My dilemma about what to watch last night was resolved about half way through this rather dull and tedious affair that showed on ITV last night. In fact, I’m not sure I can be arsed to write about it. I wasn’t impressed by this modern retelling of the Mary Shelley’s classic. It didn’t seem to update the story so much as simply transpose it entirely, merely changing the sex of the main character, giving her a slightly different motivation and updating the science behind the creature to make it more modern and relevant. Still kept the lightning in though. I’m suprised that there weren’t big glass containers full of bubbling and steaming liquid in the laboratory. I found I couldn’t bring myself to care about the characters at all, much less what happened.

Also, throwing in some random “Hammer-esque” moments (hugging the big vat of primordial soup, dramatic intonation of “It’s alive!” and so on) jarred with the otherwise serious tone of the film. Homage shots only work if they blend seamlessly with the style and feel of the rest of the piece.

And what the fuck was going on with that bit about the volcano? Eh? I mean, context people. Maybe it became more involved in the second half of the story (did the monster jump in it? I don’t know. Also, I don’t much care.) So there’s a supervolcano erupting but we don’t know where. In the UK? Because that would be a story. And how come at the beginning, Victoria not-Frankenstein’s car was covered with several inches of ash from this volcano but that was it?

Anyway, I decided, after about 20 minutes, that if they showed that the creature was afraid of fire in some contrived and hokey scene then I’d turn it off. At 45 minutes I did just that.

After months and months (about, let’s see, 7 to be precise) of not having any type of television reception whatsoever, we finally decided that we’d get a new aerial installed. Yesterday morning the helpful chappie turned up and a short while later there was television. And it was good.

Well, actually, no it wasn’t. I’ve been surprised at how much I haven’t missed having the goggle-box available. Sure I watch a lot of films on DVD and yes there have been somethings I would like to have seen but even after one evening I realised that there’s been a lot more that I’m bloody glad we’ve been unable to contaminate our domestic habitat with (namely; most soaps, all reality TV and the general detritus that pollutes the air waves.)

That being said, I’m now torn tonight between watching the new one-off version of Frankenstein on ITV or Session 9 on DVD. It’s a total dilemma! Yes, I can always watch the DVD tomorrow but if I watch it tonight, I can return it tomorrow and get a new film by Saturday. Alternatively, I could record Frankenstein and watch that later.

Or I could if I actually had a working video recorder - that’s been out of action for nearly two years!

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it but I recently got the wife started on watching 24. We watched the first series at the start of last month and she’s just started on the second series this week. (From memory, I think series 2 is the weakest of the lot so far but bear in mind I’ve only seen up to season 5 and I gather that season 6 may have jumped the shark.) Anyway, we were watching some after supper tonight and there was one scene which really grabbed my attention (I think it was hour 4.)

Basically (and without giving too much of the plot away), Tony Almeida calls up George Mason and asks him for his password which (without a care in the world for even the most common sense security protocols) George gives him.

Now both of these are returning characters from season 1. Mason’s character has already been set up and defined. He’s a stickler for following the rules, he doesn’t like Jack Bauer’s loose cannon approach, he’s ambitious and while not incompetent, you get the impression he’s perhaps a bit of a weaselly coward and not actually that good at his job. There’s more to it than that but essentially, he’s a straight laced pen pusher with aspirations that are beyond his capability and neither Jack nor Soul-Patch like him that much.

The password he gives Tony is “Hendrix”.

That single word tells us so much about Mason’s character - far more than a 5 minute casual chat with Tony or Jack in a downtown L.A. wine bar ever would. Just to be sure we’ve understood, Tony asks “With an X?” to which an affronted Mason replies “How else would you spell it?”

So, George Mason - Hendrix fan. Suddenly there’s an image of him at home sitting on the couch with a bottle of beer and unplugged electric guitar in his lap, listening to “Machine Gun”, strumming out “Foxy Lady”, dreaming of the rock career he never had. You wonder if every time he heard the Star Spangled Banner at CTU family days whether he was imagining the Hendrix live version. You realise that behind this officious grey exterior is someone who’s unconventional at heart and the impression you’ve already formed of him has been well and truly challenged.

All that with one single word.

Just been reminded about a post I was going to write after discovering Rullsenburg Rules via Troubled Diva. The other night on IrishTVChannel 6 I caught an old episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (”Earshot”, 3:18) and it reminded me how long it was since I’d watched any Buffy and how much I missed it.

It was always absolutely compulsive viewing for me although the high point was when Angel went bad in Season 2 after doing the jiggy jiggy with Buffy. (Did I spoil it for you? Tough - it was 10 years ago give or take! Keep up!) The scripts were always fantastic and even in the later series, there were some exceptional episodes. Why Joss Whedon didn’t win an Emmy for his writing on the series I’ll never know - he only ever got nominated for the fantastic episode “Hush” (the episode with little to no dialogue at all).

