Monday, August 21, 2006

Love Is Better Than A Warm Trombone

Sugar Rush Episode 1x06 - "Sensitive"

Episode Grade: B-


Previously: Blah blah gay virgin yadda yadda yadda. Oh and Kim is being stalked by Tom the butt-monkey, so I guess he'll be appearing in this episode. Great.

KimVo tells us "For the first time in a long time, I had something to smile about." Kim helpfully illustartes this by lying in bed, smiling. Then we flashback to the swirly camera kiss, with "Do You Realize??" playing. Kim sits up in bed and looks about ready to burst into awful songs about breakfast cereal, and then a rumor will get spread around the internet that she's committed suicide. "Nobody could take take kiss away from me" explains KimVo, and we flash back a little further to show Kim's terrible idea that caused the spinning camera kiss. More spinning. I'm getting dizzy here. Kim applies make up, and brings the amount of smiling we've seen from her in the first minute of this episode further above the amount we've seen at all previously. More flashbacking, but thankfully no spinning camera this time. Just intrusive close-up on lips. Freezeframe. Sugar kissage. We get it already. Kim actually skips into the kitchen and grabs an apple, while Nathan puts things in boxes with labels like "TART'S MEDICINE" and "SLAG'S SHOES". KimVo continues to blather about rainbows and unicorns and shit. Matt's helping Nathan box up Stella's stuff. It's good that they're doing things together, as a family.

Kim walks outside and cheerily greets Tom the butt-monkey, who stands looking confused. And that's all he does! (In this scene, I mean.) (And in general.) Hurrah. Meanwhile, KimVo demonstrates a total lack of grip on reality; "Sugar had shaken my world. She had to feel the same."

Paradise. Suagr is packing a suitcase, having decided to move to Paris to live with Guillame. The music comes to a record-scratchy halt, and Kim's face falls back into familiar territory. Kim asks why Sugar thinks he'll want her. Sugar explains that Kim's harmless mistranslations were not so harmless after all. Well, not in those words, obviously. But somehow, she's got it into her head that Guillame is in love with her, and called her things like "my little angel", and I don't know how that could have happened, do you, Kim?

Kim follows Sugar along the street asking "What about your mum?" Sugar tells her she won't even notice. I do like how they just slip little things about Sugar like that in like they're no big deal. Kim starts clutching at straws; "What about your GCSEs?" Sugar, of course, just laughs that one off. Kim points out that Sugar hardly knows him. Sugar basically says "Biblical sense is good enough for me!" and tells her to wait outside a shop while she gets a French dictionary "for [her] wedding vows". KimVo stupidly says "Things couldn't get any more tragic." Hi, Tom! He's walking his dog, Vanessa, and starts explaining the retractable lead he's bought her. Thankfully for Kim, and me, we're spared too much of this, as Sugar's gone for the five finger discount and comes dashing out of the shop telling Kim to run. Tom watches, looking confused. You'll be seeing that sentence a lot.

Dale's Decorating Den. Nathan's boxes are being delivered to Stella by an awesome snarky delivery man. He's only there for, like, five seconds, but he's great. Stella's eyes light up at the 'birthday present', until she reads the "Happy Birthday Whore" label, and notices all the other boxes piled up outside.

Sugar's just about to get on the coach, so Kim realises she has to come clean about the mistranslating. To a certain extent, anyway; she makes Sugar look up the word she'd translated as "angel" before she leaves. Sugar resists, accusing Kim of being jealous of her actually achieving something with her life, but eventually gives in and looks it up. "That garlic eating wanker!" she yells. Kim tries to give her a comforting hug, but Suagr fairly reasonably gives her the cold shoulder. Kim trails after her, like a dog with a new retractable lead. "That's the thing about betrayal. You always want revenge." KimVo cheerily informs us.

Stella surveys her stack of boxes resignedly. The camera pans around them, and we can see that Nathan's labelled one as "BITCHE'S BOOKS". I don't know what that apostrophe could have done to deserve such abuse.

