shallowness

I feel like I should rec a source before getting to the recs. Cairo Time (2009) is a romantic drama, written and directed by Ruba Nedda, a Canadian of Egyptian descent. Despite being about an emotional affair between a married woman and the friend her husband asks to show her Cairo and look out for her when he can’t join her there (infidelity squick), it reeled me in. There’s a touch of ‘Lost in Translation’ about Juliette (Patricia Clarkson) initially, as she suffers discombobulation on top of empty-nest syndrome and spousal abandonment, but as she gets to know Tareq (Alexander Siddig) and his city, a restrained love story develops. If this sound like something you’d be interested in, it’s well worth hunting down, as I did this summer. (And then I tried to write some fic in response to it, struggled and thought I'd check AO3 and lo and behold, thanks to Yuletide, there was fic.)

Fic and fanvid recs in the following fandoms: Alice (2009), The Bletchley Circle (San Fransisco), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cairo Time (2019) and The Mentalist.

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The Bletchley Circle San Francisco

2.4 (or episode 8 according to the ITVHub, so did ITV split it up into two, which makes my being impressed at the return of nearly all the characters less impressive?)

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Berlin Station 2.2 Right Here, Right Now

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2.3 Right to the Heart

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2.4 Do the Right Thing

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Obviously, I'm not caught up yet, but I'll be turning my attention to other shows - Agents of SHIELD has started airing here yet - and try and catch up with them. And listed as above, I can see what Berlin Station is doing with its episode title.s.

Or TV from Thursday to Friday with some catching up involved.

Brooklyn Nine-nine 6.6

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I forgot to mention when discussing the first half of the Timeless special ( Read more... )

Timeless Special: The Miracle of Christmas Part 2

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The Bletchley Circle San Fransisco 2.2

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Bodyguard ep 2

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The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco ep 2

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Before anything else, I found out yesterday that THERE IS A THE BLETCHLEY CIRCLE SPIN-OFF, featuring Millie and Jean, and they are in San Fransisco. And it is on ITV this Wednesday at nine, so that is currently my favourite TV channel. I am thrilled because I thought the show (about former lady cryptographers coming together to solve crimes) was dead and buried!

I've been catching up with some B99 episodes.

5.17 DFW

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5.18 Grey Star Mutual

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I’m obviously still behind with this show, but also a couple of others.

Gotham 4.15 The Sinking Ship, The Grand Applause

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Movie news: Initial thoughts on the announced Joker movie (a decade after The Dark Knight came out) are yes, I am interested in seeing Joaquin Phoenix’s take on the character, I’m less excited about the director (I just looked up Todd Phillips’s directing credits and…meh.) More broadly, I am not sure that having several different versions of characters or universes in the same medium out there are the same time is a great idea, Hollywood.

The Downton Abbey movie has been confirmed. I thought it was inevitable if they could get the stars to align. It’ll be interesting to see what they do with Lady Violet, who comes back and how it stands up when there's a more direct comparison to Gosford Park, even though the show has such a body of episodes behind it.

This week I went to see The Incredibles 2. Now, the first movie, which I rewatched has a ’15 Years Later’ title, and it is very nearly fifteen years since the last movie. So, a little voice in me did ask ‘why now?’ It was a very entertaining movie, though, and was much better on the women front. Although the film had Stuff to Say about modern technology and Bird’s theses about exceptionalism continued, ( SPOILERS )

I also watched Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema (it’s on the iPlayer) where he takes a genre an episode and casts a critical eye over it in the considering, non-judgmental sense, rather than with negativity, using a lot of clips to back up its suppositions. It was co-written with Kim Newman. The genre in question was the rom-com. I will definitely watch the episode on science fiction, but probably not the others. It’s fairly comprehensive. I liked the way that it looked at how the romcom overlaps with fairy tales, musicals and superhero movies, as I like all those genres.

My criticisms? It needed even more of a female perspective. It tried to be even-handed and awake to gender, but I think it could have dug deeper there and might have if more women had been involved in the making of the show. There were no clips from the late 40s through to the 60s as far as I recall, and it’s not as if there were no romcoms then. It might have been a better idea to have something explaining how we got from The Philadelphia Story to Annie Hall than going on about how The Shape of Water isn’t a rom com, but borrows from rom coms to merge with other genres and become a fable. I also have to point out that Four Weddings came out when I was at school and Bridget Jones’s Diary when I was at uni, so calling them ‘modern’ is a stretch.

Sorry, picky. I did clap my hands in delight when they did a side by side of The Shape of Water and The Gay Divorcee (or is it Follow the Fleet), shouted out ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ as the phrase was uttered and decided I must see The Lady Eve because PRATFALLS. It is the type of show that should make you want to look up or revisit films.

That's it for now. Phew.

(or...I visited Den of Geek yesterday)

Orphan Black is coming back next week to BBC Three (this was almost the only thing I felt strongly about the news that BBC Three will soon be an online only show, I’m the tail-end of Gen X, too old for the channel). There’s no way it’ll be airing in double bills if it’s following so closely on the heels of the American airing, which I think is a good thing, as they packed so much into an episode that anything extra was too much of a good thing for me. (See, too old.)

That's the good news, the bad news is that The Bletchley Circle appears to have been cancelled. Ugh. To lift a quote from Twitter referenced in the article : "There are obviously already too many women geniuses being awesome on TV".

The Good Wife 5.13

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Utterly, utterly gripping.

POI 2.14 One percent

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The Bletchley Circle 2.4

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PLEASE can there be a third series? I don't think there's been any news on that.

As I watched The Good Wife (yay!) and Brooklyn Nine-Nine (amusing, but I don't have more to say about it than that) last night, I think my next catch-up post will be massive.

Fic (not exclusively from Yuletide) and fanart in the following fandoms: Arrested Development; The Artist; The Bletchley Circle; Borgen; Everything Has Changed: Taylor Swift ft. Ed Sheeran Video; Fairy Tales (Cinderella); Harry Potter; Haywire; North and South; Star Wars; Waitress and While You Were Sleeping.

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Sherlock 3.2 The Sign of Three

Yeah, this series isn’t as good as previous ones, or certainly series 2. Deborah Orr put her finger on the issue for me with the opening episode, which was that ( Read more... )

The Bletchley Circle 2.01 Blood on their Hands part 1

Pretty good and some bits were great. ( Read more... )