TV

The Americans
2x06 Behind the Red Door

Friday Night Dinner
3x04 The Anniversary
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

Gilmore Girls
1x12 Double Date [2nd watch]

TV

The Americans
2x04 A Little Night Music
2x05 The Deal
I've been trying to ration this, because it's so good and there's only so much of it; but A Little Night Music ended on an almighty cliffhanger, and indeed this is really a two-parter without that name attached, so I don't feel so bad bending the 'rules' just this once.

Gilmore Girls
1x11 Paris is Burning [2nd watch]

TV

The Americans
2x03 The Walk In

Gilmore Girls
1x10 Forgiveness and Stuff [2nd watch]

Mock the Week
13x03 (26/6/14 edition)

Films

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2011)
[#61 in 100 Films in a Year 2014]

TV

The Americans
2x02 Cardinal

Gilmore Girls
1x09 Rory's Dance [2nd watch]
I know some would brand it 'soapy' and it's certainly 'girly', but pfft, season one of Gilmore is really good. (And later seasons may be too, I can't quite remember. Though it definitely got less good once Rory went off to college.)

TV

Gilmore Girls
1x07 Kiss and Tell [2nd watch]
1x08 Love & War & Snow [2nd watch]

this week on 100 Films

This week on 100 Films in a Year, I started a new initiative to post at least one archive review every day.

I have literally hundreds of them left languishing on my old blog still (having been moved to the new one for several years now), and I only repost them now and again when they're on TV or a sequel comes out or something. There are dozens -- hundreds, probably -- of more obscure films that would never get brought over if I stuck to that, so I'm making a concerted effort to change it. Nonetheless, there are so many posts left that I think it will take me a full year or more to finish this -- and that's if I keep it up non-stop.


Anyway, we'll come to what was posted in a minute. First, there were two brand-new reviews published this week. They were:


Journey into Fear (1943)

Remembered largely thanks to the involvement of Orson Welles (he has a supporting role, produced it, co-wrote it, and reportedly directed a fair bit too, though he denied that), Journey into Fear is an adequate if unsuspenseful World War 2 espionage thriller, redeemed by a strikingly-shot climax.

Read more here.


The Raid (2011)

perhaps the other film that The Raid is most like is Mamma Mia: a perfunctory plot that exists purely to link together the bits we’re really here for — Abba songs. Or “fights”, in The Raid’s case… though, let’s be honest, how much more original and interesting would it be if they were fighting to Abba songs?

Read more here.


And as promised, the bumper crop new to the new blog were...


Calendar Girls (2003)

The film could so easily have been quite a lowly, cheap TV movie effort, what with its apparently farcical premise, worthy cause and older characters. But instead the filmmakers have crafted a movie that is both utterly hilarious and deeply moving — even for this younger male viewer.

Read more here.


Doom (2005)

When it does kick off it’s brief and only vaguely entertaining. And the much-discussed first-person sequence is far too much like watching someone play a video game.

Read more here.


Mystic River (2003)

The acting is the main draw of this Oscar-winning murder drama, in which three childhood friends who grew apart are brought back together when one of their daughters is murdered. Tim Robbins is particularly excellent, easily earning his Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

Read more here.


The Reckless Moment (1949)

probably only the second or third film noir I’d ever seen, and I don’t think I properly appreciated what I was watching. It doesn’t really come across in this ‘review’, but I’ve felt for several years now that the sense of apathy I felt then (which I think is implied) no longer reflects my memory of the film.

Read more here.


Troy: Director's Cut (2004/2007)

This director’s cut adds almost half an hour of new material, which is about a 15% increase in length. That said, I can’t spot most of what’s new. If you know it well enough to spot the differences then you surely already like it, in which case I expect you’ll like this cut too. If you didn’t like Troy first time round, I doubt you’ll be swayed now.

Read more here.


Tu£sday (2008)

The high-profile cast frequently belie what you’re watching. Most of the production has an amateurish feel. It’s hard to pinpoint, but it seems to be a combination of photography and editing: the look is like plain digital video, the choice of shots often obvious and lacking variety, the editing not as tight as it should be.

Read more here.


More next Sunday.

TV

8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown
6x06 (11/7/14 edition)
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

Episodes
3x09 Episode 9 [season finale]
Considering we're very used to six-episode sitcoms over here, this seemed to be over very quickly! Await season four eagerly.
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Gilmore Girls
1x05 Cinnamon's Wake [2nd watch]
1x06 Rory's Birthday Parties [2nd watch]

Collection Count

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

This week, I acquired the huge Hitchcock: The Ultimate Filmmaker Collection 16-film box set. This replaces an old 14-film set and my Psycho Blu-ray (but duplicates To Catch a Thief, which I own on DVD with special features not included here, and North by Northwest twice, because I own it in a DVD box set with titles not yet available on Blu-ray, and in a Blu-ray box set with titles not included here, and that has special features that aren't here).

To show after all that were just a couple of small but strange number shifts... until I also got a new DVD, leaving virtually no trace of anything. Funny thing, my DVD collection...

Number of titles in collection: 1,684 [no change]
Of which DVDs: 1,201 [no change]
Of which Blu-rays: 483 [no change]

Number of discs in collection: 4,187 [up 2]
Number of films in collection: 1,821 [up 3]
Number of TV episodes in collection: 6,147 [no change]
Number of short films in collection: 435 [up 3]

All that does have an effect on the running time, though -- upgrading from DVD to Blu-ray means all those films are devoid of PAL speed-up. Plus there's everything else I've bought recently because, handily, it's the time of the month for an update!

