Friday, 15 May 2020

TV

Doctor Who
2x38 A Battle of Wits
aka The Time Meddler Part 3. Surely one of the series' greatest-ever cliffhangers. Less impactful today, of course, especially as most people watching will know the Monk's secret, but at the time it must've been huge. (Well, let's be honest, Doctor Who didn't have the same obsessive following then that it does now, nor were there ways to communicate like the internet; but I bet regular viewers had plenty to say about it in the school playground on Monday morning.)

Films

127 Hours (2010)
[#116 in 100 Films in a Year 2020]

A Bug's Life (1998)
[#115 in 100 Films in a Year 2020]
A fun either-side-of-midnight double-bill with Phase IV. (If you don't know what they're about... look it up.)

Thursday, 14 May 2020

TV

Doctor Who
2x37 The Meddling Monk
aka The Time Meddler Part 2

Films

Misbehaviour FilmBath Live Q&A
with the film's director, editor, and screenwriter. I believe you can still watch it at the above link.

Mission: Impossible (1996)
[5th watch]
Rewatchathon 2020 #21. Doesn't feel like it can be my 5th watch of this, but if that's what my records say... This time it was on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, and it looked fantastic.

Phase IV (1974)
[#114 in 100 Films in a Year 2020]
+ director Saul Bass's original ending, which adds a couple of lines of dialogue and an abstract psychedelic nightmare to the finale

Wednesday, 13 May 2020

TV

Doctor Who
2x36 The Watcher
aka The Time Meddler Part 1. Taking a break from watching animated missing episodes to check out the story that recently came a surprising (to me) second place in Doctor Who Magazine’s “First Doctor World Cup” Twitter poll.

Films

Misbehaviour (2020)
[#113 in 100 Films in a Year 2020]
Ready to watch the FilmBath Q&A tomorrow evening.

Stuber (2019)
[#112 in 100 Films in a Year 2020]

Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)
[#111 in 100 Films in a Year 2020]

Tuesday, 12 May 2020

Films

Marriage Story (2019)
[#110 in 100 Films in a Year 2020]
+ the 2 three-minute featurettes Netflix offer, Directing with Noah Baumbach and An Ensemble Story. Obviously they’re really EPK promo pieces, but not wholly without insight.

Monday, 11 May 2020

TV

Archer
6x12 Drastic Voyage Part 1
6x13 Drastic Voyage Part 2 [season finale]

Films

Zero Charisma (2013)
[#109 in 100 Films in a Year 2020]

Sunday, 10 May 2020

Films

American Animals (2018)
[#107 in 100 Films in a Year 2020]

Belladonna of Sadness (1973)
[#108 in 100 Films in a Year 2020]

this week on 100 Films

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


Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
I haven’t reviewed this until now because I didn’t have much to say about it... Even after reflecting on it, and reading other’s critical reactions, then reflecting on it some more (for over eight months at this point), I didn’t have much to contribute. Why was that? And I’ve kind of realised it’s because the film didn’t make me feel very much... I do consider Once Upon a Time to be a very good film. But at the same time, I didn’t leave the cinema feeling moved or wowed.
Read more here.


The 100-Week Roundup III
including...
Power Rangers
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
The Warriors
The Wild Bunch
The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage
Read more here.


More next Sunday.

Saturday, 9 May 2020

Films

Scooby-Doo! & Batman: The Brave and the Bold (2018)
[#105 in 100 Films in a Year 2020]

Top Secret! (1984)
[#106 in 100 Films in a Year 2020]

Collection Count

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

Last week I mentioned that I was going to start counting "films" and "cuts" separately, to finally settle a matter of uncertainty that's been bothering me for years (i.e. when a release includes multiple cuts of the same film, do those count as multiple films or just one film?) As I have over 2,300 titles to go through working it out (some I knew off the top of my head, some I had to check), I thought it would take a while -- weeks, maybe months -- but I've actually finished it this week! Once I started I spent altogether too much time on it (even though I've finished it between updates, it's taken multiple sessions across every day this week). I've done a lot of it from memory rather than double-checking every single title, so hopefully I've not overlooked anything in my speed. If I have, well, it'll get corrected someday.

As you can see, I found well over 100 alternate cuts ‘hiding’ among my film tally, but also quite a few that hadn’t been counted. Also, for the cuts tally I decided to only count additional cuts -- i.e. if a film only has one version it'll be listed as 1 film + 0 cuts, but if there are two versions it'll count as 1 film + 1 cut, and so on. Still haven't worked out how to square this with the running time total, nor what to do about alternative cuts of TV episodes (there are enough that I want to record them, but few enough that having a whole column for it seems daft). For now, they carry on as they were before.

And while all that is the big news this week, there were also some new additions, prime among them an upgrade of the 1989-1997 Batman movie series to UHD.

Number of titles in collection: 2,364 [up 4]
Of which DVDs: 1,105 [no change]
Of which Blu-rays: 1,259 [up 4]
— of which Ultra HD Blu-rays: 55 [up 4]

Number of discs in collection: 6,122 [up 5]
Number of films: 2,645 [down 119]
Number of additional cuts: 168
Number of TV episodes: 8,887 [no change]
Number of short films: 722 [up 2]

See you next week, faithful reader.

Thursday, 7 May 2020

Films

Black Angel (1946)
[#102 in 100 Films in a Year 2020]
+ all of Arrow's Blu-ray's special features, including an audio commentary (bit dry but full of trivia and biographical information), an appreciation by Neil Sinyard (the highlight being a story about a member of the supporting cast and Frank Sinatra's wig), a trailer and photo galleries

Flash Gordon (1980)
[3rd watch]
Rewatchathon 2020 #20. Inspired by the announcement of the gorgeous-looking 40th anniversary 4K edition — I thought I ought to watch my current copy before that renders it obsolete! (Though as I own this edition, its fun cover art would ensure it wasn’t a wasted purchase.)

Wednesday, 6 May 2020

Tuesday, 5 May 2020

Films

August 32nd on Earth (1998)
[#99 in 100 Films in a Year 2020]
Denis Villeneuve's debut feature.

Theatre

Frankenstein
This is the one directed by Danny Boyle and starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, in which they alternated the roles of Frankenstein and the Creature for each performance. Both versions are available on YouTube at the moment. Consensus seems to be that the one with Miller as the Creature is better, so that's what I watched.
[Watch Benedict Cumberbatch as the Creature and/or Jonny Lee Miller as the Creature (again) on YouTube.]

Monday, 4 May 2020

TV

The Twilight Zone
3x29 Four O'Clock
5x18 Black Leather Jackets
More of the series' worst episodes, which I'll be reviewing in 100 Films' next TV column.