TV

The British Academy Film Awards 2014
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

See also: Bafta: Unseen, a 45-minute online-only programme that presumably contains all the awards they didn't fancy showing on TV.

this week on 100 Films

No brand-new reviews on 100 Films in a Year this week, but Masters of Cinema re-issued their Lubitsch in Berlin box set, so I re-posted all my reviews from 2010...

(Spot the also-posted incongruity.)


Anna Boleyn (1920)

In an age where Henry VIII is young, slim and sometimes irritatingly called “Henry 8”, not to mention more interested in shagging every young girl he can find than in, well, anything else, it’s somewhat refreshing to return to a time when he was always older, fatter and more interested in polishing off a huge slab of meat than seeing his wife. OK, so they call him “Heinrich VIII”, but at least that’s because this production team spoke a different language.

Read more here.


Die Austernprinzessin (1919)

Lubitsch stages numerous epic set pieces on gigantic sets: Ossi’s bath, where a stream of maids carry her to and fro, wash and dry her; a huge cast of choreographed waiters, kitchen staff and guests at the wedding dinner; a mad foxtrot sequence that follows it; or the ladies’ boxing match, where for the third time in as many films Lubitsch shows a gaggle of women fighting over a man.

Read more here.


Die Bergkatze (1921)

Location filming in snow-covered Alps adds a scale and breadth to the film's imagined-kingdom setting that would be inimitable in a studio. Perhaps art director Ernst Stern was right that the realism of using genuine locations doesn't quite sit with the highly stylised fort; on the other hand, a studio set simply wouldn't have the same effect

Read more here.


Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin: From Schönhauser Allee to Hollywood (2006)

Part biography, part making-of, part analytical retrospective, Robert Fischer’s documentary does what it says on the tin: tells the story of the life and work of actor/director Ernst Lubitsch from his formative years, living on Schönhauser Allee in Berlin, to when he made the move to America in the early 1920s.

Read more here.


Ich möchte kein Mann sein (1918)

the kind of silent film that might surprise some among a wider film-viewing audience, both in terms of the attitudes prevalent in what is occasionally assumed to be a highly prim era, and, even accepting that it really wasn’t, the things people were prepared to put on film then

Read more here.


Die Puppe (1919)

[A] constant expression of humour, working at every level from intellectual wit down to slapstick tomfoolery, means that even if one element has been done to death in the past near-century, there’ll be several other moments or scenes to compensate.

Read more here.


Rambo III (1988)

he goes off to Afghanistan to defeat half the Russian army single-handed. He does all this showcasing the body of a plastic action figure coated in a year’s supply of Johnson’s Baby Oil, using weapons like explosive-tipped arrows, good for tasks like taking out helicopters. Or obliterating individual soldiers.

Read more here.


Sumurun (1920)

this is primarily an Arabian Nights-style drama… but, while on the surface this looks entirely at odds with Lubitsch’s previous comedy work, it actually concerns itself with the same topic: romance, and the various entanglements and complications that lead to it.

Read more here.


More next Sunday.

TV

Death in Paradise
3x05 Episode 5 [2nd watch]
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

TV

Outnumbered
5x02 The Swimming Competition [2nd watch]
5x03 The Goddaughter
[Watch The Swimming Competition and The Goddaughter (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

TV

The Last Leg
4x02 (7/2/14 edition)
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

The National Lottery: Who Dares Wins
7x06 (8/2/14 edition)
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Room 101
14x03 Episode 3
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

TV

Death in Paradise
3x05 Episode 5
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Duck Quacks Don't Echo
1x01 Episode 1

Films

The Next Three Days (2010)
[#9 in 100 Films in a Year 2014]

The remaining 80-or-so minutes.

DVD Extras

Special Features on The Next Three Days

Including a pretty standard and brief Making of The Next Three Days, which mainly emphasised the choice of setting and filming in Pittsburgh; an equally speedy overview of The Men of The Next Three Days; a potentially interesting featurette called True Escapes for Love, marred by being just like one of those cut-price US TV documentaries where someone moderately famous reads an obvious script at camera intercut with old news footage and the like, though fortunately only for seven minutes here; and a smattering of the deleted & extended scenes, until I got bored with them.

