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mind the walrus posted:It never fails to amaze me how every single "American Doctor Who" list features big-ticket actors who are so highly priced outside of what a Doctor Who-level production would pay that you might as well wish for Santa Claus and Reagan Hell, 60s Star Trek was a pretty decent budget production in its day, ate up the use of six FX houses to get it all done. Who was probably an order of magnitude cheaper.
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Jun 12, 2015 15:45
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On the other hand it did make me envision Martin Sheen as a conceivable Doctor at one point in-time and that puts me in my happy place.
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Jun 12, 2015 15:52
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mind the walrus posted:On the other hand it did make me envision Martin Sheen as a conceivable Doctor at one point in-time and that puts me in my happy place. That one wouldn't have been too hard right before The West Wing, when he was making garbage like Spawn.
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Jun 12, 2015 16:10
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Doctor Spaceman posted:For Christopher Eccleston? Why, did someone really get attached to Gone in 60 Seconds or something? you realize he's won an oscar right
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Jun 12, 2015 17:47
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Fungah! posted:you realize he's won an oscar right If I was in 70 films over 30 years and spent each one talking at random volumes, I might accidentally win an Oscar.
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Jun 12, 2015 17:51
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thrawn527 posted:That one wouldn't have been too hard right before The West Wing, when he was making garbage like Spawn. And also a fair bit after, when he did stuff like Mass Effect.
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Jun 12, 2015 17:51
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MikeJF posted:If I was in 70 films over 30 years and spent each one talking at random volumes, I might accidentally win an Oscar. ÁLWAYS BE CAGING
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Jun 12, 2015 17:54
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At this point, it just seems futile to link to Nicholas Cage Freaks the gently caress Out, despite it still being hilarious, all these years later.
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Jun 12, 2015 18:06
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Terry Crews should be the Doctor.
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Jun 12, 2015 18:25
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McDragon posted:Terry Crews should be the Doctor. Counterproposal - he should be the next Master.
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Jun 12, 2015 18:34
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Angela Christine posted:How would that help? Wait, do you mean an american actor playing the Doctor on the regular BBC series, or a completely separate american production? (Yes I visit AH.com often)
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Jun 12, 2015 18:45
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They already had an american Doctor Who. It was called Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.
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Jun 12, 2015 21:38
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marktheando posted:Oh. Well I don't know his work but that movie looks bad from the trailer. Lets make a film that literally has stretch armstrong in it and make it all super serious and grim. To be fair to Michael B. Jordan he was also in Fruitville Station and was regarded of the best part of it. And has had some other minor roles like most doctors have had before they become the Doctor. So I could see it.
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Jun 12, 2015 23:57
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Michael B. Jordan is one of the best young actors in hollywood right now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hor_gOBU_GU NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Jun 13, 2015 |
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Jun 12, 2015 23:59
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Doctor Who "The Crimson Horror" Series 7, Episode 12 So, this is the one hundredth episode of Doctor Who I've reviewed. Doing some napkin math, figuring for 45 minutes an episode (and that's certainly a lowball considering specials, longer-than-usual lengthed episodes, and so on), that's 4500 minutes, which translates into 75 hours. Again, being conservative, tripling that time spent on writing each review comes out to about two full weeks of my life spent critically interacting with this loving show. I've written, not counting this review, 248,092 words in reviews so far. For reference, Moby Dick has about 206,000 words. Jesus loving Christ. One hundred episodes means that I've witnessed three different Doctors, two different showrunners, and seven different major Companions. Over seven seasons of television I've changed my opinion from virulent, toxic hatred to grudging respect to shameful love to unironic but still heavily, heavily shameful love. There have been a lot of writers for Who that I've come to know, from ones whose output I can't loving stand (Chibnall, Davies, Raynor), to ones whose output I loved (Moffat, Davies again, Simon Nye, Gaiman). And then there's the writers who fall somewhere in between, like Tom Macrae, who wrote "The Girl Who Waited" but also the Cyberman two-parter from Series Two. Maybe it's most appropriate that the centennial review ends up covering an episode written by someone who exemplifies that last category in Mark Gatiss. Gatiss wrote