TV

Junior Bake Off
Episode 8 (of 13)
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

The Jury
2x03 Part 3 (of 5)
[Watch it (again) on ITV Player.]

Never Mind the Buzzcocks
25x06 Episode 6
So, when given a gun, the girl misses and the rapper shoots someone in the face. Nothing like reinforcing stereotypes.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Pointless
3x35 (1/11/10 edition)
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Comics

Wolverine and the X-Men #1 by Jason Aaron & Chris Bachalo

I've long been an X-Men fan but always struggled to get into the comics, but a post-Big Event relaunch -- including renumbering flagship title Uncanny X-Men for the first time -- seemed a good jumping on point.
But, leading out of such a Big Event, is it actually new-reader friendly (which, really, a #1 issue should always be, I think)?

Pretty much, yes. There are references to the past and it's building out of previous events, so there's some reading between the lines / online research / just accepting it for a new reader to do, but the fact it's such a Fresh New Start for the characters makes it more accessible.

As a story, it's an interesting one. It's essentially one long establishing sequence, introducing the new school, a raft of characters and their current relationships. Still, there's a new villain to contend with at the end. The artwork is very cartoony, which suits the narrative tone perfectly -- I guess we'll see how it fits with good ol' fashioned superheroics in future issues. CBR gave this issue 4.5 stars, which feels more or less right -- it doesn't really go anywhere, but it's a lot of fun.


Uncanny X-Men #1 by Kieron Gillen & Carlos Pacheco

Here's the other half of the new X-Men universe, then, featuring a team of Grown-Ups led by Cyclops (whereas Wolverine is headmaster of a school in the classic X-Men mould -- quite where Professor Xavier fits into all this I don't know. I'd assume he was dead or something, as that's The Kind Of Thing They Do In Comics, but he turns up in Wolverine and the X-Men so...)

This is more of a standard superhero book than Wolverine and the X-Men (unfortunately the existence of a solo Wolverine title, as well as a straight X-Men title, makes handy abbreviation impossible), with the group fighting a big battle against a big enemy with traditional realistic art. It may be less distinctive therefore, but it's more than solid -- this time CBR's review is 4 stars, which also feels right.


In conclusion, I'll be keeping both of these books on for the time being -- like I said, I like the X-Men and I want to see where this is going. The references to the past also intrigue me, so I'm considering digging into recent X history too. But knowing comics, the handful of references probably cover complex storylines stretching back over the last decade, so we'll see about that one.

Articles

Doctor Who movie to be directed by Harry Potter's David Yates
by Paul Millar
(from Digital Spy)
Take your pick about where you'd like to read this news in full, as it seems to have made the world explode. Most of the reaction (on twitter anyway) has been negative: people either hate the idea of Yates being in charge, or they hate all the talk of it rejecting the TV series and "starting from scratch", or they hate both.
Most recently, official Who sources have taken to twitter to deny there's even any news in this: the film's been in development for years, since before the show's TV return in 2005, and nothing's significantly changed now.

First lab-grown hamburger will cost £200,000 by Duncan Geere
(from Wired.co.uk)
A bit "ew", but fascinating. This Is The Future 'n' all that.

Poirot to return for final series on ITV
and
Marple to return for three new films on ITV
by Morgan Jeffery (from Digital Spy)
Fantastic news for Poirot -- as they've been doing it for over 20 years, it would've been a real shame to stop with just five stories left. Plus we'll finally get a DVD box set titled The Complete Poirot that isn't a lie!
As for Marple... well, only one of these stories originally starred her! They normally do each series in blocks of four, but I've heard in the past that ITV essentially treats Poirot and Marple as the same series when budgeting, scheduling, etc, so clearly they've still commissioned eight episodes as usual, just distributed differently.

Secret documents reveal the flimsy case for Ofcom to give into BBC's public TV DRM demands by Cory Doctorow
(from boingboing)
This makes for slightly depressing reading. Essentially, the BBC and Ofcom ignored all the sensible advice they were getting about DRM and went ahead anyway, because that's what they wanted.

A daily dose of sci-fi - Day 1

Favourite sci-fi movie

There are numerous contenders for second place on this list, I'm certain -- there are dozens, probably hundreds, of fantastic sci-fi films out there, and I imagine I've yet to see loads of them (I ought to make a list) -- but there can be only one winner.

