Revisiting stuff
Oct. 6th, 2023 05:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessI rewatched Equlibrium last week. I’m not sure whether I’d rewatched it since it first came out. Broadly, it was as I remembered: gun kata is still cool, the design is mostly gorgeous, but this is derivative dystopia. I didn’t remember Sean Bean was in it. The automatic question was ‘Is he…?’ (Spoiler, yes.) In some ways, Christian Bale is auditioning to play Batman here, but the film features an Alfred in Sean Pertwee. (You also have a Laurie in Bale, and a Marmee in Emily Watson, who is the only female character with several lines of dialogue.)
As it’s on iPlayer, I’ve started rewatching Cardiac Arrest, since it first aired when back I thought ‘This isn’t Casualty. Cool.’ (I checked and that would be 1994.) It’s been on my list of shows to revisit for years.
I experienced some nostalgia at the hair and the payphones, and although it’s of its time it’s not too dated, having borrowed some of ER’s camerawork (or did it? Maybe its camerawork influences), and being the debut of Jed Mercurio mining some of his own experience as a junior doctor. There’s baby Helen Baxendale in a peach of a role as cynical Claire, who seems to know what she’s given up to survive as a junior doctor. The main character is baby-faced Andrew (played by an Andrew, which must have been weird) who looks as if he should be going to uni, not a new job as a doctor.
And what a job. Constant beeps. (Pagers! The only mobile phone we saw was a status symbol.) The nurses not helping much because there’s aggro between them (mainly female) and the doctors (mainly male, and given the treatment meted out to Pamela, who’s also a mother, you can understand why. Though, hey, she hasn’t been sexually assaulted as many junior surgeons have said they’ve been in recent surveys!) The three consultants we saw swanned in in their suits, tail ends of late twentieth century middle class privilege, and at least one of them was thinking more of golf than his job.
It took a while to get used to the different aspect, and the opening scenes with a kid idealistically saying they wanted to be a doctor featured some dodgy camerawork, that wasn’t repeated, fortunately. Some bits didn’t quite flow as well as they could have, but the sense of people’s lives being in shaky hands is the stuff of drama, and the scene where BabyDoctor Andrew was supposed to tell a grieving family that their relative had died was excruciating, although I found myself not cringing, just…feeling very middle-aged? (When I first watched this, I was a teenager.) It's fast-moving, laced with black humour, and is only about the 30-minute mark, which feels so weird for a drama.
As it’s on iPlayer, I’ve started rewatching Cardiac Arrest, since it first aired when back I thought ‘This isn’t Casualty. Cool.’ (I checked and that would be 1994.) It’s been on my list of shows to revisit for years.
I experienced some nostalgia at the hair and the payphones, and although it’s of its time it’s not too dated, having borrowed some of ER’s camerawork (or did it? Maybe its camerawork influences), and being the debut of Jed Mercurio mining some of his own experience as a junior doctor. There’s baby Helen Baxendale in a peach of a role as cynical Claire, who seems to know what she’s given up to survive as a junior doctor. The main character is baby-faced Andrew (played by an Andrew, which must have been weird) who looks as if he should be going to uni, not a new job as a doctor.
And what a job. Constant beeps. (Pagers! The only mobile phone we saw was a status symbol.) The nurses not helping much because there’s aggro between them (mainly female) and the doctors (mainly male, and given the treatment meted out to Pamela, who’s also a mother, you can understand why. Though, hey, she hasn’t been sexually assaulted as many junior surgeons have said they’ve been in recent surveys!) The three consultants we saw swanned in in their suits, tail ends of late twentieth century middle class privilege, and at least one of them was thinking more of golf than his job.
It took a while to get used to the different aspect, and the opening scenes with a kid idealistically saying they wanted to be a doctor featured some dodgy camerawork, that wasn’t repeated, fortunately. Some bits didn’t quite flow as well as they could have, but the sense of people’s lives being in shaky hands is the stuff of drama, and the scene where BabyDoctor Andrew was supposed to tell a grieving family that their relative had died was excruciating, although I found myself not cringing, just…feeling very middle-aged? (When I first watched this, I was a teenager.) It's fast-moving, laced with black humour, and is only about the 30-minute mark, which feels so weird for a drama.
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Date: 2023-10-06 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-07 03:19 pm (UTC)