TV

Mad Men
1x07 Red in the Face [2nd watch]
1x08 The Hobo Code [2nd watch]
1x09 Shoot [2nd watch]
There are so many great things about Mad Men. Today's favourite: the put-downs. Also, Betty Draper shooting her neighbour's pigeons. You have to see it to get it.

Oscars 2009: Live from the Red Carpet
And so Sky's coverage begins. And, in fact, is ongoing as this is posted, because the actual ceremony doesn't start until 1am over here. So there's an hour of red carpet to go, and the ceremony itself will be part of tomorrow's updates... or just sometime after midnight, if I have thoughts to share before then.

Articles

CGI Team Creates Realistic Oscar For Michael Bay
(from The Onion)
"A leading team of CGI experts hand-selected by blockbuster producer and director Michael Bay has pushed the limits of what can be accomplished with special effects and digital imaging by creating a computer- generated best-director Oscar for the 43-year-old filmmaker... CGI technology is still decades away from making an Academy Award win for Rush Hour 3 director Brett Ratner look plausible."

100 Films update

It's been a long, long time since the last 100 Films update -- closing in on three months, in fact -- and the day of the Oscars seemed an appropriate time to finally post this. Not that anything up for a major award is included. Still, the long gap means there are a huge pile of reviews to cover.

This update, then, I'll be rounding off 2008, dipping the first toe into 2009, and finally (finally!) finishing 2007.

First, the 'new' reviews, being those from 2008 and 2009:

24: Redemption (Extended Edition) (2008)

The Aristocrats (2005)

Be Kind Rewind (2008)

Becoming Jane (2007)

The Blues Brothers (1980)

Chicago (2002)

Clockwise (1986)

Cube (1997)

Cube²: Hypercube (2002)

Cube Zero (2004)

Die Hard 2 (1990)

Enchanted (2007)

The Green Mile (1999)

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

Madagascar (2005)

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977)

Russian Ark (2002)

Scenes of a Sexual Nature (2006)

Snakes on a Plane (2006)

Son of Paleface (1952)

Swing Time (1936)

Ultimate Avengers (2006)

Ultimate Avengers II (2006)

White Christmas (1954)

Also, the following shorts...

Gasman (1997)

Wallace and Gromit in A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008)

Plus, thoughts on the Cube trilogy and what makes a film a film?

Secondly (well, kinda fourthly), the last of the re-posted reviews from 2007:

Annie Hall (1977)

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927)

Bringing Out the Dead (1999)

Bullets Over Broadway (1994)

The Crowd (1928)

Fantômas: In the Shadow of the Guillotine (1913)

Fantômas: Juve Versus Fantômas (1913)

Goodfellas (1990)

The King of Comedy (1983)

Manhattan (1979)

Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

Mean Streets (1973)

The Naked City (1948)

New York Stories (1989)

The Paleface (1948)

Taxi Driver (1976)

Traffic in Souls (1913)

And finally, some more shorts...

Manhatta (1921)

À Propos de Nice (1930)

Skyscraper Symphony (1929)

From here on it's just '09 reviews then. Which I'm rather behind on; and I'm nowhere near where I need to be to hit 100 by December either -- at my current rate, I won't even make it to 40...

TV

Lark Rise to Candleford
2x08 Episode 8
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Let's Dance for Comic Relief
Episode 1 (of 4)
It's for charity, you can't begrudge it too much. Besides which, Michael McIntyre was an inspired choice for a judge (I hope he's on it every week) and Robert Webb's rendition of Flashdance was priceless. And to top it off there was the video for Nessa & Bryn's Barry Islands in the Stream -- fantastic.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Poetry

a selection by Carol Ann Duffy:

Mrs Beast (from The World's Wife)

Anon (from Feminine Gospels)

Kipling (from Answering Back)

As part of my reading of new (to me) poetry (mentioned ages ago), I've acquired three books by Duffy, staple of GCSE and A-Level English lit and beloved by critics. This is thanks to the ever-wonderful Book People, who offered this selection of three books for a total cost lower than buying one individually. Hurrah for the Book People!

The main reason I bought it was for the highly intriguingAnswering Back collection, in which 50 poets have written new poems in response to classics (though don't expect to have actually heard of a great deal of the new authors or that many of the 'classic' poems). Duffy's Kipling is in answer to the Nation's Favourite Poem, If--... and isn't even close to being as good, or as memorable. Anon, on the other hand, is a much better piece on a famous poetry author.