the third episode this dumb little experiment-slash-project ever covered in "The Unquiet Dead". Remember that episode? It's the only episode in the first five of Series One that isn't complete mother loving garbage, and for its ability to be competent although not exactly inspiring it got saddled with that stupid "it's xenophobic as gently caress" argument. Somehow that dumb poo poo has persisted to this day, the literal only legacy of "Unquiet Dead" is of its being apparently, but not actually, xenophobic as hell. If I were to guess, Gatiss is the show's most prolific and reliable collaborator, second only to Davies and/or Moffat in episodes that he's penned. Considering he's never been a showrunner for Who, that's quite an accomplishment and speaks to how reliable he is as a writer. He's well known for writing fun, if altogether safe episodes of Who that the fandom usually mocks for being fun if altogether safe. Also he's, to my knowledge, the only staff writer who's actually been in an episode of Who, when he played the primary antagonist of Series Three episode "The Lazarus Experiment". I like Mark Gatiss. I like his output, probably on a more technical than emotive level, because admittedly his work is functional without being flashy. I guess my appreciation roots from the knowledge of, for example, how long it takes to write something as inconsequential and terrible as television reviews for the internet. That's even with the gigantic loving asterisk of the fact that the horrible bullshit I write receives no real editing and can be busted out within the span of a long afternoon if I really sat down and focused. And that's nothing compared to how much work and effort goes into even a terrible episode of an hourlong drama; we're talking a fifty to sixty page script, pre-editing. It's a lot of work. Now, this isn't to say that criticisms of Gatiss aren't inherently valid, because they are. At the end of the day "But I worked really hard on it!" isn't a valid shield against appraisal, something that a lot of writers on the internet fail to grasp. I'm just arguing that with my own firsthand knowledge of how awful it is to write even a bad hourlong script, the ability to consistently output decent-to-good scripts on so regular a basis Moffat apparently has you on speed-dial when he needs a script farted out in a week or so is a testament to Gatiss' skills. Gatiss, as I've argued in past reviews, deserves more credit than he gets because he does the ignoble job of writing the episodes that need written. Guess loving what, not every episode can be "The Girl Who Waited", "Amy's Choice", "The Pandorica Opens", "Midnight". Some of them have to be lower-stakes, lower-consequences episodes of Who. Not just because every peak has to have a valley to compare that peak to - those episodes only work as well as they do because they're so much more accomplished in the grander framing of a season of Who. It's also because just functionally, as in the production of DW demands as a matter of course, that some episodes be slower and smaller than the others (due to some combination of finances, actor availability, or story demands). Gatiss is the go-to guy to write those episodes, and his singular reliability and consistency deserves more credit than he gets. That all being said, "The Crimson Horror" boils down to yet another Gatiss-as-gently caress Gatiss episode. It's fine if unremarkable, pleasant if not exactly genre-defining. The plot plays out somewhere predictably, with some mysterious Bad Thing befalling people in a secret should-be-utopia. There's strong hints of Bioshock Infinite, one of my favorite genre pieces, going into "Crimson" - dark "utopia" revealed to actually be a horrifying dystopia, headed by an engimatic crazy rear end in a top hat in Mrs. Gillyflower (Diana Rigg). It just stinks that the episode pulls away from examining the social dynamics of the setting, because the scenes where the "common folk" want to get into Sweetville or the weird, sterile depiction of the town when Eleven and Clara con their way into a tour is the episode at its most interesting. The shift the episode makes at about halfway through the second act into finding out what, exactly, Gillyflower's plan is and how The Doctor et al are going to stop it is when the episode loses almost all of its distinctiveness by becoming a traditional run-shout. The most common complaint lodged against this episode is the existence of the Paternoster Gang within it; I disagree. I still really love the adventures of Madame Vastra, Jenny, and Strax, and I think they're both dynamic and interesting characters in their own right while also serving much the same role as Craig did when he was still around, that of being The Doctor's friends over his Companions. I think the decision the episode made to have "Crimson" focus on them exclusively for the first 15 minutes of the episode's runtime, with The Doctor and Clara not even showing up until then, was a narratively bold one that paid dividends as "Crimson" progressed. It was able to establish all three characters, especially Jenny, as full and real characters within the story over Doctor-enablers. Clara, as well, was pretty good this episode, feeling both necessary within the story and a fun character in her own right. The dynamic, too, of the Paternoster gang being visibly unsettled by The Doctor's clear obsession with her introduced a nice wrinkle into both her and The Doctor's characters, one that the episode milks well as it continues. The show as a whole doesn't really know what to do with Clara, and especially doesn't know how to make her distinctive from the other Companions before her, but they're more consistently able to write fun scenes for Jenna Coleman to play off Matt Smith while the show dimensionalizes her from without by taking specific note of how other people and/or Silurians view her. Rounding out the compliments I have for "Crimson", my favorite part of the