What did you watch last week (w/e September 14)?

September 19, 2011 TMINE Film, Film reviews, TV reviews, UK TV, US TV, US TV reviews 5

Shoot To Kill

Time for "What did you watch last week?", my chance to tell you what I watched last week and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case we’ve missed them.

My recommendations for maximum viewing pleasure this week: still nothing, apart from The Daily Show, since everything regular has finished, although Doctor Who‘s obviously good.

  • Bin Laden: Shoot To Kill: Very gripping documentary on how Osama Bin Laden was found, with plenty of interviews involving the Americans involved, including President Obama. Well worth a watch.
  • Strike Back: Project Dawn: about the same as last week, perhaps a little less humorous. Action good, bad whenever it starts trying to give people characters, but the arrival of Iain Glen and AAA from Lost this week is welcome. Women get treated almost universally badly, a lot of gratuitous female nudity, and the American guy gets shot a lot.

And in this week’s list of movies:

  • Snatch: Surprisingly boring Guy Ritchie film. Not worth watching at all
  • Tales From Earthsea: Bizarre, low-quality anime version of various elements of Ursula Le Guin’s superb Earthsea series of books (if you haven’t read them, read them immediately). Completely misses the point of the books. You’d have thought, given it’s Studio Ghibli, that it would have been a lot better, but it wasn’t. Oh well.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean 4: Surprisingly boring, rather than bad. It’s just people running around doing stuff, really. Looks expensive though.

But what have you been watching?

"What did you watch last week?" is your chance to recommend to friends and fellow blog readers the TV and films that they might be missing or should avoid – and for me to do mini-reviews of everything I’ve watched. Since we live in the fabulous world of Internet catch-up services like the iPlayer and Hulu, why not tell your fellow readers what you’ve seen so they can see the good stuff they might have missed? And keep an eye on The Stage‘s TV Today Square Eyes feature as well for British TV highlights or you’ll be missing out on the good stuff.

  • Mark Carroll

    Huh, I really liked “Snatch”, even (and unusually) more so than his other films.
    Mostly I’ve just been meandering through “Foyle’s War” and finished off series 1 of the original “The Killing”.

  • Jason S.

    Has anyone seen Planet Dinosaur on BBC1? I watched it Wednesday when everyone else was watching football on ITV1, and I thought it was fantastic! It’s definitely the most scientifically accurate and exciting representation of dinosaurs yet broadcast; it will undoubtedly put Primeval and Terra Nova to shame. I can’t wait for the rest of the series!

  • SK

    Second episode of Happy Endings, which wasn’t as good as the first, though it’s still nice to see Denise form Scrubs.
    First episode of The Body Farm, which was very disappointing… actually, that would imply I expected it to be good, wouldn’t it? Anyway, by concentrating on the least interesting cast member of Waking the Dead and on just the science – where the whole thing that put Waking the Dead above your general crime programme was that it had a mix of personalities and a mix of disciplines, so one would get clues from psychology, one from science, one from walking the beat and old-fashioned door-knocking, one from just shouting in people’s faces until they confessed…
    Ah well.
    End of Torchwood: Miracle Day. Well, that was pretty much as expected.
    Film: The Devil’s Backbone. Very much like a prototype Pan’s Labyrinth.

  • The other David

    I was pleasantly surprised to see Archer show up in my in-box (well, it’s not an in-box, but you know what I mean). Have also been enjoying the Inspector George Gently mini-series (mini because it’s short, not because it’s some TV event). While it’s your standard police procedural, it prompted me to view the previous seasons and have grown to quite like it.
    Finally got around to seeing Attack the Block and was quite taken with it. Good story, good acting — I quite enjoyed it. It was nice to see a sci-fi/thriller based on the characters and story instead of the FX.
    I’ve also been watching two shows, both of which have Underbelly in the name, Underbelly Razor and Underbelly NZ. The first is from Oz, the second from NZ, and both are franchise spin-offs of a series called (unsurprisingly) Underbelly which showed on Australia TV a few years back. The first is set in 1920’s Sydney about some two madam’s battle for control of the city’s underworld. The second is about a NZ drug importer during the 70s. While Razor is not as gripping as NZ, they have some interesting stories to tell. I would also highly recommend the original Underbelly (although I watched that a while back).

  • I’ve heard good things about Underbelly, but haven’t yet managed to catch it. Oh well.