bunn

I just watched the last episode of the Amazon Rings of Power series, and am left overall with a feeling that the whole thing was very pretty, but somehow oddly small-scale, and full of missed opportunity.

I'm not entirely sure how I would have felt about it if I'd just watched it on its own, rather than seeing it heavily trailered, discussed, dissected and panned for weeks and weeks, which inevitably has an effect. I'm sure I wouldn't have noticed some of the weak points, such as the infamous printed-on scale armour.

It also didn't help that I'd been part of a long Second-Age roleplaying campaign that made a lot more effort to fit itself around the maps and events recorded in the various books, and have also written a few things set in that long empty time period, which again, I feel, fitted themselves reasonably convincingly around the dates and locations. Amazon was never going to tell the story the way I had told it to myself, and having made the timeline work for myself, I was never going to be happy with the idea of clumsily smooshing together the story in the interest of attempting to create a not-very-surprising surprise.

But I'm fairly sure that the painfully awkward dialogue would have seemed painful all on its own. And their Finrod. Argh. There are no words for how awkward his scenes felt, though I think Gil-galad was actually worse. Also the weird anti-halfelven prejudice against Elrond, which is nowhere in the text. Anything involving Valinor is complicated and difficult to do at the best of time, and I don't think they carried it off.

There were good things. Robert Aramayo made a surprisingly convincing Elrond, and I liked his friendship with Durin and his wife. The Numenorean ships were impressively weird, though oddly few in number. I liked the social darkness to the pre-hobbit Harfoot backstory. I thought Arondir and Adar, two of the original characters from the storyline set in pre-Mordor, were both compelling characters.

But apart from that... I don't know if I want to go on watching. I might wait till the end and then dip in and out, I suppose.

I decided I would watch the series 'A Discovery of Witches' largely because parts of season 3 have been shot locally to where I live.

First few episodes were pretty and watchable (though it's always slightly weird seeing Fairytale Oxford with all the plastic and concrete bits cgi'd out).

But then it took a hard swerve into Super-Special Protagonist And Romance and somehow... the protagonist who initially seemed to have quite a strong personality and opinions sort of morphed into a plastic doll who does a lot of standing and prettily reacting to things (in that does stuff with eyes and mouth but not actually saying anything or making her own decisions way) even though apparently she was genetically the Chosen One, and the romance began to trip my 'oh come on these people have literally zero chemistry' switch in the same way that Tristran and Isolde (JUST KEEP YOUR PANTS ZIPPED FFS) do.

Anyway, I'm not watching in any very coordinated or intelligent manner because the cold is still making me zonked but I am not sure I shall make it to season 3.

Have finally got around to watching the TV series Highlander from the beginning rather than catching the odd episode here and there.

It's quite watchable, but there are too many Immortals and not enough scenes where Duncan encounters perfectly normal human beings and reminisces about people he knew who were just as foolish two hundred years previously.

It's weird that nowadays it's easier to watch old TV that you vaguely heard about and never got around to, then work out where to find new TV and realise you don't have a subscription to that.

So far, no motion from any of the seeds I'm trying to sprout. Possibly they are all Too Old.( Cut for art )
In other creative news, I randomly picked up my bamboo flute and played it a bit today, and then, feeling inspired, dug out my ancient clarinet and music books. It's SO LONG since I played, I had almost forgotten how to read music, and to begin with I couldn't get the top notes, but once I had played for a bit, it started coming back. I think I'll try it again tomorrow.

I feel like I'm sort of standing still a lot of the time. I know that the world for most people has changed fundementally and in very difficult ways, yet here, we have made small accommodations, but life poddles on not very unlike its state before. It feels wrong somehow, though I have no idea what would feel right. On the other hand, I have made some art and a little music, and that's a small achievement at least.

Took the hounds out for a longer solo walk yesterday. Theo was pulling on the lead quite a bit to start with, but my iffy knee felt FINE and so I proceeded to walk all the way up onto the top of Hingston Down and along as far as Drakewalls before turning for home. It was pretty quiet, though I did see a few walkers at a distance here and there.

