There’s an interesting piece over on the Hollywood Reporter about how a good screenplay can persuade actors and directors to drop everything and take pay cuts, simply to appear in a movie. The movie in question is Stranger than Fiction, which I’ve been looking forward to for some time. The trailer is below if you need persuading.
Lost, C4
“On the surface it’s good TV: glamorous, gripping, addictive even. That’s precisely the problem […] Lost is crack TV.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian
Lost, C4
“It should have run one season at most, at which span its empty enigmas and casual indifference to its own inventions might not have been quite so obvious.”
Thomas Sutcliffe, The Independent
Lost, C4
“There’s a real stirring sense of the writers letting their imaginations fly.”
James Walton, The Daily Telegraph
Lost, C4
“Lost has become the pub bore of the TV schedules, propping up the bar whenever you happen to be channel-surfing, forcing you to take swift avoidance action when you spot it.”
Joe Joseph, The Times
Lost, C4
“The longer Lost limps on for, the more viewers it will lose for the simple reason that, as Phineas T. Barnum said, you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express & Daily Mail
In the US: Tuesdays, 9.30/8.30c, ABC
In the UK: Anything with Ted Danson in appears on Paramount Comedy. You know that.
Help Me Help You is what is known in the trade as a “smart comedy” – that is, you won’t laugh very much, but you’ll be thinking “Oh, that’s wry and accurate”. It’s also what is known as a “Ted Danson vehicle”. That is, it stars Ted Danson with shockingly white hair.
Ah. Peri….
Sorry. Got a bit distracted there.
Peri’s one of those Doctor Who companions that could have been good but never got the chance. The Doctor’s first American companion, she could have been a good foil for the Doctor and asked questions about things we’d always taken for granted (screw “If you’re an alien, why do you sound like you’re from the North?” How about “Why is the entire universe populated by people with English accents?”). Unfortunately, bar one episode where she gets to make a potion using her knowledge of botany, she had bugger all to do except scream and look good.
Ah. Peri…
Sorry, got distracted again.
So far, Peri has appeared in a substantial number of Big Finish audios, usually with the fifth Doctor but occasionally with the sixth. Her fifth Doctor appearances have done little to rectify the “Peri as cypher” problem, since most of the allotted characterisation time has been given over to new companion, Egyptian pharoah Erimen.
And despite being more of a sixth Doctor companion anyway, only having an intro story plus one other with the fifth compared with a bit over a season and a half with the sixth, she’s had little by way of characterisation in those plays, too, with perhaps only Her Final Flight offering anything by way of variety to the character (and that one didn’t even count. Listen to it and you’ll know what I mean).
But, ta da! Here it is. Finally. The story where Peri gets something to do. More than that: it’s an entirely Peri-centric story, set in her home-town and home-age of Baltimore, 1984.
Ooh. And it’s got cybermen, too (it’s on the cover: I can’t be spoiling it for you if it’s on the cover).
In the US: Sundays, 10/9c, ABC
In the UK: Channel 4 has the rights. No air date yet.
I’m in two minds about this one. On the one hand, we have a show about three brothers and two sisters who are all ludicrously rich. I hated almost all of them immediately. It was also pretty slow-moving and uninvolving. On the other hand, the show has a pretty stellar cast (Calista Flockhart, Sally Field, Rachel Griffiths, Balthazar Getty, Ron Rifkin, Tom Skerritt) and it has a moderately interesting set-up for the rest of the series, so maybe it’ll be good.
I actually can’t be arsed to review the rest of it, though. It’s like trying to review a Hallmark card. Everyone has problems, although since they’re the kind of problems no one can really relate to (“How dare you become a radio host and talk about your feelings about the Iraq war!” “He may have embezzled money from the pension fund!”, etc), I’m not sure how much I can empathise with anyone. There are the usual second thoughts about marriage proposals, etc, etc. Pretty generic, pretty turgid, but with an incredible cast.
Toby at Inner Toob has a better review than this. There be spoilers, though. Maybe I’ll be able to get into it by the third episode, but I’m going to need caffeine in big quantities.
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