Ok, Imma just say it – Fitz has all the makings of an abusive partner and Simmons needs to get as far away from him as possible.

I remain astonished at how little this film pulled its punches, or framed anything. It's deeply, deeply subversive in its unrelenting pessimism about humans being able to do anything about their own stupidity - in particular in its quiet, unfussy hints that the people who really know what's going on are learning…

He has a brief video call to head office on earth at the end when he gets the comms back up - the two corporate types are played by Benedict Wong and, wierdly, Matt Berry. They're in it for all of 45 seconds.

It doesn't takedown reality TV (the contest is explicitly not televised), its take on generational conflict is merely a genuine and palpable hatred by the 70 year old director of the young, and ifmit had anything to say about education except 'these disrespectful teenagers won't listen unless they are literally…

Well, yeah. And a lot of those 'visionary masterpieces ' are also dismal, ugly, misanthropic murderfests that indulge the viewers' worst instincts and don't improve the world by existing one little bit. Battle Royale is an almost canonical example.

I remain convinced that this is the result of a bet in which
the director was given the back third of a script for a shitty, late-period
Steven Segal movie and challenged to make it into something people would think
was an art film.

That little exchange about it having been 'a month' was shot in a
rather…significant manner. Everyone giving slightly pained, furrowed
looks. I don't know exactly what it is, but I don't think it's just the
Doctor making the point that he really, really feels for Clara. Something's up.

I quite enjoyed the fleeting hint that the Tivolians are basically indulging in civilisation-level BDSM ('…a variety of tools with which you can oppress me').

The thing that started bothering me - Scott's training montage, of indeterminate length, takes place while he is, as far as anyone knows, a fugitive from justice and in maybe the second or third place the police would think to look for him - at one point cavorting around in the garden.

Do I just fall asleep and dream the end of this film every time, or does an old white guy swoop down from nowhere and sort it all out at the last minute?

Oh, man, there would totally be a bit where they burst into a room full of henchmen and the daughter takes them out single handed while Ron Perlman stands about looking immensely entertained and possibly smoking a cigar that he caught early on in the fight when it got roundhouse kicked out of some goomba’s mouth.

That was just extraordinary, wasn’t it? And sort of hard to get across – not sure how you explain ‘Lovejoy’ to Americans (is there a precise equivalent?) in a way that really captures why it’s weird to watch him unloosing a stream of filth and terrifying everyone around him.

No one asks, either.

In the spirit of my previous Hugh Laurie comment (and the equally delightful trajectory of Simon Pegg), I’m now thinking about other slightly goofy UK comedians/light entertainers/character actors who could plausibly make an unexpected US debut as some sort of leathery badass.

Bill Paxton is the only actor to have been killed on screen
by an Alien, a Terminator and a Predator.* The universe has completed him. He
should be in whatever film he likes.

That was Mads Mikkelsen, no?

Hugh Laurie. To US audiences I suspect it would just seem
like a plausible career move. But to us Brits it would be the hilarious endgame
of his utterly bizarre (and bizarrely satisfying) journey to see Bertie
Wooster/Prince George IV in all dead-eyed and beating on some generic Russian
gangsters.

I don’t, to be honest, think he’s particularly good in
anything, and for the same reason every time: he inflects any role he plays with his ‘Eddie Izzard’ stage persona to some extent. How
bearable this is depends on how much he does that, and how appropriate it is tothe role.

It has its moments – visually at least. It feels like someone really was trying to make something like a high budget version of the original series, surreal campiness and all, but then lost the courage of their convictions at the last minute and desperately tried to edit it into a standard blockbuster.

Shadow of a Vampire is a great film, but I think we need to
acknowledge that Eddie Izzard is as terrible in it as the character he plays
was in the original Nosferatu.