Comics

Wolverine #12-13 by Paul Cornell & Alan Davis

I caught up!

...except then the next issue (the aforementioned new #1) dropped through my letterbox, so I'm instantly behind again. Hey-ho.

Killable was good though, I thought. All the S.H.I.E.L.D. stuff seemed like a bit of an aside from the enjoyably low-key Wolverine goings-on, but it tied back in nicely at the end. That said, being an issue shorter probably wouldn't have hurt it -- condensing all the stuff at the mall down to two issues instead of three, essentially.

TV

Elementary
2x14 Dead Clade Walking

Friends
8x06 The One with the Halloween Party [5th or so watch]
aka The One with Spudnik!

Comics

Wolverine #10-11 by Paul Cornell & Alan Davis

TV

The National Lottery: Who Dares Wins
7x05 (1/2/14 edition)

Star Trek: The Next Generation
1x01 Encounter at Farpoint
This isn't me making a start on TNG -- this is me making a start on the sampler Blu-ray released a couple of years ago.

Veronica Mars
3x20 The Bitch is Back [series finale]
Veronica Mars: The Movie is released March 14th. I'll see it as soon as the distribution of Kickstarter rewards allows.

Yonderland
1x07 The Heart of the Sun

Comics

Wolverine #8-9 by Paul Cornell & Alan Davis

Being the first third of Killable. Great stuff so far. Adams' art is excellent, too, leaving me a little baffled about why it wasn't to my taste in the first few issues. The inker and colourist haven't changed either, so goodness knows what was going on.

TV

Archer
4x12 Sea Tunt Part 1
4x13 Sea Tunt Part 2 [season finale]
Finally got round to these via other means after Channel 5 titted around with them at the end of last year. I might just download the next season at some point, rather than wait for C5 to mess it up again.

Friends
8x04 The One with the Videotape [5th or so watch]
8x05 The One with Rachel's Date [5th or so watch]

Veronica Mars
3x19 Weevils Wobble But They Don't Go Down

Films

Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)
[#10 in 100 Films in a Year 2014]

Comics

Wolverine #5-7 by Paul Cornell & Mirco Pierfederici

When I said I didn't like Alan Davis' art, I meant it just wasn't to my taste, not bad per se. Pierfederici's is poor, though, with all kinds of messed-up faces, perspectives, and a sudden loss of detail in the middle of his third issue.

Next up is The Big Arc Everyone Talked About, which I suspect these first seven issues were all about facilitating: Killable. And Davis is back for it, which I now welcome.

this week on 100 Films

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


The Big Lebowski (1998)

it does meander a bit, and has a certain relaxed manner that isn’t going to be for everyone, I think that’s a valid stylistic choice rather than a filmmaking error. It’s perhaps a film to relax with, to laze even, rather than one to expect to grip you and hold your attention tight for two hours.

Read more here.


Oblivion (2013)

You could probably have generated a whole film about this world as it appears to Cruise and Riseborough, but it’s obvious from the very start that there’s something more going on. The guessing game is part of the fun, and as with almost any film with twists some viewers will get them bang-on and feel it’s all blatant, and some will be genuinely surprised.

Read more here.


And new to the new blog...


Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)

it’s easy to see why this was accused of being an American revenge fantasy. It’s not only got a bunch of Vietnamese soldiers being slaughtered (this time America wins!), but they’ve teamed up with the Ruskies (we’re still in the Cold War here, remember), so Rambo gets to blow a load of them away too. How satisfying for a certain facet of America

Read more here.


More next Sunday.

TV

Brooklyn Nine-Nine
1x04 M.E. Time
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

How I Met Your Mother
9x01 The Locket
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

Outnumbered
5x02 The Swimming Competition
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

The Voice UK
3x05 The Blind Auditions 5
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Films

The Next Three Days (2010)
[#9 in 100 Films in a Year 2014]

The first 50 minutes thereof, anyway -- then the disc went screwy (again). I await a replacement for the remaining 80-or-so minutes.

Comics

Wolverine #2-4 by Paul Cornell & Alan Davis

Both the story and art grew on me over the remaining issues of the storyline. Though, in typical modern comics style, even though the story's over, it's not over. Tsk.