Friday 22 July 2011

TV

How I Met Your Mother
6x21 Hopeless
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

Miranda
1x05 Excuse [2nd watch]
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Pointless
4x34 (21/7/11 edition)
400! Well crikey.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

The Tudors
4x06 You Have My Permission

Magazines

SFX Special Edition #51
The Top 100 Sci-Fi Icons of the 21st Century

I don't know when this issue is/was released, but I'm a subscriber and my copy turned up today. It's rare I get round to reading much of any magazine I buy these days, and never (with the recent exception of 2000 AD) do I get round to reading all of it at any time... but I read all of this within one day!

Is it that good? No, it's that lightweight. It's 100 full-page (later on, double page) pictures, some of them incredibly poor copies (they're blocky and pixellated, like they've been badly compressed for the web), with teeny tiny articles to accompany them that won't tell you anything new about anything. Ouch.

And that's before we get onto the list itself -- hey, at least no one from Twilight turns up at any point. And that's not devoid from mistakes, either: apparently #6 is "Lanto Jones", who died in an episode written by James Moran. Oh dear.

To rub salt in the wound (sort of), they've decided to include a reader survey with this issue. One of the questions is about if the magazine represents value for money. Normally, I'd be happy to say it does, even if the specials are a bit overpriced these days. But for this edition? Definitely not. It's one completely lightweight article stretched out to a whole magazine... and they're asking £7.99 for it!

I feel like I've wasted part of my subscription.

Articles

Christopher Eccleston: 'I quit Doctor Who over politics' by Kate Goodacre
(from Digital Spy)
More hints emerge on the ongoing mystery of What Went On With Doctor Who's First Season. Read some of my thoughts on the article's commenters here.

Review of Daredevil #1 by Doug Zawisza
(from Comic Book Resources)
Glowing review... which is good, because I've been interested in Daredevil for a long time and decided an issue-one relaunch was a good time to finally try jumping on board.

The Forgotten Part 2: DVD’s hidden depths by James Oliver
(from From the Cheap Seats at MovieMail)
Good article on one of the major benefits of the DVD era: access to so, so many more films in good-quality editions; so many that Oliver suggests we need to be seriously rethinking the canon of great films. And he's probably right.
(I first read this in the current MovieMail catalogue, the full version of which can be read or downloaded as a PDF here. If you've never read one of their monthly catalogues before, it's more like a mini film mag than just a list of stuff you can buy, with new short analytical pieces on some of the new releases (plus pages purely promoting products, of course). And if you're wondering what this article is part two of, the first is here. Not read it myself yet...)

Jurassic Park 4 in two or three years, says Steven Spielberg at Comic-Con 2011 by Daniel Sperling
(from Digital Spy)
They've been saying stuff to this effect for years. I'll believe it when they say they're shooting it. I hope they do, though.

Collection Count

Collection Count tracks my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics every week.

Almost no new titles this week. It should've been more, but... Well, remember that parcel from Amazon US that I mentioned? Still not arrived. They tell me I have to wait "a little while" after the final estimated date before I can claim for a replacement. In this case, "a little while" means four weeks. Ridiculous.

Anyway, at least we've got the running time update -- done accurately, which is why some of my previous discrepancies have shown up -- and that's always exciting!

Number of titles in collection: 1,348 [up 1]
Of which DVDs: 1,127 [no change]
Of which Blu-rays: 221 [up 1]

Number of discs in collection: 3,342 [up 3]
Number of films in collection: 1,421 [up 1]
Number of TV episodes in collection: 5,005 [no change]

And this month's running time update tells us the following exciting stuff...

Total running time of collection (approx.):
241 days, 13 hours, and 19 minutes.
(Up 1 day, 20 hours, and 38 minutes from last month.)

See you next week, faithful reader.