the birds have less to say for themselves

It's all good. Book re-read (in two days. Epic.). Tickets booked, with appropriately detailed discussion about where to sit for best view. 
Reviews are... all pretty good.

So. Thursday is HUNGER GAMES DAY :o)

Ahem.

In terms of Stuff I Am Excited About, this is pretty much up there.  Then comes the Snow White and The Huntsman trailer that released last night - with the crows! and the Chris! and I'm ignoring the fact that there were, like, fairies and shit, because there was also lots of hacking with swords. And did I mention Chris?!

Although I had a lovely and rather civilised NYE being fed a delicious seven course meal and nice booze aplenty, it was really all a lead-up to being able to watch A Scandal in Belgravia again tonight.  With subtitles, so as not to miss a delicious word of dialogue this time around...

I really am itching to watch it for a third time, but I'm trying to be good and not overindulge all at once... but, oh, it was still all rather splendid.  I'm so happy it's all as good as I remembered :o)

( insanely spoilery for Sherlock 2x01 and a little bit for Game of Shadows... )

Somehow I always expect to love the Who xmas specials far more than I actually do... the combination of Moffatt trying to write xmas in the middle of summer (after a typically brainmelting season finale), plus catering for all the casual viewers that inevitably drop in, ends up leading to something that's oddly neither fish nor fowl. And hey, RTD very rarely pulled it off either (I'd say The Christmas Invasion worked as a classic ep, but that's about it...).

 

So, this year's effort: not... great.  There were some lovely one-liners, the pimped up rooms were inspired, Claire Skinner did sterling work with some truly daft dialogue/plotting, kids managing not to be annoying, and the last freaking two minutes were an epically gorgous case of Moffatt writing his own fics yet again.... but mostly before that, the plot was flailing madly and falling into deep dark pits of cliche that I couldn't quite find enough xmas spirit to overlook. Shame :o(

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( slightly spoilery )

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How much do I love MI:4? Well, I seem to have seen it twice in a week so far, and today's rewatch was quite possibly the reward I'd been promising myself for surviving an insanely family-intensive Christmas.  I could quite happily watch it again but there's kinda The Artist (and possibly Puss in Boots) to catch first, just to be reasonable.  (I do appear to be watching Knight & Day on dvd at the mo, though, as apparently my brain is craving breezy Tom Cruise action flicks right now.).  I blame Brad Bird.

( massive spoilery ramblings for MI:4... )

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Because, honestly, announcing that the Ponds are exiting next year isn't exactly news news as such - they've suffered enough, surely, and had practically left to some extent before TWORS so Eleven did just spend 200 years without them - it's just announcing that it's going to be 'heartbreaking' that's kind of... uncalled for. 

It's not like any of the companions of NewWho have left to wander off to a nice cosy life sans Doctor (does Martha count? I had given up watching in disgust at the end of season 3 so still not entirely sure, but it got wrapped up quite nicely later by the end of season 4, no?) but I don't really want it confirmed at this point that Amy and/or Rory are going to be killed off AGAIN.  Seriously, you've destroyed Amy's life several times over, locked her in a giant box for 2 millenia, killed her husband off multiple times after making him hang around keeping guard for the aforementioned 2000 years, kidnapped her, replaced her with a doppelganger that promptly got melted, had her child kidnapped (and never really returned as such), made an alternate version of her spend 30 years alone on a creepy planet getting all bitter and twisted, and then made them have to choose who got saved (and then get promptly cheated out of the choice).  And I'm sure I've missed stuff off that list.  Really, Moffatt, what more can you do to the poor Ponds??!!

Oh god.  I shouldn't have even asked that, should I... 
(I'm just hanging onto the forlorn hope that it doesn't mean anything more horrible happens to River, as that's quite heartrending enough after watching the DVD extra scenes...)

On the plus side, likely more River so yay! Although it would be hard getting rid of the Ponds permanently without involving her in some way, surely?

(There was much squeeing from 2 of us in my office this week, as The Only Other Who Fan Around Here had Alex Kingston walk right past him at Waterloo Station a couple of days ago ("It was the hair! The hair!!"), and has been going on about not having stopped her to take a pic ever since...)

There was much silent squeeing at the BFI last week, as the inevitable happened while I was standing waiting in the corridor before the screening and Steven Moffatt walked right past me.  Well, obviously he was going to be there, and it's not totally unheard of for guests to wander about the halls there, but still.  There was a terribly pathetic attempt at staying cool at first, which inevitably descended into hysterical giggling out of sight behind a convenient pillar and much 'omgdidyoujustseethat'.  Oh what the hell, if you can't descend into hysterical fangirling at a Sherlock preview surrounded by most of the cast and crew, than I don't know when you can (Oh, alright, SDCC probably. And maybe BigScreen.).