( Read more... )

Because I have not posted for a while, and this is potentially DISASTROUS as I rarely remember things if I don't write them down.

- Yesterday I took 8 large paintings, four small paintings and 5 paintings in mounts and envelopes for the 'browser' (which is one of those y-shaped floor stand things where you flick through a bit pile of art) to Tavistock, for the Tavistock Group of Artists annual exhibition.

( Read more... )

- on Saturday, we watched the Chernobyl HBO/Sky miniseries.

Wow. I had no idea that the Chernobyl disaster was not a pure unforseen accident rather than what appears to have been a cocktail of really terrible management, secrecy, and ambition combined with a near-insane lack of caution.

( Read more... )

It also created an interesting link with another superb miniseries we watched recently, Good Omens, which begins with this statement:

“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”

Which provides a nearly complete explanation of Chernobyl, really. Fortunately neither miniseries ended with the threatened Apocalypse, though Chernobyl was 99% more depressing than Good Omens.

I can see many fun re-watches of G.O. ahead, but I shall probably never rewatch Chernobyl, though I thought it was brilliant, and I am very glad I saw it.

Also on Saturday, we got rid of a couple of chairs that have been lurking in the diningroom by advertising them on Facebook as free (because the cats had had a go at them and they were quite severely scratched) A lot of people wanted our scratched chairs, but it proved oddly difficult to get someone to actually come and take them: the first person dropped out, so I contacted the other people who had left messages, but ALL 6 of them had already sourced other chairs! So I advertised again, and second time lucky. But clearly free things move fast on Facebook, and now I have space for some shelves for art supplies, which is welcome because at the moment they are not so much stored as strewn.

What else has happened? Oh, Fankil continues to improve and become less scaredy. He often hangs out in the livingroom in the evenings, and also you can now rub his ears and his tummy and he purrs!

Took Rosie up to the hill-fort yesterday, and she hared about looking for rabbits, then well, OK, she didn't exactly come back, but she did stand still and let me put the lead back on, which, in a large empty space far from roads, will do.

Oh, and because I had some spare Perspex, I decided to try a design that could be painted on Perspex to be mounted in a window. Glass/Perspex paint really shows every blob or hesitation, so I drew this out several times before deciding on this design:

( Read more... )

I have watched the TV series 'Fargo', in which increasingly hideous and bloody things happen against a mundane backdrop of Minnesota life.

Turns out that, if, like me, you have no other connotations for a Minnesota accent *other* than 'Fargo', if you hear two people wandering along chatting in a dull manner and praising the colour of the azaleas, in exactly that accent...

It is TERRIFYING. I automatically froze and looked around for the body. :-D

I went for a long walk over Dartmoor last weekend and must dig out the photos. Too hot for a long walk today, but in the shadow of the woods the bluebells are at their peak, and the sunny fields are white and golden with lady's smocks and buttercups.

The willow-trees are seeding, too, a million tiny fluff-seeds floating lazily through the air. When you are walking through the bluebell woods in sunlight, this is lovely thing to see, the seeds catching the light and turning golden.

We have been watching the Stranger Things TV series recently. It's very good! It's set in a 1980's small American town, and features 80's music, children playing D&D, plus some dark-ish horror fantasy elements, with really interesting writing and beautifully layered characterisation, (though as always with American series that feature some 'high school' children, I always wonder if the 'high school' bits are supposed to look quite as horrifyingly dystopian as they appear to my eyes...)

Anyway, the series uses tiny drifting dots of fluff and gloomy blue lighting to indicate that the characters have moved from the 'normal' world to the dark horror fantasy world, and I admit when I came out of the pet-shop the other day, having gone into the shop in sunlight with people all around, to find that dark blue clouds had rolled across the sky, the car park was now completely deserted, and tiny willow-fluffs were still blowing in vast numbers through the air, it did give me a moment's pause. :-D

I just ran a reference search for a man riding bareback on a horse, and got this naked man. The naked man is not particularly the funny part. That is the horse's expression. That is what made me cackle.

