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[Slightly Brown]

Current Watching

Tramp The Dirt Down wrote: Materchef Australia is far superior to any of the UK formats - shown on Watch channel (it appears to have a bigger budget also) - plus the added bonus of not featuring the big boned bald cockerney fruit & veg seller with the shouty voice.

I have to disagree. The Oz version lasts for about five years, and boasts a cast of thousands. The rules are Byzantine, nonsensical and characters are resurrected months after they’ve been ejected for no apparent reason. They also do this thing where contestants provide as-it-happens/out-of-body commentary as they actual cook the dishes: “so, I’m like, is this flan even gonna weeeerk?” . It’s surreal and adds a staged feeling to proceedings.

In the latter stages, they make everyone cook a dish (after they’ve sky-dived into the studio and wrestled life-size courgettes for a Gold Star that affords them the power to choose The Magic Condiment) but end up only eating “the top three”. The remaining contestants are subsequently banished to a viewing gantry some thirty feet in the air, to whoop, holler and, naturally, provide more out-of-body commentary about the events unfolding below. The food they cook, even in the finals, is of bedsit-quality, too. But the worst thing - the very worst – is when it comes to tasting the dishes. The three judges are clearly too la-de-da to eat from the same plate, so they transfer the cake/pie/soup/whatever to three separate plates. It’s infuriating, takes for ever and destroys the plate of food.

Oh, and this guy is a judge:

[Tramp The Dirt Down]

Current Watching

And that is one of his more sober outfits.

[Slightly Brown]

Current Watching

Tramp The Dirt Down wrote: And that is one of his more sober outfits.

It was annoying me all day yesterday, but I had a Bingo! moment this morning: I now know who he reminds me of - Baron Silas Breenback, number-one villain and amphibious arch nemesis of Danger Mouse:

[ian.64]

Current Watching

The Muppets

The recent cinematic incarnation with Jason Segel and Amy Adams, with musical direction by Bret McKenzie - he of Flight of the Conchords, but more commonly known as the wet bloke who shouts 'my lady!' at Liv Tyler as she buggers off back to Rivendell in Return of the King.

I must confess here that I didn't find the Muppets TV show all that funny in the '70's - too much canned laughter, forced frivolity and unfunny jokes (even if they had guest stars to kill for). The film, however, is a treat, funny, warm and engaging with good songs and a turn by Chris Cooper as the power-hungry villain, who throws off the intensity with which he imbues his more darker roles and has a huge amount of fun with it.

Good, laugh-out-loud stuff and recommended.

[Femme Folle]

Current Watching

The Big Bang Theory

I had seen episodes here and there in syndication, but I had never been a faithful viewer--until now. And as I have done with other series that I came late to (Dexter, Mad Men, Game of Thrones), I am watching each series in order. I've just started series 2.

I'm actually finding that I've seen more episodes from those earlier seasons than I had remembered, but I can watch them again. I'm quite hooked.

.

[Bored Of Education]

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BBT is one of those series, like Friends and the Simpsons, that is constantly on over here but, when you sit down to watch an episode, you have seen it a dozen times before. Finding an unseen episode of any of these three is like finding a new rich seam of gold in a mine.

Friday Night Dinner

This, like Miranda or Not Going Out, is a bit of a return to traditional 70s sitcoms. It is set in a middle class suburban Jewish house where the 20 year old boys return once a week to have dinner with their parents. So far, so 'Butterflies'

However, the casting of Tamsin Grieg and Mark Heap from 'Green Wing' is a sign that is all together weirder. It has that sitcom thing of having recurring motifs every week that get suddenly more odd, if they weren't in the first place. As with many such sitcoms, the gradual introduction of one-off or repeating guest characters gradually widens it out but it is still, effectively, set around the same location and situation

[Wouter D]

Current Watching

Back in October, with the Skyfall premiere looming, one of my friends decided it was a good idea to buy the full James Bond EON film collection. We decided that we would watch them all, in order, before going to the cinema to watch the new one. This weekend we will be watching the Timothy Dalton ones, having done the last Roger Moore one before Christmas. Some short observations:

Dr. No
How the times have changed. Apparently, in 1962 it is acceptable for James Bond to tell his African-American friend to "fetch my shoes". Wouldn't fly nowadays. On a more positive note, the film has the peace and calm to show James Bond and his female companion standing in an elevator for about ten seconds, with nothing happening. Also wouldn't fly nowadays, but it's nice.

