TV

Battlestar Galactica [2004]
1x10 The Hand of God
1x11 Colonial Day
1x12 Kobol's Last Gleaming Part 1
1x13 Kobol's Last Gleaming Part 2 [season finale]
Proof again of BSG's addictiveness -- I'd intended to watch my usual two episodes, but couldn't resist ploughing on through the finale. Which leaves me having got through the whole miniseries & first season in just one week. "Oops." A break before season two... maybe...
In these episodes we have examples of everything the series has been doing best: full-on action in Hand of God; full-on politics in Colonial Day; resolutions and more mysteries in both parts of Kobol's Last Gleaming; and throughout, issues of religion, torture, democracy, and more. And a great set of cliffhangers too, without losing sight of this being a serial: there are some answers and resolutions, but many plots are left mid-way. It's a confident series that doesn't opt for "wrap everything up + cliffhanger", or even "wrap everything up for now + cliffhanger", but pushes on as if this is just a midseason ep. Thank goodness their confidence was rewarded.

Damages
3x06 Don't Forget to Thank Mr. Zedeck

Dexter
3x08 The Damage a Man Can Do
Now there's a nifty cliffhanger! It doesn't feel like it -- probably because I've watched this season so broken up -- but I'm now heading into the final third of the season. Exciting times.

Articles

Christopher Eccleston talks about Doctor Who exit
(from BBC News)
On the one hand, it's nice someone's finally talking about it -- exactly why and under what circumstances Eccleston left the series has always been a bit of a mystery -- but, at the same time as adding a bit of clarity, it also muddies the waters. I mean, what exactly does

I didn't enjoy the environment and the culture that we, the cast and crew, had to work in. I thought if I stay in this job, I'm going to have to blind myself to certain things that I thought were wrong.

mean? It gives his reasons better than before, but is still quite unclear -- what environment? What culture? Who imposed it? The show's producers? The BBC?
I suppose the wait for more revealing years-later interviews continues...

The Nintendo 3DS Is Real, and Doesn't Need Glasses
(from Gizmodo)
As you may well have heard. Highlights:

There is a 3D depth slider to choose a degree of 3D, to maximize or even turn it off entirely. ... two cameras on the outside. So you can take 3D photos. ... The 3DS can also play back 3D hollywood movies

Talk of what it's like to actually use here.

TV

Battlestar Galactica [2004]
1x08 Flesh and Bone
1x09 Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down
Holy moly, a comedy episode! Well that's not something I'd expected to see in BSG.

Damages
3x05 It's Not My Birthday
There seem to be an increasing number of unheralded super-weird dream sequences on TV these days. Or maybe it's just my imagination.

Dexter
3x07 Easy as Pie
A rather excellent episode, revisiting notions of Dexter's code -- who is and isn't worthy of his 'talents'?

Articles

Damon Lindelof Writes the Sequel to Armageddon You'll Wish Was Real by Christopher Rosen
(from Movie|Line)
I'm no fan of Armageddon (though I do need to see all of it) or Lost (though I do intend to catch up now it's all finally done), but this is still quite funny. Especially as "it’s no less ridiculous than anything in the Michael Bay original Armageddon and actually seems almost believable as a movie project". And is called -- frankly, brilliantly -- Armageddoner!

TV

Battlestar Galactica [2004]
1x06 Litmus
1x07 Six Degrees of Separation
A pair of similarly-themed but notably different episodes that are the first concrete examples of the series tackling themes that have earnt it such plaudits; namely, notions of justice, particularly in wartime, and religion. Importantly, there are few easy answers, and, I expect, further ramifications to come.

Damages
3x04 Don't Throw That at the Chicken
Much like Dexter a week (and a bit) ago, other series coming to an end means I can restart Damages, almost three months after I last watched it. Thank goodness for "previously on"s.

Dexter
3x06 Sí Se Puede
It feels considerably more than 10 days since I restarted Dexter. Too used to marathoning through it, I suppose, especially when I've got through nine BSGs in five days.

Articles

Scribes thrive on serial series by Robert Koehler
(from Variety)
Interesting (if brief) article on how US TV has, in the past decade or so, definitively moved away from the syndication-friendly format (i.e. standalone episodes suitable to be seen at random in any order) to the DVD-friendly serial format (i.e. long story arcs running the course of a whole (if not several) seasons).
(Variety limits the number of articles you can read without registering, and then limits further without paying. On Safari (and I presume other browsers, but I don't know), however, if you stop the page loading once the text has appeared, you can usually catch it before the password barrier pops up. Nifty.)

this week on 100 Films

4 new reviews were posted to 100 Films in a Year this week, and they were...

