Watching: Blake's 7 - only thirty years too late and the first thing I ever knew of this series was when a tv show about old sci-fi mentioned it as SPOILER!! "the show where they all got killed in the final episode", but hey - I get there in the end. It's all right, as it happens. Money was clearly spent on some set dressing and location shooting/costumes, yet quite a great deal more money was clearly saved on special effects. There's also a terrible habit of just throwing exposition at the viewer, like characters sitting on a sofa explaining their evil plans for civilization that hinge on censorship, or Blake sitting Avon down to watch a power point presentation of what happened in the previous episode even though Avon was not only present during events but central to them - but all told, it's okay fluff.
Clash of the Titans - this here remake movie is stupid. Really, it's utterly, utterly stupid and composed of nothing but sequences where things jump towards the camera, which as a visual gets old if you aren't watching in a 3D cinema, which I imagine the vast majority of the audience won't be. I can watch any old shit, mind, so this didn't really offend me and I quite enjoyed it, but it's a ham-fisted, sometimes visually incomprehensible beast. Cool Kraken, all the same.
Steel Dawn - a Patrick Swayze favorite round these parts, it's basically a post-apocalyptic kung-fu version of Shane. Dumb, no-budget, and acted by a bunch of trees, but still likably daft and a good reminder of those heady days when 'low-budget' didn't automatically mean A LOAD OF SHITE and film makers got around their shortcomings by being entertaining and knowing a bit about their craft. The first Terminator, for instance, was a low-budget effort (and far better than the soul-less and bloated sequel whose appeal I've never been able to comprehend), as was Monster Squad, Night of the Comet, Ghoulies, American Ninja 2, Phantasm 2, Warlock, Showdown in Little Tokyo - shit, I could go on for ages just listing complete tosh that's inexplicably entertaining despite itself because someone somewhere along the line decided to apply a little TLC to a concept.
Covert Affairs - I have often wondered what would happen if they reversed the Jennifer Garner road to success and instead of starting out in a good tv show about a female spy before graduating to success in terrible films, an actress started out in successful and good films before moving on to shit television shows about a female spy and clearly Piper Perabo and I are on the same wavelength, because after making The Prestige, she's taken a demotion to this 'so awful it's entertaining' tv show that also stars several other tv no-marks I quite like and him off Jake 2.0. It's basically Alias if you tuned into Alias for the first time and Alias was exactly how you expected it to be (especially the pop songs that play during the end and lots of girly doe-eyes made to some point vaguely off-camera because the main female is feeling inadequate in a man's world) rather than a tv show about a woman who hits a wall and decides the best course of action is to not feel bad but to instead solve that problem immediately by using fancy gadgets for a bit and then shooting Arabs before going home and drinking alcohol until the next episode starts.
Rookie Blue - the more I watch the tall brunette in this attempt to do any acting at all, the more I expect the camera to pull back and reveal the whole thing to be a 'show within a show' where everyone is deliberately spouting the most deliberately cliched lines they can in the most unconvincing way possible to convey that they're playing a terrible actor reading from a banal script, and if that actually comes to pass about ten episodes down the line, then this becomes officially the best mindfuck on soap opera viewers ever committed to television - but I'm going to lay money right now that this will not be the case and this really is all there is to it: bad actors, poor drama, and not a speck of playfulness or genre awareness in sight.
But I keep thinking "any minute now, the camera will pull back..." Quite baffling.
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