From Russia With Love
Poisonous shoe-tip blade killings are the best.

Goldfinger
Great song, great villain, great henchman, great story. Not sure whether it's better than the previous two films, but it's pretty good.

Thunderball
Hey fellas, all these exotic locations are expensive. Let's film the next one in a giant swimming pool!

You Only Live Twice
Excellent theme song. Having Sean Connery blend in with the Japanese is by far the most ridiculous disguise ever.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service
This Lazenby guy is actually not as bad as his reputation. He's probably sold short by the audience not liking an unhappy ending. Great movie.

Diamonds Are Forever
Good Shirley Bassey tune badly wasted. All the henchmen are ridiculous.

Live And Let Die
Bit too blaxploitation sometimes, but the New Orleans funeral scene is great. Baron Samedi is awesome. Sheriff Pepper is not.

The Man With The Golden Gun
We're starting to realise that almost every attempt at humor in the series drags the movie down. Again with this sheriff! Film is saved by Christopher Lee.

The Spy Who Loved Me
Hello Jaws!

Moonraker
"I think he's attempting re-entry"? Jaws becomes a good guy? Worst. Movie. Ever.

For Your Eyes Only
Meh. Not as bad as the previous one.

Octopussy
Vijay fending off the enemies with a tennis racket was kind of ridiculous, until we found out that the guy was an actual tennis player in real life. Still ridiculous, but gets a passing grade. James Bond clowning around isn't necessary, Kamal Khan is pretty cool.

A View To A Kill
Christopher Walken can do no wrong. On the other hand, we were expecting that any moment Roger Moore would take out his senior citizen card to get a discount somewhere.

General observations
It's funny how we would compare the relative quality of the early and mid-period Sean Connery films, not knowing the vast depths we would plummet into with the later Roger Moore films, who should really have stopped before being older than his female co-star's mother. By far the best way to see these movies is with a group of friends loudly commenting, for instance on the next ridiculously convoluted way to kill a captured Bond. In the early movies, for some reason all the nameless henchmen of the bad guy wear the same outfits: are were fighting the red or the blue team this time?

[Tramp The Dirt Down]

Current Watching

Hemingway & Gellhorn

Just finished watching this on Sky Atlantic, nearly 3 hours of my life wasted, pretentious, poorly scripted and Clive Owen as a younger Hemingway looked like Groucho Marx

[Ginger Yellow]

Current Watching

I'm getting quite excited by the return of several awesome US shows after quite a hiatus in some cases.

Robot Chicken has started airing again.

Archer returns next week

Justified returns tomorrow

Castle returns today

[hobbes]

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Fringe ends on 18th with a double episode.
I'm bereft at the thought.

[Gerontophile]

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'Just Another Saturday'. Mentioned it before, mentioning again. Scary, brilliance. that's all. x (If you can, stay with it after the first ... actually, fuck you. DO IT. Then, breathe.)

Oh, and trust me. As far as this shit is concerned. x

[Femme Folle]

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Watching Fringe (season one). Another series that I'm late to discover, but am enjoying very much.

I'm also getting caught up on Big Bang Theory, but I'm discovering that even though I never watched the first and second series as they was first aired, I've seen a lot more of those episodes in syndication than I remembered watching.

[danielmak]

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I just posted an updated in The Killing thread. I errrrr came into some MKV HD files for season 1 of the Danish show. It is the best show I have seen since The Wire. Anyone who digs The Wire should check it out. The subject matter is different (no focus on a drug war in the first two seasons of The Killing--I am starting season 3 tonight) but the attention to creative investigation, political corruption, media influence is similar. Season 2 was a bit of a letdown but, again, Season 1 was excellent.

