Mmmm, nice. The series has evolved a teeny weeny bit since the first installment.

Labels: gaming

I realised the other day that the number of Sony gadgets in my home has increased almost without my noticing it. It all started with a MD player I bought back in 1999 or 2000, and I have now accumulated a Sony Playstation 2, a Sony Playstation 3, a Sony DVD recorder, a Sony LCD-TV and a Sony Walkman (mp3). I am sure it is part of their evil plot to gradually take over the world.

I am very happy with these products, though, so it doesn't really matter to me.

I was watching an episode of the first series of The House of Eliott earlier today, when I just couldn't shake the feeling that one of the guest stars looked familiar, and at the same time I felt he didn't quite belong there. It was as if I didn't think of him as an avtor. At one point I thought he was connected to royalty somehow. When the credits rolled I realised I was sort of right in both ways; it was Michael Grandage, esteemed theatre director!

Labels: personal, TV

...I want you to know, in case you were confused, that America is England's fault, and the Proops proof is here. It all makes sense now! (Although I would increase the area to include the whole of Europe, ahem...)

Labels: comedy, current affairs, greg proops

Flight of the Conchords is back for a second TV series on HBO tonight. It's a must-see (if you haven't already seen it, ahem...) and the most important bit is Greg Proops is in it. NOT reprising his role from the radio series. Heh.

Labels: comedy, greg proops, TV

I have to admit this actually cheers me up a little bit. No Final Fantasy XIII until 2010 for those of us who don't know any Japanese. This gives me more time to finish...ooh, let's see...Final Fantasy IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X and XII. I became a fan of the series as recent as August 2004, but since then I have been buying just about any RPG by Squaresoft/Square Enix I can get my hands on. I have yet to finish any of them, LOL! Not that I give up, it's just that there is simply too much to explore and I honestly don't really want to finish a Square game, either, because then I feel as if I'm leaving friends behind...or maybe that's just a lame excuse to start playing a different game once I hit an obstacle. ;-)

In other news, I'm going home for the day! Yay! And there's fuck all on telly tonight, so Final Fantasy VI, here I come!

Labels: gaming

The newest thing to make our lives more complicated because of the minority of people who do things illegally, is real-time card fraud checks. Lovely. So, due to people who like to blow themselves up because they have been brainwashed by cowardly religious fanatics, flying is a mess. Due to crackers finding ways around copy protection measures even days before a computer game is released, people with legal copies will most probably get spyware SecuROM etc. installed on their computers without their knowledge. And now, due to people who can't be arsed to get a job and earn money the lawful way, we may not be able to use our money freely because there is a risk of card fraud.

I know, I know..."you'd regret it if these measures weren't in place and you became a victim". The point is I am sick and tired of these low-lives making things more difficult for the rest of us. I'm mad at them (and EA/Electronic Arts).

In other news, I watched Slumdog Millionaire with my posse the other day, and it was a nice film. Perhaps a little bit too long, but well deserving of its accolades so far in the award season.

Labels: current affairs, film, gaming, online shopping, personal

...this time from the TV drama department. Actually, they're not necessarily that old, but they bring back good memories and are still considered solid drama series. One day when I have the space and funds for it, I would like to increase my collection so that it contains series such as Upstairs Downstairs, The Forsyte Saga, The Onedin Line, Family at War, To Serve Them All My Days, The Secret Army and Tenko (the latter two have been shown on UKTV History, which now shows The House of Eliott, as previously mentioned, so there is hope for other quality shows as well).

However, I'm still working on my complete collection of the Aussie A Country Practice (a huge project in itself), and some time down the line I will get the complete series of the Canadian Road to Avonlea and all of the original Degrassi series. I think I need a bigger place.

Now, what brought all of this on? Well, it's an interesting story. OK, so maybe it isn't, but I'm going to tell you anyway. And blame Amazon and IMDb along the way.

I was watching The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, a film following the freed slave Jane through her long life, starting with the Civil War, ending up in the early 1960s and the start of the Civil Rights movement. I then naturally remembered the excellent Roots, and thought of the brilliant (albeit soapy) North and South. From here my mind wandered to another old favourite of mine, How the West Was Won (I always have to look up the title, as we just called it The Macahans), and from there I started thinking about all these great drama series from before the glossy nineties, back when they had the time to make a long intro and an equally long extro, granting all involved in the filmmaking an equal share of screen time. Isn't that a fascinating story? :p (I'm going to block comments so that question remains rhetorical, haha!)

