TV

Duck Quacks Don't Echo
1x03 Episode 3

The National Lottery: Who Dares Wins
7x08 (22/2/14 edition) [season finale]
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Person of Interest
2x10 Shadow Box
Gave up on waiting for Channel 5 to re-start this and just got on with it by... my own means.

Films

The House of Fear (1945)
[#11 in 100 Films in a Year 2014]

The 10th movie starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes.

TV

Arrow
2x10 Blast Radius

Elementary
2x15 Corpse de Ballet

Outnumbered
5x04 The Gap Year
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Room 101
14x05 Episode 5
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Fiction

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Volume I: Mr Norrell, Chapters 15-19

TV

Brooklyn Nine-Nine
1x06 Halloween
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

How I Met Your Mother
9x03 Last Time in New York
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

Stella
3x02 Episode 2

TV

8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown
5x05 (21/2/14 edition)
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

Friends
8x07 The One with the Stain [5th or so watch]

Top Gear
21x02 (9/2/14 edition)
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

The Voice UK
3x07 The Blind Auditions 7
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Articles

Ghosting
by Andrew O'Hagan (from London Review of Books)

A fascinating account of what it was like to ghostwrite Julian Assange's book, by the man who did just that.

(Worth noting that this article is over 26,000 words long -- i.e. long enough to firmly count as a novella (based on the selection criteria of awards that offer a prize for such things), so don't expect to just rattle through it in a spare five minutes.)

Collection Count

Collection Count tracks my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics every week. Except last week, when I was away, making posting trickier, and there was nothing to report anyway.

This week makes up for it, though: there's a couple of new additions, plus it's time for every month's highlight, the running time update.

Number of titles in collection: 1,656 [up 2]
Of which DVDs: 1,198 [up 1]
Of which Blu-rays: 458 [up 1]

Number of discs in collection: 4,142 [up 7]
Number of films in collection: 1,781 [no change]
Number of TV episodes in collection: 6,118 [up 16]
Number of short films in collection: 406 [no change]

And finally...

Total running time of collection (approx.):
296 days, 22 hours, and 27 minutes.
(Up 14 hours and 29 minutes from last month.)

See you next week, faithful reader.

TV

The Last Leg
4x03 (14/2/14 edition)
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

The National Lottery: Who Dares Wins
7x07 (15/2/14 edition)
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

The Voice UK
3x06 The Blind Auditions 6
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

TV

Brooklyn Nine-Nine
1x05 The Vulture
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

Duck Quacks Don't Echo
1x02 Episode 2

Room 101
14x04 Episode 4
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

TV

Death in Paradise
3x06 Episode 6
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

How I Met Your Mother
9x02 Coming Back
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

Suspects
1x01 Episode 1
Channel 5 chose not to renew their rights to CSI or NCIS or something and instead invest the money in this original homemade improvised police procedural drama. It's... well, it's a nice idea -- but I don't believe the police procedure in it can be anything close to reality (maybe the actors needed more training), and improvisation doesn't make for great dialogue. Maybe in a character drama it does, but not in situations like this. Undecided on if I'll give it a second chance.
[Watch it (again) on Demand 5.]

TV

The British Academy Film Awards 2014
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

See also: Bafta: Unseen, a 45-minute online-only programme that presumably contains all the awards they didn't fancy showing on TV.

this week on 100 Films

No brand-new reviews on 100 Films in a Year this week, but Masters of Cinema re-issued their Lubitsch in Berlin box set, so I re-posted all my reviews from 2010...

(Spot the also-posted incongruity.)


Anna Boleyn (1920)

In an age where Henry VIII is young, slim and sometimes irritatingly called “Henry 8”, not to mention more interested in shagging every young girl he can find than in, well, anything else, it’s somewhat refreshing to return to a time when he was always older, fatter and more interested in polishing off a huge slab of meat than seeing his wife. OK, so they call him “Heinrich VIII”, but at least that’s because this production team spoke a different language.

