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Like so much of the series, the final Green Wing seemed to have difficulty finding a happy balance between the show's soap opera plots and its inspired, absurd comic vignettes. Also, there was far too much naked Mark Heap. But I think it gave us as good a resolution as such an awkward series would ever sustain, and the feral HR girls in particular were hilarious and strangely hot.
Yesterday lunchtime I went to renew my acquaintance with two of the best pictures in the world. John Martin's The Great Day Of His Wrath and The Plains Of Heaven. They form the endpieces of his 'judgment pictures' triptych (the centrepiece, The Last Judgment, is by no means bad - just outclassed by its neighbours. Think Temple of Doom compared to the other two Indiana Jones films). Now, obviously I'm very lucky to have such a majestic set of works displayed in such a place that I can pop in for free on my lunch hour. But I'd be even luckier if the gallery didn't appear to have been hung and lit by total amateurs. Last time I saw them, only the endpieces were on display (not ideal), but they were so well-lit that you could make out a huge amount of detail, see the full idyllic wonder of Martin's heaven and the sheer cataclysmic grandeur of his apocalypse. Now, from anywhere but the perfect spot in the room, all you can see is the shine of reflected lighting - and even from those perfect spots, too much remains unclear. They're too high, the lights are angled wrong...this is basic stuff. I could understand it on some minor work in a badly-funded provincial gallery, but for heavens' sake, this is Tate Britain - what's their excuse?
When embarking on a revisionist re-view of Doctor Who: The Fat Colin Years, The Mark of the Rani is perhaps not the best place to start. ( Read more... ) In summary: it's pretty bad, but it's better than The Runaway Bride*. Speaking of which, if you want a decent Christmas 2006 Who story, this Paul Cornell short is absolutely lovely.
Oh look, a promising avenue of research, which could free millions of people from pain and disability, is in danger of being shut down by witch-burners: "We hope that the HFEA has found this is one hurdle too many and they are not prepared to jump over it." Why do we persist in giving these primitives any say in the world? For starters, anyone objecting to this sort of medical research on 'ethical' (aka, natural law) grounds should be prohibited from using any extant technology to which such objections have been raised in the past - flight, for instance. Or trains. Or any post-mediaeval medical procedure. That'd soon thin their ranks, and leave the rest of us free to get on with heading for the future.
Right, I know what's happening Saturday (Wards, then Seeing Scarlet at Feeling Gloomy), but is there anything of interest tonight or Sunday? If not, I think I may go see Apocalypto.
*For me, "Better than The Runaway Bride" is now largely synonymous with "Better than The Beatles", ie, 'This thing has, at the very least, some small shred of merit which justifies its existence'. But given it will generally annoy fewer wrongheaded people, I shall likely restrain its use to Who-related contexts.
Yesterday lunchtime I went to renew my acquaintance with two of the best pictures in the world. John Martin's The Great Day Of His Wrath and The Plains Of Heaven. They form the endpieces of his 'judgment pictures' triptych (the centrepiece, The Last Judgment, is by no means bad - just outclassed by its neighbours. Think Temple of Doom compared to the other two Indiana Jones films). Now, obviously I'm very lucky to have such a majestic set of works displayed in such a place that I can pop in for free on my lunch hour. But I'd be even luckier if the gallery didn't appear to have been hung and lit by total amateurs. Last time I saw them, only the endpieces were on display (not ideal), but they were so well-lit that you could make out a huge amount of detail, see the full idyllic wonder of Martin's heaven and the sheer cataclysmic grandeur of his apocalypse. Now, from anywhere but the perfect spot in the room, all you can see is the shine of reflected lighting - and even from those perfect spots, too much remains unclear. They're too high, the lights are angled wrong...this is basic stuff. I could understand it on some minor work in a badly-funded provincial gallery, but for heavens' sake, this is Tate Britain - what's their excuse?
When embarking on a revisionist re-view of Doctor Who: The Fat Colin Years, The Mark of the Rani is perhaps not the best place to start. ( Read more... ) In summary: it's pretty bad, but it's better than The Runaway Bride*. Speaking of which, if you want a decent Christmas 2006 Who story, this Paul Cornell short is absolutely lovely.
Oh look, a promising avenue of research, which could free millions of people from pain and disability, is in danger of being shut down by witch-burners: "We hope that the HFEA has found this is one hurdle too many and they are not prepared to jump over it." Why do we persist in giving these primitives any say in the world? For starters, anyone objecting to this sort of medical research on 'ethical' (aka, natural law) grounds should be prohibited from using any extant technology to which such objections have been raised in the past - flight, for instance. Or trains. Or any post-mediaeval medical procedure. That'd soon thin their ranks, and leave the rest of us free to get on with heading for the future.
Right, I know what's happening Saturday (Wards, then Seeing Scarlet at Feeling Gloomy), but is there anything of interest tonight or Sunday? If not, I think I may go see Apocalypto.
*For me, "Better than The Runaway Bride" is now largely synonymous with "Better than The Beatles", ie, 'This thing has, at the very least, some small shred of merit which justifies its existence'. But given it will generally annoy fewer wrongheaded people, I shall likely restrain its use to Who-related contexts.
