Note: To any and all writers out there. Never try to write a post when the nation you live in is vying for its fifth straight gold medal at the junior world hockey championships. It tends to be a bit distracting. I started this post a few hours ago and just finished it now. Almost makes me want to become a Canadian citizen.
Somewhere during the holiday season we got off track with the Face of Enemy webisodes from Battlestar Galactica. And with less than two weeks before the premiere of the second half of the fourth and final season we need to do some catch up. Follow the break for webisodes 4 through 8.
Continue Reading "BSG: Face of the Enemy Webisodes a plenty!"...
Since word came down that David Tennant would soon be ending his run as the titular Doctor Who - if memory serves Tenant currently has four one-off specials left to do and then he’s finished - speculation has been running rampant over who would take over the iconic role. And last night the BBC ended the uncertainty with, shall we say, a rather surprising announcement.
Meet Matt Smith, the new Doctor Who. Don’t know who Smith is? Not to worry, neither does anyone else, really. The betting money throughout this process was that comedian Paterson Joseph had the inside line to become the first black Doctor but the Beeb opted instead to go with Smith who, at the age of just twenty six, becomes the youngest doctor ever by a margin of three years. With hardly any significant entries on his resume Smith has just received the opportunity of a lifetime, though also probably one that’s going to typecast him to the nth degree. Hope you like scifi Matt ...
And then there were 5. Now we’re talking. After a couple episodes of set up and, ahem, character development we’re finally getting to the promised suspense and whodunit aboard a Raptor alone in space. When you come of think of it I don’t know if Hitchcock would dig sci-fi but he would certainly appreciate the confined spaces and suspense of it all.
I digress. You know where to go for webisode 3.
Continue Reading "BSG: Face of the Enemy Webisode 3!"...
So I guess this means that we’re in countdown mode to the January 16th premiere of season 4.5 of Battlestar Galactica! We’ve got episode 2 of the Face of the Enemy webisodes and the full 13 minutes and 10 seconds of Catch the Frak Up! the handy dandy summary of the previous three and a half seasons. Oh, and no more of that ISP bypass crap. We’ve got these babies downloaded to our own player so EVERYONE can enjoy them.
Don’t delay. Follow the jump. So say we all!
Continue Reading "BSG: Face of the Enemy Webisode 2 and ‘Catch the Frak Up’!"...
Oh goody. While I will be one of the first to admit that I found the cliffhanger to season 4.0 of Battlestar Galactica a little expected and underwhelming. I still salivate for more BSG. I need that hit, baby. As is par for the course the media machine behind the show is gearing up for the second half of the final season and have now started a fresh batch of webisodes.
The first one titled ‘The Face of the Enemy’ premiered this week. While on his way to get some R&R Gaeta’s Raptor makes an unexpected detour. Oh, and look for the ‘WTF’ point in the brief 4 minutes. You’ll know it when you see it. Those writers over at BSG are wacky. So ahead of their time.
Just a touch of a hangup. SciFi is putting these webisodes on Hulu, which only caters to those viewers with an American ISP address. Very silly considering the international appeal of the show. But if you were to say… head on over to here and put a certain program on your computer if you are outside of the U.S. this program will help you sidestep that little problem. We’re just saying…
Britain’s Peep Show is a lot like olives. Sample just one and you’ll wonder why the hell everybody talks about how good it is. But pop back three in a row and by the time the last remnants of that third one are fading you’ll be hooked for life and swearing on the grave of your long dead grandmother that it’s one of the best things ever.
Now, Peep Show has never exactly been what you’d call a ratings gang-buster but the two principals of the show - David Mitchell and Robert Webb - have apparently entered into a blood-pact with the Devil requiring them to continue working with each other for the rest of their natural born lives. This may be bad for their souls but it’s good for fans. The latest effort from the duo? Playing Shop, a new show they’ve written together and are about to shoot a pilot for in which the pair, freshly laid off, decide to run their own business out of their garden shed but only if they can do so “without getting up before eleven or ever missing Bargain Hunt”. Yes, please.