Read more here.


Die Austernprinzessin (1919)

Lubitsch stages numerous epic set pieces on gigantic sets: Ossi’s bath, where a stream of maids carry her to and fro, wash and dry her; a huge cast of choreographed waiters, kitchen staff and guests at the wedding dinner; a mad foxtrot sequence that follows it; or the ladies’ boxing match, where for the third time in as many films Lubitsch shows a gaggle of women fighting over a man.

Read more here.


Die Bergkatze (1921)

Location filming in snow-covered Alps adds a scale and breadth to the film's imagined-kingdom setting that would be inimitable in a studio. Perhaps art director Ernst Stern was right that the realism of using genuine locations doesn't quite sit with the highly stylised fort; on the other hand, a studio set simply wouldn't have the same effect

Read more here.


Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin: From Schönhauser Allee to Hollywood (2006)

Part biography, part making-of, part analytical retrospective, Robert Fischer’s documentary does what it says on the tin: tells the story of the life and work of actor/director Ernst Lubitsch from his formative years, living on Schönhauser Allee in Berlin, to when he made the move to America in the early 1920s.

Read more here.


Ich möchte kein Mann sein (1918)

the kind of silent film that might surprise some among a wider film-viewing audience, both in terms of the attitudes prevalent in what is occasionally assumed to be a highly prim era, and, even accepting that it really wasn’t, the things people were prepared to put on film then

Read more here.


Die Puppe (1919)

[A] constant expression of humour, working at every level from intellectual wit down to slapstick tomfoolery, means that even if one element has been done to death in the past near-century, there’ll be several other moments or scenes to compensate.

Read more here.


Rambo III (1988)

he goes off to Afghanistan to defeat half the Russian army single-handed. He does all this showcasing the body of a plastic action figure coated in a year’s supply of Johnson’s Baby Oil, using weapons like explosive-tipped arrows, good for tasks like taking out helicopters. Or obliterating individual soldiers.

Read more here.


Sumurun (1920)

this is primarily an Arabian Nights-style drama… but, while on the surface this looks entirely at odds with Lubitsch’s previous comedy work, it actually concerns itself with the same topic: romance, and the various entanglements and complications that lead to it.

Read more here.


More next Sunday.

TV

Death in Paradise
3x05 Episode 5 [2nd watch]
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

TV

Outnumbered
5x02 The Swimming Competition [2nd watch]
5x03 The Goddaughter
[Watch The Swimming Competition and The Goddaughter (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

TV

The Last Leg
4x02 (7/2/14 edition)
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

The National Lottery: Who Dares Wins
7x06 (8/2/14 edition)
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Room 101
14x03 Episode 3
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

TV

Death in Paradise
3x05 Episode 5
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Duck Quacks Don't Echo
1x01 Episode 1

Films

The Next Three Days (2010)
[#9 in 100 Films in a Year 2014]

The remaining 80-or-so minutes.

DVD Extras

Special Features on The Next Three Days

Including a pretty standard and brief Making of The Next Three Days, which mainly emphasised the choice of setting and filming in Pittsburgh; an equally speedy overview of The Men of The Next Three Days; a potentially interesting featurette called True Escapes for Love, marred by being just like one of those cut-price US TV documentaries where someone moderately famous reads an obvious script at camera intercut with old news footage and the like, though fortunately only for seven minutes here; and a smattering of the deleted & extended scenes, until I got bored with them.

Comics

Wolverine #12-13 by Paul Cornell & Alan Davis

I caught up!

...except then the next issue (the aforementioned new #1) dropped through my letterbox, so I'm instantly behind again. Hey-ho.

Killable was good though, I thought. All the S.H.I.E.L.D. stuff seemed like a bit of an aside from the enjoyably low-key Wolverine goings-on, but it tied back in nicely at the end. That said, being an issue shorter probably wouldn't have hurt it -- condensing all the stuff at the mall down to two issues instead of three, essentially.