Sunday 11 January 2009

TV

Broken Saints
Chapter 6 Synchronicity
Chapter 7 Lucid
After a Christmas hiatus (that lasted exactly a month), it's back down to business with this animated-comic-y epic. It's still rather pretentious and incredibly slow-paced though.

Gilmore Girls
5x14 Say Something

QI
6x03 Flotsam and Jetsam (extended repeat) [2nd watch]
A much lower percentage of filthy stuff in this fourteen-minutes-longer extended repeat. It's all interesting and amusing too, making the filthiness of the edited one look even more deliberate.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

The Sandbaggers
2x03 Decision by Committee
Another brilliant episode, as Burnside fights Whitehall bureaucracy to save two British officials -- plus Willie and a CIA agent -- trapped on a hijacked plane that's set to explode at midnight. It might sound like something Spooks would do, but in practice it really isn't. For one thing, in Spooks you'd know from the outset Harry would succeed in his persuasions, but in Sandbaggers the outcome is always in doubt -- and I'm not going to reveal it here, because you should go watch it!

Articles

Five Favourite Films with Danny Boyle by Joe Utichi & Jen Yamato
(from Rotten Tomatoes)
A very interesting list, with much of interest to say about the choices. Danny Boyle is an excellent filmmaker too, so, all in, this list earns much respect from me.

Harry circus shames journalism by Iain Martin
(from Telegraph.co.uk)
"It is all so very typical of... a section of the modern British media and its absence of any sense of perspective. There's a dislike of anything which smacks of complexity and a refusal to understand that people make mistakes. Should Harry have used those precise words? Of course not, but is anyone really surprised that young soldiers say silly things? And heavens, one can never imagine a News of the World reader using such a term as that employed by the Prince."
(If any News of the World readers happen to be reading, I'd like to point out that the last sentence is using irony. This means he actually means the opposite. Complex, I know, but people with brains can handle that kind of thing.)