This Week in Geek (16-22/04/12)

Buys

DVD buys this week: A combined edition of Conan the Barbarian/Destroyer, Doctor Who's The Daemons, and kung fu films The Supreme Swordsman and Return of the Bastard Swordsman (by popular request).

"Accomplishments"

DVDs: Better late to the party than never. I watched Game of Thrones Season 1, and like most everybody else, I'm hooked. Yeah, I might even start reading the books (need a summer read anyway). This review won't manage to say anything that hasn't been said before, so I won't really try. I'll instead react to how everybody is always talking about the high level of sex, incest and violence in the show, to say that I found it no more extreme than what was in HBO's Rome. In fact, the two series have a lot in common. Game of Thrones' characters are better across the board, however, and I found myself quite involved in each and every story strand. In Rome, I only really liked Vorenus and Pullo's stuff. Thrones is a much bigger world, and there's no part of it I would dispense with. The DVD extras are, almost necessarily, disappointing. I question the worth, for example, of putting the same exact text pieces (on each character and place) on each of the 5 discs, especially since they hold very little information you can't get from watching attentively. Various episodes have commentary tracks with different groups of people, both in front and behind the camera (including one by author George R.R. Martin himself). The making of material is of good quality, though some clips do tend to repeat from one to the other, but that's because shorter featurettes develop subjects more briefly touched on in the main feature (character profiles, the show open, from book to screen, the Night's Watch, and the Dothraki language).

1968's The Sword of Swords was our Kung Fu Friday selection, an early Shaw Brothers picture staring the One-Armed Swordman himself, Jimmy Yu. I suppose that because Yu has only the single expression, all his characters must be treated abominably and suffer, suffer, suffer. He doesn't lose an arm here, but he still gets himself handicapped. The Sword of Swords is ostensibly about a magic sword everyone wants to get their hands on, and features a particularly nasty villain whose big move is always to hurt your family. There are longueurs, especially in the first hour as the hero refuses to man up, but each time violence erupts, it's shocking, brutal and surprisingly bloody. It probably wouldn't achieve those shocks it it were wall-to-wall action. A bit slow, then, and the lead isn't terribly engaging, but a memorable villain and dynamic, violent action makes The Sword of Swords better than many later Shaw Bros. productions.

It's Earth Day, so I decided to watch a postapocalypse movie in the planet's honor, though not one about environmental concerns. Of the 70s SF movies, The Omega Man has always seemed the runt of the litter. Based on the novel "I Am Legend", it features a world decimated by germ warfare in which a lone scientist - played by Charlton Heston - must cure the human race... well, so the trailer says because before he finds other uninfected humans, he's pretty much just out to kill 'em all. Infected survivors have been turned into albino monk zombies who come out at night to protest the evils of technology. The film has some surprising shots of empty cities (for 1971 at least), but is otherwise less memorable than other Heston pics of the same kind, hitting the Messianic symbolism a bit too hard at the end. At least, like most 70s SF, it does go pleasantly pear-shaped in the end. The DVD has a couple of short features - a brief retrospective featurette with a few of the surviving actors and one of the scriptwriters, and a vintage making of that talks to Heston a fair bit.

Audios: It was up to Steve Lyons, with The Architects of History, to finish the Klein arc of the 7th Doctor audio adventures and the final story is, unfortunately, a thing of too many parts. In the future, Klein has used a TARDIS to recreate the Third Reich, but her manipulations of the Web of Time are coming home to roost. Her final confrontation with the Doctor is what we all want to see (I mean, hear), but there's also the pesky problem of the moonbase being under siege by shark-like aliens, and that's where Lyons loses me. Not that these are bad adversaries, but I just always wanted to get back to Klein, and knew, in any case, that a reset button would make that whole plotline irrelevant anyway. There's also a subplot about one of the Doctor's companions from this alternate timeline, played by Being Human's Lenora Crichlow, that gets incredibly maudlin and disturbingly unsatisfying (how about one last scene for her?). Good ideas, all of them, but they needed some audio scripts of their own to live and breathe.

Hyperion to a Satyr posts this week:
III.ii. The Mouse-Trap - The Banquet

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