Burn After Reading (2008)

as two minor characters observe at the end, we’ve learnt nothing. There’s been a sporadically complex set of coincidences and accidents, some good laughs and some surprises too, but the end result is… what? But maybe that’s the point.

Ghost Town (2008)

The high-concept at the film’s centre — that Ricky Gervais sees dead people and doesn’t want to — is neat enough. It largely sticks to its rules, it manages a few moments of humour, it doesn’t get too repetitive, it often plays the most obvious card

Ivanhoe (1952)

Most notable is an excellent siege sequence, a moderately epic extended battle that is certainly the film’s high point. The randomly hurled arrows and choreography-free sword fights may look a tad amateurish almost sixty years on, when we’re used to slickly staged and edited combat sequences, but the scale and rough excitement of the battle easily makes up for it.

Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960)

The cast are adequate, even if Richard Greene’s no Errol Flynn and Peter Cushing’s no Alan Rickman (here at least). Terence Fisher’s direction is rather flat a lot of the time, though a few scenery shots, riding sequences and fights bring out a bit more dynamism.

More next Sunday.

TV

Battlestar Galactica [2004]
1x04 Act of Contrition
1x05 You Can't Go Home Again

Doctor Who
31x11 The Lodger
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Doctor Who Confidential
5x11 Extra Time
And that's all the football I intend to watch this year.
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

The Mentalist
2x17 The Red Box
[Watch it (again) on Demand Five.]

Wallander [Swedish]
2x07 Läckan (aka The Leak)

Articles

BBC to revamp The One Show by Paul Millar
(from Digital Spy)
Is there a legal requirement that press releases must always describe HD as "glorious high definition"? How about another adjective, at least.

Collection Count

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

Despite another 24 hour delay, it's back to the teeny-tiny increases this week: one new DVD, and one new BD-that-replaces-a-DVD half cancelling it back out.

Number of titles in collection: 1,183 [up 1]
Of which DVDs: 1,094 [no change]
Of which Blu-rays: 89 [up 1]

Number of discs in collection: 2,895 [up 3]
Number of films in collection: 1,246 [no change]
Number of TV episodes in collection: 4,051 [up 6]

Statistic of the week:

Number of titles unrated:
135
(11.4% of the total)

Having previously done titles rated U, 18, and 15 (i.e. the lowest, highest, and largest-in-my-collection of the UK ratings), the only one with any significance left is "unrated". These are titles that are either E (for Exempt) in the UK, or other discs that are somehow allowed out unclassified, or some of my US imports, where ratings on DVDs aren't compulsory.

See you next week, faithful reader.

TV

Friday Night With Jonathan Ross
18x19 (4/6/10 edition)
I'm not sure why I keep linking to tv.com for Wossy episodes -- their editor for this section is clearly a bit of a dick.
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

How I Met Your Mother
5x03 Robin 101
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

all 11 Doctors in a box

Ever since Character began doing classic series action figures, this is the one box set I've been dying to get my hands on.

Click to enlarge.

All 11 Doctors' action figures in one presentation box. Beautiful.

The fact I already own most of them is irrelevant; besides, at least they've gone to the effort of making some a variant -- celery-sticked 5th Doctor (at last!) is perhaps the most obvious example; the 7th is now hatless (and brown-coated, though he was in the TARDIS set too); the 3rd, 4th Doctors are also different (or "slightly different", depending which versions you already own); the 6th may also have a slightly different costume, while the 10th is specs-on version (which, when they released so damn many 10th-era box sets with him, is hardly uncommon). Plus the 8th Doctor is new, and, as far as I'm concerned, I only recently got the Unearthly Child 1st Doctor so this is a big variant; plus I never got the 2nd and have yet to get an 11th.

Ah, the life of a collector.

Click to enlarge.

The set's due out in August. RRP is £49.99 but obviously the Forbidden Planets have discounts. Cheaper of the two is .co.uk -- only 50p on the page, but standard p&p is a whole £3 less than .com, a good saving in my book.

