Caroline John was the name of the actress who played Elizabeth Shaw on Doctor Who, and we lost her this month. She was an active actress, with 50 titles to her credit, some of which had her sharing the screen with Jon Pertwee’s Doctor. Here are just a few of the tribute videos to remember her by…
Terrestrial Human
I have a hard time imagining how they could do this justice, unless it was shown on an HBO-equivalent premium channel where running a hard-R program was a good thing. The are looking at making Barbarella as a TV Show according to that article from /Film. Both of the recent attempts to resurrect and re-imagine the original film for the big screen crashed and burned before they began filming. I have no real confidence that the TV version will be created either, but perhaps it might make it to the screen this time. The original report came from Deadline, and the closest anyone has ever come to creating a remake was 2001’s CQ, a very nicely layered film within a film which succeeded on many levels and which I recommend for everyone’s permanent collection.
Simultaneously exceedingly cute and eerily disturbing, Ted is about a talking stuffed teddy bear who came to life while its owner (Mark Wahlberg) was a child, and he has never been able to get rid of him since. This is the first feature film project Seth MacFarlane has done since he developed Family Guy, and besides writing and directing it he also does the voice work for the bear.
We have three interesting movies this week, two of them silly. The serious one is Wrath of the Titans, which I didn’t see in theaters because the first one took itself too seriously, and I didn’t need any more of that. I still don’t. I also didn’t see Mirror, Mirror, not so much because it looked too silly (you can never have too much silly in my book) but because I had to work that weekend. Before I decide whether to add it to the permanent collection I will catch it on streamy or HBO or somewhere equivalent. The third one isn’t genre: David Tennant’s The Decoy Bride was made for two and a half million pounds and earned $524 its opening weekend in the US. In part this was because it only showed up on a single screen that weekend, but even later on it wasn’t in that many theaters. Let’s face it, the only reason I will be watching it is because David is in it, and he made a wonderful Doctor. OK, and the trailer looked like silly fun, too.
Notice how I didn’t even mention Sector 7? Even the Korean audiences didn’t go to that one, a bit of a surprise as his earlier work The Host won such critical acclaim around the world.
No genre TV shows this week, but I will mention Casablanca: The Complete Series if only because it has Scatman Crothers as Sam, and one of the tracks he sings is the theme for the show. And yes, the original 1942 movie is where the phrase Play It Again, Sam came from.
Anime has a brand new release this week. Towanoquon: the Complete Collection tells the story of gifted mutant children born with special powers. Government cyborgs are hunting them down to kill them, while a rebel group with their own powers are saving them to train them to use their gifts to defend themselves. Don’t let the fact that the complete series is only 6 episodes fool you, because each episode is 50 minutes long, giving them a full 300 minutes to tell the story.
They haven’t set up the web site yet, but I loved the original Pixar animation Monsters Inc, and am looking forward to the sequel Monsters University.
A few of the monsters escaped from the Doctor Who Experience, recently relocated to Cardiff, and were wandering the streets harassing the passers by. I got to visit the exhibition in London this past October, I can’t wait to go back and learn what new goodies they deployed for the new installation. Obviously I will have to wait at least a little bit, since it doesn’t open there until July 20th…