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Post by andydecker on Jan 4, 2013 10:58:41 GMT
It's that "middle englanders are a bunch of psycho's and perves" aspect that got me hooked on MM and keeps me coming back. Anyone watch the first episode of Ripper Street (i.e., Leman Street), a kind of Victorian take on Whitechapel? "A hopelessly convoluted mess with some neat touches" was the house of dem verdict. Needless to say, the penniless, destitute, gin-sodden prostitutes are of the dressed-by- House of Fraser variety and have the most lovely teeth, while their other halves are professional bare-knuckle bruisers to a man. Yes, this is so laughable. All this pretty people playing East End desperates. One of the reasons why I hated the movie From Hell so much. Everybody looked freshly scrubbed, everything looked just fake and like people dressing up. Of course it was also rubbish like all Alan Moore movies. But this is a new one for me. Period pieces are seemingly in demand. Just read about Copper, a historical crime drama about a New York cop in 1860, produced by BBC America. Maybe I should rather read Michael McDowell's Gilded Needles which I never finished . I wonder when all those roman sleuths are dragged onto the screen. Normally I have big reservations about these pseudo-historical crime novels. But I have to confess that I rather enjoyed Cadfael. Happy new year to you, mr. crab, mr. decker! Thanks! Likewise! Edit: Wait a sec! A victorian snuff movie in 1888? WTF. Frankly this reminds me of the delightful "dirty Dr. Longstreet" in Dr. Phibes watching this "snake dance" ;D ;D
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Post by David A. Riley on Jan 4, 2013 11:38:09 GMT
"I wonder when all those roman sleuths are dragged onto the screen."
Simon Sayor writes some rather excellent who done its set around the time of the late Roman Republic. I would recommend them. And would love to see these on TV.
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Post by dem bones on Jan 7, 2013 7:21:22 GMT
Yes, this is so laughable. All this pretty people playing East End desperates. One of the reasons why I hated the movie From Hell so much. Everybody looked freshly scrubbed, everything looked just fake and like people dressing up. Of course it was also rubbish like all Alan Moore movies. Wait a sec! A victorian snuff movie in 1888? WTF. Frankly this reminds me of the delightful "dirty Dr. Longstreet" in Dr. Phibes watching this "snake dance" ;D ;D Evidently, we, the Great British public, took a dim view of the salacious goings-on in last week's series première .... The Mirror, January 1st 2013 A tough Sunday for buxom Lucy Cohu, beheaded as Jenny Russell in an afternoon showing of Midsomer Murders classic, The Sword of Guillaume, then beaten up post-watershed by infant banditti in Ripper Street. This week's hugely entertaining load of bollocks saw a child thief facing the gallows for the murder and robbery of a kindly toy-maker. Could a fourteen year old really have torn out a grown man's tongue and if so, why didn't he help himself to the gold teeth while he was about it? George Lusk of the Vigilante Committee favours lynch law, but our hero, poker faced DI Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfadyen), is prevailed upon by Miss Goran (Lucy Cohu), a saintly orphanage governess, to nail the real villains of the piece, namely a scouse psycho-Fagin named Carmichael (Joseph Gilgun), and the proprietress of a supposedly respectable Children's home. Poverty-stricken prostitutes straight from the catwalk were less in evidence this week, and some members of Vigilante. com. went so far as to throw on designer rags, but then the bordello madame, Long Susan (MyAnna Buring), steps into the fray - costume by Fairy Gothmother, hair courtesy Revlon - and we are back to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
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Post by andydecker on Jan 7, 2013 9:48:29 GMT
This reads a bit exagerrated, doesn't it? Mind, I haven't seen it, but they do let it sound it as if they have shown Hostel at 8 on free-tv. Or is this just Mirror speak? The Twitter bit is scary, though. Nothing like a Monday morning conference where the secretary passes around sheets of Twitter postings, where this or that enraged special interest group - and there is always one - do vent.
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Post by Dr Strange on Jan 7, 2013 17:10:00 GMT
Yup, Ripper Street is shaping up nicely, though I thought last night's wasn't quite as good as the first one (a bit more predictable, and the twists and turns in the plot didn't always make much sense). Anyway, it's going to be a must-see from here in I think.