And that is exciting, because, for the first time...

Total running time of collection (approx.):
300 days, 12 hours, and 16 minutes.
(Up 1 day, 1 hour, and 18 minutes from last month.)

...it's crossed 300 days! Madness.

See you next week, faithful reader.

TV

The Americans
2x01 Comrades
Here we go, then -- and it's as good as last season, which is by no means a given and so is great news. It's quite wedded in some of the plot lines left over from last year's finale/season in general, which is something I'm generally fond of TV series doing, but is a little awkward when it's been a year or so since you watched it and the "previously on" is a little inadequate. But hey-ho, I kept up well enough.

Mock the Week
13x02 (19/6/14 edition)

Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em
2x06 The Baby Arrives [season finale]

TV

Gilmore Girls
1x04 The Deer-Hunters [2nd watch]

How I Met Your Mother
9x23 Last Forever Part 1
9x24 Last Forever Part 2 [series finale]
As E4 have decided to split the clearly-conceived-as-an-hour series finale into its constituent parts, I downloaded the US version and watched it all in one go. No idea where the split would be, actually; quite tempted to watch Part 1 on catch-up and see (or just read about it on Wikipedia -- it's where I thought it might be).
Anyway, a lot of people seemed to hate it -- some have branded it the worst finale ever. Personally, I quite liked it. Kinda obvious it's been going somewhere like that all along, surely? Not to many/most, it would seem...
[Watch Last Forever Part 1 (again) on 4oD. Part 2 will be available next week.]

Live at the Apollo
9x05 Episode 5
First of two Apollo episodes I missed in the last series -- and I stumbled on it completely by accident on BBC Three, while simply looking for any old (decent-ish) comedy to pass the time! Coincidencetastic.
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

TV

Gilmore Girls
1x03 Kill Me Now [2nd watch]

Mad Men
7x07 Waterloo [mid-season finale]
But what does it all mean?!

Films

Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape (2010)
[#60 in 100 Films in a Year 2014]

TV

Top Gear
21x06 Burma Special Part 1
21x07 Burma Special Part 2 [season finale]
The 2013 Christmas special, shown in the middle of March 2014. Goodness knows why -- perhaps an editing thing: it's just over two hours long in this form, and the DVD/Blu-ray version has a further 35 minutes!

TV

8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown
6x05 (4/7/14 edition)
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

Gilmore Girls
1x02 The Lorelais' First Day at Chilton [2nd watch]

Mad Men
7x06 The Strategy

TV

Gilmore Girls
1x01 Pilot [2nd watch]
It's been 5½ years since we accidentally abandoned Gilmore Girls, so rather than try to pick it up -- and struggle to access years-old memories of what was going on -- it felt best just to start again from the start.

Wimbledon 2014
Men's Final Build-Up & Men's Final
Ah well.
[Watch the build-up and the mens' final, plus many other matches, on iPlayer.]

With Wimbledon now over, and most shows on a summer break, hopefully the next few weeks will finally see me make good on the notion of starting all the stuff I need to catch up on.

Films

We're the Millers (2013)
[#59 in 100 Films in a Year 2014]

this week on 100 Films

First up this week from 100 Films in a Year, it's my look back at June.


Elsewise, two brand-new reviews were published this week, and they were...


The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976/1978)

Ever since I read the blurb for Masters of Cinema's DVD of Maurice Pialat's Police, I've been casually enticed by The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Said blurb asserts that "Police is a genre-defying excursion rivaled only by John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie in the pantheon of cinema’s most idiosyncratic thrillers", which is both a nice turn of phrase and an intriguing one. The thriller is very much a Genre — that is to say, it's a label loaded with rules and expectations, and to be idiosyncratic within such a form is an interesting notion. Both "thriller" and "idiosyncratic" are pretty accurate labels for Chinese Bookie, though

Read more here.


Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)

It starts off well, with a virtuoso eight-minute pre-credits sequence that reconfigures the past 50 years of Earth’s spacefaring in the story’s image. OK, so it contains a seriously ill-advised, incredibly poorly-realised CGI JFK, but we can let some things go. Unfortunately, from here on out the movie does its best to pile on stuff we can’t let go.

Read more here.


Finally, several older reviews were new to the new blog...


The Three Musketeers (1973)

I like a good swashbuckler. I don’t know exactly what it is about sword fights, but they’re probably my most favourite kind of action sequence. The 1973 Three Musketeers, then, is a film I’m slightly amazed I’ve not seen before. Especially as I absolutely loved it.

Read more here.


The Four Musketeers (1974)

It’s a bit grim too [and] none of it sits well with the jolly swashbuckling tone that still dominates. There are some good action sequences nonetheless — for instance, the ice-covered lake; breakfast/siege in the ruined fort; and the burning-building finale — which go some way to make up for the shortcomings.

Read more here.


Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

It gets off to a flying start. The first 20 or 30 minutes in particular move at a rate of knots, churning through plot in a way no blockbuster would seem to dare these days...: a Borg attack; the Enterpise ordered not to join the fight; Picard doing so anyway; the destruction of the Borg cube; the Borg, erm, ball flying into the past; the Enterprise following; meeting Zephram Cochrane and his lot… It’s boom boom boom, moving on. It’s nice to rattle through a tale

Read more here.


More next Sunday.

TV

Friday Night Dinner
3x03 Mr Morris Returns
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

Films

The Raid (2011)
[#58 in 100 Films in a Year 2014]