WARNING: If you are married to a blonde woman from South Wales who's lived in London for a while and has lost her accent and started talking like an English person, you might find that after exposing her to this DVD for two or more episodes, she exhibits certain behaviours. Her accent might return; she might start saying "lush", "by here" instead of "here" or "whereto" instead of "where"; and she might start calling you with "Oh! Rob!" These effects can last anything up to three days or more, during which SHE WILL BE UNAWARE SHE IS DOING ANY OF THIS. It'll be very endearing though.
The thing about award-winning comedy shows is that no one's going to watch them if you stick them on a network primarily devoted to Two Pints of Lager and shows like Can Fat Teens Hunt?.
Had we known there was a show called Gavin and Stacey in which a blonde woman from South Wales meets, falls in love with and marries a dark-haired guy from SE England, we'd have watched every single episode and repeat from the very first moment – it'll be the closest we get to a biopic on Hallmark. Instead, it's not until the second series (which is brilliant) that we found out about it. Heaven knows how those awards people came across it.
Although BBC3 will no doubt be repeating the first series again approximately five times a day (seven times a day if it wins any more awards) once the second series finishes, we decided – as might you, gentle reader – to give that first series a go by buying it on DVD. If you are considering it, here's a handily timed reviewed to help you decide whether to spend your hard-earned money or not. Although it's only £8 on Amazon – bar-gain!
I started "Movies You Should Buy" (now called "Movies You Should Own" because I belatedly realise it rhymes with Alex Cox's old BBC2 film strand, Moviedrome) with The Satan Bug. Lovely "killer virus" movie that – probably the first.
But there was a bigger and better "killer virus" film to come, one that marked the end of many of the trends The Satan Bug seemed to start – or at least coincide with.
The title of this movie, which you should definitely own, is now used by virus researchers whenever they want to put a name to their worst nightmare: a virus that they can't cure but is utterly contagious and can kill anything in a frighteningly short space of time.
It's The Andromeda Strain and it's probably the best, clever-stupid "killer virus" movie ever made.
Here's the title sequence, complete with scary arse theme tune.
From the 17th March, Film4 are going to have a new range of budget DVD titles. The RRP is £6.99 and the films being released are:
The Yards
My Beautiful Launderette
She’s All That
Bostonians
Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel & Laurence
Raining Stones
Another Country
Maurice
Monsoon Wedding
Life is Sweet
Sexy Beast
Bread and Roses
Dogma
Buffalo Soldiers
My Name is Joe
Riff Raff
Heat and Dust
Europeans
Blue Juice
Gangster No. 1
I've just checked Amazon and they're listing them at £15.99 discounted to £11.99, so I'd advise buying them in shops while the initial discount campaign is running at least.
Anyway, since I'm very partial to Monica Potter, Rufus Sewell and Ray Winstone, and don't mind Tom Hollander (shame about Joseph Fiennes though), I ordered up a nice review copy of Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel & Laurence as a sample of the range.
We're having a bit of an Ace of Wands roundtable over at Half a Dozen Streets… Feel free to join in!
I would have reviewed the third series boxset when it came out but Action TV and TV Today have already had a go – not that I necessarily agreed with them, I was just a bit late coming to the party...
For those of you who aren't familiar with the theme tune and title sequence, here they are. Brilliant, aren't they?
Posted on November 27, 2007 at 14:17 | 2 comments |
When Battlestar Galactica first arrived on our TV screens, it was a surprise. It took a really bad old show that for some reason we all fondly remembered from our childhoods and turned it into a really good show that took military authenticity and married it with misery, dystopia and authentic human relationships.
Razor, an almost direct-to-DVD movie that aired on the SciFi channel over the weekend, is a distillation of the good and the bad of BSG. On the one hand, it's tense, well acted, gritty and has fantastic effects. On the other, it's more than a little bit pretentious, suffers from a few hackneyed plot strands and has yet more heavyweight mythology bundled on top.
Once a time, Babylon 5 was the bee's knees of sci-fi television. With a five-year arc full of surprises and effects entirely created using CGI for the first time, it was geared towards an adult audience from the outset. Even when Deep Space Nine upped its game, Babylon 5 still got the geek love.
Then things went wrong. Its five-year arc got compressed down to four years when it looked like the show wasn't going to be renewed. Then the show got renewed and a fifth year had to be grafted on. That season wasn't at all good and the love began to ebb away. The sequel show, Babylon 5: Crusade, got cancelled before the end of the first season and the follow-up pilot didn't even get commissioned for a series.
Ten years on, it's back as a straight-to-DVD movie, Voices in the Dark, which could be the first of many stories featuring the surviving members of the original cast. Can it recapture what it once had or has it finally had its day?
Read more on David Tennant on Derren Brown tonight