DVD Extras

Dunkirk Special Features
The four featurettes under the heading "Creation". I intend to watch the remaining 12, just not all in one go (altogether they add up to just under 2 hours -- slightly longer than the film itself).

TV

University Challenge
Christmas 2017 Semi-Final 2
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Films

Bright (2017)
[#1 in 100 Films in a Year 2018]
It begins again...

Dunkirk (2017)
[2nd watch]
Rewatchathon 2018 #1. This, too, begins again...

TV

University Challenge
Christmas 2017 Brunel University v Reading University
Christmas 2017 Semi-Final 1
[Watch Brunel v Reading and Semi-Final 1 (again) on iPlayer.]

TV

Michael McIntyre: Happy & Glorious
Thought I'd seen this -- I recognised the start -- but it's not in my records and there were bits I didn't remember, so...
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Mrs Brown's Boys
CSI: Mammy [New Year special]
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

University Challenge
Christmas 2017 Queen Mary College, London v Cardiff University
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

TV

The Graham Norton Show
22x13 New Year's Eve Show
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Little Women
Part 2 (of 3)
Part 3 (of 3)
[Watch parts two and three (again) on iPlayer.]

Films

Airplane! (1980)
[2nd watch]

Rewatchathon 2017 #52

this week on 100 Films

As it's the new year tomorrow, this week over at 100 Films in a Year has ended with a review of 2017's Christmas TV...





Aside from that, there were 8 brand-new film reviews...


The 39 Steps (1935)

This adaptation of John Buchan’s adventure novel is one of the best-known among director Alfred Hitchcock’s early works, and for good reason. Galloping briskly along with a running time under 90 minutes, it’s a film where mood, tone, and the wonderful execution of individual sequences are all allowed to trump plot, which is somewhere on the spectrum from unexplained to nonsensical.

Read more here.


Dances with Wolves Special Edition (1990/1991)

the near-four-hour extended one certainly feels its length. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — this is an epic in the truest sense of the word, with a large story to tell on a grand canvass; although it’s concurrently a drama about just a couple of people from different cultures coming to interact.

Read more here.


Gran Torino (2008)

I imagine it would play very nicely as a companion piece and/or counterpoint to his earlier Oscar-winner, Unforgiven — both are stories about old men in one final fight, essentially. Here, that comes with a subtext about the price that’s paid for standing up for yourself. It may be the right thing to do, and maybe it ends up with the right result, but the good guys really suffer to get to that point.

Read more here.


Jackie Brown (1997)

Some people argue that Jackie Brown is secretly Tarantino’s best movie. I add “secretly” there because it gets a lot less attention than the aforementioned movies that came either side of it. That’s not a bandwagon I’m prepared to jump on. To me, it feels a little like QT was trying to emulate what worked about Pulp Fiction without just making a rip-off of his own movie, and therefore it’s a bit of an inferior copy.

Read more here.


A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

It’s a grandly romantic film — it is all about the triumph of love over everything else, after all — but with a particular fantastical bent that I think remains unique. It has the wit to present a mildly irreverent stance on the afterlife, not taking the whole “life and death” thing too seriously.

Read more here.


Nashville (1975)

Robert Altman’s low-key epic about 24 characters and how their stories interact, overlap, and collide across five days in the city of Nashville, Tennessee. The sheer scope of that makes it a tricky film to interpret. There’s a lot going on, much of it in snatched conversations and moments that leave it up to the audience to piece together what matters and why.

Read more here.


Planet of the Apes (1968)

Coming to Planet of the Apes for the first time almost 50 years after its release, there’s an unavoidable quaintness to some of it, mainly the monkey makeup. It was for a long time iconic, but it’s been abandoned in favour of hyper-realistic CGI in the new movies and therefore shows its age.

Read more here.


Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

Screenplay (first two acts) — 3/5
Screenplay (bit where it suddenly gets plot-heavy and all exposition-y to set up the third act) — 1/5
Screenplay (third act that seems to be from a completely different, much more conventional movie) — 2/5

Read more here.


More next Sunday.

TV

A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Little Women
Part 1 (of 3)
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Films

A Few Good Men (1992)
Stumbled across this on TV and watched chunks from the second half, including the famous climax. Not something I'd do normally, but when having Christmas at other people's houses... It's not like my viewing of it first time round was perfect, having to wait over two months between most of the film and the final half-hour. I really ought to re-watch it properly.

Scrooged (1988)
[#174 in 100 Films in a Year 2017]

Collection Count

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

Technically the monthly running time update isn't due until next week, but this is the last update of 2017 so I thought it would be better to bring it forward a week and do all my past-year increases... but I'm away from home at the minute, and home is where my full records are, so it'll have to wait after all. On the bright side, I'm not expecting any new additions in the next week that aren't technically already here (they're waiting for me when I get home), so it'll still be accurate for my 2017 increases.

Aaaanyway! On with the stats for what I got for Christmas...

