Filmography
Jan. 8th, 2012 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyThe Mrs Bradley Mysteries
These have a slightly more mature Diana Rigg! Being awesome! And solving crime! And doing psychoanalysis! She is brilliant, and her chauffeur George ('poor George', as we kept on saying as the series progressed) does an excellent job of helping her and of getting into scrapes from which he has to be extricated.
Brilliant telly, fabulous script, some interesting whodunnits (although a bit prone to the 'the murderer is the most unlikely person in the program' trope), great costumes, and - well. Excellent fun and highly recommended.
Doctor Who: Genesis of the Daleks
The One Where Tom Baker Meets Davros. Unashamedly evokes a Nazi-style aesthetic and asks the predictable questions about how people can shut their eyes to and participate in great evil, but in a creepy sci-fi sort of way. A little long, perhaps, but not in a detrimental way to the story as a whole. Honestly, this much be such a classic to die-hard Whovians that I'm not even going to try to offer any critique, but as a classic, it's jolly good stuff.
Doctor Who: Remembrance of the Daleks
The One Where Sylvester McCoy Tricks Davros And Blows Things Up. We've not watched much of the McCoy Doctor, for no particularly good reasons, so it was good to see a bit more of him and Ace in one of the stories that works. The Daleks were good value, and so were the humans. It was generally pleasing and full of interesting explosions and effects, and a bit of Dalek (and human) politics to keep things moving. Again, good stuff.
Bram Stoker's Dracula
I'd got half-way through watching this with G in the States, and hadn't actually finished it, which was my mission this time. It's a visually lush film with some fine acting, and some very explicit marking of vampire-anxiety as female-sexual-agency-anxiety - in fact, the production basically goes 'actually, vampires are all about SEX' and runs with it. There are some great visual sequences - Lucy being turned into a full vampire intercut with Mina and Jonathan Harker's wedding was particularly powerful - and the costumes are generally brilliant. Some of the script is a little artifical, in particular one or two of the lines given to Anthony Hopkins' van Helsing, but the general artifice is so daft that it doesn't matter too much. Gary Oldman gets special mention for the multifaceted Dracula, who is generally good at any age.
My one slight disappointment would be the film's choice to make the end of the novel far less ambiguous than the text. There's sort of a full stop at the end of the novel that leaves things up in the air, and here they tie off the plot far more neatly. That said, this is still the most faithful adaptation of the novel that I have seen, and a very enjoyable film to boot.
These have a slightly more mature Diana Rigg! Being awesome! And solving crime! And doing psychoanalysis! She is brilliant, and her chauffeur George ('poor George', as we kept on saying as the series progressed) does an excellent job of helping her and of getting into scrapes from which he has to be extricated.
Brilliant telly, fabulous script, some interesting whodunnits (although a bit prone to the 'the murderer is the most unlikely person in the program' trope), great costumes, and - well. Excellent fun and highly recommended.
Doctor Who: Genesis of the Daleks
The One Where Tom Baker Meets Davros. Unashamedly evokes a Nazi-style aesthetic and asks the predictable questions about how people can shut their eyes to and participate in great evil, but in a creepy sci-fi sort of way. A little long, perhaps, but not in a detrimental way to the story as a whole. Honestly, this much be such a classic to die-hard Whovians that I'm not even going to try to offer any critique, but as a classic, it's jolly good stuff.
Doctor Who: Remembrance of the Daleks
The One Where Sylvester McCoy Tricks Davros And Blows Things Up. We've not watched much of the McCoy Doctor, for no particularly good reasons, so it was good to see a bit more of him and Ace in one of the stories that works. The Daleks were good value, and so were the humans. It was generally pleasing and full of interesting explosions and effects, and a bit of Dalek (and human) politics to keep things moving. Again, good stuff.
Bram Stoker's Dracula
I'd got half-way through watching this with G in the States, and hadn't actually finished it, which was my mission this time. It's a visually lush film with some fine acting, and some very explicit marking of vampire-anxiety as female-sexual-agency-anxiety - in fact, the production basically goes 'actually, vampires are all about SEX' and runs with it. There are some great visual sequences - Lucy being turned into a full vampire intercut with Mina and Jonathan Harker's wedding was particularly powerful - and the costumes are generally brilliant. Some of the script is a little artifical, in particular one or two of the lines given to Anthony Hopkins' van Helsing, but the general artifice is so daft that it doesn't matter too much. Gary Oldman gets special mention for the multifaceted Dracula, who is generally good at any age.
My one slight disappointment would be the film's choice to make the end of the novel far less ambiguous than the text. There's sort of a full stop at the end of the novel that leaves things up in the air, and here they tie off the plot far more neatly. That said, this is still the most faithful adaptation of the novel that I have seen, and a very enjoyable film to boot.