Over at the now bitche-less house, Nathan's giving Matt some helpful fatherly advice, which I'll transcribe in full, because it's so awesome: "You see, when you get married, you'll know not to make the mistakes I've made. For a start, don't trust a woman. Ever. About anything. Because she's bound to be lying. Check her mobile phone bills. Check her diary. If she seems happy, assume the worst. Question her at every available opportunity. Ideally, you should stop her from leaving the house at all." I love bitter Nathan. I wish he'd stay around longer. Throughout this speech, Matt's been squeezing "BICH" onto the table in ketchup. Nathan absently informs him that he's missed out the 'T'. And the 'E', no, Nathan?

Stella calls them on her mobile, but gets an answering machine message (After the phone rang once. That ain't right.) from Matt; "Sorry, me, dad and Kim are out and mummy doesn't live here any more". Stella leaves no message, and starts crying. I'm not really brimming with sympathy here yet, but it's a start.

Suagr and Kim are off to a club together, so I guess Sugar's forgiven her already. She doesn't really have the attention span to hold a grudge. Tom finds them at the doorway, Sugar mocks him some. Inside, Sugar and Kim do shots. And ooh, "Angel Interceptor"! I don't know why I'm pointing out the music so much in this episode, because it's always great. Sugar drunkenly worries that Guillame might be as good as it gets, then starts insulting his theoretical new girlfriend and asks Kim if her tits are too small. She's all over the place here. Kim tells her "Your tits are great!" but Sugar doesn't hear her, so she repeats it rather too loudly, which gets a bunch of guys around her staring and laughing. Kim has a deer in headlights look for a second, then Sugar bursts out laughing.

In the bathroom, Sugar lights a cigarette and gravitates angst-ward for a second asking "How can someone who makes you feel so great be so wrong?" Kim says she understands the feeling, then covers herself at Sugar's questioning by pretending to be talking about her parents. "I am totally off men", Sugar says, and Kim starts attempting to steer her into lesbian impulses by doing that 'subtle' "you just need to find the right person" thing, and saying she needs to find a person who is nice and who she can talk to, but Sugar completely doesn't get it. They go back out to the club, and Sugar starts appraising random guys, prompting an angry outburst from Kim to stop obsessing over men all the time. Sugar is all "what else is there to do?", Kim gets all teen-stereotype and tells her "You don't understand! Just go and get laid!" and storms out. Sugar is all, "WTF." As is Tom, who watches, looking confused.

Kim sits on the waltzer from the dream sequence right at the start of the pilot and stares moodily into space, and I get really distracted in this scene because it takes me ages to work out which Pulp song the instrumental that's playing right now comes from. It's "Sunrise", if you're wondering. KimVo stays fairly quiet for a while, so we can just enjoy the music, which is nice of her. The waltzers spin round and round, but shrouded in darkness to contrast nicely with the bright sunlight from the camera-spinning kiss. This scene is cool, y'all. The waltzer eventually stops, Kim watches a random couple get off, and eventually does the same herself, and KimVo is once again telling us it's time to end the lies. Voiceover who cried wolf.

So, Kim heads to Paradise, and bares her soul to Sugar, only in a ridiculous contrived and predictable plotline, she doesn't bother to check that the body in Sugar's bed completely covered by the duvet is actually her. Come on, writers, you can come up with something better than that. So as soon as Kim's finished, Sugar 'shockingly' comes out of the bathroom and asks Kim what the hell she's doing there, and in the slighlty less predictable part of the scene, Tom comes out from under the covers and watches. Looking confused.

Kim wakes up in her bed with a start, looking a whole lot rougher than when she did that at the start of the episode. Well, by TV standards, anyway. "I used to think it was bad to get so drunk you lost your memory", KimVo says, "But now I'm beginning to see that it does have its advantages." She wanders into the kitchen, where Nathan blearily tells her to have a good day, and Matt arranges his potato alphabet things into the word "TART". Meanwhile, Dale tells Stella she needs to do something about the pile of boxes since they're blocking the TV, but refuses to actually give her any help with it. Stella continues to look regretful about things.