episode (and probably the only part of it that it, in my mind, unequivocally excels at accomplishing in full), is the character and performance of Ada/Rachael Stirling. The tragic arc of Ada, the blind woman who befriends the "monster" that is poisoned Eleven, forms a neat and affecting little story that impresses upon the audience the monstrous capabilites of Gillyflower far better than the whole "she wants to genocide the world" reveal ever could. Ada's toxic and co-dependent relationship with Gillyflower, wherein she simultaneously fears and desperately wants to impress her mother for both figurative and literal redemption comes to a neat head in the climax, with the simple two-line exchange between a dying Gillyflower and Adal: Gillyflower: "Forgive me." Ada: "Never." It's a nice moment that buttons her arc of realizing the reality of the situation by rejecting her desire to please her own horrible mother, instead choosing to recognize her for the vicious psychopath that Gillyflower actually is. It helps, too, that right after that scene there's the scene of Ada brutally beating the parasite that directly caused her blindness to death. It's probably the most openly violent and graphic sequence the show has ever had and impresses the depths Ada could sink to if she wasn't otherwise in control of her darker impulses. The episode still has problems, though. I hated the film grain/color tinting during the flashback scene- it was lazy, it was obvious, it looked really fake, and broke my immersion with the episode by tapping on the glass of the fourth wall for a bad joke. If it was a scene transition that reverted back to normal framing and color I would've been fine with it, but it's the fact that it persisted and for so long that made me hate it. It was also a lovely effect because it didn't loving commit to the bit. If you want to film the scene as if it were an early 1900s movie, fine, but then pull out all the stops. At the very least, actually use a sepia filter over washing out the color, for gently caress's sake. Make the audio tinny and echo-y and bad, desync it slightly, film at a lower framecount so everyone moves in a herky-jerky fashion. The fact that it just took a regular scene and (badly) washed the colors out and put a lovely film grain effect over the whole thing in Premiere just made the whole thing look cheap and lame. I also had issues with Diana Rigg's performance as Mrs. Gillyflower. It was just too hammy and scene-chewy for my tastes; it sucks because I love her as the Queen of Thorns on Game of Thrones, but "Crimson" made me realize how much of Rigg's performance on the latter is made off of strong scene direction. Left to her own devices she just dominates every scene she's in in a way that gets annoying as the episode continues, where she just swells and swells and drowns out everybody else's performance with one that's too cartoonishly evil to be anything but a joke. It wasn't bad so much as bothersome, a performance that lacked any real nuance and because of it wasn't very much fun. But that's it. That's review number 100 in the books. Jesus Christ I think about Doctor Who way too goddamn much. gently caress. Grade: B Random Thoughts:
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Jun 13, 2015 02:33
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marktheando posted:It's possible he uses an actor-y accent rather than his natural home town accent (not sure where he's from) but it's most definitely still a Scottish accent, and that's his normal speaking voice. He's from Troon, I believe. But yes, it's kind of a Scots version of RP in the TV show, but it's a Scottish accent, not even rrrrrremotely English.
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Jun 13, 2015 03:09
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The DealTM with McCoy's accent on the show is that it's his natural speaking voice - he wasn't required to "put on" an RP voice for the role - but that his accent had softened from the heavier scottish of his youth due to his heavy theater work through his life, nearly all of which still demanded RP.
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Jun 13, 2015 03:17
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My god McCoy's got good Rs.
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Jun 13, 2015 03:35
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_in_Silver In which Cybermen still loving suck
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Jun 13, 2015 03:58
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quote:me: SHUT UP
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Jun 13, 2015 03:59
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Toxxupation posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_in_Silver They were good once. In the 60s. AND NO WHERE ELSE. loving Hell why Cybermen.
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Jun 13, 2015 04:01
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The kids are fine. They're stupid because they're children.
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Jun 13, 2015 04:02
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DoctorWhat posted:The kids are fine. They're stupid because they're children. no.
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Jun 13, 2015 04:06
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Yes. Goon hatred of TV children has always been and will always be ridiculously overblown. I have a young cousin about the age of the girl in Nightmare as well as a bunch of other younger cousins, all of whom I see/babysit/am irritated by multiple times a week, and frankly they're exactly as endearing AND annoying as any fictional kids, and vice-versa.
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Jun 13, 2015 04:11
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DoctorWhat posted:Yes. Goon hatred of TV children has always been and will always be ridiculously overblown.