‘Giant plants attack people’. Now, there’s a high concept idea from a time when Simpson and Bruckheimer were barely into puberty, let alone slipping Tom Cruise into a fighter jet. It’s also the premise for the BBC commissioned, modern day remake of the (somewhat iconic) 1962 sci-fi flick, The Day of the Triffids. Itself an adaptation of John Wyndham’s 1951 novel, the film is one of those camp relics that, though known well by title and poster, is disproportionately famous when compared to the number of people that have actually seen it. I suspect, much like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Planned as a two part drama for BBC1 the script will come courtesy of Patrick Harbinson, the writing talent behind ER and Law & Order. The Beeb has had a go at a Triffids remake in the past – a 1981 version was set in the late 20th Century – but this version promises to update the story with a topical twist involving the search for fossil fuels in 2011. Earlier this year The Ruins had a go at making flora scary again, but for all its ancient-civilization-with-savage-rituals and copious blood letting, the sorry fact is that giant, angry plants just aren’t that scary. Comical maybe. Scary? Not so much. Hopefully the powers that be will err on the side of sci-fi over horror, and if it comes to budget CGI versus a guy in a rubber plant suit, the latex wins every time.
In the beginning there was Wallace And Gromit and, yes verily, it was good. And Wallace and Gromit begat Shaun the Sheep - though not literally because that would be impossible for both species and gender reasons - and, also verily, that was also good. And now Shaun shall beget Timmy Time, a new fifty two episode television series featuring Timmy, the little lamb who made it’s first appearance as part of Shaun‘s flock.
Yep, the shows are getting progressively younger as they go but I’m a sucker for anything Aardman Animation does so I’ll be keeping an eye out for this once it hits the air in 2009.
Tonight sees the first episode of Guardian writer turned film-maker Charlie Brooker’s British zombie mini series, Dead Set. Showing on E4 over five consecutive nights, the show takes the familiar siege set-up of previous zombie movies and stages it in TV’s Big Brother house, replete with contestants and of course brimming with cameras. A zombified version of presenter Davina McCall is said to be a highlight.
Aiming for a tone similar to An American Werewolf in London, and promising not to skimp on the gore, Dead Set sounds like the real deal. Describing the show as “unashamed populist schlock” Brooker (best known for writing Nathan Barley) is keen to acknowledge the debts to what is, after all, a saturated genre, whilst proclaiming this as the first of its kind to be broadcast on UK TV. How far down the satire route the show goes is unconfirmed, but given E4’s teen audience and Brooker’s own comments I wouldn’t expect a Romero social commentary.
The project has been in gestation since 2004, so whilst the reality show format is still in fairly rude health, there’s undoubtedly now an increased level of cynicism around the dubious nature of the housemates and the subsequent ‘celebrity’ status they achieve. This could play into Dead Set’s hands rather nicely – I for one am drooling (blood obviously) at the prospect of seeing the assorted fame-hungry housemates disemboweled in the name of entertainment by zombies with an altogether different hunger. What more fitting revenge for years of tabloid baiting drudgery could there possibly be?
We talked a little about the upcoming cable action drama 맞짱 (Road Fighter) (a.k.a. Fight Master before I saw the International title on the script) over the last few weeks, and with their first episode broadcasting next Friday, tvN aired a documentary yesterday night about the show. Usually, drama specials aired before the first episode are an annoying mix of spoilers, obnoxious MCs stinking up the program with their “funny” comments, and a few largely useless interviews with the cast, repeating the same “polite interviewee 101” canon over and over. Perhaps a sign of good things to come starting next Friday, this was completely different. The show, narrated by Eom Tae-Woong and refreshingly “real,” was essentially about Yoo Gun and Baek Do-Bin (who happens to be Baek Yoon-Shik’s son, and shows tremendous screen presence already) training for the drama, which highlighted one important point.
