TV

QI
17x04 Queasy Quacks
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

University Challenge
2019/20 Episode 7
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

TV

The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco
1x03 Charlotte's Web
1x04 Madhouse

Films

Howards End (1992)
[#130 in 100 Films in a Year 2019]

TV

The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco
1x01 Presidio
1x02 Wake
American-produced sequel/spin-off from The Bletchley Circle. And it certainly feels like cheap US TV rather than a properly British show, unfortunately.

Films

Agatha and the Truth of Murder (2018)
[#129 in 100 Films in a Year 2019]

Collection Count

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

Ah, a lull -- there's absolutely nothing to report this week. Next week will, I think, be a different story.

Number of titles in collection: 2,258 [no change]
Of which DVDs: 1,130 [no change]
Of which Blu-rays: 1,128 [no change]
— of which Ultra HD Blu-rays: 34 [no change]

Number of discs in collection: 5,871 [no change]
Number of films: 2,612 [no change]
Number of TV episodes: 8,640 [no change]
Number of short films: 674 [no change]

See you next week, faithful reader.

TV

Lewis
7x05 Intelligent Design Part 1
7x06 Intelligent Design Part 2 [season finale]
[Watch both parts (again) on the ITV Hub.]

Fiction

Shōgun by James Clavell
Chapter 30

TV

University Challenge
2019/20 Episode 10
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Films

Hannibal (2001)
[2nd watch]
Rewatchathon 2019 #23

this week on 100 Films

3 new reviews were published to 100 Films in a Year this week, and they were...


Battle at Big Rock (2019)

Set one year on from the cliffhanger-ish ending to the last film, this short presents a vignette in the Jurassic world that will help bridge the gap between the previous feature and 2021’s third/sixth instalment. But aside from that large franchise-minded goal, it’s also a chance to see some different characters have a different kind of encounter within the films’ universe.

Read more here.


Downton Abbey (2019)

As the 2020s loom, with the world in a scary old place for a whole host of reasons, why not retreat to the safety of the 1920s, when posh toffs ran the country because their birthright had put them there rather than because the hoi polloi had actually chosen to vote for them in some act of retrograde nationalism. Downton Abbey does actually feature a subplot where a group of working-class servants secretly plot to overthrow the system… but the system in question is the one about who gets to serve the King and Queen their dinner. The working classes fighting amongst themselves about something fundamentally unimportant while the upper classes carry on serenely above them? It’s almost allegorical, although I suspect not on purpose.

Read more here.


John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)

The action-man with the second most quotable line about being back is, er, back — again — for the third chapter in the ongoing saga of what happens if you kill a man’s dog. Basically, lots of people die. Quite right too.

Read more here.


More next Sunday.

Fiction

Shōgun by James Clavell
Chapters 26-29

End of Book Two.

Collection Count

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

After last week's biggie, it's a comparatively quiet one for the collection this week, with just one new addition -- and that doesn't even change the number of discs, because I found a discrepancy somewhere else in the count.

But it's also time for the monthly running time update, so there's that excitement!

Number of titles in collection: 2,258 [up 1]
Of which DVDs: 1,130 [no change]
Of which Blu-rays: 1,128 [up 1]
— of which Ultra HD Blu-rays: 34 [no change]

Number of discs in collection: 5,871 [no change]
Number of films: 2,612 [up 1]
Number of TV episodes: 8,640 [no change]
Number of short films: 674 [no change]

Total running time of collection (approx.):
429 days, 23 hours, and 10 minutes.
(Up 2 days, 1 hour, and 42 minutes from last month.)

See you next week, faithful reader.

TV

QI
17x01 Quirky
17x02 Quintessential
17x03 Quarrels
[Watch these episodes (again) on iPlayer.]

Films

Downton Abbey (2019)
[#128 in 100 Films in a Year 2019]

Fiction

Shōgun by James Clavell
Chapter 25

Fiction

Shōgun by James Clavell
Chapter 24

Fiction

Shōgun by James Clavell
Chapter 23

TV

University Challenge
2019/20 Episode 8
2019/20 Episode 9
[Watch episodes eight and nine (again) on iPlayer.]

Films

Battle at Big Rock (2019)
[#127a in 100 Films in a Year 2019]

Short film set between Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Jurassic World 3. Watch it on YouTube here, and read my review here.

Fiction

Shōgun by James Clavell
Chapter 22

Films

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
[3rd watch]
Rewatchathon 2019 #22

Fiction

Shōgun by James Clavell
Chapters 20-21

this week on 100 Films

Just 1 new review was published to 100 Films in a Year this week, and it was...