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Jun 13, 2015 04:12
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is this the one with the chess match because the cyberman part of that was cool
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Jun 13, 2015 04:14
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Toxxupation posted:Gatiss wrote the third episode this dumb little experiment-slash-project ever covered in "The Unquiet Dead". Remember that episode? It's the only episode in the first five of Series One that isn't complete mother loving garbage, and for its ability to be competent although not exactly inspiring it got saddled with that stupid "it's xenophobic as gently caress" argument. Somehow that dumb poo poo has persisted to this day, the literal only legacy of "Unquiet Dead" is of its being apparently, but not actually, xenophobic as hell. God it still blows my mind that this became a real thing people actually attribute to the episode. I mean it was originally conceived by the fandom's most vitriolic nutcase who took his rant down hours after posting it because even he realized that it was the deranged ramblings of a lunatic. From there it got turned into a bit of a joke but ohhhhh no you can't just make fun of someone's crazy ideas on the internet, no it has to become an endless running joke every time the episode is mentioned. Now it's just a meme repeated by people that don't even understand that it doesn't really have anything to do with Mark Gatiss or immigration, but that it's a dig at Lawrence Miles and his festering hatred of modern Doctor Who.
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Jun 13, 2015 04:14
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Toxxupation posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_in_Silver In the same token of 'Asylum of the Daleks should have been a Cyberman episode', Nightmare in Silver really should have been a Dalek episode.
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Jun 13, 2015 04:16
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Proof that not everything Gaiman touches is gold, or silver as the case may be.
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Jun 13, 2015 04:25
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I remember hating this episode but really liked it on a rewatch. The kids were really annoying, not really because of being cute little pieces of poo poo but because of how badly acted they were. I liked the chess game, especially the early acknowledgment by the Doctor that the Cyberplanner obviously wouldn't keep its promise if he won. There's also something endearing about the new Cybermen slogan, "Welcome To The Cyberiad".
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Jun 13, 2015 04:27
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Burkion posted:They were good once. I also liked them in Sword of Orion, but that's an audio.
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Jun 13, 2015 04:32
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Also that's not how chess works damnit.
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Jun 13, 2015 04:37
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It's one thing to say that the Borg were inspired by the Cybermen but in this they're Just The Borg.
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Jun 13, 2015 04:41
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Fungah! posted:you realize he's won an oscar right Yeah, but I don't see how that matters. Those lists are generally about trying to pair up somewhat similar actors who were working during the period (Tom Baker --> Gene Wilder being a good example), and there's just nothing to link Cage and Eccleston beyond them both being in that lovely movie.
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Jun 13, 2015 04:46
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This episode allowed Matt Smith to play a cheesy villain for once, so that's automatically a C minimum for me. Unfortunately, there's not much else. Shame he's wasted on these scripts. That's kind of a thing with this entire season, really. Episodes like this and Akhaten and Power of Three and Journey to the...etc. They're the kind of episodes that show up once a season (even the greatest season had that Silurian two-parter) but this season just seems loaded with them. And to me that makes it the weakest season since the first one.
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Jun 13, 2015 07:18
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This was the episode I was most looking forward to all season.... it was also the episode I was most disappointed in all season  And yeah, I can't stand Angie - she's just horribly written and distracts and detracts from every single scene she is in.
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Jun 13, 2015 08:59
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Jerusalem posted:This was the episode I was most looking forward to all season.... it was also the episode I was most disappointed in all season Ugh she was awful. THIS IS STUUPID, WHEN I AM BLAHBLAH BLAH, I WILL BLAH.
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Jun 13, 2015 13:36
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Put simply, this episode failed to live up to the hype.
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Jun 13, 2015 14:13
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I didn't remember this episode at all. Then I read the setting, remembered watching the episode, but still didn't remember a drat thing about it. I like Gaiman but he is far from perfect. For all we know, though, he was given the obligatory Cybermen episode this season and had to work with what he had, but really they already have a recurring villain of the year with the Daleks, either go with another old villain from the show or make up a new one or anything. Kill it with fire please.
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Jun 13, 2015 14:24
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I turned this episode off halfway through. It's legitimately shocking. The whole good vs bad Doctor thing in his brain is absolutely terrible in every way possible, the kid sucks, it's just muddled as gently caress....I guess you can't blame Gaiman because apparently they took his original script and just threw its guts all over the place (he wrote it back when companion Clara was intended to be the Governess from The Snowmen and not modern-day Clara, for instance). And it's just really really bad and lovely. edit: I would VVV but the post is on the next page. Anyway Mr. Clever is one of the only things (along with Akhaten speech) that for me Smith's performance can't save even a little. It's just so fundamentally wack. Escobarbarian fucked around with this message at 15:09 on Jun 13, 2015 |
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Jun 13, 2015 14:32
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