The British legal system has something called the “appropriate adult”. This is a volunteer who’s brought in to observe interrogations when a suspect is deemed incapable of looking out for their own interests, either through some learning disability or other mental handicap. At the beginning of ITV’s two-part fact-based drama, Janet Leach (Emily Watson), a […]
I recently came across a comment (can’t recall where) that it’s wrong to binge on TV series now that we can get whole seasons on disk. The art form is designed to be watched and appreciated in installments and watching many episodes back to back prevents absorbing each one individually. I do see the point, […]
Some things just sound like a bad idea. In 2010, Greg Wise, an executive producer at the BBC, decided to commission an adaptation of a long narrative poem by Christopher Reid to mark National Poetry Day in Britain. That poem, The Song of Lunch, tells of a bitter, sarcastic failed writer and editor who arranges […]
Jalmari Helander’s Rare Exports (2010) began as a couple of shorts (2003 and 2005) which were a success on the Internet. In the form of industrial training films, they depicted the hunting, taming, and training of wild Santa Clauses in Northern Finland. These are strong, rather vicious creatures which end up being marketed around the […]
There’s still no recognizable pattern to my DVD watching, but maybe I shouldn’t worry about it. If my viewing became more systematic, it would probably start to feel like work. I finally finished getting through the British TV series Department S, which I mentioned a while back. It never really improved, though perhaps the production […]
Rapidly developing video technologies are altering not just our expectations but also our responses to the experience of watching movies. Blu-ray, hi-def TVs, the digital technologies which are used more and more in production – all have helped to create particular standards which many viewers now apply to virtually everything they watch. A lot of […]
Christopher Smith is an English director whose first feature, Creep (2004), was an attempt to emulate Gary Sherman’s Raw Meat (aka Deathline, 1973) and Douglas Cheek’s C.H.U.D. (1984); it had a woman trapped overnight in the London Underground, pursued by the mutant remnants of some medical experiments in a hidden lab, but it never quite […]
If anything, my viewing seems to be becoming more random these days. I mean to apply some order to what I watch – to view the new Silent Naruse set from Criterion Eclipse, or the Columbia Sam Fuller Collection from two years ago which I recently got hold of – but there are so many […]
British television in the ’60s and ’70s was limited by a lack of money, a fact which resulted in certain distinctive characteristics. Most shows were shot in studio, on videotape, with quite obviously flimsy sets. These limitations forced creators to follow a theatrical, rather than cinematic, model; at their worst, these shows seemed like creaky […]
British TV has always been primarily a writer’s medium; since the ’50s, the biggest stars have tended to be the writers, with writers’ names attached possessively to projects. Television production was often built around writers such as Alan Bennett, Alan Bleasdale and Dennis Potter, who was one of the biggest, with each of his new […]