Entries Tagged 'BBC' ↓

While Comic Con tends to be kamikaze journalism for those of us foolish enough to throw ourselves into it, some of the hidden gems are the small interview opportunities that pop up throughout the weekend, and this is a perfect example. Best known for his work on Battlestar Galactica, a relaxed Jamie Bamber was tucked away in the Genius Products booth at the back of a manic Saturday morning convention floor doing small press for Pulse: Afterlife, a film he shot during hiatus last season, and arrives on DVD September 30. But as these interviews often go, the conversation strayed into some fascinating areas.

TV Verdict: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse (Kairo)…

Jamie Bamber: Thank you for mentioning it.

TVV: Of course. The film was a fascinating J-Horror metaphor for our increasing anxiety over technology dependence…

JB: You know, I loved it. I just loved it, from the very first shot of these people in this sort of plant nurturing place which is on a building… like a nursery within an office building… it’s just a patio… and they’re so distant from each other… and it’s just about how disconnected we actually are. We think we’re connected by this technology, and that’s an illusion. And then people get haunted by the illusion, and ghosts come through and it takes over their lives… I thought it was mesmerizing, really mesmerizing. I have to say that’s why… Pulse 2, a sequel to a film I really liked… that’s why I decided to do it. To see if we could do something a bit more faithful to Kurosawa’s piece. I have no idea whether it is or not. It probably wasn’t one of the aims of the producers to be honest… to be faithful… because foreign films that leave the camera rolling on wide shots and don’t cut into it every two seconds are just not particularly en vogue in America right now. But I think we’ll learn and we’ll wake up that that’s actually more dramatic than being slapped around the head with a bat and told you don’t expect this, but you do and here it is.

Continue reading →

Watched what’s going to be the last Doctor Who for a while tonight. In a word: weird. It looks like the end for the Daleks–again (until the writers really, really need a Dalek fix). The episode played up some of the show’s plot quirks: the mortals around him sacrifice their lives and happiness, while the immortal Doctor “never looks back,” and the irony that he’s a loner with so many friends. The latter became my favorite TV irony when it reached its illogical extreme in Burn Notice: If you were dumped in sunny Miami with as many friends as Michael Westen has there (not just Sam, Fiona, and his mom, but a contact for every occasion), wouldn’t you just hit the beach and chill?

I’ll have the full review for you later over on DVD Verdict, but I’ve just seen the first two episodes of Wild China, the BBC documentary on the land which will host the 2008 Olympics, and they are beautiful. I was hooked about 5 minutes in, as the sheer human accomplishment behind the rice paddy terraces of Yuanyang County sank in.

I’m blogging now because The Travel Channel will be running Wild China in two big Sunday three-hour blocks on July 27 and August 3, starting at 8 p.m. each night. Since the shows run 59 minutes on the DVD, there will likely be cuts to fit the hour time slots. The documentary also has a rare graceful flow that could be lost amid commercials and those ubiquitous promos. Still, it is something to behold, and you ought to catch it.

Yeah, you’ve heard that before about documentaries, and yeah, I realize there are a lot of times when you just aren’t interested in the subject. From what I’ve seen so far, though, you could be hooked even if you think you’re uninterested.

Doctor Who’s latest episode just ended with a Time Lady (Georgia Moffett, daughter of former Doctor Who star Peter Davison) cloned from The Doctor’s DNA running around out in the universe somewhere. Judging from what I’ve seen of the BBC’s cloning techniques (Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures already have sprung from the show’s DNA), this smells like another spinoff just waiting to land.

Stephen Moffat, best known for the brilliant BBC comedy Coupling and the mini-series Jekyll, succeeds the departing Russell T. Davies as Doctor Who showrunner for Season Five. Moffat has given Who fans some of the new series’ most memorable episodes, including Blink and Girl in the Fireplace, and couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity… “My entire career has been a secret plan to get this job. I applied for it once before but got backed because the BBC wanted someone else. Also, I was 7.” Season Four wraps the end of June, and Season Five will not air until 2010.

Has Doctor Who finally morphed into The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? You might think so with the Titanic-in-space plot (reminiscent of a Douglas Adams video game) last week, and all the comic bits between David Tennant and Catherine Tate in this week’s official season premiere.

Since I’m always a sucker for slapstick, I kinda liked “Partners in Crime,” which introduces Catherine Tate as Donna Noble, the woman with the mile-a-minute mouth (who may eerily remind you of Carol Burnett). Tennant and Tate play off each other well; the scene in which Donna comes up with a solution to the Doctor’s dilemma with an alien computer played a lot better than it should have. Of course, Donna seems to have fallen for the Doctor, despite her protestations; that’s now a Who cliche. Please, this is a sci-fi action show; let’s not get too mushy.