The Predator (2018)

it was quite a poor film… but I also sort of enjoyed it. Not in a Gods of Egypt way (that was kinda “so bad it’s good”; or maybe “so strange it’s good”), nor in a “I can see what they were going for, they just couldn’t quite get there” way, but in a… well, there’s the rub. The film undoubtedly has its problems, but it also has bits I was okay with; liked, even. What it feels like is a decent, middle-of-the-road-ish sci-fi actioner… that they then, for some unfathomable reason, deliberately dicked around with to make it kinda bad.

Read more here.


More next Sunday.

TV

Stranger Things 3
3x05 Chapter Five: The Flayed
3x06 Chapter Six: E Pluribus Unum
[Watch it (again) on Netflix.]

Films

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)
[#127 in 100 Films in a Year 2019]

Fiction

Shōgun by James Clavell
Chapter 19

Collection Count

Collection Count tracks my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics every week. And this week, almost out of the blue (or, should I say, Blu), there's a mass of additions!

Four are sale/offer titles, two new releases that aren't out officially until next week. One upgrades a Blu-ray from 2D to 3D, so only adds a single disc to the totals. Another upgrades a Blu-ray from 2D to 3D, but I'm keeping the old one for a special features disc, so it effectively doubles that film's numbers. Another upgrades a Blu-ray from HD to UHD, adding a new cut of the film and a whole raft of extra discs in the process, more than doubling that film's presence in this numbers.

Not that any of that actually matters. I mean, Apocalypse Now going from making up 0.085% of my discs to 0.187% doesn't really make much difference, does it?

Number of titles in collection: 2,257 [up 5]
Of which DVDs: 1,130 [no change]
Of which Blu-rays: 1,127 [up 5]
— of which Ultra HD Blu-rays: 34 [up 2]

Number of discs in collection: 5,871 [up 15]
Number of films: 2,611 [up 7]
Number of TV episodes: 8,640 [up 3]
Number of short films: 674 [up 1]

Finally, one of the other new acquisitions is the miniseries Shogun, which is noteworthy because it presented something of a dilemma for my episode count. It was originally screened over five nights in the US, but I believe has been shown in as many as ten episodes elsewhere (it's long enough for ten one-hours). However, on home media it's always edited into one long feature spread across multiple discs. On DVD, that made it into four parts; on Blu-ray, it's in three; and either way you could argue it's just one long film, with one set of opening titles and closing credits. So, how to count it? In the end, I've gone with three episodes. I can't imagine I'll watch it in three three-hour chunks (well, I might), but that's how it's presented (thanks to the disc breaks), so...

See you next week, faithful reader.

TV

Stranger Things 3
3x04 Chapter Four: The Sauna Test
[Watch it (again) on Netflix.]

Fiction

Shōgun by James Clavell
Chapters 16-18

TV

Stranger Things 3
3x03 Chapter Three: The Case of the Missing Lifeguard
[Watch it (again) on Netflix.]

Fiction

Shōgun by James Clavell
Chapter 15

TV

Stranger Things 3
3x02 Chapter Two: The Mall Rats
[Watch it (again) on Netflix.]

Films

Dollman (1991)
[#126 in 100 Films in a Year 2019]

Fiction

Shōgun by James Clavell
Chapters 13-14

TV

Stranger Things 3
3x01 Chapter One: Suzie, Do You Copy?
Finally getting round to this! Thought it was a really good opener -- reminded me why the show's so enjoyable. Well, one of the reasons: in this case, the characters, which is good because the episode spends quite a lot of time hanging around with them.
[Watch it (again) on Netflix.]

Films

Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler. Zweiter Teil: Inferno. Ein Spiel von Menschen unserer Zeit. (1922)
[#125 in 100 Films in a Year 2019]

aka Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler. Part Two: Inferno. A Game of People of Our Time.

Blindspot 2019 #9b

Fiction

Shōgun by James Clavell
Chapters 10-12

Films

Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler. Erster Teil: Der groBe Spieler. Ein Bild der Zeit. (1922)
[#124 in 100 Films in a Year 2019]

aka Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler. Part One: The Great Gambler. An Image of the Time.

Blindspot 2019 #9a

Fiction

Shōgun by James Clavell
Chapters 8-9

End of Book One. Not really sure why, but maybe the structural reason will become clearer as I read on. It's undoubtedly a long, complicated book (I'm on page 187, just 15% of the way through, and there are already dozens of characters, but there are major ones we've not yet met), but it's a good read.

