TV

Mad Men
6x10 A Tale of Two Cities

Vicious
1x06 Episode 6 [season finale]
The series on the whole has been of variable quality, but I really liked this final episode. Weird how it paid off all the running jokes, though, as if they assumed it wouldn't be coming back -- there's a Christmas special, if nothing else.
[Watch it (again) on ITV Player.]

TV

The Good Life
4x03 Our Speaker Today
Guest starring Robert Lindsay as a pervy young offender! Weird.

Podcasts

Nerd Poker: Dungeons and Dragons with Brian Posehn & Friends
Episode 7 Follow the Whispers

Five episodes in eight days, then nothing for a month, then nothing for six weeks? Such is my way.

TV

Have I Got News For You
45x09 (31/5/2013 edition; extended repeat) [season finale]
[Watch the extended version (again) on iPlayer.]

Paul O'Grady: For the Love of Dogs
2x04 Episode 4
[Watch it (again) on ITV Player.]

Ripper Street
1x04 The Good of This City

Films

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
[#56 in 100 Films in a Year 2013]

This lost out on a number of awards (especially at the Oscars) thanks at least in part to that year's pair of awards darlings, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. Personally, I thought it was considerably better than either of those.

As of Monday morning, you can read my full review here.

Articles

Neil Gaiman: 'Iain Banks was one of us, whatever that meant'
by Neil Gaiman (from the Guardian)

A beautiful tribute to the author, who died today.

this week on 100 Films

One new review was published to 100 Films in a Year this week...


The Bourne Legacy (2012)

About 52 minutes in I paused it and went to the kitchen. Not for any particular reason; I just needed a break. There, I saw a slug crawling into my dog’s water bowl, drinking the water or something, I don’t know. I’d never seen that before. I ended up watching that slug slowly edge around the bowl for 15 minutes or more rather than go back to the film. It’s that engrossing.

Read more here.


But there were also three new to the new blog...


300 (2006)

Everyone's favourite movie about men with glistening muscles slicing evil Easterners

Read more here.


The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

This final instalment in the action-thriller trilogy was Empire magazine’s film of 2007, following wide praise on release that dubbed it the best action movie in a long time. Unfortunately, I fear it may’ve become a victim of its own hype.

Read more here.


Night Watch (2004)

Urban action fantasy from Russia; the first part of a trilogy... It makes for a pretty entertaining tale, with a neat ending that both concludes this film’s plot and leaves everything wide open for what’s to come.

Read more here.


More next Sunday.

TV

The Voice UK
2x12 The Quarter-Finals
2x13 The Quarter-Finals Results
[Watch the Quarter-Finals and the Results (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Fiction

The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum
Chapters 7-10

The film clearly follows the novel's broad strokes, but still less than a quarter of the way through and it feels completely different. It makes it hard to judge, because I prefer the film, but that doesn't make the book bad.

Collection Count

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

All new releases this week: a Doctor Who, a Western, and a documentary (actually out next Monday -- can't remember the last time I actually got a pre-order before release day).

Number of titles in collection: 1,568 [up 3]
Of which DVDs: 1,164 [up 2]
Of which Blu-rays: 404 [up 1]

Number of discs in collection: 3,912 [up 4]
Number of films in collection: 1,680 [up 2]
Number of TV episodes in collection: 5,771 [up 6]
Number of short films in collection: 380 [no change]

See you next week, faithful reader.

TV

The Graham Norton Show
13x09 (31/5/13 edition)
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

How I Met Your Mother
8x19 The Fortress
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

Fiction

The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum
Chapters 1-6

Here's a funny one. The film is so modern, even though it's now 11 years old, but this original is from 1980 -- it feels more like reading a classic James Bond novel than watching the tech-age thriller they made the film into. It kind of takes some getting used to. Plus, it's over 550 pages long, so even at this early point, with the story barely under way, it already has wild divergences from the big screen adaptation.