The plot — about a diet pill with which “the fat just walks away,” literally and possibly dangerously — wasn’t much, but the emphasis on the characters kept the episode in working order. Still, there weren’t any bits as perfect as that one in last week’s belated Christmas episode in which the Doctor lands with Titanic sightseers to find that London now evacuates annually on Christmas, just in case there should be an alien invasion with a certain Time Lord involved. Both episodes were fun, but I’d like an exciting cliffhanger one of these days.

When a girl moving into a new neighborhood with her divorced father sees the local crazy lady talking to what must be an alien, she decides the crazy lady mustn’t be so crazy after all. Soon, Maria learns that Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) has an attic full of alien gadgets and a knack for getting space invaders riled up. That’s the premise of The Sarah Jane Adventures, a Doctor Who spinoff that premiered tonight on Sci-Fi Channel. Doctor Who fans will probably be curious–and there is something amusing about having a black hole in the attic that needs sealing–but anyone who doesn’t already know that Sarah Jane traveled with the Doctor in the 1970s will probably feel lost. The family-friendly series is mostly harmless, not as scary as Doctor Who can be, but not as inventive or witty either. Moreover, Sarah Jane’s pining for a lost love from outer space (the Doctor, of course) could get really tiresome really fast.

It does leave me with a question, though: Do all of the Doctor’s former companions run into aliens once a week?

Sarah Jane Adventures will run on Fridays at 8 p.m. on Sci-Fi Channel.

It might seem a bit strange to hear a commentary track before you have a chance to see the show, but BBC7 radio online is featuring David Tennant and Catherine Tate as they talk about the new season’s episodes of Doctor Who. The shows are live at 6:30 p.m. London time (1:30 p.m. EST, I believe), with reruns on the Listen Again feature for six days starting sometime Monday. They’re also running episodes of Paul McGann’s Doctor Who audio drama. The BBC radio sites block sports programs, but there’s no problem with the rest of the lineup.

The first episode has some good stuff, like Catherine Tate talking about how she felt about getting a regular gig and seeing her name on that “iconic credits sequence.” David Tennant drops hints about an end-of-season shocker that will be teased throughout the season (”Bad Wolf,” anyone). They tend to do specifics of the episode in a way that’ll leave you baffled and curious, instead of spoiling the surprise, so it’s more like a half-hour advert if you haven’t seen the episode yet. These two laugh a lot.

It’d be great if Sci-Fi Channel and CBC put these up on their sites after their runs, but that could be too much to hope for.

You can catch the Doctor Who commentaries at Listen Again under Sunday here.

The fourth season of the rebooted and reanimated Doctor Who airs Saturday, April 5th on the BBC, much to the ire of every fan who doesn’t live in the United Kingdom. For those of us stuck in Canada, it will be many moons before the CBC gets around to airing Season Four, but we can take minor consolation in knowing it will be infinitely faster than you unlucky Americans tucked down there. You guys have some serious Who lag.

If you find yourself more inclined to follow the good Doctor on his adventures regardless of your particular citizenship, join the club. Alas, your options are painfully limited.

The newly re-launched BBC iPlayer streams new BBC programming right from your browser, and even allows high-quality downloaded versions to be saved for 30 days… provided you can convince the website you live in the UK. It will check your IP address based on region and weed out the unfaithful. There are ways to get around this sort of thing, ahem, but obviously we can’t help you in this regard.

There are also, ahem, more unscrupulous methods of acquiring television content via the internet involving black-and-white flags with skulls on them, but we do not do that around here. We are good and proper people, thank you very much. Our mothers love us dearly, and we enjoy pie. Cherry, apple, you name it. No eye patches whatsoever. Just sweet, sweet pie.

To summarize: I curse the British.

Update: Actually, I curse Canada! As it turns out, Sci-Fi will be airing Season Four of Doctor Who on April 18, while the CBC has been painfully mum on future plans to show the new episodes. Looks like for the first time, the US will be ahead of the curve on this one. Lucky you guys!

Anyone think the writers’ strike might have moved up some release schedules for TV-on-DVD? I recently reviewed the latest season set of MI-5, which helped me get through my withdrawal from 24, and have noticed that the BBC’s winter DVD slate has also included State of Play and Five Days, two other hard-hitting dramas, at about the same time. Seems to me these might have been spread out more in past years–but if you miss Jack Bauer, you’ve got to be grateful.

Here’s where you can get the scoop on the latest of those, Five Days.