In unrelated news, I had forgotten the ending of Robin of Sherwood, and my initial reaction on rewatch is that it is just awful.Marion decides life as an outlaw is all too stressful and goes into a nunnery after finding Robin dead, only he isn't really dead and turns up within hours for a dramatic parting scene, in which she reiterates that the whole Dead Robin thing is just too much.

On reflection though, I'm coming around to it. I was never quite comfortable with Marion transferring her affections so automatically from Robin I to Robin II (I'm fine with the idea of Two Robins: I like the idea of reflecting both origin-stories) . Maybe Marion never really fell for Robin II, perhaps she just found herself being pushed by the story into a relationship with him? In which case, perhaps it does work that she should decide to look for something else to do elsewhere, and I suppose 'nun' is really the only other career available to a medieval gentlewoman that isn't 'wife'.

Pp wanted to watch The Shannara Chronicles.

"It'll be terrible!" I warned him.

"It might be good!" he said.

The look of dawning horror on his face as we watched the first fifteen minutes was a thing of beauty, but now things have pretty much dissolved into helpless giggling.

Pp's conclusion: There should be more lines like: "Are there any elven traditions you respect?" "Only the ones with parties." Or "I was expecting something more woodsy".
And characters named after minor African countries.

My conclusion: MAKE IT GO AWAY! THE HORROR! THE HORROR!

I think the very worst bit for me was the Elventhrone of Obviously Moulded Plastic, surrounded by garden centre silk plants. You feel that there should be an overpriced tea-room and a shelf of new age music just around the corner.

First: Deutschland 83. ( Read more... )

And then : The Night Manager ( Read more... )

In other news, I was stopped while dog walking this morning by a chap who asked if I had seen a dachshund and a Westie wandering the lanes. "Sorry, no!" I said, and was about to go on, when a vague memory came to me.( Read more... )

I mean, I'm not planning to move my bank account, because I am lazy and have both low standards and low expectations.
But I can appreciate this ad as a work of art. It expertly expresses the qualities you'd want in a bank brand: strength, reliability, a long-term approach, an awareness of people as individuals. It could not have been made by any other business I can think of, which is surely part of the the essence of effective branding.

Plus

The horses are all so beautiful and look so superbly cared for.

I like seeing horses shown working in such a range of roles.

The girl who plays the bride looks so genuinely delighted.

The horse-drawn RNLI lifeboat. I love lifeboats, and how often do you see an original lifeboat being moved as originally intended? The lifeboat is the William Riley, built 1909, bought, in a tragic state, on Ebay in 2005 and now magnificently restored. (I feel obscurely guilty about the William Riley, because she fell into disrepair when she was on the River Taw near Barnstaple, which is the river I grew up sailing on, and I am pretty sure that if my Dad, who was a relentless sentimentalist about old boats and the RNLI who had a habit of buying multiple copies of books from charity shops on the grounds that they were too good for a charity shop and needed rescuing, had known the background, the William Riley would have come home with him... Lucky escape for her really, as I'm sure her current owner, the Whitby Historic Lifeboat Trust is a much more sensible arrangement.)

I've just realised that the lifeboat in the painting I made of the Royal Jubilee pageant in 2012 is the William Riley! I didn't recognise her before.

I'm really enjoying 'You, Me and the Apocalypse' on Sky , a TV series about events in the days before a comet hits Earth. (I'm one episode behind at the moment) I believe it's only shown in the UK so far.

It started out seeming like it was more or less a sitcom, with Jamie the frustrated junior bank manager in Slough struggling to find the wife who mysteriously left him on their honeymoon, discovering he was adopted, (his Mum played by Pauline Quirke: what's more British sitcom than Pauline Quirke playing someone's Mum in Slough?) and oh yes, a comet is about to hit Earth, to add urgency to the situation.

Then they brought in a sort of US Jail sitcom element, with Jenna Fischer out of the US Office as an ever so lovely librarian lady wrongly convicted in a women's prison, experiencing an unlikely jailbreak with the aid of cyberterrorists and going on the run with a Deep South white supremicist lady called Leanne who has a swastika tattoo on her forehead.

