Quatermass

US TV

Review: Heroes 3×15 – Trust and Blood

11 February 2009 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Not a proper review as such, more like a question and a brief look-over: anyone actually want episode by episode reviews of Heroes, given it’s finally getting good again?

Given I don’t normally do e-by-e reviews of US shows, only the occasional Brit show (there’s only so much time in the week and let’s not commit to anything we can’t sustain), I thought there was an atypical lack of symmetry there that might need fixing. Besides, it’s about the only US show I’d want to review e-by-e, apart from 24, but my 24 reviews would just be me giggling insanely because each episode has more well executed action scenes in it than any other US show has per season (with the honourable exceptions of The Unit and Battlestar Galactica, of course).

Of course, if Heroes goes pants again, I might regret the offer, but I thought I’d put it out there – over to you.

As for this week’s episode, for a mini-review, join me after the jump.

Continue reading “Review: Heroes 3×15 – Trust and Blood”

February at the BFI

23 December 2008 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Time for our regular round-up of tele events at the BFI. February has a big TV season as well as a Q&A, so get your desk planner out now:

  • 5th: Law & Order: UK preview + Q&A with Chris Chibnall, Ben Daniels and Freema Agyeman
  • 23rd: Is Art Necessary? + Five Revolutionary Painters: Goya: Part of the Celebration of Kenneth Clark season
  • 26th: Picasso at the Tate + An Edwardian Childhood: Part of the Celebration of Kenneth Clark season

The season, TX in Ten: An Examination of Live TV Drama, is pretty long so I’m sticking it in its own section:

  • 2nd: Timeshift: Live on the Night + Monitor: Making The Bedmakers: Two documentaries about live television. Includes a Q&A with Timeshift director Bob Bayly following the screening
  • 2nd: It Is Midnight, Dr Schweitzer: The oldest surviving single TV drama. Stars Andre Morell and directed by Rudolph Cartier
  • 6th: Dixon of Dock Green: Roaring Boy + Z Cars: A Man Like Yourself
  • 6th: The Bill + debate: The live 20th anniversary episode of The Bill. The debate, chaired by Kwame Kwei Armah, will include Brian Blessed, Lisa Maxwell, David Rose and Sue Mather
  • 10th: The Quatermass Experiment (1953) + Timeshift: The Nigel Kneale Interviews: The two surviving episodes of the original version of The Quatermass Experiment, and a documentary about Quatermass writer Nigel Kneale. Followed by…
  • 10th: The Quatermass Experiment (2005) + Q&A: The BBC4 remake featuring Mark Gatiss and David Tennant. Followed by a Q&A with director Sam Miller
  • 12th: Live from Pebble Mill: The Battle of Waterloo and Redundant! Or the Wife’s Revenge: The second play, by Fay Weldon, sees the lights fail during the performance, yet the actors carry on anyway.
  • 12th: Armchair Theatre: A Night Out: Stars Tom Bell. Followed by a panel discussion including Susannah York and Billie Whitelaw
  • 16th: Armchair Theatre: Lena, O My Lena + Live from Pebble Mill: Cargo Kings
  • 16th: Armchair Theatre: The Emperor Jones + A Liverpool Nativity
  • 18th: Television Playhouse: Promenade + Live from Pebble Mill: Night Kids
  • 24th: Two episodes of Coronation Street, including the live 40th anniversary special. Also includes a clip from the only surviving episode of The Grove Family
  • 25th: Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps + panel discussion: The live episode of the show followed by a discussion including Will Mellor, Graham Duff and Stephen McCrum (exec producer, BBC Comedy)

Members’ priority postal booking opens 2 January
Members’ online and phone booking opens 8 January
Public booking opens 12 January

As always, visit the BFI web site for more details

Richard Harris and David Hemmings in Juggernaut
Movies you should own

Movies you should own: Juggernaut (Terror on the Britannic)

17 November 2008 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

Juggernaut

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.

Continue reading “Movies you should own: Juggernaut (Terror on the Britannic)”

Review: The Sinister Folk

2 May 2008 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Went to the NFT’s showing of Murrain, an episode of the old play strand Against The Crowd* written by Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale, and Robin Redbreast, from the BBC’s Play for Today written by British arch-surrealist John Bowen.

Robin Redbreast

Surprisingly, Robin Redbreast was the stronger of the two: think a cross between Rosemary’s Baby, The Wicker Man and The Aphrodite Inheritance, all set in the Cotswalds, in which a newly single TV script editor finds that country folk have their own strange ways. Absolutely off its head, with bizarre naked karate in the woods, appearances by Herne the Hunter and Wayland the Smithy, and some of the weirdest dialogue you’d ever hear, it was just endlessly entertaining.

Murrain

Murrain was relatively normal by comparison, a standard piece of Kneale fare in which superstition meets science – in the form of a pig farmer who thinks a local woman is really a witch and a vet who wants to protect the little old lady from those nasty bumpkins. If anything, it proved that DoPs in the 70s shouldn’t have got ambitions above their stations so many years before the invention of the Steadicam. Not really worth looking out for unless you’re a big fan of Bernard Lee (the original M in the Bond movies) or the scary dad in Sapphire and Steel – Assignment 1.

The audience: As always, it’s worth reviewing the audience:

  • An above average beardy weirdy count this time, with a folk music DJ playing in the bar afterwards
  • Two audible uses of ‘the voice’
  • On my left, a young posh girl out with a ridiculously older man who clearly wasn’t a relative (shudder) and who insisted on narrating the plays to each other when they weren’t making out
  • On my right, a man with little understanding of personal boundaries and an incredible sinus problem: so bad was it, that the man to his right had to squeeze his way past Kim Newman at the end of Murrain to escape the torture in time for Robin Redbreast. I could not escape past ‘the lovers’
  • The man behind me started snoring 10 minutes before the end.

I’ve had better nights out

* My, didn’t they think they were being subversive?