Saturday 27 August 2011

TV

Doctor Who
32x08 Let's Kill Hitler
Well, I thoroughly enjoyed that. I'm concerned that in retrospect it might look more like four people stood around in a series of rooms explaining things to each other, but at least they ran around a bit between the rooms and it was quite funny. And Rory was as brilliant as ever.
And the title was worth it for the twitter trend #letskillhitler, half fed by people exclaiming that he's already dead. Idiots. (I mean, obviously he is dead, but look at the bloody trend and see why it's bloody trending. Idiots.)
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Proms 2011
Prom 39 Spaghetti Western Orchestra
This was incredible, I thought -- so much fun, and brilliant music to boot. It's on iPlayer for the rest of the week, I urge you to check it out. Plus, the full programme can be read here.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Films

Nirvana (1997)
[#75 in 100 Films in a Year 2011]

The Radio Times described this as "one of the best science-fiction films ever made. Yet few people outside Italy have seen it." So when it was on BBC Two last night, it felt like a must-see -- it's not available on DVD over here, never even been classified by the BBFC.

It's an Italian film (you may have guessed), but the version shown by the Beeb was the US one: acquired by Miramax, they did their usual foreign film hatchet job, chopping out over quarter of an hour and dubbing it into English. I don't know what difference the cuts made (have to research that before writing my review, I suppose), but the dubbing doesn't help, oscillating between awkward accents with broken English (Christopher Lambert dubs himself) and regular stereotypically bad voice acting.

It's an interesting film, with some interesting ideas, but some plot threads seem unfocused -- possibly they're too thematically-minded and I missed a little of what they were aiming at. In this bastardised form, at least, I'd be loathe to call it one of the best sci-fi flicks ever.

I'm tempted to get the uncut, original language, and apparently very good quality, Italian DVD... but I'd also point out that, if you're interested, the English-language version is available on iPlayer for the next week.