TV

Aida
So, my first proper experience with opera. I quite liked it; this version, staged in 2009 for the Bregenz Festival, was certainly a spectacular piece of theatre (you can see a couple of photos of the huge set at the link above). Seems to me that opera is rather like a classically-scored foreign-language musical... which I'm sure many opera fans would like to lynch me for saying.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Battlestar Galactica [2004]
1x01 33
1x02 Water
1x03 Bastille Day
I'd only intended to watch one episode, but got rather drawn in and... well, you can see. It's nice to have a bit of politics with your sci-fi -- it makes a change -- and a series that treats the viewer with a little bit of respect. For example, it's obvious what's going on in 33 -- the Cylons are attacking every 33 minutes -- but in the whole episode no one states it. Few genre shows would have the confidence not to have the very first line be, "so this will be the 237th time they've attacked after a 33 minute gap", or whatever.
The worst I would say about the series so far is that you can sometimes tell the writers' background is in genre/Star Trek TV, rather than 'proper drama'. Occasionally the story or way it's constructed reminds you that this is, really, a bunch of Star Trek writers putting all their efforts into making a 'proper drama' instead of just another space opera, rather than some 'proper drama' writers choosing to use sci-fi as a medium for social/political comment (like, for example, David Milch was aiming at with Deadwood, which was originally going to be set in the totally-different time period of Ancient Rome before Rome turned up). But it's loftier aims largely keep it above stuff we've all seen numerous times before... so far, at least.

Articles

Die Hard 24/7 Starring John McClane & Jack Bauer Is The Wrong Call, But The Right Direction by Josh Wigler
(from MTV Movies Blog)

20th Century Fox once mulled over the idea of teaming the Die Hard and 24 heroes together in a movie called — wait for it — Die Hard 24/7. The source reports that "the project didn't pan out because Kiefer was more interested in launching his own 24 movie franchise ... than doing buddy shtick in Bruce's already established series."

Well... hm...
Be warned, the full article (which doesn't contain any more details on the project than that, just some opinion) has massive spoilers for 24 season 8.

Even New Line Execs Can’t Figure Out Why the Fourth Final Destination Made Nearly $200 Million, But Here Comes No. Five by Claude Brodesser-Akner
(from )
It's quite incredibly how much of a turnaround the franchise has seen with its fourth entry --

it’s made $115 million internationally, which is $55.5 million more than the next highest-grossing entry, the first one. Some areas seem particularly crazy about death: Colombia’s grosses quintupled from the third film in the franchise. Australian grosses are three and a half times greater. Dutch, Israeli, and German grosses tripled. And French and Brazilian grosses doubled.

-- and no one, least of all the studio who released it, seems to know why.

Feeder Call Out video - exclusive, honest!

Exclusive to you for the next 24 hours, the code below contains the hot new video for the single Call Out.

Please post it anywhere you like online, and host your own premiere!

Yep, exclusive to me. And everyone else who gets their emails. And now to you, if you click that "share" button.

TV

Battlestar Galactica [2004]
Miniseries Part 1 (of 2)
Miniseries Part 2 (of 2)
Here I go, at last -- only 6½ years after it was first on and 9 months after buying the Blu-ray, I'm finally commencing perhaps the greatest TV series ever made. Does it top The Wire? And/or Everything Else Ever Made Ever? Based on the evidence of these opening three hours -- which play more like an epic movie (albeit with series-launching cliffhanger) than a two-part miniseries, if you ask me -- there's a good chance it might.

Luther
1x06 Episode 6 [season finale]
So, that's that then. Not sure if another series is a good idea; even less sure if it's going to happen. We'll see I suppose.
One thing I did rather like about Luther, by-the-by, is how they cut their "next time" trailer (and, in the finale, the episode's closing moments) in amongst the end credits, thereby circumventing the BBC guidelines that are designed to allow that irritating shrinking thing that means you can't see everyone's names. Well done, Luther production team, very clever. I bet the BBC modify their guidelines to stop anyone copying.
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Articles

Back to Future, Jurassic Park to become games by Derrik J. Lang
(from Google News)
You'd assume they'd be ultra-mainstream action-y titles, wouldn't you... but they're actually coming from Telltale, the company behind such point-and-click-esque adventure games as Sam and Max and Tales of Monkey Island. So will they be that style, or something new for the company? It would lend itself to Back to the Future, but what about Jurassic Park? How do you do the dino-fighting action? Or is that out the window in favour of Plot? Only time will tell.

Major Indy 5 News: Bermuda Triangle, the last of Harrison Ford
(from Sci Fi Wire)
I know I'm in the minority, but I thought Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was pretty entertaining. That said, this next adventure does sound more promising -- a more supernatural MacGuffin (though they could go sci-fi with it if they wanted, of course) and, perhaps, a degree of abandonment for CGI (which was overdone in Crystal Skull).

Russell T Davies Talks About Torchwood Series 4 and Doctor Who Series 31 (video)
(from Gallifreyan Embassy)
The post-announcement news-dribble continues with another RTD interview. More repetition and reassurances, as you'd expect. Also worth watching for the mildly amusing pronunciation of "John Barrowman".