TV

The Hoff's Best Film ...Ever!
1x01 The Hoff's Best Action Film ...Ever!
Cool clips and talking heads -- nice easy viewing... even if some of the talking heads are intensely irritating 'comedians' (no one famous, so I've no names to regurgitate).
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Once Upon a Time
2x04 The Crocodile
I love it when Once Upon a Time decides to do an origin episode. It's always glaringly obvious who the unfamiliar new character will turn out to be, but it still takes 45 minutes and a final scene of comically on-the-nose dialogue to reveal that, yes indeed, the pirate captain who called Rumplestiltskin a crocodile before his hand was cut off is Captain Hook.

Pointless
9x26a 500th Show
A special episode to mark the 500th edition of the popular quiz show, featuring the best-scoring teams who didn't win the jackpot. The questions seemed harder than normal too, I thought.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

TV

Case Histories
2x02 Nobody's Darling
The first episode not based on one of the original novels. Personally, I preferred it to the first one.
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

The Job Lot
1x05 Episode 5
[Watch it (again) on ITV Player].

Watson and Oliver
2x06 Episode 6 [season finale]
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

TV

Mad Men
6x09 The Better Half

Up the Women
1x01 Episode 1
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Vicious
1x05 Episode 5
[Watch it (again) on ITV Player.]

Films

The Bourne Legacy (2012)
[#55 in 100 Films in a Year 2013]

I'll write a full review of this on 100 Films in due course (hopefully by the end of the week, as it's on Sky Movies Premiere from Friday and I do like to tie in to things); but for now I'll say that it's massively disappointing. It puts all my criticism of Ultimatum yesterday in the shade, because (as I said) that's only a smidgen off the other Bourne films, while this is leagues apart. For much of the running time it's not even good as a generic action-thriller, because it's quite spectacularly dull.

Ironically, this is the first Bourne film that leaves the storyline truly open-ended. The other sequels found threads to pick up on, true, but if the series had stopped after either Identity or Supremacy, you had a complete tale (and Ultimatum too, of course). This closes on basically a cliffhanger. And I say that's ironic because it's also the first time that I have no desire to see a follow-up.

I believe they could have continued this series without the character of Jason Bourne -- there's potential in some of the ideas here. But this version just doesn't work, as a compelling film or worthy successor.

TV

How I Met Your Mother
8x18 Weekend at Barney's
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

Ripper Street
1x03 The King Came Calling

Films

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
[2nd watch]

Here we go, then: the most uber-praised of all the Bourne movies, which I haven't seen since it reached DVD in late 2007.

And I still think it's overrated.

Really, I'm talking relative to the other two films. In and of itself, it's a great action-thriller, rattling along with both story and action, pushing boundaries in entertaining fashion. But it feels like the series is retreading old ground -- oh look, another shady CIA conspiracy, even higher up than the last two! And oh look, a twist where an agent who seemed newly assigned actually had an ulterior motive to be after Bourne all along! And so on.

And then there's the final act, which feels like too pat a conclusion. Bourne finds out everything (including stuff I'm sure we'd well guessed); all sorts of stuff gets publicly exposed and people are brought to justice; etc etc.

There are some great sequences along the way -- the Waterloo bit is amongst the series' very finest, the New York car chase rivals Supremacy's (though I still think Identity's Mini tops both), and the Tangier sequence, while being thoroughly silly (how the hell can all these people chase each other across all those rooftops and tiny side streets?), is still pretty great.

But overall, I find it slightly less enjoyable than the previous two... though if Identity is 5/5, perhaps Supremacy is 4.9/5 and Ultimatum is 4.8/5. Something like that.

Fiction

Bill, the Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison
Book Two, Chapters 6-8
Book Three, Chapters 1-5
Envoi [the end]

Well, that was rather good. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes sci-fi with a comical, satirical edge. It's not as laugh-out-loud funny as something like Hitchhiker's, but it has a point (or points) to make, and a set of organisations and world views to criticise, and it tackles both entertainingly.

For a lot more about the novel -- including an interview with Harrison, details on the BBC radio and comic book adaptations, and the numerous sequels -- have a look here.

TV

The Voice UK
2x11 The Knockouts 2
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Would I Lie To You?
7x05 Episode 5
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]