Serenity

It may not have the groundbreaking originality of Star Wars, or the huge budget of countless others, or the iconic appeal of others still, but it does have the cult following, and above all it takes what many did before it and polishes it until it's good and shiny.

It's bloody exciting, it's hilariously funny, it's gut-wrenchingly heartbreaking; it has endlessly loveable characters, amazing mannered dialogue, a well-realised 'verse; it has a theme that marries perfectly with the real-life story of the film, making it much richer than anything Lucas has churned out.

Serenity is completely brilliant. And if you don't think so, you're wrong.

(Do watch Firefly first though.)


Read about a daily dose of sci-fi, with links to the rest of the series, here.

A daily dose of sci-fi

I found this quite randomly on another blog. I've never come across such a thing (in this form) before, but apparently they're all over the place. Essentially, it's a list of topics/questions to help promote daily blogging. Not that I need to here, but it looked like fun nonetheless.

This one is, as you'll soon see, all to do with science fiction. The full list is below, and starting in, ooh, five minutes, I'll begin posting my answers... continuing one per day, obviously. (I'll update this with links as I go along.)

This is going to take us until the week before Christmas, so settle down for the long haul.

Day 1 Favourite sci-fi movie
Day 2 Favourite sci-fi TV series
Day 3 Favourite sci-fi book/story
Day 4 Best sci-fi heroine
Day 5 Best sci-fi hero
Day 6 Best sci-fi villain
Day 7 Best non-human character
Day 8 Best robot/android
Day 9 No.1 sci-fi hottie
Day 10 Which sci-fi universe/reality would you most like to live in?
Day 11 Favourite space film/series
Day 12 What's your "yeah I know it's rubbish but I love it" sci-fi film?
Day 13 What's your favourite flavour of Star Trek?
Day 14 An under-rated sci-fi gem
Day 15 Which spaceship would you most like to own/fly?
Day 16 A great quote!
Day 17 Best use of special effects on the big screen
Day 18 Best use of special effects on the small screen
Day 19 Empire or Rebel Alliance?
Day 20 What's the best adaptation of a sci-fi book/story?
Day 21 Favourite alien invasion movie/series
Day 22 Coolest alien race
Day 23 It's party-time! Which sci-fi character are you going to dress-up as?
Day 24 Who's the no.1 captain?
Day 25 Funniest sci-fi (intentional or otherwise)
Day 26 Best battle scene
Day 27 Who are the nastiest bad guys?
Day 28 A great sci-fi B-movie
Day 29 Best pre-1980s sci-fi
Day 30 To finish we need a great tune for the end credits - what's your favourite sci-fi theme?

I'll try not to make it all about Doctor Who...

TV

Have I Got News For You
42x04 (4/11/11 edition; extended repeat)

House
8x04 Risky Business

Junior Bake Off
Episode 7 (of 13)
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

The Jury
2x01 Part 1 (of 5)
2x02 Part 2 (of 5)
Nine years after the first series (which, as you may remember, I watched last month, if you fancy a read of my thoughts), the second run of The Jury (shown in its entirety last week on ITV1) naturally features an all-new jury, all-new barristers and an all-new case. Same theme music though, which slightly surprised me. Once again we're not only following the trial but also the lives the jurors, which I suppose helps make it more than just "yet another crime drama, but dressed differently".
[Watch parts one and two (again) on ITV Player.]

this week on 100 Films

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

Bringing Up Baby (1938)

it’s a little awkward to start with while one warms to Hepburn’s anarchic character, and it drags its heels a little through the middle, but by the time we reach the final act — when an array of characters and situations collide in a manic run-about too intricate to describe here — it all pays off marvellously.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010)

the well-established Potter team have created one of the series’ best instalments here. Long gone is the cartoonish frivolity of Chris Colombus’ opening pair of Children’s Films — this is Potter at his darkest... a grim, oppressive world, where our trio of heroes are completely removed from the safety of school and on the run as fugitives.

Young Guns (1988)

Considering this is ‘the Brat Pack Western’, one might well expect a modernised, sanitised West; something rated PG-13. Instead the film seems to have begun life as a serious attempt at a Billy the Kid biography, right down to bloody violence that earns it an 18. This intention seems to survive — bar a music-video-styled opening, a couple of lines of dialogue and the wailing ’80s guitar score — but how successful it was is another matter.

