Starring: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci Writer/Director: Nora Ephron Price: £19.99 (Amazon price: £12.98) Released: March 8th 2010
Calling all foodies! Slight departure from the normal TMINE fare, I know, but I refuse to be confined to one little box - here's your chance to win a copy of Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep as famous US TV chef (ah, see the TMINE link now?) and writer Julia Child and Amy Adams (you know, off Enchanted, Sunshine Cleaning et al) as a blogger who tries to make all the recipes in Childs' magnum opus Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year.
In the US/UK: Sometime in 2010
Available from Amazon.co.uk on BluRay import
The Cylons were created by man. They evolved. They rebelled. They look and feel human. Some are programmed to think they are human. There are many copies. And they have a plan.
Unfortunately for them, it's rubbish, and they can't make up their minds about what to do. At least, that's what Battlestar Galactica: The Plan appears to suggest. A final "milk it for all it's worth" effort before it becomes impossible to get the actors in the same place, it's more like a director's commentary than a worthwhile addition to a TV classic's range.
I'm confused. This is a review of a DVD that contains an extended version of the pilot episode of Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica, which won't be transmitted until next year. So is it a preview or a review?
Whatever it is, let's begin.
Science fiction is a lot of things to a lot of people. It can be space exploration, like Star Trek; it can be alternative reality fare like Eureka; it can be science extrapolation like The Six Million Dollar Man.
Battlestar Galactica is loosely credited with revitalising science fiction, taking the dull, lifeless and artificial people and situations of Star Trek and replacing them with a dark, gritty, quasi-realistic examination of the horrors of war. But BSG only really addressed one category of science-fiction.
Caprica takes away the war, combat and exploration of BSG to revitalise another vein of science fiction: what another, futuristic society might be like. More of a soap opera concerned with relationships and the nature of belief and society than with spaceships and war, Caprica isn't really like anything you've seen before - although it's probably like something you might have read.
The burning question: do we have a soul and if we do, can it be copied?
The story of Merlin and King Arthur has been around for centuries, so it's not surprising that every so often, someone wants to retell it*. Most recently, we've had the BBC series Merlin, but there have been numerous other retellings including the Sam Neill mini-series Merlin, the movie Excalibur, the Clive Owen historical, King Arthur, and mild American 70s sitcom Mr Merlin.
Back in the 80s though, there was a more subtle adaptation of the myth set in modern times. Starring Patrick Malahide (Minder et al) as the Merlin-esque 'Magnus' and Stephen Dillane (Hamlet, Spy Game, Welcome to Sarajevo) as Nick, the King Arthur of the piece, The One Game posited the question: "What would have happened if Arthur had been made King with Merlin's help - and then Arthur had kicked him out?"
This being the 80s, however, for the retelling Nick was the MD of a games company and Magnus was the creator of his best-selling game, thrown out and sent to a mental asylum after he couldn't handle Nick's rejection of his newest invention. Magnus escapes from the asylum and using his near-magical skills, steals all Nick's company's assets and plans his further revenge.
What made The One Game so interesting and worthy of being described as a Lost Gem was its then-unique concept: during the course of the four episodes, set over a Bank Holiday weekend, everyone Nick meets - including friends and loved-ones - and everything he does and comes across may be part of 'The One Game', a live-action and possibly deadly game invented by Magnus to teach Nick a lesson.
It was only ever shown once on ITV1, was released on DVD but is no longer available. It's The One Game and it's a Lost Gem. Here's the the opening titles to the second episode, Saturday, complete with theme tune sung in Patagonian Welsh and annoying 80s narrator recapping just enough of the plot for you to know what's going on.
You wouldn't know it from the BFI's celebration of 25 years of Channel 4 and S4C, but S4C does in fact produce television programmes, some of them quite good. Have a look at Caerdydd. Go on. It's good.
But it would be a mistake to think this is a recent development. A case in point is A Mind to Kill, Wales' answer to Taggart. Starring Welsh man-god Philip Madoc as widower Detective Inspector Noel Bain, A Mind to Kill was a dark and gritty 1991 TV movie about neo-Nazis set and filmed in South Wales.
Shot in both English and Welsh - as (Noson) yr Heliwr (which, I think means either The Night Hunter or Hunter in the Night. Anyone?) - the film, the charismatic Bain and the series format proved popular enough that a series of sequel films was made, running for five series from 1994 to 2004 - even making the transition to the rest of the UK by airing on Five. Yet almost nobody remembers it.