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Post by David A. Riley on Jan 7, 2013 17:59:11 GMT
I like Ripper Street, though I do wish they would talk less and speed things up. The DS in particular is a tad too ponderous for my taste. And doesn't half love the sound of his own voice.
Not at all realistic, but who really cares. It's got plenty of atmosphere and could almost have been an early seventies Hammer if the pacing were better.
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Post by dem bones on Jan 10, 2013 9:28:22 GMT
Meanwhile, back with the perves, murderers, kinky priests and village idiots who constitute Middle England .... Harriet (Jo Woodcock) enjoys a women running away from houses moment in The Sicilian Defence Harriet Farmer, Midsomer's beautiful young May Queen, climbs from her bedroom window and makes off into the woods. Harriet is planning to elope with fiancé Finn Robson, but doesn't get far on account of she's attacked by a shadowy figure with an oversize chess piece on their head. That same night, Finn vanishes without trace. When, a year later, Harriet revives from her coma, several members of the Bishopwood Chess Club meet with ghastly deaths ... After this wonderfully cranky, shades-of-Gothic-Romance prelude, The Sicilian Defence settles into something relatively sensible, and those who thrilled to last week's hammer horror mayhem may find this episode a little flat. Recommend they seek out another of the post-Netley's, Night Of The Stag, instead.
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Post by David A. Riley on Jan 10, 2013 10:22:11 GMT
Until I started to watch Midsomer Murders I never realised just how dangerous it is to join a club or society. Perhaps it's time to get out of the BFS before the blood starts to flow!
On the other hand, perhaps the Vault is dangerous too!
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Post by pulphack on Jan 11, 2013 10:16:47 GMT
I'd like to move to Midsommer - with all that death, I bet property prices are dead low, and I could make a killing on selling my place and trading up.
Ripper Street - tosh, and interesting to compare to the sixties show Sergeant Cork, which is set in a similar era. I only say this as I've finally read the Cork tie-in mentioned elsewhere, which I picked up a couple of years back at Zardoz.
I think the show is on DVD, but having not seen I'll guess it was low budget as it was BBC, and is studio-set bound. However,it is incredibly political if the book is anything to go by. At least liberal, at most socialist, it comes from an era when ripping the lid off inequality was a good thing and not the preserve of Guardian reading middle class intellectuals who turn it into a chore. The writing is taut, and the necessarily wordy scripts are brought to life by some nice period detail. It has thought and heart. (Worth a read, by the way.)
By comparison, Ripper Street is vacuous and dumb in that sense. However, there are a lot of smarts expended on the visuals, both in terms of an appealing look and - as with Whitechapel - having clever cuts and structure to make it look fast and appealing. Which I'm starting to think is what distiguishes TV now and then: people who say TV is dumbed down are not accurate: in the past the intellect was about the ideas and the words for the actors. Now it's about the look and keeping the eye fixed, while the words are secondary. It's a shift of emphasis that says much (like an popular culture) about modern preoccupations.
You can find me being pretentious over on the Peter Hammill thread...
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Post by andydecker on Jan 11, 2013 12:05:36 GMT
people who say TV is dumbed down are not accurate: in the past the intellect was about the ideas and the words for the actors. Now it's about the look and keeping the eye fixed, while the words are secondary. It's a shift of emphasis that says much (like an popular culture) about modern preoccupations. You can find me being pretentious over on the Peter Hammill thread... This is a very good definition. Especially (american) crime shows often don't make any sense whatsoever, everything seems to happen on the same day, regardless how improbable or even downright idiotic this is. Story logic takes a back-seat to a weird dream logic, however everything is fast, fast, fast and looking glam.
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Post by Dr Strange on Jan 11, 2013 13:28:06 GMT
With regards to any discussion about "cult" TV and "dumbing down", I think there's a tendency (in everyone) to try to rationalize (or intellectualize, if you prefer) things that really aren't rational or intellectual. If you like something "cult" (i.e. something that others around you think is rubbish), then you might try to defend that my making out it's got some "intellectual" worth that is maybe not appreciated by others - and if you don't like it then you say it's "dumbed down", regardless of the actual content. Personally, I have tried really hard to "get" Middle England Murders and I just don't - to me it's dull, formulaic and dumb. I just don't get the appeal and doubt that I ever will (I also can't stand anything from Agatha Crusty). I am enjoying Ripper Street probably for all the same reasons that others don't rate it - it's flashy, trashy nonsense, but I like that. And I had to laugh when David Riley said he liked it but thought it too talky and ponderous, and it doesn't get to the action fast enough!