More next Sunday.

TV

Argumental
4x01 Episode 1
Uncancelled... but with a new set, new host, new team captains, new audience interactivity thing... I was prepared to hate the all-new Argumental, but actually the format hasn't changed at all (not even a little bit -- even the link script is identical) and it was saved by Robert Webb and his guest teammate, Jimmy Carr. Sean Lock wasn't that bad -- he's no John Sergeant but, held back by being host, at least he can't stick his oar in too much. That said, the other team -- new captain Seann Walsh with guest Russell Kane -- were at least twice as irritating as they always are separately.

Derren Brown: The Experiments
1x04 The Secret of Luck [season finale]
While the conclusions about a positive and open attitude are surely sound, I think that a) the car experiment wasn't completely fair (if that woman hadn't known someone who could fix a tyre, surely she'd've pointed them to the garage too?), and b) they must've rigged that final dice roll -- how?
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

Downton Abbey
2x07 Episode 7
Hurrah, Thomas gets some comeuppance! I do hope there's more to come.
[Watch it (again) on ITV Player.]

Merlin
4x07 The Secret Sharer
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Pointless
3x34 (29/10/10 edition)
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Comics

Action Comics #3 by Grant Morrison, Rags Morales & Gene Ha
I liked the first two issues of Action, which surprised me a little as I'm not a great Superman fan, but this isn't so hot. It has a good idea at its core -- "humans turn on alien Superman" -- but despite being on the cover, and a good idea, that's actually underplayed in favour of lengthy scenes of blah. Especially when read in such close proximity to excellent books like Daredevil and Aquaman (see below), this doesn't quite cut it. Still, everyone's allowed a blip -- I'll see how it continues.

Aquaman #1 by Geoff Johns & Ivan Reis
[2nd print]
My final in-print re-read. My thoughts from before are here. Then it's straight on to...

Aquaman #2 by Geoff Johns & Ivan Reis
A much quicker issue than the first, which has its pros and cons. It's not as obviously fun as the first issue, made up essentially of two big action sequences, but then you can't have people slagging off Aquaman every issue. The villains remain intriguing, and the cliffhanger promises something interesting next time. More standard superhero-y stuff than issue one, then, but a solid continuation of the story. Great art, too.

TV

Derren Brown: The Experiments
1x03 The Guilt Trip
It's probably for the best that the extreme lengths Derren had to go to in order to get an innocent man to confess to a murder aren't easily imitable in real life!
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

The Graham Norton Show
10x03 (4/11/11 edition)
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Junior Bake Off
Episode 5 (of 13)
Episode 6 (of 13)
[Watch episodes five and six (again) on iPlayer.]

Live at the Apollo
7x01 Episode 1
Three stand-ups I don't really like doing routines that either went on too long or I'd heard chunks of before? Great return, Live at the Apollo. And the next one features the despised Lee Nelson and overrated Sean Lock? Wonderful.
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

QI
9x09 Illness (XL edition)
One of the best -- arguably, important -- bits was cut from the regular version this week. Tut tut.
[Watch QI XL (again) on iPlayer.]

Woody Allen on Ingmar Bergman
Filmed and first shown in 2002, and aired repeatedly this past summer during Film4's latest Bergman season, here Woody Allen spends the best part of 20 minutes telling Mark Kermode why he loves the Swedish director's work.
[Watch it (again) on Film4.com.]

Comics

Daredevil #5 by Mark Waid & Marcos Martín
While I felt the first arc tailed off, this one is keeping the quality up -- really great stuff.

Collection Count

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

This week's arrivals include Masters of Cinema's new releases of Silent Running and Touch of Evil, the latter of which includes five different versions of the film -- crikey!

Number of titles in collection: 1,399 [up 4]
Of which DVDs: 1,141 [no change]
Of which Blu-rays: 258 [up 4]

Number of discs in collection: 3,476 [up 7]
Number of films in collection: 1,488 [up 6]
Number of TV episodes in collection: 5,270 [no change]

See you next week, faithful reader, when I might exceed 1,400 titles! Or I might not...

11:11 11/11/11

It's the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year (of the 21st century)!

...yep, this post was pretty pointless.