And then there was the US Military drama, bit less comedy feeling, this, with Arnold the general in charge of organising Operation Saviour, the attempt to divert the comet by hitting it with a rocket, having a secret affair with Scotty, the civil service chap in charge of emergency planning. (I have to admit, this is the only bit of casting I'm not quite sure about : I have some difficulty believing in Paterson Joseph as a US General. Seems like there's something incredibly British about Paterson Joseph. But that may just be overspill from things I've seen him in before.)

And finally we have the Glamour Section from the Vatican: Sister Celine the world's most gorgeous-looking nun, and Father Jude played by Rob Lowe, all filmed against a series of fabulous jewel-coloured Mediterranean buildings and locations, as if to make the point to alien observers: Earth: it's Not All Like Slough, You Know. Celine and Jude have the job of investigating potential Messiahs on behalf of the Catholic Church, which feels that if the end of the world is nigh, clearly its time for the Second Coming and they need to be sure to back the right horse.

I really like the way all these different and contrasting strands have wound together. The cast and writing are superb. It's gone from being 'oh yes, that will be suitable for entertaining my rightbrain, while my leftbrain gets on with some work.' sort of viewing, to 'put the computer down, all my brain wants to watch this!' It has got darker and darker though, and has pretty much left sitcom land behind now, and I'm a bit worried about where it's going next. But I definitely want to know!

Tell you what though, the US government/military/NASA setup in this makes a hell of a contrast with the situation in 'The Martian' where everyone is basically just really nice and works together in perfect harmony. This is a much more British world view somehow. Even the nice people end up doing mean and dirty things.

Well, OK, hurray Saxons, hurray Vikings. But why does it all have to be so *muddy* ? Here we are at the tragic end as Northumbria's Golden Age finally ends in fire, can we not have some leftover bling? Or at least some nice embroidery? Silk hangings? The odd fancy woodcarving, or some nice trim around a tunic at least? Even the box of treasure looked kind of manky, and for some mysterious reason, even though we were clearly around for several years of Uhtred's growing up, everything took place in late autumn, so there wasn't even much colour to the grass or trees. :-(

I suppose fancy objects are expensive. But I still have my fingers crossed that there will be a bit less mud in Wessex. At least outside of the Somerset marshes.

I have to admit, I'd assumed that Jeremy Clarkson had long ago jumped his own personal shark, and had been playing an Ali G -style character based on himself on Top Gear for many years. I'm rather saddened that recent events suggest that he was actually taking himself seriously.

Although I've not signed it myself*, I am amused by the fact that the petition to bring back Clarkson was set up on change.org. Judging by the emails I get from change.org, they take themselves rather seriously, and their userbase profile has probably just changed in ways they were really not expecting...

Also, The Stig delivering the petition to the BBC in a ~~tank~~ (or is it a self-propelled gun as I saw some gun nerd complaining somewhere?) was an inspired piece of theatre that I can only appreciate.

* because, amusing though Clarkson and petition both are, when it comes down to it, if he really thumped someone vastly poorer and less influential than himself, or even threatened to do so, that's pretty abysmal behaviour and I'm not sure an online petition to allow him 'freedom to fracas' is in any way an appropriate response.

I am watching an episode of 'Lewis' in which a very smarmy young fantasy author (who may or may not have dunnit) is attempting to walk in the shoes of the Inklings. It's all about fantasy worlds. I like it!

Amused though to find that I still have an automatic reaction to seeing piles of Oxford bicycles on bike-stands,which is to immediately lose focus on the plot and peer hopefully at them all. I am still, it seems, looking for the late lamented Geraldine, my very old heavy black bike which was stolen in Oxford and that I never got back again. I suppose she may still be out there somewhere, but one thing is for sure, if I DID spot her in an episode of 'Lewis' it isn't going to help me get her back now. Also, the thought of trying to ride her across the Cornish hills makes my bum ache.

The Christmas decorations are back in their boxes and almost all the cheese and satsumas have been eaten.

Rosie has decided she likes her fluffy Christmas octopus, and has gone rather silly and playful and keeps running up and honking it.

I have almost finished my Christmas tree woodcarving, only I think I've decided to do a bit more to the surface before I photograph it and pop it in a box.

