This year I shall be mostly watching

[Andy Turnbull]

Michio Kaku?

Andy

[Philip Ayres]

No I thought he was rather good.

[The Doctor]

I hope Andu has done his duty...

-Ralph

[Andy Turnbull]

He has indeed.

Andy

[The Doctor]

Good Andu, good.

*pats head*

-Ralph

[Andy Turnbull]

That doesn't mean he's going to pass them on to you.

MWAHAHAAHAHAAH!

Andy

[The Doctor]

Do I need to make you watch more Voltron Force?

-Ralph

[Grand Moff Muffin]

1. Merlin (Hallmark 3-hour mini-series)
2. King Arthur (Clive Owen)
3. First Knight
4. Camelot (Channel 4)
5. Merlin (BBC)

Well, as Camelot went on it dropped down my screen Arthur league table, but the final two-parter was back to the quality of the early episodes, and yesterday's finale was quite satisfying, with some plot twists that were inevitable and a few others that caught me off-guard. The ten-episode series stands quite well on its own as a story, but I would much rather have had it continue than have BBC Merlin continue. The latter annoys me more in light of having seen Camelot get right so much that it got wrong. Oh well!

Martin

[blueshift]

For me, the main problem with Camelot was the casting and scripting of Arthur. The actor they got has no screen presence or authority at all, and comes across as an extremely unlikeable character.

EDIT: I am watching the last ep now OH COME ON they just killed off one of the knights in exactly the same way that they did last episode "oh look the battle is over we are happy SURPRISE ARROW". You'd have thought they would have got wise to that by now.

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Aug 7, 2011 17:04:48 GMT blueshift said:

EDIT: I am watching the last ep now OH COME ON they just killed off one of the knights in exactly the same way that they did last episode "oh look the battle is over we are happy SURPRISE ARROW". You'd have thought they would have got wise to that by now.

SPOILER: Click to show

This was the most predictable plot twist in the episode. Leontes had to sacrifice himself nobly and then die in Arthur's arms after giving him the OK to marry Guinevere.

Gawain is definitely someone you want on your side in a fight.

Martin

[blueshift]

I was wondering if they would touch on the incest issue re: Mortdred's conception as in the original tales.

OH HO HO they did. Classy.

[legios]

Just finished watching the season closer to Castle Season 2. They seem to be establishing a pattern of switching of the humor and going full-bore on the melodrama for their season closers. I guess it mostly gets away with it if you are a regular viewer invested in the characters, but I think that for the casual audience it may be a little too much like every other law enforcement show on the planet. That said, it was good melodrama and they do say a change is as good as a rest. All told it has been a decent second season for the show though. If, as some allege, it is a show that coasts on the charm of its cast then I can't really blame it - when you have a cast as charming and with such a good screen chemistry then why not lean on that a bit?

I've also been working my way through Season 3 of Burn Notice. This seems to be the Season where Burn Notice tries to work out what it wants to be when it grows up. It is still a charming mix of glossy production and distinctly low-fi style (James Bond stuck in one city and with a budget of whatever he can find down the back of the sofa) but when they bring in a recurring threat/plot device in the shape of a Psychotic for hire (don't blame me, that's what the little help-labels the show puts on people call him) who is dapper and camp as a row of tents it really starts to feel like three or four tones stapled together. Fortunately the regular cast manage to hold the whole thing together, just about. I am impressed by how good the actual spycraft of the show actually is - as presented on screen there are clearly some liberties being taken, but the main characters voice-over musing about information gathering, tailing and Escape and Evasion etc do ring strongly of actual espionage agency practice. Once more, not an example of serious drama but good fun tosh still.

Karl

[Hero]

Been re-watching through the first 7 seasons of Rab C Nesbitt and so forth. A 10th season is due to air this year sometime.

Also been watching through Inspector George Gently too. Two new programmes also due to screen later this year with more commissioned in 2012.

===KEN

[duffism1981]

I must be the only Scottish person who absolutely hates Rab C Nesbitt. I don't funny in the slightest.

[The Doctor]

Watched the first 2 (of 6) episodes of 'The Hour' on the iPlayer. Tis about a BBC News show in 1956 with a spy story running in the background. It's very good stuff.

-Ralph

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Tonight - BBC2, 9pm new QI XL, followed by an hour-long 'Making of QI' at 9.45pm.

Wednesday - BBC1, 8.30pm 'Planet Dinosaur' (essentially new Walking With Dinosaurs), followed by 'Dinosaurs, Myths and Monsters' on BBC4 at 9pm.



