Critique: Close to Me

Jo fell down the stairs and lost an entire year of memories. This series follows Jo as she reclaims her past and remembers the night of the accident.

 

*****SPOILERS*****

 

On multiple occasions, the scenes are unusual yet remarkably brilliant.

One of the first scenes is of Jo being wheeled in a hospital bed through a fancy party. The necessity of health care being paired with the frivolity of a party is such an odd pairing that the audience can’t help paying attention.

At the end of the first episode, Jo had a beach hallucination, seeing a shoal of mermaids had beached themselves. Really quite unusual. Mermaids are the only bit on animation and whilst rarely used they’re used well.

Whilst it’s neither brilliant nor unusual as a piece of film, I did think this next bit was brilliant despite being unusual as a life hack. Jo and her friend had a dinner plate full of jelly sweets. That’s excellent.

 

Whilst the show itself was dark, there were a fair few bits of humour thrown into it.

An early scene is of the doctor telling Rob that Jo may never recover her memories. So Jo pipes up, “I can hear you! It’s a curtain, not a fucking wall.”

Jo asks her gardener if they’re close and he replies, “Well I’ve handled your lobelia.” So funny.

Someone tries to rob Jo. At first I thought it was a hallucination (bad things so far had been hallucinations) but surprisingly it was real. Jo responds by whacking the mugger with her crutch over and over again. I’m not fond of violence but this scene did rather tickle me.

At Jo’s support group, a lady called Helen repeatedly introduces herself with a joke about working in a coffee shop and being fed up of the daily grind. Jo’s response? “Imagine being stuck inside that shit joke for the rest of your life.”

A funny bit of inner monologue happens as Jo gets into a car. ‘I’m going to Hell anyway. Taking out the odd pedestrian won’t make much of a difference at this stage.’ One, I had to pause the show because I laughed so hard. Two, the ‘at this stage’ is unnecessary.

At the fundraiser for the refugees, Rob’s speech thanks everyone, finishing with, “And thank you to the people who use this centre who we’ve seemed to forgot to invite.” That has to be the funniest line in this show.

 

Several times, Jo’s inner monologue comes up with heart-wrenching statements.

Jo refuses to take her medication, deciding it’s better to be in pain than confused. Meds can confuse you and if someone’s as confused as Jo already was, I can see how they’d come to that conclusion. But to be in that situation, where you have to choose pain and clear thoughts or less pan and foggy thoughts, is awful.

She describes the confusion in her head in an excellent way. ‘It’s like someone came in and trashed the place and now I can’t find anything.’

The one that hit me the hardest was ‘I don’t feel safe inside my own head’. To lack a safe environment is bad enough, but to not have safety in yourself? It’s a horrible sensation and not one to wish upon anyone.

‘How many bad things do you have to do before you become a bad person?’ Just sit back and think about that one.

 

At times, Jo’s behaviour is questionable. Not surprising for someone who suffered as badly as she did but it still seemed problematic.

Jo vomits into and then flushes the toilet. Nothing wrong with that. But then she doesn’t wash her hands afterwards. Considering all the dirty jobs people do before they flush the loo, why don’t people wash their hands after touching the flusher? Disgusting.

Several times Jo has arguments at the top of the stairs. In the place that caused all your issues, Jo! Yes being there helps you remember but is it worth it when you could lose even more?

 

Jo’s husband Rob is such a dick.

He’s definitely more controlling than protecting. Seeing him throw Jo’s phone into the river cements his guilt.  We learn it’s because Jo was going to break up with him before the fall yet Rob wanted another shot at his marriage. That’s so wrong.

He told lies so as not to overwhelm Jo all at once. But they soon catch up with him, especially the lies he tells to protect himself rather than her.

When Jo realises there was someone else in the house the night she fell, Rob goes ballistic and takes her to the police. Clearly the police won’t believe her because she’s hazy and medically has lost her memories. Maybe that’s the point, for Rob to get out of the firing line.

 

Other good elements are as followed.

Rob’s mistress suggests to Rob to get a loan from Jo, Rob’s wife. The mistress works at the company that needs to loan so she’s using Jo to her full advantage. Now the mistress isn’t the one at fault, it’s the cheater, but there’s no need for the mistress to kick the wife in the teeth.

Episode Five cuts off right before Jo falls down the stairs. Urgh! Such good suspense. (Obviously I wish I had the answer straight away but it’s at that point that you know the suspense works.)

Jo finally remembers the night of the fall. She confronted Rob for being a cheater and decided to leave him. She tells him to not blame her ‘for your wandering dick’ (too right). Then we see Jo start to fall down the stairs but Rob catches her. Then we see Rob let her go. The show leads you up to know Rob pushed her but then it reveals this?! Somehow this seems so much worse than if Rob had pushed her down the stairs.

 

On occasion, there are events that let the show down.

Jo runs over a fox and picks it up straight away. It’s stiff but rigor mortis wouldn’t have set in that quickly. She picks it back up later, when rigor mortis would have set in, yet it’s all floppy. That was rather weird.

I’m not quite sure what to make of Wendy, the lady with the Dobermans. Each time she sees Jo it’s like she has a different personality.

Twenty per cent of the time Jo says ‘fuck’ or ‘fucking’, it seems really unnatural. It doesn’t flow with the words or the sentence, as if it’s shoehorned in.

 

This show was thought provoking.

It literally demonstrates what can go wrong if you put your life into the hands of the wrong person. But you’ll only ever know they’re the wrong person to be trusted when they do something wrong. Trust is a beautiful gift but it’s open to corruption.

The adverts portrayed the programme as a dysfunctional family. Which it was. But that wasn’t what the show was about. If the adverts had truly reflected the show, I would have been eager to watch it. But with things as they stood, it made for a nice surprise. Hardly any programmes deal with memory loss and how this befuddled confusion affects the individual so this was fantastic.