After I finish season 3, I'll seek out the US version to see how it compares.

[diabloinglés]

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Archer is back. Yayy!

[Martin C]

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Tramp The Dirt Down wrote: Hemingway & Gellhorn

Just finished watching this on Sky Atlantic, nearly 3 hours of my life wasted, pretentious, poorly scripted and Clive Owen as a younger Hemingway looked like Groucho Marx

I pretty much agree, this movie did drag on and Owen as a young Hemingway did look like a young Groucho. But we did get to see Nicole Kidman's nipples which is probably more than Tom Cruise can say!

This is probably old news to all the UK viewers but over the past month and a half I have watched multiple episodes of Vera, starring Brenda Blethyn as the title character detective. Quite an enjoyable series.

[Slightly Brown]

Current Watching

Tramp The Dirt Down wrote: Hemingway & Gellhorn

Just finished watching this on Sky Atlantic, nearly 3 hours of my life wasted, pretentious, poorly scripted and Clive Owen as a younger Hemingway looked like Groucho Marx

Apologies: I know this should be in TV crushes, but I couldn’t find it. Anyway, I’ve developed a weird man-crush on the guy that played Hemingway in Midnight in Paris. Like the film, it was all very broad, but there was something about the ‘tache and throw-your-head-back swashbuckling drinking style that I loved. And then he appears on Law & Order: LA and he’s bald. Bald! (nowt wrong with that, mind, I once snogged a girl who had a head like a glass egg). But he still has the ‘tache and the rugged Old Spice man-thing going on and I’m charmed again.

[Gerontophile]

Current Watching

I watched 'The Last Leg' last night, and it had quite possibly the funniest thing I have ever seen, in it.

It's a vaguely chat show type thing, and it is joyous. And occasionally hilarious.

The 'rock, paper, scissors' thing is absolutely genius. And I can't tell you why, without you watching it.

[ian.64]

Current Watching

New Yes, Prime Minister.

Remember that bit at the start of Father Ted where Ted and Dougal watch Father Ben, a copycat version of their lives that they're too lacking of self-awareness to notice? On a slight riff of that concept, NYPM has a touch of the Father Bens where the same characters seem to be a world away from the originals that came before them.

Yes, I know, this is a completely different interpretation from the original, and it uses the template of its successful stage show and its leads, but it just feels a little weird, a little less elegant (the original series had an almost stately and delicate feel that made the on-screen machinations more enjoyable) and a little more forced and, well, farcical. It's a bit like watching imposters having a go and not quite bringing it off, no matter their pedigree.

Henry Goodman's a fine actor, but his Sir Humphrey seems almost cuddly and grandfatherly, as if he'd lend you the keys to his car and a copy of his favourite book. Nigel Hawthorn's interpretation was like watching a courteous spider pulling the strings of his web.

David Haig always struck me as being the 'forced' type of comedy actor (I mentioned this before in a previous thread - possibly The Thick Of It) and he doesn't let me down here, his Jim Hacker being shouty and wavy, and pushing most of his lines to gurning level. Some like him, but, sorry ladies and gentlemen, the Haig magic hasn't seduced me yet. A long way from Paul Eddington's controlled and subtle comic fragility.

Chris Larkin's Bernard, takes Derek Fowlds's interpretation of a hapless sort, out of touch with the here and now, but with a core of steady intelligence hidden underneath all that, and just makes him a tentative and nervous bumpkin, while Zoe Telford just seems to have been a female character inserted into the action to make up for the lack of female influence in the nearly all-male original (much respect to Deborah Norton's steely adviser in the '86 version).

When it comes down to it, what the new version seems to lack is the cold, clinical focus of the original where the events of the story guided the viewer and helped with the laughs. Here, everything's a bit of a melange that's plonked in your lap, and I wouldn't have been surprised to see a pantomime donkey canter on, so much is the slightly cartoonish feel of the whole thing.

