Friday 6 November 2009

TV

The Armstrong and Miller Show
2x03 Episode 3
A brilliant return for "kill them".
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Friday Night with Jonathan Ross
17x09 (30/10/09 edition)
It seems that Christopher Walken makes for an awkward interview, but his spoken word rendition of a Lady Gaga song was TV gold.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

House
6x05 Instant Karma

How I Met Your Mother
2x18 Moving Day

The Sarah Jane Adventures
3x08 The Eternity Trap Part Two
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Films

Avatar Trailer 2
I was thoroughly underwhelmed by the first Avatar trailer -- as were many, despite the media's insistence that it was the best thing since someone invented moving pictures. This, on the other hand, actually looks quite good... but you have to ignore the hype. The CGI doesn't look completely lifelike, as we've been repeatedly told it will, but it is very good CGI; and overall it looks like a potentially entertaining sci-fi action/war movie, but not The Greatest Most Important Movie Ever Made Ever, as some are still insisting. So if you ignore all that -- don't take it on its own terms, as it were -- it looks like it might be quite good.
Still keep thinking of this though.

Exiled (2006)
[#68 in 100 Films in a Year 2009]

Sherlock Holmes Trailer 2
Feels less like a trailer and more a semi-randomly assembled series of clips. But they're really cool clips. No, it's not 'proper' Sherlock Holmes, but it does look like a great big entertaining action/adventure film, and that's fine by me.

Articles

How Scary Should Kids Movies Be? by Helen O'Hara
(from the Empire Blog)
An excellent point -- essentially, that a bit of a scare is good for kids. It's certainly the ethos that Doctor Who operates on, and that's just one of the reasons it's so good.

Ian McKellen has read The Hobbit! by James White
(from Total Film)
The screenplay, that is, not the book. Though he's probably read the book. But that's not news, is it. Of course, this is barely news, because he can't actually say anything about it. Still, it's exciting that it's getting closer.


Kick-Ass Character Posters Now Online by Chris Hewitt
(from Empire)
Much coolness.

Collection Count

It's the third week of Collection Count, tracking my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics. If you don't know what this is you can read my initial post here.

Another week of increases here, and a very adult statistic of the week...

Number of titles in collection: 1,072 [up 6]
Of which DVDs: 1,037 [up 6]
Of which Blu-rays: 35 [no change]

Number of discs in collection: 2,633 [up 8]
Number of films in collection: 1,117 [up 15]
Number of TV episodes in collection: 3,653 [no change]

Statistic of the week:

Number of titles rated 18:
171
(15.9% of the collection)

Any particularly anal readers may like to note that as my collection includes discs from around the world, I have 154 titles without a BBFC classification, some of which are/would be rated 18 if I had the UK edition.

See you next week, faithful reader.

new review at 100 Films

Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)
so imbued with the recognisable calling cards of noir in its cinematography, characters and plot points that it feels more like an entry in a well-established genre than a formative inclusion. At only just over an hour it is, on the one hand, too brief to dig into its characters or complicate its story, but on the other, it rattles past quickly enough that the good bits impress and the weak bits are only briefly registered

Read the full review at 100 Films.

There are currently 17 films in the review pipeline at 100 Films. As ever, updates here as and when they're posted.