Well now, long time no blog.
Or at least it seems that way - really it's only been 4 days, 2 of which were the weekend in which I don't normally blog anyway. But still, feels like a long time.
Or maybe not.
Maybe it's because I'm now officially one year older.
I'm feeling thoroughly rested this morning. It was good to have the time off. As usual, I'd made a gigantic "to do" list. And as usual I only got about half of it done.
My normal to do lists I have for the weekend are honed and perfected things. I've learnt over the years what I can achieve in the given time. But when a long weekend pops up I suddenly start adding in loads of extra stuff.
Now really I could have achieve it all, however, that's not the issue. The issue is that a long weekend is there to relax - watch a bit of telly or a DVD, maybe clean the car - those sorts of things. So by adding in to many chore-like activities I'm defeating the purpose of that and I tend to rebel against it.
Anyway, the point is I didn't do everything I wanted to do, but did achieve everything I had to do and also a few I didn't have to but were kinda nice to do.
Specifically on Sunday I finally sat down and watched the last bit of telly recorded on my PVR - Red Riding. Throughout all of Sunday evening and Monday day it was totally empty. It did acquire a few things last night, admittedly, but those are the usual culprits.
And generally on the whole telly has calmed down a lot - there's only about 9 things across the entire week I'll watch, which is down to a third what it was. Plus three of those end this week or next week.
I may finally return to trawling through anime DVDs!
Anyway, I watched Red Riding as I say. It was a three-part job, each of which was adapted from a different book in a series and each of which was two hours long, so not a small amount of screen time.
If I'm honest and I'd watched part 1 at the time it was broadcast I'm not sure I would have watched the other two parts. It was kinda rubbish.
The filming style was very... stylistic, shall we say? I'm not sure there was a room that hadn't been filled with smoke from a dry ice machine in the entire thing. I get why - grim up north, gloomy, but it was a bit over the top.
Also, the narrative was confusing. Partly this was due to the style, but partly it was because we didn't really spend any time getting to know the main character. We were just dumped in at a certain point and left to figure things out. Now in some ways this is good writing, but in others it's confusing because we've also got to figure out the murders as well, and it's difficult to do both.
Certainly in the other two parts the main characters are introduced more normally - we get to see a little of their lives before they become wrapped up in the main mystery.
And that's one of the reasons the other two parts were much better. The other reason was that the mystery is more clearly framed in the other two parts.
In the first, the character is bumbling around not really knowing what he's doing. But then equally he's portrayed as being this go-getter reporter. And also as a womanising shag-monster.
Now I know complex characters are good, but as I say - this is a mystery crime drama thing, so if we're focusing on working out this complex character, then what happens to that part? It gets short shrift.
But as I say, the other two parts are much better.
Although there are some holes left. I think this is probably a reflection of the fact that it's adapting a series of books - I'd guess it would need to have been 12 hours long to get it all in, so it's inevitable that some bits get left out or fudged.
My last real criticism is that the timeline jumps around a lot. Now this isn't fundamentally a problem except it's jumping around by only a few years. So normally where you'd use things like fashion or hairstyle to clue you in as to when something is, those things aren't really changing all that much so it's difficult to tell.
For example, someone can get into their car in 1983 and then in the next scene they're getting out of their car in 1980. You can see how that might be confusing.
But overall it pretty much does what it says on the tin - horrible murders and appalling police corruption & incompetence.
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