Kim and Sugar sitting on deckchairs on the beach, Sugar enthusing about Tom's performance the night before, though she continuity-friendlily doesn't actually remember it. "You should see the marks on me!" she exclaims. I'm sure Kim won't turn down that invitation no matter how disgusted she is. And, as her dead-eyed, disbelieving and other such alliterative adjectives stare indicates, she is certainly disgusted. There's a flashback/fantasy sequence to helpfully illustrate Sugar and Tom's fun, sexy time last night. I don't think anyone needed to see that. Then, the emoest KimVo yet: "It was as if someone had ripped out my insides and replaced them with pure unadulterated pain." Seriously, she said that. Pure, unadulterated pain. Ah, the exuberance of youth. Sugar gets a call from Tom to confirm he'll be meeting her at eight that night, and gleefully laughs "Guillame can kiss my ass". She laughs some more, and it's all edited together really disjointedly, which I assume is purposeful, but I'm not really sure what that purpose is.

Over in Paradise now, Kim is pissily complaining that when she was telling Sugar to find someone sensitive, Tom wasn't exactly what she had in mind. You'd think she'd be grateful he had something to distract his attention from her. Honestly, there's no pleasing that girl. Anyway, Sugar protests that he is a real gentleman, since she recalls him holding her hair back while she threw up. She's so classy. Kim does her usual storm-off to Sugar's confused protests.

KimVo rants about how she could cope with Sugar screwing random blokes from pubs and French wankers, but butt-monkey stalkers is just taking it too far. Kim is walking home when conveniently happens to see Tom walking into a shop leaving Vanessa tied to a lamp post outside, so she does what anyone in their wrong mind would do in her situation and kidnaps his dog. And texts him a ransom note with no actual ransom demand, just telling him to collect her at eight tonight from "blackmore es tate", and with photographic evidence that she really has his dog. I can't even be bothered to point out how stupid all that is, honestly. Tom reads the text and looks confused, because it's the only expression he has.

Dale's Decorating Den, boxes are still stacked high, and Stella is flicking through an old photo album wistfully. There's pictures of a couple of younger Kims that actually look somewhat like younger Kims this time, which I guess is easier to do when they just need to be pictures. Also, younger Stella who looks so much like her that I have to assume that it actually is a younger Sara Stewart, and someone who I guess is supposed to be a younger Nathan, but, not done a great job there. Still, two out of three ain't bad.

Back to Kim's canine kidnapping caper, Kim ties Vanessa to a pole at the rendezvous point and runs. "OK, kidnapping a dog was a little extreme, but I just couldn't stand the thought of anyone else getting their hands on what was rightfully mine." KimVo, you're bordering on serial killer right now. Back to slightly less psychotic territory, she reports "Love makes you blind to the world around you."

Nathan sinks into the couch with a glass of wine, but puts it to one side when he notices a pile of Matt's drawings on the table in front of him. There's a general space theme, with a random alien, "Dad" in a spacesuit and for some reason about as much hair as Homer Simpson, a rocket labelled "our car", and finally a large face with blonde hair labelled "Mum" at the top and "fucking whore" at the bottom. Uh, that one doesn't fit the space theme, obviously. Nathan finally registers that perhaps he should get back to doing a little parenting and heads up to Matt's room, which has various anti-Stella slogans painted all around the walls. Matt stands there, having painted himself completely red, and cheerfully informs Nathan that he likes him the best.

Kim meets Sugar in a bar, and Sugar tells her she shouldn't have listened to her. "He cancelled on you then?" Kim asks, and tries her best not to look ecstatic about it. Don't you think that might be kind of a suspicious thing to ask, Kim? There could be any number of reasons for Sugar's upset. Not that Sugar notices, of course. "Do you know what nice guys are?" Sugar asks. "Tedious, overrated and full of shit?" Kim suggests matter-of-factly. "Wankers!" Sugar exclaims, then actually listens to Kim's answer and, wind rather taken out of her sails, agrees "but, yeah, that'll do". Heh. Kim and Sugar agree that it's a good time for going down to the beach with a bottle of cheap vodka, and, given the next scene, I can't blame them.