I've almost finished rewatching season 8 of Stargate SG1, and have remembered why I kind of gave up watching it after this series - although I did enjoy the two part season finale, which I'd completely forgotten, where they time travel back to Ancient Egypt and do ridiculous time-paradoxy things.

I'm also wondering in passing, things such as;( Read more... )

While walking the dogs, I met in passing a chap in our village. He was outside a house having a smoke, and he greeted me with some observation about the weather, and patted Brythen.

Normally I would have chatted back in a more enthusiastically friendly manner, but I had a vague feeling that someone had told me something was suspect about this particular person, so while polite, I made rather more of an effort to move on quickly without engaging than I would do normally.

Only about five minutes later did it occur to me that my vague feelings of distrust and suspicion had their root in the fact that he bore a noticeable resemblance in appearance and clothing to Owen Harper, from Torchwood. Whoops.

People who tell you to 'go with your gut instinct' presumably don't suffer from this kind of problem. My instincts are constantly swayed by being bathed in a sea of suspicious and dubious characters and improbable scenarios from around the galaxy. They rarely seem to have any validity.

For some reason I am howling with laughter at the 'haunted house' in this week's Sleepy Hollow. Supposedly this house was overtaken by fearful Eldrich Forces in the eighteenth century, and nobody has spent more than a few days in it since, because it is inhabited by a Scary. ( I don't think this is a spoiler. Or, only a tiddler, anyway.)

Here it is: http://www.entertainmentoutlook.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Sleepy-Hollow-Sanctuary-02.jpg

It's so CLEAN! Those bricks! I could cheerfully eat a meal off those bricks! And that paint! It GLOWS!

Clearly the Scary has spent most of its time since 1781 scrubbing like mad. I wonder if I can get one to move in with me...?

Of course the whole series is riddled with anachronisms of all kinds, but (perhaps because I live in a place so damp that all surfaces turn green in weeks) this one really spoke to me. :-D

I am continuing to enjoy watching Sleepy Hollow, to the point where I actually went through the pain* of watching online the two episodes that I'd missed, from the US (well, I could have watched them on UK tv. I had the right licenses and so on. I just happened to miss them. So I don't feel that briefly concealing my IP address (via Tunnelbear) to view them from the States was really very naughty).

It's a very ridiculous series. The premise is that the apocalypse is coming, the Four Horsemen are on their way, and for some reason this is causing a series of mysterious events in a small American town, which must be investigated by a rookie cop (short, female, black, wisecracking, named Abbie) and Ichabod Crane (tall, white, sarcastic), who in this telling is an English turncoat/spy from the US Revolution who has slept for 230 years, but has none the less awoken full of investigatory zeal, pausing not even to change his pants before flinging himself back into the action.

Most of the details make no sense, but there's more than enough good lines, pretty faces and panache to cover these up as long as you don't look too hard at the joins or the history and hum loudly when scepticism threatens to break the illusion.

At the moment I am very pleased that Ichabod Crane has been confirmed as being somehow an Oxford History faculty member at Merton, despite being 230ish years out of time. I mean, OK probably Merton would notice, *really* if they got a call about one of their dons from a previous century who had never officially been removed from the list - but wouldn't it be great if they didn't? Although I vaguely have the impression that Merton might be too efficient and not mysterious enough for that sort of thing. All Souls might be a better fit.

*if you don't find watching long video content online painful, this may be because you don't live in a small Cornish village connected to the outside world by a shonky strand of copper installed around 1938.

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bunn

July 2025

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Entries tagged with tv

Rings of Power

Hmmph

Highlander

Things

So, March ends. Now, what horrors await in April?

The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things

Aaaaargh!

Bluebells & willow-seeds

A disgruntled horse & Robin of Sherwood

Shannara

Two lots of TV Spies! And a dachshund.

I like this advert

You, Me and the Apocalypse

The Last Kingdom

Clarkson

Lewis

Of all the Star franchises this is easily my favorite

Reality, left. Fiction, right

It's the little things.

Sleepy Hollow

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July 2025

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