Jim are reunited, and Michael holds the worst party ever.

0303 – The Coup: I didn’t see this episode this time out – Girl One watched it while I was doing other stuffs, or trying to. I remember it being a pretty strong Dwight episode, but all I saw of it this time out was him writhing on the floor begging for his job. Oh, also – “hug it out, bitch”.

0304 – Grief Counselling: Michael gets lots of nice moments of self-denying neurosis in this episode, but the best moment for me is the hastily called meeting he gives, in which Pam and Ryan bond ever so slightly by recounting bereavements that are actually movie plots, and Dwight reveals that he absorbed his own fetal twin.

0305 – Initiation: A great Ryan episode, with some cool interactions between him and Dwight. Also, the first appearance of cousin Mose, I think. I like cousin Mose.

0306 – Diwali: Heh. Michael tries far too hard to make everyone understand Hindu culture. Angela has some great moments here, as her intolerance brings her front and center. And as Pam starts to properly miss Jim, Jim finds himself making friends at Stamford.
Of course, the action has been split between branches all season so far, and this further stretches the “documentary” conceit of the show, but as much as it loses in format fetishism, it gains in being pitch perfect observational character comedy.

Torchwood Season 0206

Still catching up here. Only managed to watch the one.

0206 – Reset: Jim Robinson! Martha Jones! A cure for everything!

Not a bad episode, and it’s always nice to see Martha. A quite fun sci-fi concept driving the story, too, which is nice – not all “Torchwood” episodes hold together all that well, plotwise, and this one crackles along at quite a nice pace, with a bit of character development between Owen and Tosh, and some nice stuff between Martha and everyone!

The episode has a climax that would have been quite shocking, had I not already had it spoilered for me, and it’s handled well, and not forecast at all.

For some reason, though, despite dropping the melodrama in the main text of the episode, they’ve gone full-throttle with the swishey wipes and zooms, and the overdone stabs in the score. I haven’t noticed this level of hyperactivity in any of the other episodes, so either it’s just really obvious in this episode, or it’s a brand-new foible. Not a deal-breaker, but a little annoying all the same!

Dead Set 01-05

Charlie Brooker’s “Dead Set” was a nice and nifty, compact drama series, that only half bothered with the black-comedy remit that I decided on for it, and didn’t outstay it’s welcome at all.

To be honest, despite the lofty expectations that had been critically manufactured for the show, the first half of the series pretty much concerned itself with setting up the situations, and firmly establishing it’s horror credentials from early on, making sure nobody thought that because they were watching a made-for-broadcast series, they were going to get short-changed on the gore and intensity.

Any satire in the first half comes entirely out of the situation, and in fact played almost entirely straight as it is, the ludicrousness and spectacle of Big Brother itself, and the fervour of the people who turn up for eviction night, is left pretty much to speak for itself. Brooker doesn’t try to force the point, as I worried that he might – and the housemates and media types are only as vile or vacuous as you’d expect them to be.

Once the producer, Patrick – played with wonderful moments of schizophrenic rage by Andy Nyman – properly enters the fray, however, Brooker delights in the heavy-handed – both subtextually and explicitly – dispensation of visual metaphors, first in commenting on how the showrunners gleefully dissect the “talent” of the show’s contestants, and then in ever glorious moments of violence running down to the climax. Without spoiling the show too much, there’s an obvious theme of rampant consumption throughout, but some people get a more brutal onscreen deconstruction than others, and I don’t think it’s by accident.

Everyone does great work, here, from director to production team to the cast. The only possible miscasting being that of Kevin Eldon as Joplin – or Gollum as the other housemates call him behind his back. This isn’t because he does a bad job – his performance is spot on, and very reminiscent of the “eccentric, pretentious older guy” archetypal role that the show has filled for the last few seasons at least. It’s just that, for me at least, I know his face too well, and alongside the rest of the cast, who were either unknowns, are blank enough slates to pass as unknowns, or are Davina McCall and as such make sense in context, he sticks out, and pulled me out of the setting a little.

Aesthetically, the show owes a lot to “28 Days Later”, specifically using the similar camera work to amp up the frenzied nature of the zombie attacks – though here, they really are zombies, unlike the “28 Days” “infected”.

Actually, Simon Pegg recently wrote for the Guardian on the subject of the running, jumping, screaming dead in “Dead Set”, and in other recent zombie films – he is very much not for it. The article is interesting reading, as he breaks down the history of the zombie as we know it in cinema, and explains why the slow zombie makes sense, and the fast one doesn’t. I’ve heard the argument before, as well, and it’s a good one.

However, I don’t agree. For a start, the zombie tradition that Pegg is referring to is pretty much new as of Romero, and while it’s got a strong pedigree, that’s still not long in terms of traditions.

As well as that, I feel that while the slow zombie and the fast zombie, while both tapping into our existential fear of death – as Pegg almost suggests, the zombie works on a level more universal than vampires, werewolves or ghosts, because in those cases there is a fear of an outside state imposing itself on us. Zombism isn’t an allegory for sex or primal force, or memory – it’s simply the absence of life, and as such it’s the one thing that at some level creeps almost all of us out. There’s a reason why in the proper zombie flicks the cause of the outbreak is generally left as redundant – the driving problem of the zombie outbreak is we all die. It’s about the one thing that we’re all going to prove excellent at.

But the Romero zombie served a different purpose, as well. It came at a time when people were scared of creeping cultural invasion – either by communism, or more potently in Romero’s “… Of The Dead” movies, by the numbing aspects of consumer culture and commercialism. Those films seemed to be asking questions about the emotional numbness and complacency that modern life was breeding in the populace, Romero’s zombies only ever galvanised into motion by the simplest desire – to feed – and even then, more relentless than urgent.

