What's everyone up to right now?

[no one]

Counting the leaves which tremble at dawn.

[Rev. Rye]

In the back pages of my Inside Black Mirror book, there's a list of media that Brooker and Jones considered influences on the series. Some of them are obvious, some are a bit less so (I'm not sure exactly how Cutter and Bone or 10 Rillington Place fit in with the series), and some are pretty ubiquitous, and some I've never seen. I'm going out of my way to look through the ones I haven't seen, and Elephant is one of them.





It's basically a film about The Troubles. Well, actually, it's just a collection of 18 murders, captured with a Steadicam, with zero music and almost no dialogue. Anything that gives the murder any context, and certainly any glamour, is stripped away, and each murder ends with an uncomfortably long static shot of the victim. David Leland, A collaborator of director Alan Clarke said of it: "I remember lying in bed, watching it, thinking, 'Stop, Alan, you can't keep doing this.' [n.b. Clarke had a history of writing teleplays so disturbing that they rarely got repeated and, in at least one case, had to wait until his death to get shown on television.] And the cumulative effect is that you say, 'It's got to stop. The killing has got to stop.' Instinctively, without an intellectual process, it becomes a gut reaction." This work is crying out for a modern American remake. Then again, maybe given that Clarke went out of his way to remove any context (cultural or otherwise) to the murders, there may not be a point to a modern version that's set in, say, Chicago, except maybe to put a bit more color in the killers and victims (probably with a more-or-less equal mix of White, Black, and Latino with maybe a token Asian to reflect the ethnic diversity of Chicago.) Or maybe less football.

Also, there's another dialogue-free, made-for-TV featurette on the list and this one more or less speaks for itself:

[Fireball]

Two of my spawn and I just finished plumbing in the rest of the watering system and throwing the remaining wood chips onto the drought-resistant landscaping in our front yard. Ima tell you straight up that I despise working with the soil with a hatred one might not believe. I did enough of it as a youth out of economic necessity that I did learn this hatred. I'll lay under a vehicle and get completely covered with dinosaur squeezin's (don't enjoy that either, particularly, but it pays about 5 times as much) before I'll entertain digging in soil.

[ignoramus]

I hate it also. But I'm too silly to pay someone to do something I can physically do myself.
I just keep telling myself to think of it as exercise!

[*Deidre*]

Going to sleep now. Night, AF

[pocaracas]

Waking up... Good morning AF! 🌄

[Cod]

Looking for a bob hat. It wasn't the greatest of ideas shaving my head in the depths of winter. Carlsberg + hair clippers never a good idea.

[Angrboda]

Drinking coffee. But you already knew that! Tonight I have a meeting of an inter-faith discussion group devoted to the topic of whether government should be religiously neutral. There are multiple ways to interpret that question, and unfortunately the organizers haven't done a very good job of introducing the question, so I'm at something of a loss as to how to prepare for tonight's discussion. Oh well. It gets me out of the house and into the world. That's the main thing that I care about.

[Clueless Morgan]

Catching up on work...

Actually, procrastinating working right now...

And wanting to open my Amazon package that was just delivered

[The Grand Nudger]

Cooking my own b-day cake so that my heathens can eat it..while my youngest son skulks down the hallway growling "I hate my dad" for how it's not done yet.

LOL, love you too you little asshole.