He’s so cute!
And he’s Scottish!
That would be David Tennant, aka David MacDonald!
I have indeed seen him once before, not on Dr Who, and he did have a lovely Scotch accent then, but I thought that might have been put on.
Anyway – he was the guest on Top Gear’s last episode of season 10. He’s funny, he’s got a lovely voice, he was hilarious when talking about Billie Piper (he desperately wanted to beat her in the time trial…) – if you’re a Who fan, and you haven’t seen this episode of Top Gear, you’ll have to try and find it; it could well be on YouTube.
Ah, voyeurism
I missed all of the “Who do you think you are?” episodes on SBS – UK and Aussie – and I was a bit sad about that, because although it’s not entirely my thing I do like a bit of this sort of personal history. Fortunately, my darling mother (she of the apricots) taped those of Bill Oddie and Nigella Lawson. I’ve just now got around to watching them, having had the video waiting for me for weeks. Bill Oddie’s was quite sad – his mother in a “sanitorium,” or asylum, for much of his childhood; he has very few memories of her, and basically no good ones. It was quite interesting hearing his reasons for researching his past.
Nigella comes from a tradition of caterers, which I think is hilarious. I didn’t know she was Jewish, so that was fascinating too: her great grandparents came, respectively, from now west Germany and Amsterdam. The history of Jewish migration and experience is one I know little about, and I wonder just how well researched it is; I would guess fairly well. It gives quite a different view on early modern history in Europe (and, I am sure, on medieval too) from what you get if you simply focus on the Christian European experience.
too much Stargate? Never!
I am lucky enough at the moment to have little bit of what I choose to call play money. My natural Scrooge tendencies are too painful to go into here, but suffice to say that splurging – even on thins that I really want and will get a lot of joy out of – is something I struggle with. So I thought long and hard, and eventually decided it would be worth it: I bought the 59 DVD box of Stargate: SG-1. This is a crazy extravagance; I know someone with them already – although theirs are pirated, and of course I don’t have easy access to them. Plus, this comes in a lovely big box, complete with tacky raised circle (aka stargate) on the front.
Anyway, it arrived on Thursday. We watched the entire first season on the weekend – my love didn’t get into show until about season 2 or 3 when we watched it the first time (oh, did I mention that I’ve already seen the whole lot?), so he enjoyed watching that; I also discovered that first time through I missed a disc – three or four episodes, including the wonderful Antarctic episode. We’re now into the second season, and we’re trying to limit ourselves to only two… or so… episodes a night. Hard, though…
Couple of things of note:
* Samantha is cringingly nerdy in the first couple of episodes. I am so glad they sophisticated her.
* Teal’c is fairly painful in these first few seasons; his facial expressions are just ridiculous. And not always convincing.
* Michael Shanks. Daniel Jackson. *sigh* Wonderful!
* Richard Dean Anderson. Jack O’Neill. As above!
I said something to my love as we watched an episode – something about enjoying the interaction between Jack and Samantha – and he turned to me, in ridicule, and asked whether I had bought 59 DVDs just for the sake of a few, frustratingly brief, interactions between the two.
Well, duh.
Productive and critical
Watching four Roman DVDs, for school, and I think I’m going to send all four back. Three are a series – republic, empire, ‘building and empire’; the other is a stand-alone. The stand-alone was definitely for younger kids, which would be fine – since this is for yr7 kids – but the background music was appalling. The others… well, I think they’re just a bit boring. I’m sure I can find docos with more interesting narration, and less bad music. They also feel a bit dated, although I think they’re actually fairly recent; they’re just leaving me cold.
On the plus side, though, since they’re all 30-45 min long – being average, I’ve been skipping through the chapters a bit; has made it a lot faster than I expected! I’ve got a couple of French and Russian Rev (eek! They’ve just shown a clip of a picture from a brothel – one of the awfully explicit ones; really not sure if I can show this to my 7s!) DVDs to preview, too, and a couple of other Roman and ancient Greek ones – hopefully they’ll be better than these.
Star Trek Generations
I think Picard is my favourite. He’s just more… refined. Kirk makes Jon Mclean look like a choir boy. The thing that’s particularly funny about those lists (and there were quite a few that I didn’t get) is that a number of them are the same, word for word – yet on one list it’s bad and on the other, good.
So I’ve watched Star Trek Generations tonight. I don’t think I’d seen it before – although it’s possible that I saw it at my first O’Week party, back in the day (the cinema at uni was showing movies all night; I know I saw a Star Trek at maybe 1am – with the kir part of kirmish, as I recall – but don’t remember it at all; and no I wasn’t drunk, because the Melbourne Uni security team, in their wisdom, wouldn’t accept NT proof of age – only Victorian). What can I say? The effects are definitely better. I don’t like Riker much, Troi is a pain, and while Crusher is good she ain’t no Bones. Geordie (oooh, it jut occurred to me that that’s another UK slang reference, like Scotty… yes, I’m a bit slow) is ok, but no Scotty, and Data is a lesser version of Spock without the interesting reason for being all logical and cold. I think what I’m saying is that I want Picard with the original crew; that would be my ideal Star Trek!
Soren was a worthy adversary, with a very interesting reason for being a prat. It was fun seeing Kirk and Picard together (they’re in one other together, I believe?). Overall, quite a satisfying plot, I thought.
My final question, though: why is such a nice-looking planet as Viridian 3 uninhabited??