It's not a complete failure: it's ably performed, there's some good writing and there's enough going on to keep things ticking by, but the biggest handicap is that it can't help but be measured against an original that had a keen, intricate and subtle grasp of story and character, and you could sense the craft, plotting and care beneath the almost-genteel approach.

This new one seems a bit...bizarre.

[RobW]

Current Watching

I've got a weird hatred for David Haig. I don't care for him at all. Probably a very nice gentleman but I hate him in anything i've seen him in.

Anyway, I started watching Nashville on More4 last night. Bit trashy, but loving it already.

[Crusoe]

Current Watching

Dredd

A very low-tech, non-showy adaptation. It was gritty, very bloody (a wide-ranging tour of various bullet wounds and exploding body parts), short on plot and long on action, but lacked something compared to the earlier version. It just didn't feel, well, futuristic enough. Dredd could have been a rival gang leader for all he was supposed to be a totemic representation of law enforcement.

It felt like a combination of Shoot 'Em Up (creative death scenes and gratuitous gun porn), District 9 (the grimy, slum-riddled, shit world feel; it didn't surprise me to see it was filmed in Johannesburg and Cape Town), 300 (stylised slow-mo violence and near-superhuman warriors against the odds), and an old school on-rails shooter arcade game (like a dystopian Time Crisis). It wasn't awful as such, and I don't regret watching it, but it felt a bit hollow and light on imagination. The Stallone version managed to make Mega City One look and feel a lot more like the comics, that's for sure.

[Slightly Brown]

Current Watching

It's also owes a fair bit to Gareth Evan's The Raid. Anyway, I totally get your points, but enjoyed it all the same. I only have a vague recollection of the comics, though. One thing, the helmet looked slightly off. I'm sure it was millimetre-accurate, but it didn't quite look right. That said, I liked Carl Urban as Dredd; he has a good chin. You could say a Dreddful chin, if you wanted people to hate you.

[Edie St Pierre]

Current Watching

Dark Victory (1939)

Bette Davis plays a rich society women who's got an inoperable brain tumour. Clark Gable is the doctor who gives her initial diagnosis and then ends up marrying her. His surgery must be the only one in the world that has champagne on ice pretty much permenantly, or was that was what was all private healthcare was like in the 30's? Ronald Reagan plays one of her best mates, a bit of a stupid fucker, but with a heart of gold. There's no real twist, Bette just gets iller and iller. A bit morbid, to be honest. There's a kind of clear subtext about the importance of stoicism in the face of impossible situations that's kind of fascinating though. Was this a result of the ten-year economic collapse or an aknowledgment of the impending war? It's always the change in social mores that makes the past feel like the past innit.

[Slightly Brown]

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[Crusoe]

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I had an evening off from the little one tonight, so it's been movie & six Kronenbourg for £6 night:

Battleship. Awful. The same US military jolly as the Transformers films, but even Michael Bay could've made a better film than this. Giant killer mechanical yoyos, an incoherent plot, just terrible.

The Darkest Hour. Based on the reviews, I'd been expecting something 90% terrible. I was pleasantly surprised to find out it was only 80% terrible, but maybe Battleship had lowered my expectations. A substandard ripoff of Tom Cruise's War Of The Worlds and Cloverfield. Apparently invisible aliens can be beaten with microwaves and chunks of dead alien being chucked at them.

John Carter. Not nearly so bad as I'd thought. Despite the charisma-free Taylor Kitsch following me from Battleship, it's a fairly entertaining CGI romp, lightweight and a little uneven in places but quite fun. How badly was this marketed to have got such a bad reputation?

[Come along, Min]

Current Watching

Crusoe wrote: Despite the charisma-free Taylor Kitsch following me from Battleship,

In general agreement on Battleship and John Carter but his casting as Tim Riggins in Friday Night Lights was perfect and certainly not charisma free.