Buffy did go down hill from about season 5 onwards in my opinion. Season 6 was struggling to tread water and season 7 was entirely unmemorable. Still, when Buffy began to fade, its spinoff, Angel, just kept getting better. I get the impression that I’m in a minority but I do confess to preferring Angel over Buffy after Buffy Season 4. It was darker for the most part but it was also funnier and kept going strong all the way to the end. The final season, with the return of Spike and Angel Investigations in charge of Wolfram Hart, had some of the funniest and most gripping episodes, particularly Smile Time when Angel gets turned into a puppet. (I saw one of these on sale in Forbidden Planet the other day and was very tempted to get one.) Plus Illyria was hot.

I’d almost say that they don’t make ‘em like they used to but that wouldn’t really be true. BSG and 24* keep me going as well as a healthy dose of Scrubs. But I have a distinct feeling that I might dig out the dvds when I get home and indulge my nostalgia with a Buffython weekend.

*(Trivia time: while watching 24 series 5 the other week, I clocked a geeky bit of trivia when Audrey gave the false name of “Jane Espenson” who was one of the regular writers on Buffy. Probably not something to be proud of but I felt chuffed with myself for noticing.)

Wherein we discuss the premiere of Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica and associated spoilers.

(more…)

If you’ve ever watched any “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, then you might be amused to read these reviews of some of the first episodes to be broadcast including the pilot, “Encounter at Farpoint”, and the lamentable “The Naked Now”. (I say lamentable - I wouldn’t know having never watched it but the reviewer seems to think it’s perhaps the worst episode of TNG, evah!)

An extra reason to read these reviews is because they’re written by Wil Wheaton who starred in the show as the rebarbative Wesley Crusher. It’s obviously therapy for him and is very, very funny.

(Via Lum)

In other television news, Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica is premiering on Sky One tomorrow night. If I were at home, this would be painful as we only have freeview (and only for 6 months of the year - damn you trees and your leafy green foilage!) but I’m not; I’m stuck in a dumpy little hotel in Dublin 2 which has no window but does have a television with good Sky One reception.

Frakkin’ A!

“Stay tuned for genius!” declared a sycophantic Davina McCall on Friday night.
“Absolute shite!” declared Dragon after sitting through half an hour of a new, agonisingly bad comedy show that’s “taken the US by storm’.

Ugly Betty is, primarily, for girls. It’s about fashion, after all, and it’s about beauty being only skin deep or some such sermonizing bollocks. It’s brim full of clichés such as the fantastic looking but amazingly shallow and bitchy staff, the ultra camp and condescending assistant, the stud-u-like male lead who comes across as a vain, self serving, nasty piece of work but is okay really but the main thing that’s lacking is, well, humour. Unless, that is, watching a fat, ugly girl committing “embarassing” social faux pas and doing lame pratfalls is your idea of high comedy.

And about this word “ugly”. Apparently “ugly” means wearing glasses, having braced teeth and wearing mismatched clothes. Oh, and being socially and physically inept. And fat. My biggest problem with the show (aside from the fact that it’s on TV at all) is that the title character is played by America Ferrara who could not be described as ugly at all. It undermines the point (if there is one) of the show by highlighting the wariness of the producers to employ someone who is anything other than good looking.

Needless to say, while I enjoy spending time with my beloved wife, there’s only so much of this sort of crap I can put up with. If there’s nothing better on next week then you may find me sticking splinters of bamboo under my fingernails and, quite possibly, into my eyes too.

(I am attempting to make sure that by the end of the year I have watched every single one of the top 100 rated films according to IMDB as of 18th March 2005. I have 22 to go. The full list is here.)

I’m a big fan of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, especially the Clint Eastwood “man with no name” trilogy. In fact, I would never have claimed to have really liked westerns on the whole but that’s only when I think about all the macho, strutting “heroes of the wild west” type films which are full of the smug jingoism that resurfaced in many of the eighties hollywood actioners.

Leone treated the films differently. There are no heroes as such, just bad buys who do bad things and bad guys who do good things. The film might always turn out okay at the end but there’s always a bit of a sour taste left in your mouth and no-one ever gets to ride away cleanly into the sunset.

Once Upon A Time In The West is pretty much the same. Featuring the combined acting talents of Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda and Jason Robards (in the usual Leone roles of the good, the bad and the ugly respectively) it’s slightly more epic than the Eastwood trilogy which is unsurprising given that once set (the railway station set in the opening scene) cost more than the entire budget of his first film. Charles Bronson’s Harmonica isn’t quite as charismatic as Eastwood’s man with no name and is only really memorable for his theme tune (the one he plays himself with his harmonica… hence his name). But the film works and while I think it’s less iconic than the original trilogy, it’s still an interesting and watchable film and definitely worth watching. Wouldn’t personally have placed it so high in the top 100 list though.

The return of Phil Mitchell to Eastenderland may have been a bit of a (dull) flash in the pan bid to get more people to tune into the Beeb’s flagship soap but I may have to break a habit of a lifetime and watch some Corrie in the next few weeks.

Why? Because Ian McKellen is going to be in it. I kid you not - he’s going to be in 10 episodes of the this years prizewinning ongoing television serial. Still don’t believe me? Well you can read it straight from the horse’s mouth too.