There’s a big difference between what you’d learn at the Seoul Action School with Jung Doo-Hong and his alumni. That is, the training might be just as hard, but all you’re doing is learning techniques which look good on the screen, be it Jung’s more realistic style, or flashier action. But here what they’re learning is straightforward martial arts, including ground technique and striking. The drama looks to be of the gritty kind (“Road” Fighter should tell you something already), a sort of Fight Club meets 짝패 (The City of Violence), so the fact director Park Jung-Woo is stressing so much the importance of realism in this kind of setting can only raise expectations. Well, all we have to do is wait for next week. We’ll keep talking about this in the coming weeks, and hopefully the show will make its way to DVD, since it’s produced by CJ Media after all.
The clip below the break shows Eom Tae-Woong and Denis Kang shooting what looks to be a flashback fight, along with a few shots from the show, which looks quite good on the visuals as well.
Continue Reading "Eom Tae-Woong Gets Bloody for 맞짱 (Road Fighter)"...
Good news for all the Aardman Studio animation fans: according to their webforum, this week principal photography finished on the new Wallace and Gromit short “A Matter of Loaf and Death”, previously titled “Trouble at the Mill”.
The first real Wallace & Gromit short since “A Close Shave” wayyyy back in 1995 (not counting those ultra-short “Contraption” films), “A Matter of Loaf and Death” puts the hapless inventor and his dog in an Agathy Christie-like murder mystery. Judging by the way Nick Park used genre conventions in the previous W&G outings this makes me very happy indeed and I can’t wait to see where he’ll go with this.
“Wallace & Gromit - A Matter of Loaf and Death” is expected to see its broadcasting premiere on the (British) BBC, which will announce the exact date in a few weeks although Christmas 2008 seems like the best bet. Worldwide premieres are expected from January onward.
Counting down till Christmas…
It must have been quite exciting, Korean Tv in the 1970s. Although you had landmark exceptions like 수사반장 (Inspector Chief), most TV dramas were shot on a sound stage, and broadcast live, as if we were dealing with a play. That might be one of the reasons why so many veteran TV actors are so good when it comes to reaction acting, after all those years of training on the spot. But the TV landscape of the 1970s is peculiarly resembling today’s TV circus in Korea, the “생방 (live broadcast)” shoot syndrome one of its most sinister symptoms.
Although the situation varies from country to country, you usually see a TV production secure funding and go through casting (or viceversa), complete its shoot or at least the vast majority of it, and then broadcast. But in Korea, where a drama can go belly up just because it fails to enter a broadcaster’s lineup, timing is everything. Projects might take even a couple of months to get the green light, but always wait in standby, until the timeslot has been secured, after which shooting starts. This means most miniseries only shoot between 4 and 8 episodes before broadcast starts, and that’s where problems begin. Shooting fast and editing even quicker is not really the problem (Koreans doing rather well by now): the issue is the script. With so much attention paid to ratings, the idea of starting with a completed script (or something to that extent) is only something the greats can do, think a Jung Ha-Yeon or Noh Hee-Kyung. The rest, even the talented ones, end up facing the nightmare of 쪽대본 (paper scripts) sooner or later. That is, scripts written on the fly, sent to the shooting location via fax or e-mail, trying to stick to the original synopsis yes, but often adapted to various production issues, such as the need to bloat every episode up to a ridiculous 70 to 80 minutes (the current trend, but some are even touching the 90 minutes), just to take full advantage of ad revenue. Which, in turns, hurts both the acting and the drama itself.
Continue Reading "Moon Geun-Young Injured, 바람의 화원 (Painter of the Wind) Shoot Halted"...
Can’t actually believe what I’m saying, but… mama, can’t wait for this. A “pure action” drama. On cable?!