Number of titles in collection: 2,072 [up 2]
Of which DVDs: 1,166 [down 1]
Of which Blu-rays: 906 [up 3]

Number of discs in collection: 5,314 [up 3]
Number of films: 2,307 [up 2]
Number of TV episodes: 8,005 [no change]
Number of short films: 599 [no change]

See you next week, faithful reader.

TV

The Late Late Show Carpool Karaoke Primetime Special
Mistook this for a Christmas special in Sky One's listings, but it's actually from the summer. Despite the title, it's really just a Late Late Show special -- presumably they put Carpool Karaoke in the title because it's famous and therefore a draw.

Live at the Apollo
13x07 Christmas Special
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

QI
15x09 O Christmas (XL edition)
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Tim Vine Travels Through Time
Christmas Special
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

University Challenge
Christmas 2017 St John's College, Cambridge v St Edmund Hall, Oxford
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Films

Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942)
[2nd watch]

Rewatchathon 2017 #51, although this time I watched the colourised version, just out of curiosity. It wasn't bad, but it doesn't look quite real -- everything's too washed out, too pastel-y, without enough nuance in the shades and range of colours, despite their best efforts. It's not distracting, at least, but it's ultimately pointless.

TV

Michael McIntyre's Big Show
3x06 Christmas Special [season finale]
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Miranda Does Christmas
On the same set from those Christmas specials Ruth Jones used to do, I swear.
[Watch it (again) on All 4.]

Romesh Ranganathan: Irrational Live
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

University Challenge
Christmas 2017 University of Leicester v UCL
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Upstart Crow
2x07 A Christmas Crow [Christmas special]
Followed by scouring through Love Actually for the scenes being referenced.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

TV

The Big Fat Quiz of the Year 2017
[Watch it (again) on All 4.]

The Miniaturist
Part 2 (of 2)
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

University Challenge
Christmas 2017 University of York v University of Southampton
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

TV

The Miniaturist
Part 1 (of 2)
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Snow Bears
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Travel Man
6x00 48 Hours in Hong Kong [Christmas special]
with John Hamm.
[Watch it (again) on All 4.]

University Challenge
Christmas 2017 Selwyn College, Cambridge v St Andrews University
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

TV

As usual, it was a busy Christmas Day in front of the telly...

300 Years of French and Saunders
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Doctor Who
37x00 Twice Upon a Time [Christmas special]
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

The Dresser
Finally got round to watching this 2015 re-adaptation of Ronald Harwood's play. With its Oscar-calibre cast and feature-length running time, it's the kind of thing that's perfectly positioned to fall between stools in the "what's film and what's TV?" debate.

Have I Got News For You
54x11 Have I Got a Bit More 2017 News for You
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

The Highway Rat
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Mrs Brown's Boys
Mammy's Mummy [Christmas special]
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

TV

University Challenge
Christmas 2017 Durham University v Keble College, Oxford
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Gogglebox
10x16 The Best of 2017
[Watch it (again) on All 4.]

Joanna & Jennifer: Absolutely Champers
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Films

Elf (2003)
[#173 in 100 Films in a Year 2017]

this week on 100 Films

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


Hidden Figures (2016)

Based on a true story, Hidden Figures is about three black women working at NASA in the early ’60s, a time when segregation was still in force in the US. It’s a double whammy of timely issues, then: they struggle to prove they’re clever and have scientific know-how because they’re women, and they struggle to prove they’re worth treating with respect because they’re black. How depressing that these things are still relevant over 50 years later.

Read more here.


John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

For anyone who particularly liked the snippets of this world’s mythology from the first movie, Chapter 2 delivers what they’re after in spades... Of course, it’s all still in service of people shooting and stabbing and punching and whatever-else-ing each other. Maybe that’s doing it a disservice. Nonetheless, there’s lots of intricately choreographed, cleanly staged action — and what more do you want from a film like this?

Read more here.


The LEGO Batman Movie (2017)

You might think the story is almost by the by, because the real point is the gags — and fortunately the movie is indeed consistently funny, with a Flash-like pace to keep things moving... But don’t disregard the narrative offhand, because it also summons up surprisingly effective character arcs. Who expected that, right?

Read more here.


Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

I’ve felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if a small but vocal group of fanboys suddenly cried out in terror and were unfortunately not silenced because on the internet such complaining goes on forever. Yes, something terrible has happened: a new Star Wars movie has come out and, rather than go the Force Awakens route of appealing to nostalgia and familiarity, it’s attempted to boldly go where no Star Wars movie has gone before. Well, it’s maybe not quite that innovative, but writer and director Rian Johnson has given us an Episode VIII that eschews rehashing former glories for an attempt to push the franchise forward in interesting new ways. It’s not an unmitigated success, but it is considerably more than just “a good effort”.

Read more here.


I also wrote a piece about my continuing experience with 4K UHD...





More next Sunday.