Peter Serafinowicz seems to be all over the place, these days. He's on tele, he's on the Internet, he's in the movies. What a busy chap.
Here are some recent and forthcoming highlights for your enjoyment. In the first, he's out with Sarah Alexander when he bumps into Will Arnett and Amy Poehler.
He's also starring with Jon Favreau, Kristen Bell, Jason Bateman, Kristin Davis, Malin Akerman, Kali Hawk, Faizon Love and Jean Reno in Couples Retreat:
And to prove he's not gone all big time, he's still working with Look Around You partner Robert Popper on Radio Spiritworld, the only radio station to broadcast from the after-life. You can subscribe to it in iTunes.
I often wonder what happened to Kathryn Bigelow's career. She's arguably one of the best directors in Hollywood, directing movies like Point Break, Blue Steel and K-19. But she's not had the stratospheric adulation that ex-hubby James Cameron's had. In a world where McG and Brett Ratner get to make movies, this seems appalling, and I'm just going to accuse Hollywood of rampant sexism here.
Okay, Strange Days might have been to blame for her career decline, but she has been responsible for some really fantastically directed scenes:
Her latest movie, about a US bomb squad in Baghdad, is on limited release in the US. I'm not going to say anything about the writing, but take a look at how well The Hurt Locker is directed.
I may be running a competition to win a prize on this 'ere blog very soon.
Wow, that was vague, wasn't it?
See, I haven't decided on the prize. There's a range of options, all of them DVDs or Blu-Ray disks, most of them Film4/Channel 4 content, but I'm not sure what y'all would like best. So I'm going to give you the options, you say which one you'd like to win best, and I'll see if I can swing it with TPTB (no guarantees).
So I was watching Taken again yesterday. It's a cracking movie – you can always tell when an action film isn't as dumb as the others when it gets described as a 'thriller' or an 'action-thriller'.
In it, Liam Neeson plays a retired CIA agent whose teenage daughter gets abducted while in Paris. He has 96 hours to track her down before she disappears forever. Now, it owes an awful lot to the Bourne movies, from its gritty fights and its European locations to its camerawork and stunt scenes. But it definitely stands by itself as a film intended for grown-ups, and Neeson's fantastic and the director lets him have some great moments to himself.
It also deserves a lot of credit for portraying the world of prostitution and trafficking in women as the horrific, miserable, squalid thing it is, rather than the usual glamourous Pretty Woman-esque view.
But it suddenly got me thinking. When exactly did Liam Neeson become the West's greatest martial arts action star? Okay, he started off in Hollywood doing Dark Man, so it's not like he was a stranger to action films. But over the last decade or so, he's become a real martial arts star who is also a great actor at the same time. That's pretty rare: in fact, he may be the movies' greatest martial arts actor. What do you think?
After the jump, some of Liam's recent fight scenes to prove my point – at least as far as the fighting's concerned.
Read more on Rupert Penry-Jones on (not being in) The Forgotten