These few are ones I've read as a randomish initial selection; I'll be reading the collections in full later.

Articles

30 Novels Worth Buying For the Cover Alone by Beth Carswell
(from AbeBooks.co.uk)
Can't say I agree with many of them, but, to someone who loves packaging as much as I do, it's a nice idea.

RT Predicts the Oscars by Jen Yamato
(from Rotten Tomatoes)
As the day nears, more and more sites will be predicting things (if they haven't already, that is). RT's justifications -- and that they've made a prediction for every category -- make it a more interesting read than most.

Why Alan Moore Hates Comic-Book Movies by Sam Ashurst
(from Total Film)
And all sorts of ranting about other stuff too. Depending on your perspective, what he has to say is either quite sensible or a bit loopy. Personally, I land somewhere in between -- his points about why America feels the need to create superheroes while the rest of the world doesn't seem pretty valid.

New Zealand Internet blackout

A reminder for the weekend...

Join New Zealand Internet blackout
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TV

Moses Jones
Part 3 (of 3)
Series like this are always hard to end -- they're 'gritty' and 'realistic', but how do you turn that into a satisfying Big Climax? Moses Jones makes the usual mistake of letting it all go a bit (for want of a better word) mainstream in the closing minutes. A decent series on the whole, though not without its flaws.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Not Going Out
3x04 Party
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

The Office [American]
3x03 The Coup
Watched the majority of this episode in a seminar. It was very funny, which was nice, and thankfully not as painful to watch as the original version (which is deliberately excruciating to watch much of the time). I'd quite like to see more, in fact.

Articles

Two bits of comedy today...

Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition) by Sarah Schmelling
(from Timothy McSweeney)
Spot on, very funny, and very cleverly executed (it uses the whole gamut of Facebook news feed items, not just a slew of status updates).

Oscar Handicapping
(from The Onion)
The ever-reliable Onion helpfully explains what some of those pesky Oscar odds mean ahead of this Sunday's ceremony. "Best Supporting Actor, Josh Brolin, 10-1: There's an outside chance that voters have mistakenly identified Brolin as the dead one."

Poem of the Week: Typo

by Russell Hoban

Unsurprisingly to regular readers, this week's poem is selected from The Puffin Book of Nonsense Verse. Upon completing it last weekend I posted a list of my favourite poems from within its pages, calling this one "probably my favourite". An easy choice then.

'Nitgub,' said the typewriter,
and clenched the paper tight.
'Nitgub positively.
It is here in black and white.'
'Nonsense,' I said.
'I typed N-O-T-H-I-N-G;
the word of course was nothing,
simply nothing, don't you see?'
'Nothing may be what you meant,
but nitgub's what you wrote.
I like it,' said the typewriter.
'It strikes a happy note.
It has more style than nothing,
has a different sort of sound.
The colour is superior;
the flavour's nice and round.
Have you plumbed its deepest depths,
its mysteries explained?'
'All right,' I said, 'I'll take it.
Nitgub ventured, nitgub gained.'

As well as being found in the aforementioned anthology, the poem was originally published in Hoban's book The Pedalling Man, which is sadly out of print. However, you could try your luck on AbeBooks.

(As this work is likely still in copyright, I'll just draw your attention to the Poem of the Week copyright page.)

TV

Cracker
1x05 To Say I Love You Part 3
[Watch it (again) on ITV Player.]

Friday Night With Jonathan Ross
16x04 (13/2/09 edition)
Including a clip from The Pink Panther 2 which perfectly encapsulated why it (and films like it) are so hated: it started with a genuinely funny, workable idea -- I even laughed -- and then ruined it by pushing things too far, making it utterly ridiculous and completely overdoing it. Tsk.
That aside, good guests this week (or last week, really).
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Magazines: new-look Torchwood

Torchwood: The Official Magazine #14

So the new-look Torchwood Magazine has arrived, longer and bi-monthly. This makes a lot of sense for a show like Torchwood, especially when there'll only be five episodes in 2009, and they're all one story to boot -- DWM can sustain its lengthy monthliness thanks to 26 years of classic series and an ever-growing mass of novels, audios, comics, and the fact that even when Who isn't on it never stops.

