Tuesday 9 September 2008

TV

Dragons' Den
6x08 (8/9/08 edition) [season finale]
At some point, I watched 6x07 and seem to have completely forgotten to mention it. Oops.

Gilmore Girls
5x05 We Got Us a Pippi Virgin

The National Movie Awards 2008
A surprisingly good celebration of all that's popular in film. Despite a spectacularly weak opening monologue, James Nesbitt developed into a funny and enjoyable host. Though I do rather feel that, as they're British, they should be "Film Awards". Still, Quantum of Solace trailer! Yay! It was a slightly odd one, I thought, but still brilliantly exciting. (As of the end of this programme, the trailer is available online here, including HD options.)

Fiction

Double or Die by Charlie Higson
Chapter 15

Articles

24 Boss Orders Seventh Season Rewrites
(from WENN)
It's good to see they're making a concerted effort to up the quality, after a couple of decidedly poor seasons.

Favorite live-action musical of the 00's (so far)? (poll results)
(from IMDb)
I vote in IMDb's Daily Poll most days, though don't usually mention them. Yesterday's earns one though, due to the extraordinary closeness of the top two: Moulin Rouge edges into first with just 7 more votes than Sweeney Todd. When the total number of votes is 21,523, that's a tiny margin -- 0.03%, in fact. I was one of the 2,735 people who preferred Baz Luhrmann's colourful explosion of joy and sorrow, a film packed with light and shade... whereas Sweeney, while good, was all just shades of grey -- literally.

Knightley Finished With Pirates
(from WENN)
Definitely no more Pirates, or just no more Pirates with Keira? The latter seems more likely.

We Cast Potential Spider-Man 4 Villians
(from Empire Online)
With Spider-Man 4 and 5 seemingly confirmed, Empire has a go at predicting which villain(s) might turn up and who might play them. (Note that they misspelt "villains" in the article's title... and then in the article itself too! Ho ho ho!)

Also check out some bits & bobs about this weekend at the US box office.

Dubya

Empire have a gallery of rather nifty posters for W., Oliver Stone's premature George W. Bush biopic. Most of the posters are amusingly similar (in a good way), so I thought I'd share my three favourites with you. (Click on any to enlarge.)

Click to enlarge

This is the best one. Brolin looks the most like Bush that I've seen to date here, allowing it to convey exactly what the film's about (W.'s a rather mysterious title, after all), while his looking to the sky conveys a mixture of carefree idiocy and "please help me God", something I'm sure Bush must've thought often.

Click to enlarge

Again conveying Bush's carefree -- or care-less -- attitude, especially with his boots on the desk like that. He looks too dreamy though, as if he's just come up with some grand plan that will save everything, and only he, with his reckless irreverence, can pull it off. Which is obviously not the case. Not a particularly close second favourite, then -- the top one's far better.

Though there's alway this one...

Click to enlarge

Monkey see monkey do!

On second thought, that's a lot better than the second. While those are my favourites, the very fact there are six so similar posters works brilliantly -- one hopes cinemas will choose to display all/several of them, in the way they do with different character posters for major releases, rather than just choosing their favourite.

This weekend at the US box office

A couple of bits about the past weekend's box office in the US...

Box Office: The Winner Tanks
(from Studio Briefing)
"Although it opened in first-place at the box-office, the Nicolas Cage thriller Bangkok Dangerous was considered an unmitigated flop this weekend as it drew just $7.8 million... This was not a pretty weekend at the box office." Nope, it was a thoroughly shocking one. Total ticket sales were just $51.6 million, "the smallest number of tickets sold in at least five years".

And the reason why?

Movie Reviews: Bangkok Dangerous
(from Studio Briefing)
...And here's the primary reason why, as the critics pan the only new release. And I thought the trailer looked quite good. Oh well.

Additionally, the all-conquering Dark Knight is still sitting pretty in 3rd, taking a further $5.52m -- increasingly thanks to IMAX screenings. It was originally announced as coming 4th this weekend, but actual figures (as opposed to the estimates they publish on Sunday, which are almost always correct about positions) show it beat The House Bunny by $0.01m.