DVD of the Week: Bridge of Spies

I didn't write it up, but last week we watched the recent movie of The Man From UNCLE, a film that can be best be summed as "Okay". I mean, it's fine - functional, inoffensive, but like it's two leading men, hopelessly bland and short of the necesary charm or wit to really make it work. There is a moment in where Hugh Grant turns up and effortlessly outshines everone else and I suddenly realised what was missing. Anyhow, enough of that, because this week we watched another movie set around the Cold War, spies, and even the Berlin Wall, but it really couldn't be more different in nearly every way. After missing it at the cinema, I finally got to see Steven Speilberg's Bridge of Spies. 

TV Review: The Night Manager

Its odd how little British TV we watch these days. There is Doctor Who, obviously, but outside of that very little of what appears on the screen in our house is from the UK. I'm not entirely sure why - certainly there are a lot of British actors on our screen, just, it seems, in US shows. Instincitvely it feels like something has gone wrong; that the  preconception my generation grew up with the British TV was the best in the world has been usurped by the dastardly Yanks and their HBOs and Showtimes. Its not to say that I'm not on the lookout for some up-market British Drama - And Then There Were None was a high-light of the Xmas season, and now we have a similiarly high-class adaptation of John Le Carre's The Night Manager, starring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie. 

TV Review: Deutschland '83

I was 10 years old in 1983. It seems hard to believe these days - especially if you're of a younger generation - but back then we didn't worry so much about global warming or post-capitalism or many of the things that we worry about now, but instead worried about the last flowering of the Cold War, of Nuclear Armaggeddon just around the corner. The inevitability of this conflict seeped into any vision of the future you cared to mention; even ones that weren't blasted landscapes assumed, as a matter of course, that some sort of nuclear exchange would happen, because a future where we decided not to launch the missiles just seemed so outlandish. So it's been a fascinating journey back to that time whilst watching Deutschland '83. 

DVD of (last) Week: Spy

Movie Comedy feels like it's in a wierd place at the moment. It's easy to look back and claim it's worse now, mostly because most of the unfunny dross of earlier ages are easily forgotten, but at the same time I rarely see a trailer for a big-budget comedy and even crack a smile. There are some great comedy movies coming from various animation houses, where every joke has to be carefully crafted years in advance, the dominant live action form seems to be the matey, semi-improvisational form that really doesn't work for me. Oddly, what has worked for me is the Paul Feig/Melissa McCarthy combination, from Bridesmaids, to The Heat, and now Spy. 

Movie Review: SPECTRE

Having failed to go and see SPECTRE a couple of weeks back, we seized on the opportuity this weekend, prior to Thoughtbubble, to catch up with it. After all, we've seen every Bond film since Goldeneye together - even the bad ones - and it's important to keep these traditions up. Also, Ewan saw it with my dad already, and we can't have him seeing films we want to, but can't! Before we get onto SPECTRE, it's worth mentioning that we got the full Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer on the big screen, and boy does it look pretty. And if the silent excitement from the audience anything to go by, it may as hard to get tickets for early on as the lastest Bond outage has been. So, Bond is again a big box office draw, but this far into an actors tenure, it's usually starting to creak. How is Daniel Craig's Bond doing? Warning - Spoilers.

Book Review: Round Up!

So, we are still in "round up" mode and this time it's all the reading I've been doing. Somehow, I feel I'm making more time for reading this year (writing being a whole different story, sadly) and I'm making an effort to try new stuff that I've missed. I also want to make a bit of a return to the Science Fiction genre, which I've not been deep into for many years now, hence the prescene on this list of a couple of "classic" series that have been mentioned us as we've put out new episodes of Dissecting Worlds. So, with apologies for the brevity, lets get on with catching up.

Movie Review: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation

We suddenly seem to be on a run of actually getting out to see movies. OK, so we've usually got at least one child in tow, but with Robert now old enough, and interested enough, to go to the cinema, and Ewan reasonably keen on the idea too, it feels like we've turned a bit of a corner. No longer is a relatively rare, logisitically fraud special occasion, although I would perhaps like to see something with a more adult rating at the cinema more than once a year. Yes, I know I went to see Mad Max Fury Road twice, but shush, OK? So with a couple of days off for just me and Ewan last week we took the opportunity to catch up on our blockbuster watching, this time with Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. 

Book Review: Declare

Over on the Dissecting Worlds channel, we're currently doing a series on Spies and all things Espionage related. We've just recorded the third episode, on the intersection between horror and the spy genre, and when we mentioned this planned episode a couple of months back, one book kept coming up, and it was one that I've never actually heard of. I guess thats kind of appropriate, right? The book was Declare, by Tim Powers, and when at least four people recommend is a "set text" for the subject, then you really have to read it. I'm really, really glad I did. 

Box Set Blues: Archer

Is it still a Box-Set if I'm streaming from Netflix? At the risk of a diversion, we signed up to Netflix over the holidays mainly to watch Breaking Bad, but it's actually a pretty solid service, technically speaking, if a little sparse on the "current shows" front. But that isn't a big problem for us, being perennially behind, and it gives us easy access to the early runs of things like Sons of Anarchy, which we've been meaning to start on for ages. It also has the first 4 series of Justified, so if you've not caught this on it's "down the channel numbers" purgatory, you should get on that right now.  More relevantly, it has three seasons of Archer, which is another show people keep recommending, but we'd yet to catch. Whats that?  now we've seen 3 series in seven weeks? Guess it's OK then!