After we, along with a couple of other people, managed to sit in the wrong row (hey, the row markings in NFT1 are hideously confusing, no matter how many bloody times I've been there!) and had to scramble back over the seats in a terribly ungainly fashion just before the show kicked off, we then had the insane excitement of Benedict Cumberbatch very nearly sitting in our bit of the row... alright, so the VIPs were sitting in the middle section of row G, well away from the irritating giggly fans (ie, us), and someone mistakenly directed poor Mr C to our end section instead. He nearly sat down, and then got rescued, so not really much of an occurance at all, except it was so very, very difficult to keep a straight face when there's been about 6 weeks of total hype for the damn preview and there was a pleasant amount of infectious buzz in the air.  Oh well, at least I wasn't the only one who ended up slunk down in her seat trying to cackle out of sight of all the VIPs sat across the aisle as he departed...

It's actually hideously difficult trying to write anything about 'A Scandal In Belgravia' at all, bearing in mind that you really really really can't be the idiot that spoils everything.   It was fabulous, of course, but then I've always loved the original story best out of the entirety of Holmes and in my current state of River fangirling, I was intrigued to see what Moffatt did with Irene Adler...  As it is, I really want to write a whole meta thing about who inspired what and how it all feeds back into each other, and obviously it's all off limits at the moment.  I will say the characters hit a lot of the same beats if you're looking for it, and that made me very happy.  Sherlock is the show that gets to have the darker, more adult tone (yay!) so hell, yes, it goes darker places with less overt sentiment, perhaps.  It was insanely funny, wonderfully twisted and, arch as she is, this Irene could break your heart.  Lots of things about this ep could, but that was what surprised me most.

Actually, sod it, I sat through Immortals mostly going "ooooohhh, pretty."  I was entertained.  At no point did I start nodding off (which has been happening recently in anything remotely boring, thank you Tintin and, bizarrely, Troll Hunter).

I will say, expectations were pretty damn low.  This was averaging, oooh, one star in a lot of the reviews I'd read.  But it was Tarsem. Doing something approaching a 300 redux.  And it was absolutely batshit crazy cracked up fun, but it still managed to be approximately 70% less silly than *shudder* Clash of the Titans.

This is because: 
1. Tarsem.  Who probably can't direct his way out of paper bag story-wise, but my god the man has an eye for... well, anything baroque or ridiculously gorgeous (the random oil soaking! Bonkers genius!).  The screen practically glowed dammit.  Visually it was utterly stunning; the 3D worked subtly and nicely even on the tiny west end Odeon screen and I will happily watch it again at some point just to see all the heads exploding in slo-mo.  Hell, all the everything exploding in slo-mo.  There was rather a lot of that.

2. Henry Cavill.  Yeah, I will believe the dude can be Superman.  Hell, I'd believe he can do just about anything, because he carried this entire freaking film single-handedly despite atrocious dialogue and minimal help from the script, and he was just lovely.  f ( vaguely spoilery )

Y'know, I'm sure there's a reason, somewhere deep down, why I'm still watching the banal parsimonious fluff that is Terra Nova.  I just... can't for the life of me think what it is.

And I'm totally getting why Kelly Marcel took the money for a co-creator credit and ran as fast as she could.  It's shockingly brainless, trite and for a SF show, a tragically amateur approach to the actual laws of science.  I've seen the vast majority of the cast in other, better, shows, and frankly I just spend most of the episodes embarrassed for them.  The rest of the time I just want the dinosaurs to eat them.

Most irritatingly of all is the fact that it makes life in what is basically a frontier colony so insanely cosy. The fishing scene in tonight's ep had me fastforwarding, and the scene at the end with the apple orchard just defied all known tenets of biology last time I looked (beetles eat mould off apples, and the previously mouldy apples are miraculously perfect again afterwards?).  Last week we had a full three minutes of Jason O'Mara singing a stupid song about spiders. It's not cute or funny, it's just absurd.  I think I keep watching for some lingering loyalty that the previously fabulous Shelley Conn got the lead in a major network show, but also that it shows so little sign of life that I keep expecting it to be cancelled any day now and I may as well see how it ends.  Hmmm.. may have to rethink that plan.

