05/06/2005
There's bad news and good news...
Bad news: Richard Whiteley is having to take several months off Countdown
because of his pneumonia.
Good news: one of the guest presenters is apparently going to be Stephen
Fry. That's going to be unmissable.
For those of you unfamiliar with Countdown, it's possibly one of
the strangest long-running programmes on British TV. Wikipedia
has a decent article. It's one of those programmes that just shouldn't
work - it is run at a completely sedentary pace, by rights the games
should be mind-numbingly boring, most of the airtime is taken up by
Richard Whiteley's godawful puns, the prizes are legendarily poor and
there are Stannah Stairlift adverts in the commercial breaks. And yet it
does: it is one of the last survivors of the classic British game shows,
those where what counts is the competition rather than the prize money
(Countdown doesn't even have prize money), and it survives
because it just works. Everything from the bad jokes to Carol
Vorderman actually makes sense when put together - in a way they
wouldn't separately.
It does help that the game format is extremely simple, yet so hard to do
well - it allows everyone to join in, attempting to one-up each other,
and even the contestants on screen. And because it's so universal, even
the contestants are interesting; recently, an eight-year-old boy managed
to win two episodes, for example, even getting nine-letter words and the
Conundrum. It's fantastic that at least one old-style game show survives
to this day; I much prefer a game show which is actually about
intellectual challenge to something like the Weakest Link where
getting the questions right is actively discouraged, for example. And
it, University Challenge and Mastermind are the last
examples of their kind - shame, isn't it?
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Sin City - a non comics-reader's view
(Frank Miller will hate me for not calling it a graphic novel,
but...)
Sin City is unrelentingly grim, morally suspect at best,
profoundingly depressing and, to put it somewhat plainly, screwed up.
But since that's exactly what you would expect from the movie in the
first place, this isn't a criticism. It's basically an interconnected
anthology movie (similar in interconnections to something like Pulp
Fiction) relating three only slightly different storylines from the
seedy side of the tracks: one where Marv (Mickey Rourke) takes revenge
on the surprisingly large conspiracy that killed his prostitute
girlfriend, one where local boy Dwight (the surprisingly good Clive
Owen) gets into trouble when his girlfriend's somewhat dodgy ex-lover
'Jackie Boy' (Benicio del Toro) turns out to be much more of a problem
than anticipated, and one where vice cop John Hartigan (Bruce Willis) is
taken revenge on by a paedophile (Nick Stahl) that's too high in the
political food chain.
It does have a truly impressive visual style. Robert Rodriguez has taken
every effort to replicate the visual style of the "graphic novel", and
succeeds remarkably. Most attempts at CG-sets look horrible, and out of
place; the most obvious recent example being Sky Captain and the
World of Tomorrow, which uses the same techniques as Sin City but
doesn't have a good reason for using them, and hence just feels
disjointed and over-enthusiastic. For Sin City, a world told
pretty much entirely in black and white, the stylisation does
have a purpose and it works; you don't notice the unreality of the
CG-sets since the film works because it is unreal. It is thus a
remarkable triumph of style benefiting substance, where Sky
Captain was style over.
Certainly, it's a grim movie, but it is benefited by a truly enormous
amount of black humour; especially in the Marv section, which despite
being the most nasty of the three sections (and that's some achievement,
folks) also contains Marv's sardonic commentary, pumping out his
somewhat single-minded philosophy in the most well-constructed of terms:
e.g. before a back-alley beating, "I love hitmen. No matter what
you do to them, you don't feel bad." Sin City has the
ability to be funny in the most unexpected of places, and that saves the
movie from being as vile as it sounds from the descriptions; it really
is worth watching. So much in the movie has the opportunity to go wrong
- the near-permanent CGI, the use of HDTV cameras instead of film, Clive
Owen - but it doesn't, and that can only be put down to the strength of
the source material and the talents of Rodriguez and Miller. Really,
it's a must-see.
And Batman Begins comes out in two weeks - David Goyer's a good
writer and Christopher Nolan's a good director and together, they could
create a really good movie. And the trailer's decent too.
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23/06/2005
Reasons for BitTorrent #1...
I've just obtained another huge cache of I'm
Sorry I Haven't A Clue MP3s. Some kind souls have dubbed their
entire radio-tape collections into MP3 format going right back to
episode one, and posted them on the ukn*** torrent site; meaning that I
have hour after hour of Humph and co available at my disposal. And it's
really good to have, too - there's nothing better than having an instant
laugh available at a hit of the RANDOM key. Courtesy of the various
torrents, I'm not missing that many ISIHACs - and mostly early
ones, I'm complete from 1996 onwards - and 32kbit MP3, which most of
them are in, is still very listenable for speech radio.
Not much of this will ever be released on tape or CD - there's seven
whole days of it - and BBC7 won't repeat everything. So torrents like
these provide a sort of public service - preserving the programme's
memory. Besides, this form of sharing isn't new at all - tape traders
have been doing it since the invention of the cassette recorder, and the
Internet simply allows the rest of us to get in on the act. Plus there's Just
a Minute (right back to the very first episode) and Radio Active
and The Mary Whitehouse Experience and much much more unreleased
brilliant material out there, and that's not even counting the archive
TV... Some torrent sites are about more than porn and warez, you know,
and it's all the better for it.
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Beam me up, please...
entry posted by Inquisitor at 19:57
(permalink).
edited on: 23/06/2005 20:01.
categories: Funny
, Idiots
If you read one thing today, read this: <http://blogs.salon.com/0003522/2005/06/06.html#a576>.
It will blow your mind, as you wonder... What exactly is that
First Amendment thing anyway, and does it really apply anymore?
Kudos to the mother, though: that's exactly the right reaction to such a
truly silly situation.
[Oh yeah, via Boing
Boing and Pharyngula.]
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