Hey, exciting though my current current affairs news is at the moment, life in TV World is far more exciting.
Your old mate Sis is proud to announce he has a (maybe) direct link to - wait for it - Steven Moffett himself.!! It might just be that my various wild Who ramblings might be able to get through to our shiney new head writer. One of my chatty friends in the library who (bizaarely) shares a name with grumpy genius (and Sam admirer) McKay of Stargate: Atlantis fame used to work for BBC Wales and saw the writer on a daily basis. Together, we've had a little chinwag regarding the Big Bad in the 2010 Season and he seems to think there's some mileage with the Evil High Council arc and possibly bringing back Omega. However, another side of my head says that Moffett will come up with some totally wild new ideas for the new regular series - Steven is definitely on a parallel with Robert Holmes from the cla$$ic series as opposed to RTD's JNT - who was always stomping about going "Wouldn't it be great if so& so came back - find some way to make it happen" . Indeed, Moffett has now gone on record to say that under his tenure, there will be some all new monsters and frightening stuff going on.
So much telly ground to cover this blog with season reviews - and so many lost opportunities, unfortunately - you can't blame it all on the US Writers Strike - there's just too much retread ground, poor concepts and all-round sloppyness. For all-round sloppyness, I really don't want to, but I have to mention the recent Bionic Woman flop. The satellite channels must be really up against it because this seems to be on wall-2-wall - and my God, it's awful. Eight episodes is seven too many here - sixty minutes of my life I will never get back, no matter how hard I try to recreate the creation of black holes in my front room. I'm already three experiments in debt from being dragged to see Rocky Balboa - trust me, the same mistake will not be made with the movie of Mamma Mia - as Jon Stewart mentioned to Pierce Brosnan on the Daily Show, " If all the guys I see at a bachelor party are singing Abba, I somehow don't hold very much hope for the wedding....".
Plus I start to see now why Tim Kring was so worried about Season 2 of Heroes and publicly decided to apologise. It's nowhere near in the Bionic Woman category of awful , but it did seem a little rushed. But there are little flashes of excellence through the eleven episodes - Matts dads' illusion sequence in Fight Or Flight, The immunities in the blood which save Nathan in Four Months Ago and Noah in Cautionary Tales and David Anders (the best character this year). Having six months to polish before The Butterfly effect in September for Series Three should help - and the Beebs decision to showcase a week or so after US transmission is fantastic. Should bridge the gap neatly between now and Jan 2009 for the long-awaited return of 24 Day Seven !!
Obviously, being Summer, the blockbusters are here at the flicks to make up for telly mediocrity - WALL-E, the Dark Knight, I Want to Believe (x-files2) & Hellboy: Golden Army. Reports on them in upcoming blogs. But a library cloud has a silver lining - end of July, the city lost its supplier of new DVDs so we have to cast around for a new company. ( No new Heroes Series2 Discs for the moment). This gives me the chance to catch up on some films I had missed - 3.10 To Yuma , Bee Movie , American Gangster, , No Country For Old Men, The Assassination Of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford.
No matter how anyone slags this last film off , find out for yourself. It's a real Marmite film - you hate it or love it with a passion. Mark Kermode (the Uks only film critic that matters) stood up and defended this when no-one else would - and , of course, he's right. A gorgeous sweeping film with great music, lush rolling fields, great narration and two towering central performances by Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck - another great case of how the main character (James) being killed off doesn't mean the end of the film, it just develops it further.
And - finally - I got round to seeing The Prestige. (Like to think I'm catching up on films with Christian Bale in directed by Chris Nolan). Think at the start , I said to myself "It's a Victorian magic show - whats the interest in that?" But it's a huge huge film - the cast list is impressive and then some - Bale, Hugh Jackman, Scarlet Johansson, Michael Caine , Andy Serkis (off LoTR & King Kong), David Bowie (??!) - and what a twist. Nolan pulls off the impossible here. They say a magic trick -when you know the secret- loses its magic - its not so with this film. It stands up to repeated viewings - must have seen it three times over the weekend and was still impressed. If there's a 2 or 3-disc spec edition out there , my moneys on that one - no wonder everyones gaga about how good the Dark Knight is when Nolan has such a quality back catalog (Memento, Batman Begins and now this). Why so serious ,people? Don't worry, my popcorns booked soon...
Resident Evil Update 
Even managing to progress with some seriously ace evenings of zombie blasting. RE3 - Nemesis was re-finished end of June (finally managed to put pay to that growling "STARRRRRRS" horror, thank God) and also just put pay to Code Veronica X!
(Thank you , thank you - its too much!)
A slightly different setup on this game because of the fact it first came out on the unlamented Dreamcast before swopping format.This game was huge - two discs , dodging back and forth between five different locations with items you need for Locations 5 right back at Location2 for instance - God, it was tough. I thought maybe the fact it originally came out on a different format meant there might be some loss of familiar element, but no, the gangs all here. Chris & Claire, Wesker and some nasssty creatures. Liked the fact that swopping between Chris and Claire throughout the game meant you had to think carefully about weapons to use (since if Chris has the Shotgun for instance, when you were playing Claire for a considerable time, you couldn't use it - major drawback). Also the improved graphics where the third person scene shifts when you go around a corner - its far more fluid than just one scene to next.
Some major CG Cutscenes here as well deserve special mention - Alexia transforming to the Ant mutant looks the bomb and the final faceoff between Chris and Wesker again is tense. The hardest boss by far is Claire vs Nosferatu on the Antarctica heliport - hitting a moving target DEAD on the heart with a sniper rifle that only has 7 shots available needed a tricky combo of range (and a frustrating evening to figure out). So in contrast , it was great just to let loose on the final mutant with submachine gun , magnums and launcher blazing.
So a bit of change of focus coming up - RE0 (the prequel) has an interesting twist where you control two characters at once -one dead and its game over. As for RE4 that ditches survival horror completely - can't wait. That's the game that the temptation works on - but I thought "no have to go through 1, 2, 3, CVX and 0 " first. Its getting closer.. also RE4 on the Wii which allows me to start all over again with the Umbrella Chronicles before RE5 in 2009/2010.
Did you know also you can buy a PS2 for 50 quid??? How crazy is that? I can feel a major Grand Theft Auto quest starting soon as well....
And finally.....
It's no question that sometimes I wish some of the library customers would turn mouldy and start groaning so I can blast their heads off. Recently, as some of you may know, the council services took a two-day strike over pay - so I was down to work being relief and then all of a sudden, I was told I wasn't needed. Its quite unrefreshing when coming back to work on Friday , folks decide to take the fact that their bins haven't been collected out on you - as we are suffering from a worldwide credit crunch , the idea of my colleagues wanting more money isn't that appealing - indeed , we were accused of being - wait for it - "Over-Reaching Greedy Money-grabbing Scum". See, it was worth reading through all that praise and moaning for that little ray of light, wasn't it?
Looking to carry on liking being liked...
Enjoy the sun, Sis x