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Post by pulphack on Jan 11, 2013 16:20:48 GMT
That's true enough about everyone's tendency to try and justify what they like, but not really the point I was making. To clarify, what I meant to say was that the intellectual energies of the production team are directed these days towards making a visually clever piece, rather than a wordily clever one, as it was in the old days.
This is, I think, because we are a more visual popular culture because of mobility (think how many people you have to catch as a producer in the UK when English is a second or other language as opposed to forty, fifty years back) and technology - both in terms of how much and how we view, and also the means for making a better visual product. I regret this as I like the wordy stuff, but by the same token even though Whitechapel suffered in this way I loved it.
The other thing is that an instant visual has a greater impact than a lot of words. When I was teaching adult ed I was initially amazed at how a group of people could read the same story and yet get a number of meanings from it. Which is obvious when you think about it, seeing as they bring their own experience to it, but because I'd never had that challenge before it was a revelation. The same is true of the visual, I guess, but when it's instant and gone onto the next, then maybe there's not the time to assimilate anything other than the big, primary meaning, and it makes its point in an easier manner.
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Post by Dr Strange on Jan 15, 2013 12:59:15 GMT
Well, here is a press release for what could very well be the next big "cult" show - Penny Dreadful.
SHOWTIME PRESS RELEASE:
Some of literature’s most iconic figures will step into the light on SHOWTIME in PENNY DREADFUL, a psychosexual horror series created, written and executive produced by three-time Oscar(R) nominee John Logan (Hugo, The Aviator, Gladiator) and executive produced by Oscar winner Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road) and Neal Street’s Pippa Harris (Revolutionary Road, Call The Midwife), it was announced today by David Nevins, President of Entertainment, Showtime Networks. PENNY DREADFUL will begin production in London in the second half of 2013.
In PENNY DREADFUL, some of literature’s most famously terrifying characters – including Dr. Frankenstein and his creature, Dorian Gray and iconic figures from the novel Dracula – become embroiled in Victorian London. The series weaves together these classic horror origin stories as the characters grapple with their monstrous alienation. This project marks Logan and Mendes’ second major collaboration, following Skyfall, their recent critically-acclaimed and box office record-breaking James Bond film, which Mendes directed and Logan co-wrote; and their first ever collaboration for television. The project will be produced by Mendes’ production company Neal Street Productions.
“John Logan and Sam Mendes are two of the great storytellers of our time,” said Nevins. “The visual spectacle combined with the psychological insight in their reimagining of these iconic literary characters seems totally mesmerizing to me. This promises to be a wholly original television show.”
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Post by andydecker on Jan 15, 2013 18:05:33 GMT
In PENNY DREADFUL, some of literature’s most famously terrifying characters – including Dr. Frankenstein and his creature, Dorian Gray and iconic figures from the novel Dracula – become embroiled in Victorian London. The series weaves together these classic horror origin stories as the characters grapple with their monstrous alienation. combined with the psychological insight in their reimagining of these iconic literary characters seems totally mesmerizing to me. This promises to be a wholly original television show.” What a novel idea! So original! And only 20 years after we read it in books.
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Post by Dr Strange on Jan 16, 2013 11:58:38 GMT
You'll also be delighted to know that NBC are making a Dracula TV series. Here's what they are saying about it ( www.nbc.com/dracula/about/ ) - The father of all vampires rises in this provocative new drama starring Golden Globe® winner Jonathan Rhys Meyers ("The Tudors") as one of the world's most iconic characters. It's the late 19th century, and the mysterious Dracula has arrived in London, posing as an American entrepreneur who wants to bring modern science to Victorian society. He's especially interested in the new technology of electricity, which promises to brighten the night - useful for someone who avoids the sun. But he has another reason for his travels: he hopes to take revenge on those who crossed him centuries earlier. Everything seems to be going according to plan... until he becomes infatuated with a woman who appears to be a reincarnation of his dead wife. From the producers of the critically acclaimed, Emmy Award®-winning hit "Downton Abbey" comes DRACULA, a twisted, sophisticated and provocative take on Bram Stoker's classic novel, proving that some stories are truly eternal.
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