As for the mag itself... well, it's not exactly a disappointment, but it's not the revelation it could've been. Yes, it's longer, which is theoretically nice... but it costs more and there's a helluva lot of filler. 28 pages of original fiction (as the cover proudly boasts) is fantastic, especially when that includes a 15-page comic co-written by John Barrowman, but fluffy articles on the show's relationships and 'how to be Captain Jack' feel like filler, and too lightweight for a magazine about an adult-orientated series. Put it this way: I don't think DWM would feature such vacant articles and that's family-friendly! And I haven't even mentioned the 'which team member are you' quiz.

But there are some nice interviews, and a Jack timeline is a good idea for a feature (half-decently executed), plus there's news and columns about the forthcoming season. This last one may still be the best reason to buy the mag, though anything seriously interesting will likely make it online promptly. Christ knows what they'll survive on when there's no new season news to report. Still, there's always all that fiction.

And so the new-look Torchwood Magazine is a mixed bag: half worthwhile, half filler. More or less the same as before then.

TV

Mad Men
1x06 Babylon [2nd watch]
It's interesting how much episodes of Mad Men flow into each other, almost as if it was written as one thirteen-hour long piece and then just chopped up at regular intervals. Which does it a disservice, to be honest, because this episode rounds itself off as well as progressing ongoing threads; but I distinctly remember that episode 7 continues elements of this one to the level that any other show would surely have considered it a Part Two.

Fiction

The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson & Axel Scheffler
It's the 10th anniversary of The Gruffalo this year, in which time it seems to have become a classic of young children's literature. I've never read it before though (unsurprisingly, considering my age). It certainly lives up to its reputation however.
(Like most good young children's books, it's also poetry, hence the additional tag.)

Family Guy spoofs Christian Bale

And does so brilliantly.

TV

Nature's Great Events
Part 1 The Great Melt
Stunning footage, of course. The last ten minutes are a segment called Nature's Great Events: Diaries, which looks at the making of that particular episode. It really shows off the lengths they go to in capturing these images for entertainment/information. Equally as fascinating, in my opinion.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Terry Pratchett: Living With Alzheimer's
Part 2 (of 2)
Fascinating, well-made documentary.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Articles

Heroes: Five Ways to Fix a Series In Crisis by Jeff Jensen
(from EW.com)
Heroes is already back in the US, and returns to British screens in just under a week. But will they have fixed it?

Joss Whedon’s 16 Most Painful Character Deaths
(from fandomania)
"spoilers abound in this article, so if you’re not up to date on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly & Serenity, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, or Astonishing X-Men, you might want to avert your eyes."
These are seriously spoilersome spoilers -- if you're part way through or ever intend to follow any of these series, avoid avoid avoid.

Magazines

Empire #237
The numerous 'exclusives' branded over the cover are all a bit lacklustre, to be honest. The Hobbit films are far too early in development to add anything meaningful; the Watchmen photos are taken from a book (so not exclusive) and the brief interviews don't add much to what's already been said; at least the interview with Terry Gilliam about Dr Parnassus, Heath Ledger's last film, is interesting. I like Empire and don't mean to tear it down too much, but really, those claims are stretching things.

SFX #180
Both this and the Empire above contain interviews about Lesbian Vampire Killers -- unsurprisingly, as it's out in a month -- and retrospective features on Georges Méliès -- which is more surprising, as his stuff is Rather Old. And, to round things off, it trumps the Watchmen feature by interviewing original artist Dave Gibbons. Sure, Gibbons hasn't been quiet about the project, but he's not as oft interviewed as others involved in its production.

Doctor Who goes anime

I'm never quite sure where to classify web videos (you'd think I'd've thought of that), so this one earns a post all to itself. It's a fan-made video of a Doctor Who anime... which you'd think would be dreadful, but is in fact amazing. No, really, it's got better animation than I've seen in some professional productions -- and that's not fan-to-fan hyperbole, that's genuine.

Anyway, you can watch it for yourselves and see what I mean. The early stuff is all making-of (i.e. sketchy pencils, etc), but wait til it gets to the finished sequences and stick with it to the end. I'd be more than happy to see a whole series like this -- the Cybermen in particular are stunning.

Go to YouTube itself to watch in high quality, which looks even more amazing.

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