Films

The Red Shoes (1948)
[#123 in 100 Films in a Year 2019]
What Do You Mean You Haven't Seen...? 2019 #8

Fiction

Shōgun by James Clavell
Chapters 3-7

TV

BBC Two's night of programmes to mark the 50th anniversary of Monty Python, with one new archive-trawl clip show and two repeats...

Monty Python: Almost the Truth - The BBC Lawyer's Cut
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Monty Python's Flying Circus
1x01 Whither Canada?
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Python at 50: Silly Talks and Holy Grails
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Fiction

Shōgun by James Clavell
Prologue
Chapters 1-2

A more successful "let's try this" than the last one (coincidentally, both begin with an adventure at sea; this one's more entertaining, despite the other author's acclaim for exactly that). Shogun is a damn long book, though (the edition I'm reading is 1,210 pages of fairly small text), and I don't have a good track record with those, so we'll see...

Collection Count

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

This week, I upgraded my DVD of In Bruges to the recent limited edition Blu-ray release, plus added a selection of Indicator series titles from their sale. There were even more I wanted, but one has to find limits somewhere... especially as Arrow and Eureka recently announced their November slates and, coupled with their October ones and what Criterion are also putting out, it's going to be a very busy (i.e. expensive) run up to Christmas.

Number of titles in collection: 2,252 [up 3]
Of which DVDs: 1,130 [down 1]
Of which Blu-rays: 1,122 [up 4]
— of which Ultra HD Blu-rays: 32 [no change]

Number of discs in collection: 5,856 [up 3]
Number of films: 2,604 [up 5]
Number of TV episodes: 8,637 [no change]
Number of short films: 673 [up 2]

See you next week, faithful reader.

this week on 100 Films

A new month begins today, so it's time once again to look back at the old one on 100 Films in a Year...





Plus, there were 3 new reviews this week...


Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)

feels like an imitation of latter-day Tarantino flicks. At least writer-director Drew Goddard has the good sense to dodge the carbon-copy style of Reservoir Dogs mimics by shifting genre, taking some of what QT brought to war movies in Inglourious Basterds and Westerns in The Hateful Eight and applying it to a neo-noir mystery-thriller. He even preempts Tarantino’s own oeuvre by including a Charles Manson-esque cult leader, thereby prefiguring Manson’s role in QT’s own Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Read more here.


Sholay (1975)

There’s every chance you’ll’ve only heard of Sholay (if you’ve heard of it at all) as “one of those Indian films that’s on the IMDb Top 250 nowadays”. But in Indian culture it’s a much bigger deal, a huge and longstanding success; like Star Wars or something is to us, I guess, only without the reams of sequels and spinoffs and merchandise and theme parks. Instead, it’s enjoyed remarkable success of its own: it topped the Indian box office for 19 years, was the first film in India to celebrate a Silver Jubilee at over 100 cinemas, and eventually set a record of 60 Golden Jubilees across India. From a British perspective, in 2002 it topped the BFI’s “top ten Indian films of all time” poll, and in 2004 it was voted the “Greatest Indian Movie” in a Sky poll of 1 million British Indians. I first heard about it years ago in that context, and my desire to see it was only exacerbated when it made it onto IMDb’s list. All of which is why I chose it to be my second-ever #200.

Read more here.


Their Finest (2016)

much of Their Finest follows the expected shape of a story like this (the love triangle; the woman coming to be respected by her initially dubious colleagues; etc). Two things work to stop it feeling too staid: an engaging lead cast, and some weightier developments and subplots. The latter includes at least one wholly unexpected twist, which helps make this a more powerful film than the potentially-light “people go on a jolly to make a movie during the war” premise initially seems. There’s a somewhat classical balance of comedy and tragedy there, which is reminiscent of movies from the era the film’s set.

Read more here.


More next Sunday.

Collection Count

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

Two last-minute arrivals led to this update being slightly later than normal: Avengers: Endgame on 3D Blu-ray (out on Monday, but it turned up early), and a Blu-ray box set of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films from Italy, which I've had my eye on for ages and finally dropped in price to a steal. Which means a lot of additions to the films total this week.

Number of titles in collection: 2,249 [up 2]
Of which DVDs: 1,131 [no change]
Of which Blu-rays: 1,118 [up 2]
— of which Ultra HD Blu-rays: 32 [no change]

Number of discs in collection: 5,853 [up 10]
Number of films: 2,599 [up 15]
Number of TV episodes: 8,637 [no change]
Number of short films: 671 [no change]

See you next week, faithful reader.