Spamalot
I went tonight. It was great, of course. I wasn’t in stitches – having shown Holy Grail to two classes in the last couple of days might have taken the edge off for me – but it was still very, very funny. The bits they’ve added in were magnificent.
Anyway, there was one part I thought I’d share with you. They blow the bunny up with the Holy Hand Grenade, and the scenery falls down to reveal the word BONES in ‘stone.’ There is much confusion, until one of the knights suggests the S might be a 5. So it might actually say B-one-5.
At this point, my stomach dropped.
Then the spotlight landed on B15.
Yup.
The Grail was “under my seat”; after they retrieved it, they decided that the brave peasant needed to be brought on stage, so they could properly say thank you. (They are so LOUD on stage!) So I got to shake their hands, had my name announced to the audience (I checked; there’s about 1700 seats at Her Majesty’s)… and then I won an Arthur for Best Peasant in Melbourne, which means I now have a little statuette of a foot… and a photo with half the cast! Yes, they brought a Polaroid out on to stage.
These sorts of things never happen to me.
I will blog properly about the show itself tomorrow, when I have calmed down a bit. For now… when Patsy retrieved the Grail and went back on stage, part of me was relieved that that might be all, and part of me was just a little disappointed – how dumb is that?? And then they got me on stage, and part of me was embarrassed and really didn’t know where to look (seriously; you can see maybe to the second row); but part of was dead impressed.
Yeh, ok, I’m going to try and sleep it off now. Although given it’s still a million degrees, sleeping might be hard.
Stargate – the movie
We watched the original Stargate movie for the first time in a long time the other night. I must admit to a little fangirl flutter of the heart when the theme music started: I had either not realised, or forgotten, that the theme music is the same in the show as it was in the movie. Not surprising, of course. It did give me the giggles to realise just how much I loved SG-1 – we finished it ages ago, and I miss having more episodes to watch. More than I miss FarScape; perhaps not quite as much as West Wing.*
A couple of things I noticed, post-viewing of SG-1:
# Michael Shanks and James Spader – very cool, very similar, at least in playing Daniel. sigh.
# Richard Dean Anderson kicks Kurt Russell as Jack. Completely.
# I had never thought about the fact that they must store sets – in the hopes of re-using them at some stage. Either that or they worked really, really hard at being true to the movie for the show, and I just doubt it.
# There was a three year gap between movie and show. Is that a long time? It seems like a long time.
# The movie was a bit… well… boring. Especially compared with the show. Am I getting old and jaded?
# I cannot wait for the SG-1 movie to be made. There’s nothing on IMdB about it, but seriously… it has to happen.
*Of which we must retrieve seasons 2 and 3 from the in-laws. I love the first season, but there’s only so many times you can watch it with only season 7 as your other option. Oh, and season 5, but that gets a bit depressing.
Star Trek VI
So all that stuff about odds and evens of Star Trek movies is, I have decided, crap. I just watched VI (man I love BigPond Movies!), and it was great. Right from the start it was obvious that it was made much more recently than V, because the effects were infinitely better. And the plot – there was one! And it was a good one! No faffing around at the start; an unexpected double-cross (for me to be surprised by a double-cross is quite unusual); and the acting was probably a bit better than it had been previously.
Kirk got emotion and a turn-around, Spock got devious, Bones got insulted… and Sulu got his own ship.
This one I am happy to recommend to most scifi buffs.
Oh – and Klingons quoting Shakespeare – brilliant! An interesting touch to make them more civilised, which throws the whole Klingons-as-brutes questions into the air and pushes Kirk, and the audience, into questioning the relationship between ‘civilised’ and not, and indeed what ‘civilised’ means.
I liked it.
And there’s a new Star Trek coming out next year, with Karl Urban as Bones! It’s set in the space academy, as a prequel – the original gang learning how to be the insubordinate types we know and love. I’m not entirely convinced, but I’ll probably go and see it.
Star Trek V
As part of my ongoing effort to watch all of the Star Trek movies, I finally saw this one a few days ago. I think I’ve mentioned before the odds/evens thing with them, and after the craptacular nature of IV I had hopes for V, although with some trepidation. Fortunately, it was most certainly better than IV – although that wasn’t hard. What felt like about the first third was a weird, let’s-get-to-know-the-characters-outside-of-the-ship thing… maybe their audience polling said that would play well? Me, I don’t need to hear Kirk and Bones singing “Row, row, row your boat.” And am I the only one who thought the suggestion of romance between Uhura and Scotty just a bit weird??
Anyway, the storyline was bearable; I quite liked the emotion-mad Vulcan, although most of the twists were predictable. I thought he was a good character, and they used him well. I also liked the way they managed to get yet another ego-tripping maniacal Klingon in there (and all the while reading subtitles, I couldn’t help but think of those people who ‘speak’ Klingon – figuring out syntax from subtitles is hard work!!). As always, I think Bones was my favourite. His acerbic wit and delight in calling Spock out as a nutter are highly enjoyable.
Probably not one for the casual movie viewer. You have to be a bit nuts to watch it, I think.
House
I’ve thought this vaguely in the past, but watching the end of season three on DVD solidified it in my head.
TV’s Dr Gregory House is Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.
No wife/girlfriend; drug habit; musical; detective; slightly antisocial; bizarre techniques.
This can’t be accidental, surely. The writers didn’t have to make House musical, for instance.
What is it about dysfunctional people that make them so fascinating to watch or read about??
Randomly Yours, Alex 