So, Tom runs to his rendezvous point, and discovers the wonderful retracting lead draped around a pole, but with no Vanessa attached. Camera stays on his confused looking face, which is perhaps not the best directing choice, as we hear dog barking, squealing tires and then some squelching. And then more cars drive past, and there's squelching, squelching, squelching. It seems this show hates animals as much as it hates linear storytelling. Then the most horiffic part; overhead shot of Tom as he gives some Darth Vader in Episode III worthy overacting, shrieking "VANESSA!!!!!!!" to the stars. You'd think I'd be happy he's managed a new facial expression, but dear God.

Nathan washes the red paint off Matt and hums and haws his way around trying to talk sense into him, and and Matt cuts right to the heart of the matter at his "So what I'm trying to say is..." by finishing "Mum's not a whore?" Nathan looks relieved. "Does that mean we've got to repaint my room?" Matt asks, and, at Nathan's affirmative, "Can it be pink?".

Sugar and Kim drunkenly chat, and ,deciding that the butt-monkey hasn't had enough crap piled on him yet this episode, Sugar tells Kim, having had a little more recollection of the night she spent with him, that he wasn't so great after all. Actual flashback time! Sugar pours drinks, Tom babbles about his fucking trombone. But he gets an actual funny line; "And you know, despite what everyone says, me playing it doesn't make me a twat." Sugar and Kim laugh about that a bit, then back to the flashback. I really don't know why we needed that jump out of the flashback. Is it a sort of makeshift laugh track, just in case one or two viewers hadn't worked out that the butt-monkey is a butt-monkey? Tom stares intently at the wall, and continues to explain the exciting life of a trombonist. "Most people think the trombonist moves the slide just with his wrist. But really... it's these two fingers." Sugar attempts to get into this completely absurd seduction technique and gropes him, because she's really drunk. Tom suddenly dives at her, knocking her onto her hair straighteners, creating the marks mentioned earlier. Tut tut, she left them on, just lying on the floor. That's, like, number one cause of house fires these days, isn't it? Anyway, Tom apologises, Sugar laughs it off, until she notices that he's pointing significantly at his crotch, and not actually apologising for the straightener burns. Back to the present, Sugar and Kim continue laughing, and Sugar wonders why Kim thought a sensitive guy was such a good idea. "Maybe because that's what you go for," she suggests, which Kim vehemently denies, and also calls Tom "sooo square." Now, I'm not going to claim to be excessively cool, but I'm fairly certain no one has used "square" in that sense since about the eighteenth century, writers. Sugar continues to press the matter, and Kim insists that he is absolutely not the type she goes for. Then the butt-monkey abuse stops and things pick up again at last; Sugar asks "Then why have you been acting weird all day? Maybe it's because you're jealous." Kim continues to insist that Tom does nothing for her, and Sugar jokingly suggests "Well, maybe you like me then." And Kim just has nothing to say to that, and just gives an intense look. Sugar stops laughing, and all the pieces start falling into place. Kim realises she's still not ready, and tries to laugh it off, but it's too little, too late. More intense looks between them, and that is what this show is all about. I'm always giving props to Olivia, but Lenora Crichlow does a great job with Sugar too, it's just that up to now, she hasn't had much call to show it. Sugar's depth reveals itself slowly. There's like a full minute of them just looking at each other here, neither of them have the words, and it's far more intense than anything else in the episode. When I say "a full minute", I actually mean about five seconds. I'm saying this now, because I'm sure I'll do that a lot. I don't have a great concept of time, apparently. Kim eventually stammers that she has to go, and flees, leaving Sugar to think about just exactly what this says about some of Kim's past behaviour. And now there'll be no more KimVo insisting halfway through every episode that "the lies must end", which has got to be a good thing. So, past the halfway point of the first season, and I guess now it should really get going.

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1 Comments:

Blogger if said...

Best post title yet!!

2:22 pm  

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