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James

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Posts posted by James

  1. Yes, I meant to commend the shift back to a more episodic format, though I suspect that sex dungeon vamp and the fight club lot will be back before the season's out. Hopefully in the same episode because the contrast in personalities would be entertaining.

     

    Actually, there's another thing that's pleased me a bit about this series: we're finally seeing more variety in our vamps now they're not all moving exclusively in Herrick's circle. I still loathe the lot of them, but the shades of black are appreciated.

  2. Right, caught up with the main series (if not the webisodes) and am pleased at the directions the latest two episodes have taken. The lighter tone is appreciated, as is the fact that they're not letting Mitchell off hook for the Box Tunnel 20 thing. His admission in purgatory that he's a 'disease' and the remarks that the creepy sex dungeon vamp made about him being weak both mirror what I actually think about him, so I guess I was responding in exactly the way the writers anticipated.

     

    'Werewolf shaped bullet' was a good line but it's being overused a bit now. And given that Herrick came back at the end of the last series they've given a great big 'out' for any death that Mitchell might experience.

     

    Other things... the depiction of purgatory was disappointingly mundane given the much creepier hints about the afterlife given in previous episodes. However, I hold out hope that this was a defence mechanism - a trick, basically - to stop Mitchell from learning the full truth about the afterlife; get him riled up by forcing him to confront his own monstrous nature and he won't think too hard about where the fellas with the sticks and rope have gone. And since he's apparently going to kark it at some point soon I imagine that we'll return to the afterlife and get a better glimpse of something weirder and scarier.

     

    Liked werewolf fight club even if it was nicked off Torchwood (which nicked it off Angel, which nicked it off... etc). The addition of other werewolves and the shift to Wales was the fresh blood - so to speak - that the series needed. Shame the fight club was being run by vamps (even if their leader was Dennis Pennis cosplaying as Spike from Buffy) as I'm a bit sick of them by now. Still, you can't have everything.

     

    Also liked the slightly hopeful end to 'Adam's Family'. The first example we've been given that vamps can be anything other than monstrous, murderous scum. Obviously Mitchell's recent history kind of adds an element of uncertainty, but Nina and George don't know that. Also, the guy playing Adam delivered his 'fuck you' goodbye to the orgy vamps brilliantly.

     

    Nina's managed to eclipse Annie as my favourite character. Annie's more adorable, obviously, but Nina gets all the best lines. I still crack up when I think of her remark from last season: 'Stop worrying about Mitchell, George. He's a 119-year-old mass murderer, not your fucking gerbil.'

  3. Hathaway's a good actress. And yeah, she's beautiful - though she looks kind of like someone's Photoshopped her face to make everything just slightly too big.

    Y'see, I think that's one of the things that makes her so beautiful. But I'm odd like that.

     

    Oh yeah, I agree absolutely.

  4. Yeah. It allows for the Batman/sidekick dynamic without including Robin (since Nolan's down on the idea of including The Boy Wonder). It also follows on thematically with Wayne becoming more and more entrenched in his role as Batman. Without Maggie Gylenhaal's lawyer in the picture there's little to keep Bruce Wayne out of the darkness.

     

    Hathaway's a good actress. And yeah, she's beautiful - though she looks kind of like someone's Photoshopped her face to make everything just slightly too big.

     

    I'm wondering whether Nolan's quietly planning a Dark Knight Returns film for a few years hence. Gets around having another actor doing The Joker, too, because everyone would have to be in their 60s.

  5. Congrats, James. Hope this doesn't mean you'll be MIA again.

     

    I'll certainly make the effort to stay in touch this time around. I went without an internet connection for four months when I first went to Dubai and that's what did for me. I'll know better this time around.

     

    Also: what the devil is your avatar from?

  6. Also, I'm taking a class on Ulysses this semester, and my book came in the mail. It is two and a half inches thick with no footnotes, endnotes, anything. We'll see how this goes.

     

    It's been 10 years since I read Ulysses but I feel confident in saying that it's a fantastic book and much less baffling and pretentious than you'd expect. Just don't read Finnegans Wake. That motherfucker has destroyed people.

  7. Fuck this 'London' for a game of soldiers - I'm becoming deputy editor of Time Out Beijing in March 2011!

     

    The trouble with a job in China

     

    (pause for effect)

     

    is that you want another one half an hour later.

     

    I think you're the one who deserves congratulations after a joke like that!

     

    Red - Thanks. They reckon I'll only need 'restaurant Chinese', which is basically enough to get by with. There are Chinese-speaking members of staff who'll deal with non-English-speaking interviewees and the like.

     

    Mark - It's an indefinite contract. I reckon I'll give it a year, then see how I feel. But riding out this recession in China seems like a good idea right now...

  8. But it's an approach which seems fundamentally incompatible with the sort of detail-oriented narrative arc he was simultaneously trying to introduce

    It's also fundamentally incompatible with the well-meaning but flawed writers that the BBC seems to hire these days.