At the same time I bought Press Gang more than a year ago and still hasn't finished more than half of the first series, so I have a feeling there's no rush to get other titles just yet, ahem!

Labels: film, TV

Until Doomsday. Or "the 2012 Olympics", as non-Londoners call it. There's a countdown pillar thing outside Stratford station telling us how long we'll have to wait until we're swarmed by tourists and sport enthusiasts. Somehow I hope I don't live there then (I thought Norway Cup each year was bad enough when I lived in Oslo, and that's just twenty thousand kids or something).

Yesterday was the "you go, girl!" episode of Lark Rise to Candleford. I counted four utterings of that phrase by the occupant of any of the sofas in our sitting room.

Yesterday also introduced a re-run of the brilliant The House of Eliott, which I have seen twice before and which DVD boxsets I have been drooling over for a bit now. I was so chuffed I had to watch the first episode the minute I came home. I remember buying the soundtrack the first time I saw the series, hehe!

I also watched Call Northside 777 yesterday; an investigative drama based on a true story and featuring James Stewart. It was very well made and I would recommend it. There was a funny scene in the middle where a lie detector was introduced. The film was made in 1948, so lie detectors were still fairly new. The guy who explained to Jimmy Stewart how it worked, didn't seem like an actor, and I instinctively thought "it's probably the creator of the lie detector himself". A quick search on IMDb proved me right. Well, he was possibly the only one who could explain the machine at that time, LOL! He wouldn't have needed going so much into detail, though...

Anyway, the Golden Globes took place yesterday and I am fairly happy with the results, even though I didn't win any! No big surprise, really, as I wasn't nominated, but I could have got a lifetime achievement award or something! I mean, what's the difference between me and the person who actually got that award? (So as to keep this spoiler-free, I suggest you go check the results for yourself.)

Labels: film, personal, sport, TV

Now, Before Winter Comes wasn't too bad, but I guess I won't be watching it again anytime soon. John Hurt and David Niven were good, of course, but there were boring bits among the romantic subplot, and mixed with the typical musical interludes of 60s films, it became long-winded. The Baby's Room, on the other hand, was pretty good. Spanish psychological thriller at its best.

Yesterday saw the last episode of BBC's five-parter The Diary of Anne Frank. I've read the book three times and seen a few different productions on telly/film, but the ending always gets to me. Such a tremendous waste.

Labels: film, tamsin greig, TV

Sometimes I wish I had a time machine so that I could go back to the 30s and 40s to experience cinema back then (yes, I would probably do other, more sensible things with a time machine, too). I was just watching The Big Sleep and thinking "ok, I bet this was a great night out back in 1945, but in 2009 it's a bit too long for my taste". Of course, Philip Marlowe is a super-cool detective (I refuse to use the word "dick"), and he seems to be a gun magnet, but the film could have been cut to one hour thirty minutes without losing any vital information. Still, it's nice to see a film without outrageous fighting scenes; apparently in the 40s people actually got hurt after a few punches, but nowadays people can take 150 blows to the head without flinching. Somehow I have a feeling filmmakers in the 40s were slightly more realistic...

OK, onto the next film! It's supposed to be a mediocre one, so not particularly looking forward to it (Before Winter Comes), but it does have David Niven in it.

Labels: david niven, film

Only joking, there's no snow here.

I have been watching a few films lately, though, just thought I'd keep you up to date. Or rather, to keep myself up to date. After all, how else am I going to know if I've kept my promise to watch one unseen film per day of 2009? Let's see...there was In the Valley of Elah the other day, which was better than I had anticipated. By the way, that Charlize Theron looks great even with hardly any makeup (and before you start arguing, she did wear lots of makeup in Monster ;-) ). Good for her!