Praise be, then, the first series is being released on DVD by Network on March 16th.
Let's face it, vampires are silly. Yes, they are. They so are. Unless you're stuck in some perpetual Twilight of gothdom/Emodom, the whole "vampiredom is cool/mysterious/sexy/dark/a great way to live" should have been replaced in your psyche by vampiredom is "sad/ridiculous/obvious metaphor for oral sex and venereal diseases" years ago.
To be fair, in part, that's because of the daftness of general TV depictions of vampires, which should have put you off them altogether. The vampires on Buffy very quickly became laughable and Angel very rapidly became self-parody. The Marc Warren Dracula adaptation was awful, and no matter how good the 1970s BBC adaptation with Louis Jourdan was, his flapping his way up a wall like an overladen man on a spacehopper was enough to cause hysterics - and not the frightened kind - in any viewer.
But it needn't be so. As Being Human in the UK and to a lesser extent True Blood in the US recently showed, you can do vampires convincingly in this day and age if you do them right.
Ten years ago, Channel 4 did the first - and possibly the best - of the modern vampire stories. Starring Jack Davenport, Susannah Harker and Idris Elba of The Wire, Ultraviolet managed to bring science, intelligence, moral ambiguity, decent characters and all the hallmarks of modern storytelling to the vampire story - all without saying the word 'vampire' once.
Although it's been repeated and issued on DVD, it's hard to get now (although you can watch every episode on YouTube) as it's been deleted, so it's officially a Lost Gem. Here's a shiny fan-produced trailer for you, albeit one with a very bad choice in soundtrack:
If you grew up during the 80s (or even the 70s) in the UK, like me, you were probably subjected to some pretty rubbish teaching programmes during science classes - they were usually narrated by Chris Tarrant, if that helps jog your memory. Joe has just reminded me of the marvellous first series of Look Around You, in which Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz mercilessly and very surreally sent up "television for schools and colleges".
I won't say too much about it, since it really does speak for itself. Here's a scary clip of the 'Helvetica Scenario' from the pilot episode, Calcium, for those that just want a sample.
For those with more time and who liked that taster, here's the entire pilot episode. Be warned, you will feel a palpable sensation of nostalgia within about five seconds if you are over 30 and British.
And here's the Sulphur episode, which is one of my favourites:
If you're in the US, you can watch all the episodes (with a few adverts) on Adult Swim's web site, since it's currently airing on Sunday nights. If you're in the UK, if you loved it, you can buy the whole series, including pilot episode, on DVD.
There was also a second series that sent up Tomorrow's World and Micro Live, but it wasn't as good IMHO - although it was still pretty hilarious at times. Here's a sample - you can get it on DVD, too.
PS: At no point should you rely on Look Around You for accurate scientific information.
If you've watched enough movies and TV shows, the idea of the 'ticking bomb' should be familiar to you. You know: there's a bomb, it's got to be defused, usually by snipping either a red wire or a blue wire, and there's only a few minutes or seconds to do it in.
Normally, you'll find this in a single episode of a TV show or maybe in the final act of a film and it'll usually be just a regular cop or soldier doing the disarming, rather than a heroic bomb disposal expert – typically they're running late. Equally rarely will the ticking bomb scenario last the length of the entire movie or TV show or the bomb be any more complex than just that red-blue question.
In fact, off the top of my head I can only think of Danger UXB and occasionally The Unit really focusing on bomb disposal on TV; in the movies, even Speed didn't dwell on disarmament, only evasion, and Quatermass and the Pit didn't have a bomb, only a spaceship everyone thought was a bomb.
Juggernaut (also known as Terror on the Britannic), released in 1974, is perhaps the only instance of a movie that deals exclusively from beginning to end with the defusal of a single bomb and that features a heroic bomb disposal expert at the centre of the action.
Set on board a luxury liner travelling across the Atlantic, the movie sees Richard Harris try to disarm seven identical and highly complicated bombs designed by a man calling himself 'Juggernaut'. The first film to develop the 'red wire/blue wire' dilemma, it's a tense piece directed by Richard 'Superman II' Lester, with dialogue by Alan 'Beiderbecke' Plater, that while featuring an all-star cast is in reality a mesmerising monologue by Harris and a musing on the nature of death. It's a movie you should own.