  9. Absolutely, although with 'The Big Bang' and this story coming right on the back of each other, I'd question the wisdom of placing such heavy emphasis to the use of localised time travel in such a way which rather begs exactly that sort of question

     

    I honestly think you're the only person I've met (or seen on ver webs) who's been remotely bothered by this aspect of Moffat's writing. And I can sort of see your point, but 'Why doesn't The Doctor just use the TARDIS' is a question hanging over almost every episode and in any case the timey-wimey babble and 'some things are just fixed' are vague enough to apply to most situations. I don't think that using time travel in this way makes them any more pressing, really.

     

    Actually, I have to say that I quite like the way that Moffat finds new ways to mess about with time travel within the Who universe. Given that the possibilities were hardly explored in 40-odd years of TV writing, it feels long overdue.

     

    (stuff like the two-minute space Spitfires in 'Victory of the Daleks', or the instantaneous surveillance network in 'The Hungry Earth')

     

    Nah, that was just shit writing.

  10. As for your final sentence, I couldn't agree more - it's not the first time I've been slightly at odds with Moffat's take on who the Doctor is and what he stands for, but it's probably the most glaring. At least when Sylvester McCoy callously manipulated people around him and twisted the timelines for his own purposes, it was clearly supposed to be a bit creepy and morally ambiguous. I really hope that Moffat has some sort of idea where he's going with that bit, because if it was just an unintended consequence of borrowing the plot from a Seventh Doctor story without rewriting the Doctor's motivations, I'll be very disappointed.

     

    Hurm. I'd put it down to an act of desperation in a very limited timeframe, to be honest. Needs must when the devil drives your spaceship into a planet. Besides, it was made quite clear in dialogue that his list of priorities was 4,004 people long and that Gambon was right at the bottom - enough to put the question of 'Is The Doctor doing a bad thing?' in people's heads but not so much that it overpowers what is basically a cheerful, if slightly melancholic, Christmas episode.

     

    (There's the whole 'Why doesn't he just go back and fix the ship before it takes off' question, but if you're seriously entertaining that then you're watching the wrong show.)

  11. I pretty much agree with Mark's earlier comments, but in a far more positive tone of voice (it's odd - with Moffat we seem to agree that the glass is half full, it's just the wording that seems to differ). First half-hour was absolutely excellent; shark ride through the sky was bollocks ('So the shark's friendly now?' - if your sozzled, half-asleep uncle can ask questions like that then something's gone wrong) and the last half, despite some really good gags and scenes, seemed to be in a bit of a hurry to get everything wrapped up.

     

    Jenkins' beatific love interest was wafer thin but I suppose she served the story well enough (and if we're talking misogyny then nobody has yet trumped the ending of Love & Monsters). 'Woman singing makes the tumultuous storm go away to Gambon can let people in' worked okay as a metaphor but it's one of the least satisfying Ridiculous Who Conclusions we've had in a while.

     

    Would've been nice if there'd even been a line saying Gambon was going to free all the frozen folk. The Doctor walking out with a bunch of peasants still lying around in deep freeze seemed a bit off. I suppose we can assume that his last-minute conversion to the side of good will mean everybody comes out of the deep freeze on boxing day.

     

    As Mark said, it's not as good as Christmas Invasion (though the satsuma bit still pisses me off) or Runaway Bride; definitely prefer it to the maudlin David Morrissey vs the Cyber Mecha story though; and it's light years ahead of Voyage of the Damned. But we all know that.

     

    Trailer for next series looks amazing. Where the hell did they get the budget? I'm assuming that all the episodes not set to the backdrop of sweeping American vistas will cost about 50p and be shot in Moffat's house...

  12. Doing swell, thanks. Just finished C2. If they make this.. and of course that's a big "if", it could very very cool.. even for the ones here that didn't much care for the first. This one's more my baby so I'm a pretty proud pappa at this minute. Then again, it hasn't gone through the grismill yet... Always remember, wat you see up on screen isn't always what was intended.

     

    Have a happy holiday and drink down a pint for ol' Johnny... He may be coming back....

     

    Frank, why don't you direct it? You'd do a whole helluva lot better than douchie-mcforeskin who directed the first one. Plus, you have some skins on the wall that douchie didn't have and still does not have.

     

    I'm obviously missing something - everything - here. I take it that TearsInRain is Frank, that Frank is in the movies in some capacity? But being terribly uncool don't know who he is or what he does in movies.

     

    If Frank can do a good C2 movie I'm his fan/chum for life though.

     

    TearsInRain is Frank Capello, who wrote Constantine (though it was rewritten by Akiva Goldsman and others). He also wrote He was a Quiet Man, which I haven't seen but have heard good things about through other people.

  13. This post will definitely be a disappointment after that, but never mind: someone's made a very funny spoof fanzine that's completely free to read. You probably need to know a bit about Who fandom to fully appreciate it (though i liked it even though I'm hardly one of the hardcore).

     

    Give it a go.

     

    POTMM.jpg

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