TV

The National Lottery: Who Dares Wins
4x05 (28/5/11 edition)
The lists feel more desperately obscure/specific every week. And pity the poor girl who managed to throw away two out of three lists she played by guessing answers that were almost correct.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Vera
1x04 Little Lazarus [season finale]
Generally this is quite good, though in this case marred by some niggly plot holes (mainly to do with the husband).
[Watch it (again) on ITV Player.]

Articles

Agreeing and Disagreeing with Roger Ebert on Dim Projection by Tim League
(from Alamo Blog at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema)
A response to/continuation of Ebert's article the other day on dim projection of movies. It shows it can be done right, but, as Ebert says in the comments, "I have a sinking feeling that many theaters do not make the effort you describe".

Films That Killed Studios by Helen Cox
(from New Empress Magazine)
If you're a film fan you may well be familiar with some or all of these stories, but it's still quite astonishing to see how studios have been killed just by a single misjudged film.

this week on 100 Films

3 new reviews were posted to 100 Films in a Year this week. As they included both versions of Assault on Precinct 13, I did a Make/Remake feature on them here.

And the rest of the reviews included...

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

I should probably also note that the main cop character is black and the main criminal is white, which I imagine was revolutionary in the ’70s. To be honest, it would probably go against the norm today — note how the remake reverted to (stereo)type.

Assault on Precinct 13 (2005)

In terms of the representation of race on screen, this is a film that could certainly be seen as a step backwards. While the original had a black police officer in charge of a white criminal, here not only is the lead officer white — as are all but one of the dozens of other policemen — but all the criminals inside the precinct are black or (in one case) hispanic. Ouch.

Family Guy Presents Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story (2005)

it does feel like three Family Guy episodes stitched together. Much like that other stitched-together-from-three-animated-TV-episodes movie, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the events of part one (or the first twenty-odd minutes) seem entirely separated from the two-parter that makes up the back hour. Fortunately the Family Guy team seem to have more common sense than their Lucasfilm counterparts, choosing to link back round to the start for their film’s climax, tying it all together after all.

More next Sunday.