Filmography
Mar. 14th, 2010 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyDoctor Who: The Seeds of Death
This is the first Second Doctor, Patrick Troughton, that we've watched; the companions are Zoe (Wendy Padbury) and Jamie (Frazer Hines). The plot is fairly straightforward, and brings back the Ice Warriors from Mars, with whom the Doctor and Jamie have apparently had previous dealings. The Ice Warriors are trying to kill off all life on earth through the use of an oxygen-devouring fungus, which they have got onto earth by taking over the Moon Control of T-MAT, a transportation system thingie used to move food and other supplies around the earth. The first sign that things have gone wrong is when the central ground control can't get in touch with Moon Base; thankfully, the Doctor happens to be around and thus helps concoct a plan to get up to the moon via a pet rocket kept by a charmingly eccentric scientist who held grimly on to the 'old technology' when T-MAT came into favour. Said old professor, played by Philip Ray, is terribly good.
Anyway, the Doctor of course manages to work out what's going on, find out how to destroy the fungus, work out how to repair the weather center destroyed by the Ice Warriors to make it rain (as water destroys said fungus), and then send up a fake signal to send the Ice Warrior invasion fleet off-course and into the sun. The earth is saved again, hurrah.
I was really quite taken with this, not least because the head T-MAT technician, Miss Kelly (Louise Pajo), is - well, a Miss. It's made perfectly clear that she's the only person who really can fix the technical end and the only person with a real grasp of how T-MAT works. Yes, this probably speaks to bad management technique, but at the same time, it's a woman who is in full control of the technology here, and gets respected for that. She's not allowed to go on various missions, but it's couched in terms of 'because we need you here to run tech', and she does eventually use said tech to get to Moon Base and thus be threatened by Ice Warriors. It was just quite nice to see a competent and intelligent woman being such a key part of the plot, and being given the appropriate respect for her grasp of the technology.
In more general terms, gosh, Patrick Troughton is a wee bit camp, and clearly enjoys himself an awful lot. The plot was also quite tight, and kept up a good pace. Four stars.
Hot Fuzz
I'd heard quite a lot of about this, but never actually got around to watching it. It's very much a film of two halves, and I have to say that (because I am a delicate soul) the degree of violence in the second half did come as a wee bit of a shock. This is probably because I don't tend to watch things that have this casual, cartoonish blood/gore/spurting stuff in it as a rule, or if I do, it's normally set back in the Roman period and thus is represented a wee bit differently. I don't like blood and gore and drippy bits. That said, this did at least have the decency not to dwell on those bits too much, and focused far more on characters and dialogue and plot than on random gruesome and slightly peculiar murders. There were, however, a couple of gun-fight scenes that wouldn't have suffered from a wee bit of cutting to keep the pace going, but I suppose when there's a bit of a deliberate homage to something like Bad Boys II going on, you don't have that much of a choice.
Anyway! The plot, for those of you who haven't seen it, is centered around a Top London Police Officer who lives the job, but is showing the rest of the Met up; he is thus deployed to a small rural village where nothing ever happens. Oh, except a strangely high number of freak accidents. Hmmm. It turns out that the Neighbourhood Watch Association is a bit more... proactive than most about keeping the place the most Beautiful Village in Britain, and, of course, it's down to our hero and his chubby rural sidekick to take them down.
The thing is, that besides all the gore, in some ways this is the ancestor of the witty 1940s/1950s films that I grew up on. There are a lot of verbal and visual jokes, a lot of clever banter, and some really fun stereotype-exploding. (Not literally. Although there is one explosion.) An escaped swan, for instance, forms a vital plot element in a very inventive and thoroughly British way. The pace is good, the characters are excellent, and the dialogue isn't bad. However, not being a great aficionado of the gore-flick or the shoot-'em-up, I suspect that some of the allusive joys were lost on me. But it was good fun for a Friday night silly film.
