It’s been fun watching them try to chart a slow, audience frog-boiling course from the semi-’realism’* of Casino Royale to, you know, an actual Bond film of the old school. Like, Quantum of Solace introduced a weirdly located and designed ‘lair’, Skyfall tentatively added light gadgetry and a more flamboyant and…

My issue with Skyfall is just the extent to which it falls apart with even the slightest wisp of rational thought. I don’t expect my Bonds to be particularly plausible or rigorous, but an entire first act which could have been completely bypassed if the main villain had simply got on a commercial flight to the UK and…

I mean, nearly all of what happened in the Matrix had happened an unspecified number of times before, and only wasn’t going to happen again because of some sort of uneasy and poorly specified truce. They’ve got some leeway to just say ‘welp, things broke down in some way and now we’ve gone back to iterating Neos to…

Nah, the original is high heeled boots, stockings, hot-pants and some sort of...jacket-bra thing, I guess? There’s a picture in a thread downstream from here. It’d be pretty demeaning on a live-action actress.

I’d rather worried about the live-action Fay costume but it looks like they’ve done rather well on that score - tasteful while being vaguely reminiscent of the original. 

Really, it’s Jeunet and Caro together that made the good stuff. At the time they were being touted as a French equivalent to the Coens.

I think this is absolutely right - I read an interview with Ianucci and Baynham before the second series of I’m Alan Partridge came out where they said that the endless fragmentation of the media landscape was a bit of a gift to them because it meant that rather than just falling off the merry-go-round and having to…

Jesus. When people say this sort of transparent boilerplate, do they really think anyone buys it? Or is this just now the official rich white guy dog-whistle for yeah, I totally said/did all this, and now watch me say the magic words to make it all go away.

I know that’s the subtitle of the actual Sterne novel, but I thought the film (which is only partially of the book, although very definitely in its spirit) was just ‘Cock and Bull’.

Was it released as ‘Tristram Shandy’ in the US? I think it’s ‘A Cock and Bull Story’ here.

While there were some awkward details, mainly due to a combination of it being Star Trek and it being the 90s, I really liked the idea of the Odo/Kira arc. Two damaged outsiders holding themselves together through overly dogmatic personal codes which make them difficult to be around a lot of the time finding each…

That does not excuse ‘Profit and Lace’. Nothing excuses ‘Profit and Lace’.

To paraphrase Arthur Dent, this is clearly some new definition of ‘working’ I haven’t yet come across.

They get worse, or seem to get worse, as they pop up later and later in the series. The Dominion war is heating up, the Federation is under threat, and when the cold open tells you that we’re getting more mirror universe campery (or light Ferengi comedy shenanigans) you’re like really? We’re doing this now?

I was amazed when an actual show called ‘The Mentalist’ turned up.

I’m not sure how Morris feels about Marber these days. One of his Blue Jam monologues involves a rather scabrous portrait of a vicious, self-regarding London playwright who’s just had massive success with a play called Fuckers.

I did not know that. Very interesting! I can see why they might have shied off it in the end, it could have been a bit too much of a distraction from the basic fun of Alan being Alan.

The character wouldn’t, but the general idea that the BBC was oppressively left wing just wasn’t taken all that seriously back then (people said it, but not the sort of people you took very seriously) so it simply wouldn’t be funny to have him kicking against that as an aspect of his character. He’s explicitly…

That’s totally how it would go. Some clip of him just accidentally being oblivious and rude generates viral online controversy, he briefly becomes a darling of the Laurence Fox types and, following what looks like a path to renewed fame, gets pulled into a world he barely understands and either finds increasingly…

Oh, fuck, the Linehan trajectory is just baffling. It’s like watching someone deliberately and very carefully throwing themselves over a cliff over and over again.