TV

The Good Life
4x04 The Weaver's Tale

Comics

Superman: Red Son #1 by Mark Millar & Dave Johnson

I just got an iPad, and Comixology are having a Superman sale, so I managed to get digital copies of all three issues of this for a total of just over £2. Sounds like a deal to me.

TV

Dexter
7x03 Buck the System

Paul O'Grady: For the Love of Dogs
2x05 Episode 5
[Watch it (again) on ITV Player.]

Ripper Street
1x05 The Weight of One Man's Heart

TV

Horrible Histories
4x12 Episode 12

Mock the Week
12x01 (13/6/13 edition)
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Queen's
Rally Against Cancer
A charity event from the final day of this year's Aegon Championships tennis at Queen's Club. Featuring Andy Murray and Tim Henman vs Ivan Lendl and Tomáš Berdych, and Murray vs Henman with rotating teammates including Jonathan Ross, Jimmy Carr, Michael McIntyre, Eddie Redmayne, Richard Branson and Boris Johnson. Much hilarity.
[Watch it (again) soon on iPlayer.]

Would I Lie To You?
7x06 Episode 6
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

this week on 100 Films

Two new pieces were published to 100 Films in a Year this week, and they were...


The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

found itself going head-to-head in the awards season with No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood... in some kind of thematic and stylistic triumvirate: they’re all products of what I’d call “American mainstream art house” cinema; all classifiable as Westerns, though none in a strictly traditional sense; all more concerned with their characters and their lives than the machinations of the plot.

In the end, No Country garnered most of the awards, There Will Be Blood seems to have settled in as a critical darling, but, for my money, this purest Western of the three is by far the best.

Read more here.


The Harry Potter Films of David Yates

Later than promised, but here it is: a director-focused overview of the final four Harry Potter films.

Plus, some closing thoughts on the series as a whole.

Read more here.


And new to the new blog...


The Cube Trilogy
An overview of:

Cube (1997)

In its series of careful, measured, necessary reveals, the film strikes a perfect balance between what it lets the viewer know and what it keeps hidden, either for the viewer to deduce or interpret for themselves

Read more here.

Cube²: Hypercube (2002)

The new cube set is bigger, shinier, simpler, emptier, always one plain colour, and devoid of traps. Consequently, but perhaps inadvertently, it seems to symbolise the film itself.

Read more here.

Cube Zero (2004)

answers too many questions, which might be acceptable if the answers were remotely original or satisfying, but, of course, they aren’t: they’re derivative and, worst of all, quite irritating.

Read more here.


Plus:


Coraline (2009)

[The novel] won a Hugo, Nebula and Stoker, while the film adaptation was Oscar-nominated (naturally it lost to whichever Pixar film was eligible) and widely well reviewed (an 89% Tomatometer). All of which seems to set it up for a fall. But... Coraline, in short, is excellent.

Read more here.


Transporter 2 (2005)

In spite of the odd bit of CG-aided silliness, or the lack of anything as inspired as the first film’s oil fight, the fights are still a lot of fun; one involving a fire hose is especially well executed.

Read more here.


Transporter 3 (2008)

Megaton over-directs and over-edits the action (and a lot else besides) too often — it would be nice to tell what’s going on. Someone also needs to tell him that speeding up footage of two cars racing doesn’t make it more exciting, it just makes it look silly.

Read more here.


More next Sunday.

TV

Dexter
7x02 Sunshine and Frosty Swirl

The Voice UK
2x14 The Semi-Finals
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Articles

5 Versions Of Jurassic Park You Never Saw
by Drew Taylor (from The Playlist)

An interesting insight into the development of Jurassic Park, which is 20 this year (bloody hell!)

Most interesting bit: for all the talk of its pioneering effects and extensive use of CGI, it has just 15 minutes of dino action, and only 6 of those are computer generated!

Collection Count

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

Just one new addition this week (another Doctor Who DVD), but it's also time for a running time update, so there's that.

Number of titles in collection: 1,569 [up 1]
Of which DVDs: 1,165 [up 1]
Of which Blu-rays: 404 [no change]

Number of discs in collection: 3,914 [up 2]
Number of films in collection: 1,680 [no change]
Number of TV episodes in collection: 5,773 [up 2]
Number of short films in collection: 380 [no change]

And finally...

Total running time of collection (approx.):
281 days, 21 hours, and 33 minutes.
(Up 9 hours and 26 minutes from last month.)

See you next week, faithful reader, when there may be nothing to report at all! Gasp!

TV

The Graham Norton Show
13x10 (7/6/13 edition)
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

The Hoff's Best Film ...Ever!
1x02 The Hoff's Best Horror Film ...Ever!
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Pointless Celebrities
3x08 (22/12/12 edition)

Articles

How Hit Movies Become Flops
by Matt Singer (from Criticwire)

As the new Superman movie hits cinemas, a look back at how the last one was and is regarded. The general gist:

Weird fact: Superman Returns got good reviews when it was released, and made more money than Batman Begins. Now it's considered a flop.

What a Doctor Who-ha!
(from Private Eye)

Private Eye on the recent problems that have dogged Who. Nothing significantly new, though it does sum it up neatly. Especially this bit:

between January 2012 and June 2014, when under Doctor Who’s previously-accustomed schedule 41 episodes would have been broadcast, the BBC will actually put out a grand total of 16. That period includes the show’s 50th anniversary year, during which Moffat had announced: “I promise you, we’re going to take over television, trust me.”

TV

Dexter
7x01 Are You...?
The final season of Dexter is imminent in the US (it starts on the 30th), so it's a good time to crack on with the penultimate one, which I believe finished airing in the UK a few weeks ago. There's a lot of weight on this episode, having to deal with the immediate fallout from last season's game-changing cliffhanger, as well as set-up the pieces and plots for this season's arc story. As such it's a bit establishing-y, but at least it comes to a conclusion even more unavoidable than last episode's.

How I Met Your Mother
8x20 The Time Travelers
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

Up the Women
1x02 Episode 2
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Films

The Hitch-Hiker (1953)
[#57 in 100 Films in a Year 2013]

Articles

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas predict film industry 'implosion'
by Ben Child (from the Guardian)

"There's going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that's going to change the paradigm."

"I think eventually the Lincolns will go away and they're going to be on television," Lucas added. "As mine almost was," Spielberg interjected. "This close – ask HBO – this close."

"The pathway to get into theatres is really getting smaller and smaller," said Star Wars creator Lucas, pointing out that his own passion project, the war drama Red Tails, barely scraped into cinemas last year. "We're talking Lincoln and Red Tails – we barely got them into theatres," he said. "You're talking about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas can't get their movie into a theatre!"

TV

The Job Lot
1x06 Episode 6 [season finale]
[Watch it (again) on ITV Player].

Poirot
13x01 Elephants Can Remember
And so the last-ever series of Poirot begins, funnily enough with an adaptation of the last novel written. Apparently the novel isn't that well regarded, but I thought it made for a good episode.
There are four more to go, but this being ITV they're not on weekly, so I hope they plan to screen the final one around the TV series' 25th anniversary, at the start of January 2014.
[Watch it (again) on ITV Player].

Podcasts

Nerd Poker: Dungeons and Dragons with Brian Posehn & Friends
Episode 8 The Survivors

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.