Here's the very 70s, slightly judgemental trailer narrated by a bored American man.
Do you know what my wife said when she saw this had arrived through the post? "Oh, lush."
I'm not saying she is Joanna Page or Stacey, just that sometimes the similarities get a little spooky.
Anyway: Gavin & Stacey, bit of a sleeper hit during its first series on BBC3, won surprising amounts of awards, then suddenly went through the roof during series two, which went on to win even more awards.
Now series two is going to be repeated on BBC1 (starting this Friday) just in time for a Christmas special, also to be aired on BBC1, and for this DVD release.
It's a lovely little sitcom about a girl from Wales and a boy from SE England who meet, fall in love and get married (rings some bells. Hmm). But as the tag line almost says, it's not just the two of them and the story is as much about their best friends and family as it is about them.
This should probably be called The Other The Other Boleyn Girl, given there's a multi-million dollar effort with Eric Bana, Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman out on DVD right now, too. Also based on Philippa Gregory's book of the same, this is a study of Mary Boleyn, Anne Boleyn's elder sister and fellow mistress of Henry VIII. Made for the BBC in 2003 and starring Natasha McElhone, Jodhi May, Jared Harris and Steven Mackintosh, it's cheaply made yet more powerful and more innovative that its highly turgid American cousin.
It's quite a traumatic tale, with happy newlywed Mary finding that the king's interested in her and that both her husband and her father want her to take up with the King to advance their standing in court. Reluctant at first, not least because she regards adultery as a terrible sin, Mary eventually falls in love with Henry and as history recounts, it all goes pear-shaped after that.
The adaption is relatively faithful to the book, although it does skip over big chunks of the narrative - unlike Hollywood, however, the BBC adaptation does at least make clear where there have been jumps of a year or so, something that made the big screen version less than coherent at times.
You couldn't describe it as historically authentic, though, because despite its best efforts, Gregory's book isn't to be trusted on all its details - rather than being a pious so-and-so as Gregory suggests, most of the records hint that Mary was a bit of a goer - and McElhone is obviously too old to play the teenage Mary. I won't go into the incest stuff either, although Gregory usually does, more or less in every book she writes. Hmmm.
The oddest part of this adaption is that it's shot on grainy video almost as a reality TV show (complete with partially improvised script), with Mary and Anne both offering video diary-like pieces to camera at various parts of the narrative. This more radical approach does involve you, but it also distances, since its fast cuts and shaky-cam mean you spend more time being fascinated by Philippa Lowthorpe's direction than having a chance to get involved with the characters.
McElhone's as good as always; May seems far less devious than other Anne Boleyns you might have seen (on The Tudors for example); Jared Harris, who plays Henry, turns in pretty much the same performance he did in To The Ends of the Earth, which is good in its way but doesn't seem particularly Henry-ish (again, age seems to be a factor); and Steven Mackintosh is okay in a difficult role: the gay, incestuous (as written by Gregory, anyway) brother George Boleyn.
If it's a toss-up between the big-screen version and this one, get this one, if only because it's better and considerably cheaper. But probably only worth getting if you're a big history buff.
Here's the first few minutes to give you an idea of what's it's like:
Incidentally, Philip Glenister's in it as William Stafford, Mary's second husband. Someone's stuck all his appearances in it together and uploaded the result to YouTube. Enjoy!
About the blog
This is a UK media blog with daily news, views, exclusive reviews and good conversation. There's a bit of a bias towards the latest and greatest US TV, but we also cover British TV ranging from new Doctor Who to old Z Cars, Property Ladder to Big Brother, and BBC4 to S4C – yes, this blog is firmly part of the conspiracy to promote all things Welsh where possible, particularly Caerdydd.
Add in film, theatre, art, books, events and media journalism and you've (hopefully) got one of the best places on the web for media lovers. Oh yes, and there's The Carusometer, the ultimate guide to quality TV.
About me
I'm Rob Buckley, a freelance journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of. I've edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for trade magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and contributed sarcastic articles about television to the blink-and-you-missed-it "web site for urban hedonists" The Tribe. I'm freelance now and have contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly and TV Scoop. Have pity on me.
Starring: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci
![The Other Boleyn Girl [2003]](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B0012X6RG0.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_SX175_.jpg)
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