Martin

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Finding the 1-hour follow-on documentaries on BBC4 more interesting and enjoyable than Planet Dinosaur itself so far.

Will give the new series of Merlin a go tonight, and also Frost/Nixon which I missed seeing in the cinema. And QI XL, of course.

Martin

[Hero]

Merlin's on tonight!? I better set the SKY+.

===KEN

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Caught the film 'Franklyn' on TV the other day for the first time. Found it thoroughly engrossing and would recommend it to all.



I would also recommend last night's BBC offering, Your Money and How They Spend It. I almost feel it should be required viewing for voters...

Martin

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Having been so impressed by 'Franklyn' when it came on the telly I bought the DVD (stupidly cheap now) and saw it again today. Blown away by it even more on a second viewing. The first viewing benefits from not fully understanding what is going on until the very end. The second viewing benefits from spotting all the tie-ins between the parallel worlds that you missed the first time round... and then a realisation at the very end (if you keep an eye-out for the short dialogue-free scenes) that actually there was a third layer of reality more subtle and powerful than the obvious one that gets erased.

The DVD case describes it as 'Donnie Darko meets The Matrix' but I would describe it more as 'Inception meets Kingdom of Heaven meets The Phantom of the Opera'. Or something. Anyway, Eva Green and Bernard Hill are predictably phenomenal in their roles.

Has anyone else here seen this film?

Martin

[The Doctor]

Never heard of it. What exactly is the premise?

-Ralph

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Nov 26, 2011 12:51:15 GMT The Doctor said:

Never heard of it. What exactly is the premise?

-Ralph

I hadn't heard of it either, but the RT review dismissing it as "overambitious" made me want to see it.

I can't explain what it's really about without spoiling it, but it's partly set in an alternate reality gothic city where religion is compulsory and a masked vigilante called Jonathan Preest is on a mission to avenge the killing of a young girl while avoiding capture by the authorities. And it also follows three other lives in present-day London - a young man jilted on his wedding day, a young woman who makes her serial suicide attempts part of her college art project whilst lashing out at her mother, and a father (Bernard Hill) looking for his lost son. The movie is about learning the details of these four seemingly unrelated lives and how they end up overlapping.

It was just my cup of tea. Probably isn't most people's, but it's worth giving a go - if only because it's British rather than Hollywood.

If anyone does consider watching it, please don't attempt to read any more about it on-line than what I've just typed or you'll risk ruining it.

Martin

[jameso]

I've seen Franklyn, it was quite well recieved when it came out and has a fairly strong reputation. Thought it was pretty good myself, might be worth a rewatch.

[legios]

Dec 3, 2011 16:32:37 GMT jameso said:

I've seen Franklyn, it was quite well recieved when it came out and has a fairly strong reputation. Thought it was pretty good myself, might be worth a rewatch.

It has been added to my rental queue to be seen in due course.

Speaking of rentals, on Friday Bewoulf, which I had put in the queue a while ago turned up. My second thought was that like the Tintin film this would have made a perfectly decent live-action film, and that I couldn't work out why they didn't just make it in Live-action. It didn't seem like it was specifically taking advantage of the medium to do, or to look, different enough to warrant animation.

My first thought had been that casting Ray Winston as Beowulf was accidentally amusing. The line where he explains that he is "'ere ta kill ya monstah." was funny in the trailer and it remains funny in context. He just sounds too much like he has come all the way from Lun-dahn to shank Grendel. It is unfortunate because he actually puts in a decent shift, it is just occasionally the accent overwhelms the performance.

It isn't a bad film, I just wish they had either made it in live-action, or really gone all out with what animation can achieve.

Karl

[legios]

Got the animated adaptation of "Batman: Year One" cheap a while back and finally got around to watching it this evening. It wasn't a bad attempt, reasonably well-animated and with a voice-cast that put in a fair shift but I am hard-pressed to say that it rose above competently average. Not sure quite why but something about it didn't really come together for me. Bryan Cranston's noirish delivery on his voice-overs as James Gordon worked quite well though and did help to bolster the feel that it was going for. Not sure about Ben McKenzie's Batman though something about his performance just didn't work for me. It did strike me that it was a bit short too - considering it should have cost me thirteen pounds a running time of an hour is a little pricey.

The Catwoman short that was on the disc with it was by far the more lacklustre affair though. A fairly run of the mill chase story for the most part, marred by some unnecessary T&A at one point which I actually found a little offputting.