And all of these existential concerns are there in the remade “Dawn Of The Dead”, in the “28 … Later” movies, and here in “Dead Set”, but there’s something else, too.

Because while the earlier films are asking us to be scared of the masses, a more modern audience is also scared of the mob. While the mass is inexorable and predictable at a distance, but too vast to predict up close, the mob is chaos. It’s the chaos of the yob, the unsettling worry that that cluster of teenagers over there that seem to be mumbling in voices and shambling around might actually be as feral as they look.

The grey and shambling zombie is what we imagined when it seemed that our lives and the lives of others were becoming too predictable for us to really still call it life – when we could look in the eyes of our neighbours, or our children, and be fairly sure that they wanted the same corporate packaged and marketed toys and meals and cars as we did. The fast, twitchy and bright-eyed infected are the result of our alienation from each other – they’re what we’re scared of when we catch the eye of a nervy stranger in the street, or an unknown face in a pub, and we no longer have the slightest clue what’s going on inside that head, and we can’t be certain that they have the same socialised moral compass that we have.

You see it whenever you see the crowd at a reality show, or even just part of the inexplicable morass of shoppers milling around a town-center on a weekday – though it seems like everybody is still driven by the most basic of needs, nobody is shouting the same names, or moving in the same direction, and as such you can’t be confident of their disposition toward you, but you have to assume from their raised voices and urgent manner that it isn’t positive. That’s the fear that the fast-footed undead represent, and there’s a place for narratives featuring them.

I enjoyed the movie the first time I watched it, but something about it wasn’t quite right, to the extent that I couldn’t recommend it, and it almost made it into my dvd cull of last year. However, watching it a second time gave me a chance to reappraise it, and it’s still a pretty good, intense movie. I did manage to put my finger on what my problems were with it, though.

The first feeling you get for the film is that the pacing is all askew. Any discussion of the movie seems to cover the first twenty minutes or so, and how stirring and unnerving the sight of an empty London is, but then falters badly, barely acknowledging the middle act at all, and seemingly undecided on the build-up and climax (the “bit with the soldiers”). It certainly seems that the movie goes from striking and assured, and then doesn’t know what to do with itself for about an hour, before wrapping up in an exhaustingly contrived, jerky and beyond the point of “what has gone before” battle sequence.

A closer look, though, and you notice smaller scenes, and underplayed nuance in the script, that suggest that what has actually happened here isn’t a badly paced movie, so much as film direction and scripts that work badly against each other.

What I’m suggesting is that, in making such a fucking astounding impression with the sequences of Cillian Murphy wandering through a silent London, leading up to the petrol station explosion, Danny Boyle has started out telling a much larger, more visually and emotionally impressive and expansive story then was told by the Alex Garland script.

The story that you get if you strip out almost all of the visuals and gorgeous direction, is actually a very insular philosophical debate about the nature of modern humanity, that takes it’s key points from the very first scene in the research lab, threads through the reactions of the soldiers, holed up and scared of the future, and culminates in Jim’s descent into brutality.

It’s possible that Boyle didn’t have anywhere much to go with this script, beyond focusing on the bits that really interested him visually, or that he believed wholeheartedly in Garland’s vision and just couldn’t quite pull it off cinematically- it’s difficult to tell whether the inward-looking aspects of the story would have stood up to clear scrutiny. At times, it feels a little like the script is delivered by Garland with po-faced seriousness and the gravity of someone who believes that no-one has ever explored these weighty ideas before, or the uncertain touch of a writer that doesn’t know quite how deep to bury their subtext.

(My experience of Garland’s work bears this out – “The Beach” was a really enjoyable and occasionally insightful read, but his follow-up book, “The Tesseract” was just too wrapped-up in it’s own cleverness entirely, to the point that it rendered itself utterly obscure and far too much work, for almost no reward. Garland’s own script for “The Beach” movie adaptation added some of this forced intellectuality to the already fine story, trying to inject further meaning to the extent that the film is another curiously lumpy mix of beautiful and sometimes hip visuals, and heavy-handed philosophy. Garland has a great way with prose, and a good sense of character, but certainly with these earlier works, he needed a stronger internal editor, or a clearer self-awareness.)

Whatever the case, as a chap who pays quite close attention to the films I watch, I had remembered that there was an overdone and largely redundant bit at the beginning of the movie, in a research lab, but had entirely wiped any memory of the details of that sequence, let alone the meaningful ambiguity of what the Rage infection really is, beyond the point that everyone in it was annoying, and it “got good” soon afterwards. Most people seem to have forgotten even that much, without prompting.

Further to that, I’d remembered that things went pear-shaped when our survivors got to the army fortress, but was hazy on the details of how events had broken down during that, and in fact, because of the lumpiness of the film, I think I’d taken many of the clearly pertinent lines that the Major delivers, and the vital details of Jim’s rescue attempt, as being at best, quirky, and at worst complete non-sequiturs.

(This was further scuppered by some pretty poor acting on the part of everyone except Murphy… it’s clear that this is what you get when you ask RADA-trained actors to act like ordinary people… and in fact, how Boyle managed to get such an unconvincing performance out of the normally exceptional Christopher Ecclestone, I have no idea.)

With all that said, second time around I found a lot more to like, and to think about, in “28 Days Later” (although I still think that the sequel, “28 Weeks Later“, was a little more consistently put together, and was paced a lot more assuredly.) The visuals and scenes that stick with you really stick with you, and it has some of the best music, and sound editing, that I’ve heard in a movie before or since.