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@tokenizedhuman
I finished Adolescence last night. Wanted to let it percolate for a bit before typing up my thoughts. From a purely technical perspective, it's an absolute masterpiece. Four episodes shot at four different points across a 13 month timeline all in a single shot throws up a multitude of limitations. The camera follows characters from one scene to the next, sometimes transitioning from one actor to another to provide a natural segmentation where a cut would usually reside, it goes in and out of houses and office rooms, and school classrooms, it circles our protagonists in close up yet never impedes (not once did I catch an actor breaking the fourth wall), and at one jaw-dropping point in the last episode, it mounts the outside of a car for a near ten journey along the motorway to a DIY store.
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It's easy to forget all of this is done without a single cut in any of the episodes (some of which are an hour long), and the reason for that is the competence of the technical team, the absolutely mesmerising performances by the cast, and the screenplay itself, which focuses on four integral hour or so long sections across that year long journey we take with the family when Jamie is accused (and awaiting trail) of murder. This is theatre thrown onto the screen, another thing you are probably told as a rule to avoid when writing something directly for the screen, and it works beautifully. I'm a parent, not of adolescent children, but of children that are in the primary school system, in the same world depicted in Adolescense, and I absolutely loved how well they captured the difficult relationships between parents and their children, of being an adolescent, of trying to fit into a world in which information can reach us in many different ways.
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"What does it mean to be a man?" might be considered the question at the heart of the story and references are made of the incel internet culture (complete with a complex emoji code system I had no idea existed), of Andrew Tate and his controversial views, of social media platforms, and parental and school responsibility, and it does an excellent job of representing the world we're living in now, the problems we are currently facing, and what might be the possible consequences of the environment we've created for ourselves. This is a tough watch, especially for a parent, but it's an essential watch in my opinion. I haven't seen anything as good in years.
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Forgot about this incredible scene as well as described on IMDB: How they filmed the aerial scene: The DOP carries the camera and follows a school pupil to the traffic lights with a wide shot as she goes at the end of the school day. Before she crosses the road, a team attach the camera to a drone, which then flies a distance of 0.3 miles across the site to the murder scene, where it comes down to a camera operator and team of grips who smoothly catch the camera and transition into a close shot of Stephen Graham.
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some more trivia here whcih gives you an idea how difficult it is to achieve: Every episode had three weeks of production time, with the last week being for filming. Because of this, five days were allowed for filming the final product, with two allowed per day. Episode 1 was completed on only the second take; the other three were completed on the last one.
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