It was very silly. Simon Pegg, as the chief protagonist, was very good; Jim Broadbent turned in a stunning performance; Bill Nighy was criminally underused; Steve Coogan was perfectly used (give the man a decent cameo and don't let him take over the film); and Timothy Dalton presented a wonderful supermarket boss with a eeeeeevil moustache. The sort-of-kind-of romantic element between Pegg and his rural sidekick were also handled very well - it managed to hint at the kind of homo-erotic connection that the male-buddy-shoot-'em-up tends to foster without going too far with it. Which was quite something. However, see first paragraph about me and gore and gunfights, for which we're in four stars.
Doctor Who: Pyramids of Mars
A Tom Baker and Sarah Jane adventure, my first Sarah Jane, would you believe (excepting New Who, of course). G commented that this was a bit von Däniken, and I see where he was coming from! The essentialy plot is that the Egyptian god Sutekh is actually an incredibly powerful alien trapped in a tomb by his brother, Horus; he has taken over the body of a British archaeologist, and is trying to build a missile to break the signal holding him in captivity, unleashing a rule of violence and death upon the earth. Obviously, the Doctor is not keen on this option, and manages to stop him - although it does take a while and looks a bit close at the end, as you'd expect.
So, what to say about this? First, Sarah Jane is jolly plucky, isn't she? She's also a crack shot and fairly good at not being a wimp, so I think I like her so far. Second, the production team obviously did a jolly good job of 'suggesting' Egypt without having to leave England - lots of big We're In Egypt props without ever actually having an outdoor shot that wasn't on a UK estate somewhere. I have to say I was expecting to be a bit more Egypt-based, but there we are, that's just me being literal about the title.
The actor who played Sutekh clearly had far too much fun in the final episode, when he was overpowering the Doctor and it all got a bit kinky. 'Toy of Sutekh' shouldn't be said in that tone of voice before the watershed. There were also some good performances turned in by the possessed archaeologist and his brother, although the Victorian family dynamics exploration (resulting in the brother's death) really was quite tragic.
A good, solid four stars here; a fun episode with some nice acting, but never really tried doing anything very exciting or out of the way. I don't know if I'm becoming a bit of a purist about this, but I'm starting to wonder what I want to see in a Who episode that pushes it beyond four stars; possibly a bit more aporia? Slightly sharper writing? Hmmm.
This is the first Second Doctor, Patrick Troughton, that we've watched; the companions are Zoe (Wendy Padbury) and Jamie (Frazer Hines). The plot is fairly straightforward, and brings back the Ice Warriors from Mars, with whom the Doctor and Jamie have apparently had previous dealings. The Ice Warriors are trying to kill off all life on earth through the use of an oxygen-devouring fungus, which they have got onto earth by taking over the Moon Control of T-MAT, a transportation system thingie used to move food and other supplies around the earth. The first sign that things have gone wrong is when the central ground control can't get in touch with Moon Base; thankfully, the Doctor happens to be around and thus helps concoct a plan to get up to the moon via a pet rocket kept by a charmingly eccentric scientist who held grimly on to the 'old technology' when T-MAT came into favour. Said old professor, played by Philip Ray, is terribly good.
Anyway, the Doctor of course manages to work out what's going on, find out how to destroy the fungus, work out how to repair the weather center destroyed by the Ice Warriors to make it rain (as water destroys said fungus), and then send up a fake signal to send the Ice Warrior invasion fleet off-course and into the sun. The earth is saved again, hurrah.
I was really quite taken with this, not least because the head T-MAT technician, Miss Kelly (Louise Pajo), is - well, a Miss. It's made perfectly clear that she's the only person who really can fix the technical end and the only person with a real grasp of how T-MAT works. Yes, this probably speaks to bad management technique, but at the same time, it's a woman who is in full control of the technology here, and gets respected for that. She's not allowed to go on various missions, but it's couched in terms of 'because we need you here to run tech', and she does eventually use said tech to get to Moon Base and thus be threatened by Ice Warriors. It was just quite nice to see a competent and intelligent woman being such a key part of the plot, and being given the appropriate respect for her grasp of the technology.
In more general terms, gosh, Patrick Troughton is a wee bit camp, and clearly enjoys himself an awful lot. The plot was also quite tight, and kept up a good pace. Four stars.