Seeing as how the season 6 boxset won't be arriving for another couple weeks, and Sky now have season 1 on the Anytime menu, I had a yen to rewatch the first couple of eps for once... 
I probably wasn't concentrating so much when I watched Rose the other day, but it was still as cute and quirky as I remembered from way back when (ended up watching it in a hostel in Norfolk at Easter the first time around, on a very fuzzy tv, and it was such a nice surprise at how awesome it was.)

Tonight was The End of the World (and, let's be honest, new Who destroys the world at least once a series as a rule.. they eventually had to upgrade to destroying the universe a couple of times now, just to up the ante a bit, let's face it).  And I'd forgotten quite how impressive it was, especially considering how early on it is, with hardly any of the later canon established.  There are some lovely one-liners, Zoe Wanamaker shamelessly stealing the show as the voice of a CGI strip of skin - and bizarrely, Tainted Love and Britney's Toxic making an appearance on a jukebox (hey, Toxic as a soundtrack improves almost anything, it's true..).  Also the trees! 
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And.. now I have much-sought-after tickets for the Sherlock preview next month, which started off as a whole 'will Moffatt show up?!' (we only got Mark Gatiss at Big Screen, after all) and then descended into a OMG THE BFI ARE EVIL from lots of other people who didn't get tickets after the date was changed by the BBC.  I can totally see how you could miss out on the tickets, after all that - they took the online booking offline just as it was about to open, the phone lines immediately got blocked with frantic phone calls (I know, as I was hitting redial constantly for 35 minutes and couldn't even get through to the queue), and in the end I decided it was quiet at work and I was 2 tube stops away from the box office so trotted off down there.  Looks like I made the reservation list just in time, 35 mins after it theoretically opened - and I got through to the phone queue just as I walked into the box office, lol! 

Eesh, it's been such an odd week.  And showing no signs of getting less odd, unfortunately...

Last night I kinda reluctantly went to see Contagion (it's hard to say no when I just had The LFF Splurge), and it was... more than a little meh, really.  I think I read Steven Soderbergh had about a gazillion edits ranging from 3 hours to, er, half that - and went with the slimmed down version.  

Erm, yep, you can tell.  Want to see a whole bunch of Oscar winners faff about momentarily before disappearing without explanation? Then you should totally catch Contagion. Or.. not, obviously.  

I mostly didn't want to see it because it looked fairly po-faced and depressing, and while it does like to pile on the close ups of icky dead faces , it's weirdly just po-faced and pretty shallow.  .  ( slightly spoilery )

Apparently I didn't take into account quite how brainmelting it would be trying to do LFF the way I have this year. *note to self for next year: TAKE MORE TIME OFF WORK...!*

My brain is still kinda off running around the plains of Armenia/a spooky Cumbrian boarding school circa 1921, and yet there are, like, patients to deal with and letters to be typed. Obviously I may as well start with the interesting stuff (so, completely backwards then)...

The last double-bill kicked off with The Awakening, which at some points had the potential to be utterly fabulous, and at other times was content to tick along as a kind of sub-The Others/Sixth Sense bog standard Ghost Story With a Twist. The fabulousness, as best seen in the first 20 mins, was Rebecca Hall dashing about Edwardian London being Florence the Kickass Lady Ghost Hunter/Writer.  Really, we do need more of this particular bit immediately.  Whenever the film got occasionally annoying after that, I distracted myself by theorising about a TV show where she disproves hauntings/fights crime on a weekly basis - preferably with Dominic West's adorabubble severely traumatised WW1 vet/kindly teacher Robert as her sidekick. 

Honestly, at that point it was a little bit like Sherlock with an awesome girl. And GHOSTS. What's not to love?

( slightly spoilery for The Awakening )

The thing being is that this film is still in my head a couple of weeks later - for all it's many imperfections - and it's out on Friday here.. Armistice Day, nicely.  So I may have to go see it again.  

The very last festival film this year was HERE (the fact that it's 'arthouse' is about all the explanation you're gonna get for the vaguely unnecessary use of CAPSLOCK, but what the hey).

Actually it was utterly lovely, for all that it risked being fairly alienating, and I have pretty much zero knowledge of Armenia (except about the Turkish massacre about a century ago, oddly enough).  There's a nice American boy doing satellite map engineering in Armenia (part of which is disputed and has never been mapped properly), and he runs into a slightly flighty Armenian photographer who's back home  briefly on a grant and slightly reluctant to reconnect with her family, who can't really understand that photography can be an actual career.  And then they run into each other again, by pure chance, and take a little road trip to the disputed territory... Well that's one version of it.

( Read more slightly spoilery ramblings )