We talked a little about Korean cable TV in the last few weeks, usually on the tone of “a horny teenager’s paradise,” but sometimes they actually get it right. Although season 2 of 별순검 (Chosun Police) had an extremely disappointing start, tvN’s 맞짱 (Road Fighter) actually looks better and better. I just wish they’d give us something more than 30 second teasers. Anyhow, official website is open, and we have a few details, along with the bone-crunching teaser you’ll find below the break. First, other than Denis Kang, another legit fighter (Choi Mu-Bae who once fought for PRIDE) is joining the show, although only as a cameo. And the cast really isn’t too bad, with veterans like Kang Sung-Jin, Jo Deok-Hyeon and Jang Hang-Seon completing the roster. The story seems to indeed focus on fighting and not just trendy drama tropes with a few punches thrown in. But I save the best news for last: I thought it wouldn’t be him, although I did leave the possibility open, but the Park Jung-Woo who wrote and directed this is indeed Chungmuro’s Park Jung-Woo, writer of many of Kim Sang-Jin’s films—주유소 습격사건 (Attack the Gas Station), 신라의 달밤 (Kick the Moon)—some really glorious flicks like 라이터를 켜라 (Breakout), and even his own films, like 바람의 전설 (Dance with the Wind) and 쏜다 (Big Bang). Definitely another reason to watch.
Story goes something like this: Kang Geon (Yoo Gun) sees by chance a colleague from his office, who looked to be everything but “energetic,” squaring off in the ring of an underground fight club, where he’s actually known as the best. Kang joins the club and starts training to fight, when a particularly sinister fighter injures someone close to him, and it’s… well, guess what? Revenge. Oh oh… sounds like the kind of post-it synopsis that would make for a great 80s action flick. And this is starting in two weeks. Not a bad way to start the fall season.
Continue Reading "Some More Action From 맞짱 (Road Fighter)"...
Yes, all you observant folk have already recognized the men in the picture as being three quarters of the brilliant League of Gentlemen but, alas, I’ll have to ask you to ignore the tall man in the middle because Mark Gatiss in not involved in what I’m about to talk about. Too busy writing novels and other shows, I suppose ... anyway ...
Two of the founding members of the League - Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith - have been hard at work on a new show for BBC2 for a good while now. Titled Psychoville it’s finally ready to go into production and they’ve just announced the full cast: Dawn French, Christopher Biggins, Dame Eileen Atkins and Nicholas Le Prevost will be joining the two former League-ers. French should need no introduction, really, as is the case for anyone with ‘Dame’ in front of their name, while Biggins is a long time veteran of British television and appeared in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, while Nicholas Le Prevost has racked up sixty screen credits in a career going back to the late seventies. So clearly the originating duo went out looking to add some experience to their cast and came back having landed some rather large fish.
A recent article in the UK’s Guardian outlines some of the plot points for this new one, which sounds every bit as odd and brilliant as the League ...
一勤天下無難事, nothing in the world is difficult if you work hard enough for it.
It’s the motto of the (in)famous Jung Mong-Gu, chairman of the Hyundai Motors empire, also known as the company whose popularity is inversely proportional to the amount of people who can spell its name properly. Strangely, every time I hear that, it ends up reminding me of a tiny little concept which ruled East Asian history for over two millennia. Whether one should call it tianxia, cheonha, tenka or thiên hạ is up to personal taste and cultural upbringing (as long as you know where it originated), but the end result is always the same: all under heaven. These days “rulers” can be considered capable if they can handle their cabinet, but… oh oh, back in the glory days, it was different. They were the sons of heaven, that entity which bestowed a mandate upon them to rule over the masses. Or, well, the civilized world anyway, meaning everyone who nodded in respect and obeisance, lest they’d be labeled with a fearsome “barbarian” moniker. It wasn’t a bad idea after all, what the Duke of Zhou used to convince the remnants of the conquered Shang dynasty that it all happened for a reason, and that the Zhou’s newfound rule was blessed by the gods. It took Mencius’ prose to make it a full fledged phenomenon, but the 天命 (mandate of heaven) is what ruled most Chinese dynasties between 1122 BC and the zenith of the Qing dynasty.
Continue Reading "[SAGEUK WORLD] 바람의 나라 (Kingdom of the Wind) - Ep 1~8"...