Hot Fuzz
I'd heard quite a lot of about this, but never actually got around to watching it. It's very much a film of two halves, and I have to say that (because I am a delicate soul) the degree of violence in the second half did come as a wee bit of a shock. This is probably because I don't tend to watch things that have this casual, cartoonish blood/gore/spurting stuff in it as a rule, or if I do, it's normally set back in the Roman period and thus is represented a wee bit differently. I don't like blood and gore and drippy bits. That said, this did at least have the decency not to dwell on those bits too much, and focused far more on characters and dialogue and plot than on random gruesome and slightly peculiar murders. There were, however, a couple of gun-fight scenes that wouldn't have suffered from a wee bit of cutting to keep the pace going, but I suppose when there's a bit of a deliberate homage to something like Bad Boys II going on, you don't have that much of a choice.
Anyway! The plot, for those of you who haven't seen it, is centered around a Top London Police Officer who lives the job, but is showing the rest of the Met up; he is thus deployed to a small rural village where nothing ever happens. Oh, except a strangely high number of freak accidents. Hmmm. It turns out that the Neighbourhood Watch Association is a bit more... proactive than most about keeping the place the most Beautiful Village in Britain, and, of course, it's down to our hero and his chubby rural sidekick to take them down.
The thing is, that besides all the gore, in some ways this is the ancestor of the witty 1940s/1950s films that I grew up on. There are a lot of verbal and visual jokes, a lot of clever banter, and some really fun stereotype-exploding. (Not literally. Although there is one explosion.) An escaped swan, for instance, forms a vital plot element in a very inventive and thoroughly British way. The pace is good, the characters are excellent, and the dialogue isn't bad. However, not being a great aficionado of the gore-flick or the shoot-'em-up, I suspect that some of the allusive joys were lost on me. But it was good fun for a Friday night silly film.
It was very silly. Simon Pegg, as the chief protagonist, was very good; Jim Broadbent turned in a stunning performance; Bill Nighy was criminally underused; Steve Coogan was perfectly used (give the man a decent cameo and don't let him take over the film); and Timothy Dalton presented a wonderful supermarket boss with a eeeeeevil moustache. The sort-of-kind-of romantic element between Pegg and his rural sidekick were also handled very well - it managed to hint at the kind of homo-erotic connection that the male-buddy-shoot-'em-up tends to foster without going too far with it. Which was quite something. However, see first paragraph about me and gore and gunfights, for which we're in four stars.
Doctor Who: Pyramids of Mars
A Tom Baker and Sarah Jane adventure, my first Sarah Jane, would you believe (excepting New Who, of course). G commented that this was a bit von Däniken, and I see where he was coming from! The essentialy plot is that the Egyptian god Sutekh is actually an incredibly powerful alien trapped in a tomb by his brother, Horus; he has taken over the body of a British archaeologist, and is trying to build a missile to break the signal holding him in captivity, unleashing a rule of violence and death upon the earth. Obviously, the Doctor is not keen on this option, and manages to stop him - although it does take a while and looks a bit close at the end, as you'd expect.
So, what to say about this? First, Sarah Jane is jolly plucky, isn't she? She's also a crack shot and fairly good at not being a wimp, so I think I like her so far. Second, the production team obviously did a jolly good job of 'suggesting' Egypt without having to leave England - lots of big We're In Egypt props without ever actually having an outdoor shot that wasn't on a UK estate somewhere. I have to say I was expecting to be a bit more Egypt-based, but there we are, that's just me being literal about the title.
The actor who played Sutekh clearly had far too much fun in the final episode, when he was overpowering the Doctor and it all got a bit kinky. 'Toy of Sutekh' shouldn't be said in that tone of voice before the watershed. There were also some good performances turned in by the possessed archaeologist and his brother, although the Victorian family dynamics exploration (resulting in the brother's death) really was quite tragic.
A good, solid four stars here; a fun episode with some nice acting, but never really tried doing anything very exciting or out of the way. I don't know if I'm becoming a bit of a purist about this, but I'm starting to wonder what I want to see in a Who episode that pushes it beyond four stars; possibly a bit more aporia? Slightly sharper writing? Hmmm.
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Date: 2010-03-14 10:02 pm (UTC)