OK, then I had a Guillermo del Toro day on Wednesday, as I watched Pan's Labyrinth (not a children's story, like I had expected) and then The Orphanage (which I thought was going to be a thriller, but turned out to be a very sad story). Yesterday I watched D.A.R.Y.L., which I thought I hadn't seen before, but apparently I had. Oh, well. Then today I watched 21 Grams, which spent too much time being chronologically confusing to be captivating enough. I'm sure the story was a good one, and normally I like films which jump forwards and backwards in time, but I didn't like the editing in this one. They simply waited too long to make any sense of it all, by which time I had started staring at my chipped nails instead. 3-Iron wasn't too bad. Slow and very quiet (there is hardly any dialogue), but you've come to expect that from Far Eastern films by now. I liked the ending, but unfortunately what seemed to last two hours only lasted 1 hour 22 minutes, which means it is not exactly action-packed.

Labels: film

These are the things that have occupied my mind these past few days. I resumed my game of Mass Effect which I started half a year ago. This led to some serious power gaming until my computer simply turned itself off. Oops. Need some proper cooling. Anyway. Then the newest Lynda LaPlante offering featured Ciarán Hinds with a very peculiar haircut. I was perhaps a little too focused on that to begin with, but got into the story after a bit.

I was going to comment upon the news item about the six-year-old boy who took his mum's car to drive to school, but after some digging around for the source, I just became depressed. What started as a funny, little story that I heard this morning on the Beeb, has now turned into a nasty POLITICAL DEBATE over in the States. For crying out loud, why do they have to twist everything to suit their own political views? Do they actually KNOW what happened? Or are they simply listening to whatever they're saying at the news on their TV station of choice? I was going to say that I found it strange that someone would let their kid play Grand Theft Auto--which is an amazingly brilliant game, but should probably be available only to those who actually understand the difference between fact and fiction--but if I do, that will probably just be taken into the long-winded, boring discussion about how games, films, music and just about anything else which is remotely entertaining, may or may not contribute to an increased aggression among those very few among us who are already aggression-prone.

Computer and video gaming is officially the number one pastime in Britain. Thus I vote for ten pages of computer news in all the major newspapers, every day, plus at least five minutes worth of gaming reviews and news on telly during every news programme. It's clearly more interesting to people than sport, so it's time we got the focus off of sport. I mean, this morning the news about Kevin Pietersen quitting as English captain was the third item on the agenda. Luckily they had the common sense to put the horrible situation on the Gaza Strip first, but only just, it seemed. Then there was something about the credit crunch again. But third? I mean, a lot of people care, but it should NOT have that sort of priority! Surely there are lots upon lots of more important stuff happening around the world? I believe, for instance, there is a list of forgotten humanitarian crises we could get back to before caring about some cricket player who just couldn't take the pressure.

By the way, have I mentioned how little I can stand people who slurp when they eat and/or drink? Unfortunately I have a few of those working nearby me, and they have like three meals a day while at work (seriously!) and lots of cups of god-knows-what (probably tea). Their meals are usually stinky fish, noodles or smelly soups or stinky, smelly noodle fish soups, so there is a lot of slurping going on and it's making my blood boil.

Labels: ciàran hinds, current affairs, gaming, personal, sport, TV

OK, so I had to watch tonight's introduction of this year's housemates in the Celebrity Big Brother house. So there's LaToya Jackson, Verne Troyer, Coolio and Ulrika Jonsson mixed with a couple of ex-popstars and a "glamour model" (don't know why they have started calling girls who like being photographed topless "glamour models", because let's face it; there's no glamour in that), a Scottish politician and Terry Christian from the controversial/annoying The Word. Well, well, well.

I started my only kind of New Year resolution yesterday (although I had planned starting it a little bit earlier, so technically it isn't a resolution for the new year); I have to watch one of my many, many unseen films for each day of 2009. Since there may be days where I actually have better things to do, and other days where I have nothing better to do, I have not made it a rule to watch one film every day, because then the project would have been doomed from the start. Yesterday I watched Mamma Mia! (Colin Firth! Stellan Skarsgård! In...spandex?!), which I had received the day before, so it was obviously a film I was going to see ASAP anyway, but it was unseen until then and as such a real option. Today I watched The 39 Steps (1935, Hitchcock), which was kind of mediocre, but then Hitchcock's films have mostly lost their charm over the years anyway, with a few exceptions (like the excellent Rope). I had to watch 36 Hours again after that. Great film, and it has James Garner in it, which is always a plus.

Labels: colin firth, film, james garner, TV

Here's to a happy 2009 for everyone!

Labels: personal