28 weeks later - Spoiler alert

Sunday night again. Just had some sausages, some tea. Music's playing. Thinking if I should go back to my room or stay online. Going back means sleep. Sleep means entering the new week. 6 days of work. Guard duty on wednesday. 6 days of drudgery. Parade rehearsal on saturday. Guess I'll stay online.

28 Weeks Later was great. I love horror films for the dilemmas characters find themselves in. Land of the Dead had a bunch of people trapped between an electric fence and a horde of zombies. The tension as you see the horde coming towards the helpless folks is exquisite.

There are many equivalent scenes in 28 Weeks Later. Watch how a zombie enters a holding area where the folks were stored. He bites a fellow and soon everyone starts turning into zombies and eating everyone else up. It wouldnt have been so bad if the place wasn't dark, packed with people, and locked from the outside. Watch how the sniper sergeant and his small group were caught between a gas cloud and a pack of zombies. They got into a car and the zombies surrounded them.

The best of such scenes, though, is in the opening part of the film. As the zombies infiltrated a locked house man abandons his wife and jumps out the window. He runs across an open field with zombies chasing him. I initially thought he did it to lure the zombies away from the house but he was in fact trying to escape. As he ran across the field, his face a mixture of determination and fear, the zombies all after him, I thought he was going to die, and I thought that this is one scene I will never forget because the music accompanying it was really beautiful.

Dinner while walking back home

OT till 815PM today. I felt like tearing out my hair, strangling people, and burning the whole place down.

I saw eight puppies a few days ago in my camp. They were cold and desperately pressing their bodies together. I've been thinking about whether to help them out, call SPCA or something. I've made up my mind not to. It's their lot to shiver in the cold, as is mine.

The Road

The post-apocalpytic condition both man and boy face in The Road is not so much a futuristic statement as it is the condition we face in the present and the condition that has always been since man was born. In a world stripped to its bare essentials we find that the raison d’être of man is really just to protect and bring his children up, which the protagonist single-mindedly does. Beyond that there is nothing, as he sees before he dies:

The road crosses a dried slough where pipes of ice stood out of the frozen mud like formations in a cave. The remains of an old fire by the side of the road. Beyond that a long concrete causeway. A dead swamp. Dead trees standing out of the gray water trailing gray and relic hegmoss. The silky spills of ash against the curbing. He stood leaning on the gritty concrete rail. Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.

The story is powerful in its imagery and poetic prose, a style similar to that in Blood Meridian-- only this time it is drenched in ash not blood, tepid bleakness not visceral violence. The critical difference is that the child survives, an ending which, I feel, is weak because it destroys the totality of nothingness. At the same time, though, it suggests a continuity that is not only meaningless but hopeless, for, trapped in an ashen world, he might as well been dead.

Some music and some time please

I am seated in front of my computer with my long weekend behind me. I am dreading tomorow because tomorow is the start of another 4 days (there's ndp rehearsals on saturdays) of work, and there's 1 guard duty on top of that.

I hate this feeling. It feels worse than returning back to school after 2 months of undisturbed holidays. It feels so bad now that I feel like falling sick tomorow. It's horrible.

I henceforth swear that I will never land myself a job that would subject me to feel so tortured every night before the next working day, no matter how highly paid it is.

In view of the compulsory immersion into hell over the next 4 days I expended 2 of 12 fawlty towers episodes. It's a great comedy series and I wish they'd bring such stuff to arts central. They took out The Sketch Show and I've felt demoralised ever since.