The whole package was ok for what I paid for it, but I'm not sure that it quite lives up to the full retail price.

Karl

[Andy Turnbull]

Watched I, Monster. Tis an Amicus version of Jekyll and Hyde with the names changed (rights reasons I assume) with Christopher Lee as the Jekyll/Hyde character and Cushing as Utterson (name not changed). Cracking stuff. Minimal make-up and prosthetics on Lee, his performance carries it.

Andy

[blueshift]

Has anyone else been watching Black Mirror?

My god, last night's episode was one of the finest things I've seen all year. You definately definately need to watch it.

www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/4od

[The Doctor]

Behold the madness.



-Ralph

[legios]

Been watching a lot of stuff recently.

Finished watching the first season of the new "Nikita" television series. Whilst the previous television version of Nikita was effectively an "alternate version" of the film the new version is a kind of semi-sequel to "Point of No Return" the US remake of the film, with Nikita having escaped the organisation that trained her and working on the outside to bring them down. On the bright side the show has a good action lead in the shape of Maggie Q, who comes with an excellent pedigree in terms of training for action sequences. The show has a very good fight choreagrapher too - you can tell a good fight guy by how he does when you ask him to make a close-quarters fight in a small space look good on screen. Unfortunately what this versions format lacks is the moral ambiguity that the previous version did so well. Rather than an organisation using horrendous methods to attain possibly noble goals the organisation that trained Nikita is, in this version, an overtly evil organisation that used to be government black-ops but is now Murder Inc. on a global scale. That change leaches out the dramatic tension that made the previous version so watchable and just turns it into generic good guy versus generic bad guys in an Action Spy setting. Nothing wrong with that except that it does it in a terribly po-faced way.

That said, the closing episodes of the series do finally start making something of the espionage setting with a nice pile-up of betrayals, side-switching and mixed agendas, and if they can keep up that momentum into a second season then it might still find its feet.

This afternoon I started out by watching "The Invincible Iron Man", Marvel's Iron Man OAV. There is nothing inherently wrong with recasting the Iron Man origin in modern china, setting the character up as a paragon of modern technology in opposition to a scheme to resurect a long-dead chinese warlord and his mystical might - all while dealing with his own conflict with his fathers dedication to their companies weapons manufacturing pedigree. Unfortunately the execution is somewhat lacking. The animation is only really of television quality - and in a straight-to-dvd production really should be a little better and the plot feels like it is going through the motions a lot of the time. It doesn't help that the main villians of the piece are magically animated elemental creatures who can't speak - leading to lots of dialogueless fight-scenes which just tend to lie there on the screen. (Also I am at a loss to explain why a mystical chinese warlord wouldn't have elemental forces of the actual taoist elements. Earth and Fire are ok, but why Water and Air and where are Wood and Metal?). It telegraphs one of its plot-twists fairly hard quite early on as well, which leaches any real impact out of it. All told it was a fairly lacklustre affair. Not as bad as the two Ultimates derived OAV's but still far from the quality of most of the DC ones.

Fortunately things picked up after that as I settled down to watch District 13: Ulimatum. A sequel to the French action movie District 13, Ultimatum is a good example of identifying everything that worked well in a first film and tweaking it to make it that bit better. Like the first film it starts out with a couple of sequences to re-establish the two leads - a parkour chase for one and a superb martial arts fight for the other (a fight where our hero has to carry around/use as a weapon a priceless Van Gogh painting whilst making sure it is not damaged and incapacitating an entire nightclub of criminal scum. That painting may well count, against very strong competition, as one of the best improvised weapons ever seen on screen), before kicking of the proper plot. The plot itself is some nonsense about part of the French government being in league with a company called Harriburton to blow up District 13, one of the walled slums that the French government in the future have forced the immigrant (the satire in this film is no more subtle than in the first one).

Really the plot is just an excuse to kick of a series of action sequences, whether a blazing parkour chase or a fight scene where it feels like one of our heroes systematically beats up the entire Paris police force. The film certainly knows how to do pace, moving at a relentless clip once it gets going, and has a vein of very European humor in terms of its ability to acknowledge how ludicrous the whole thing is. Perhaps it could be said that it is a triumph of style over substance but in many ways it is fully aware of that and, like the golden age of Hong Kong cinema, prepared to throw its all into that style in that case. Very enjoyable tosh indeed. I wonder if these are flashes in the pan or if France really does have the gift of producing good daft action flicks?

Karl

[Andy Turnbull]

Countess Dracula is on the Horror Channel tonight so that's my evening sorted.

Andy