TV

The Case
Part 5 (of 5)
Interesting choice for a last-minute twist. Not sure if I approve of the surprise or think it was a pointless addition.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

How I Met Your Mother
7x01 The Best Man
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

Junior Bake Off
Episode 4 (of 13)
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Joanna Lumley's Greek Odyssey
Episode 4 (of 4)
[Watch it (again) on ITV Player.]

TV

The Case
Part 4 (of 5)
A twist-y cliffhanger! Except it's not really a twist if the thing your main/hero character thought to be true turns out to be true, is it?
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Frozen Planet
Part 2 Spring
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Junior Bake Off
Episode 2 (of 13)
Episode 3 (of 13)
This is tougher than the adult version: there, each week there were three challenges in which to impress the judges, with one person (sometimes two) kicked off; here, there's just two challenges in which to do well, with three people being sent home. Poor kiddies.
[Watch episodes two and three (again) on iPlayer.]

Comics

Batwoman #1 by J.H. Williams III & W. Haden Blackman
[2nd read]
Batwoman #3 is out today... but I won't be getting that until at least Saturday, so, as with Animal Man (and soon Aquaman), I'm having an in-print re-read of the issue I previously read digitally, and...

Batwoman #2 by J.H. Williams III & W. Haden Blackman
...catching up issue 2, too. And it's not as if I don't have enough other DC stuff to tide me over until this week's releases finally arrive.
Anyway, the art in this series is exceptional. Williams's art is beautifully detailed, the inks making everything unusually crisp and accentuated, sometimes inverting the style to make characters different (e.g. the DEO agent), and that's not to mention his varied and interesting layouts; while Dave Stewart's colours are thoughtfully applied -- look at the opening four pages, for instance, where Batwoman herself is very painterly, the location and Plebe have modern comic colouring, and the nameless gang of stock robbers are rendered in the blocky simple colours of old comics. This kind of thing goes on throughout. Brilliant stuff.

Articles

Treasury to close loophole that allows VAT-free DVDs
(from BBC News)
That would be the loophole exploited by the likes of Play.com to offer their low prices -- it's how they started out, and various other companies have copied it since, including Amazon for some of their orders.
It'll be interesting to see how this change effects things, mainly in terms of if prices for consumers shoot up. Supposedly this is to help smaller UK-based businesses be able to compete, but I can imagine bigger companies like Amazon keeping their lower prices and swallowing the cost of VAT in order to price out the competition. Or they might not bother. Fingers crossed things don't get jacked up too much...

TV

Ask Rhod Gilbert
2x07 Episode 7
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Death in Paradise
1x02 Episode 2
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Junior Bake Off
Episode 1 (of 13)
Having enjoyed the adult version -- or "the grown-up version", if you want it to sound less porn-y -- the kids' one seemed worth a go. Largely similar, but with a much more annoying presenter.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Pointless
3x33 (28/10/10 edition)
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Articles

'No evidence' for extraterrestrials, says White House
(from BBC News)

The US government has formally denied that it has any knowledge of contact with extraterrestrial life. The announcement came as a response to submissions to the We The People website, which promises to address any petition that gains 5,000 signatories...

More than 17,000 citizens joined the two petitions, and the White House has since amended the requirements for response to a minimum of 25,000 signatories.

As da kidz say, "lol".

TV

The Case
Part 3 (of 5)
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Misfits
2x05 Episode 5
2x06 Episode 6
Way back when it started, I nearly didn't watch Misfits, but I was glad I did because it turned out to be brilliant. It's always nice to have been on to something before everyone else jumped on the bandwagon (the second series had over double the first's viewing figures). But however much I liked the first series, this second one has been better in every respect.
It feels grander in scale, without seriously stepping outside the bounds of our five protagonists and their community service. It's more ambitious in its arc plots, both in terms of characters and genre-y elements, and that's made for an even better series all round.
And now I'm almost caught up (Episode 6 is, really, the season finale, though it was followed by a Christmas Special a few days later) so I can join everyone else in enjoying the currently-airing third run (it's second episode went out last night)... hopefully before I get it seriously spoiled.
[Watch episodes five and six (again) on 4oD.]

Pointless
3x32 (27/10/10 edition)
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Top Gear USA
1x03 Episode 3
Tonight's challenge was the closest they've yet come to real Top Gear. Still a pale imitation of the British version overall, of course.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]