Critique: A Teacher

This programme was… interesting. It follows the relationship (and fallout) between a teacher Claire and Eric, her student. Admittedly the dialogue was off a lot but this was made up for by the superb acting from the two lead characters.

 

*****SPOILERS*****

 

Claire’s teacher friend pesters her to say who she’s having an affair with.

I can’t believe Claire actually did so! Why would you do that? Why risk destroying your career and marriage? At first her teacher friend thought it was a joke and Claire could’ve agreed: she’d just been given a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Considering Claire’d only just had the one drink, there’s no way the alcohol would have kicked in by then. Besides, even if it had, she wouldn’t be drunk enough to be so stupid. She went to a good university so she’s clearly intelligent. The writers could have done better.

 

The town finds out that Eric has been sleeping with Claire and chaos breaks loose.

When this happens, Eric convinces Claire to run away with him. The police treat it like a kidnapping. But he’s eighteen, a legal adult. If it’s their idea, it’s only kidnapping if they legally can’t give consent, such as being disabled or a child (neither of which applies to Eric). So I don’t quite understand what happened there.

Claire went to jail for shagging Eric when he’s seventeen/eighteen, i.e. above the age of consent Why, I don’t know. I can understand losing your teaching job for sleeping with a student but jail seems a bit extreme. I suppose the laws on age and consent could be different in the USA but my British perspective, nothing seems to line up. (I’m not trying to justify what Claire did. She definitely shouldn’t have done it. I’m just looking at it through a legal perspective.)

 

We see from Claire’s perspective once she gets out of jail.

On one of her first jogs, she gets given a pastry for free so we expect the rest of her day to go well, like going into a shop to get a job. But then someone reveals to the shop manager Claire’s criminal history, Claire runs out. By putting a good event before a bad one, the writers made the bad one feel worse. It makes you feel almost sorry for Claire. The audience definitely needed some kind of boost to feel for her.

We also see her having sex with her date and he calls her ‘a dirty slut’ for sleeping with her student. Why on Earth would anyone say that during sex? You could see her face drop and then holding it in her hands. You could see how uncomfortable she was. So even if you were weird enough to say this, how could you be dysfunctional enough to not stop?

 

Ten years on, Eric comes back to town. He’s shown whistling in the car which was a good and clever way to make him appear older. He bumps into Claire. He blames her for the fallout (like how he quite university). That’s fair, considering she slept with her student and that power imbalance isn’t healthy.

But Eric’s reasons are bizarre.

Apparently her agreeing to tutor him and for him to use her first name were part of the problem. Agreeing to tutor a student is very common in the USA so I don’t see how that applies.

Getting Eric to use her first name would have broken down the official barrier between the two. This could have added to the general sense of closeness that led to the sex.

So those two reasons, out of all the reasons he could have chosen from, were an extremely weird choice.

 

Two episodes are spent pursuing the relationship. Three episodes are spent on the relationship. Five episodes were spent on the fall out of the relationship.

The fallout section was the perfect size. But this seems poorly balanced compared to episodes spent on the relationship itself. The fallout can only happen because of the relationship, after all, so it seems rather out of proportion.

The emotional fallout for Eric means his feelings were deep (whether love or obsession I don’t know) but from what the writers showed us I’m not convinced that his feelings did run that deep. They were there, to be sure, but not at a convincing level.

 

Whilst there was a lot of things that could’ve been better, this programme was one of the most engrossing shows I’ve watched and I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it’s because you know your school friends had crushes on teachers and you wonder what would happen if they’d acted on it, or if they did act on it. I think a new set of eyes for final editing would have smoothed out the kinks and to make this programme a more rounded show.

Critique: A Wrinkle in Time (Film)

*****SPOILERS*****

 

Seeing as they travelled in space (to tesser), I initially thought that ‘A Wrinkle in Space’ would be a more appropriate title. But only initially: the actual title is appropriate (and far catchier). To travel through space instantaneously, by not taking the time that the journey should have took, is sort of travelling in time. More importantly, space and time are in physics considered to be one thing (space-time) so saying ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ is essentially the same as saying ‘A Wrinkle in Space’.

 

Usually when a child acts, you can appreciate how well they did even if they’re not as capable as the adults. Yet in this film, the child actors were phenomenal, being equal to the abilities of the adults.

 

Meg is a black girl with curly hair. So when she sees the version of herself that she likes, a girl with straight hair. Meg hates her naturally curly hair and that hurts. She thinks she would be a better, more likeable person if she had straight hair. That hurts even more.

 

The three Mrs (who help Meg) are made of light. They say that tessering is done via love. The Mrs tesser a lot. So love moves light. That’s sweet.

 

When Meg first meets Mrs Who, she falls asleep after a few quotations. When awake, Mrs Who is calm and collected. So when she says, “Dang!” into her fist, it was pure perfection. But when they tessered to the final place, the three Mrs couldn’t stay long (because they were getting weak) so Mrs Who spoke in her own words. This was odd at first but finding the right quotation is taxing for her. If she’s already weak (like she is in the last location), it makes sense for her to speak with her own words.

 

The start of the film was frustrating.

Everyone was being horrid to Meg, the main character. Other kids celebrate the anniversary of Meg’s dad going missing and they wish Meg disappeared too. Um excuse me but no one of any age would say things like that.

It’s not realistic but the bullying is important for understanding Meg’s character. Toning down the bullying to something believable would be make understanding Meg better.

This was the only negative thing I have to say about this film.

 

This was a pleasant film with fantastic animation. There was a theme of female empowerment but it was gentle and ‘not in your face’, meaning even sexists couldn’t complain. Meg builds up her self-confidence and self-acceptance, qualities with which all people can struggle.