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The
Dog's Tits |
Live
Whacking Permalink Archive 21-12-02 I'm not a big TV watcher. Let's face it, most TV is shit, and all TV weekly dramas are shit: there's nothing duller than the one-hour-per-week bulk fodder drama. Boring cop shows, soaps, medical dramas...Zzzzzz. You want great stories which get you in the gut, only mini-series or movies can offer them. Well, that's what I thought.
Kiefer Sutherland plays the head of the Counter Terrorist Unit in Los Angeles investigating a death threat against a presidential candidate. This show didn't look that interesting when I started watching it on TV: the "real time" thing looked like a bad gimmick, and it had connotations of the wannabe James Bond "secret agency with kick-ass techno toys" childish garbage we see on shows like Mission Impossible and Alias. Still, after the first two episodes I had to admit the show was pretty damned interesting. Unfortunately, I missed a couple of episodes, and this really isn't the kind of show where you can miss things and pick them up later, so I skipped the rest of the series and decided to wait for the DVDs Well, whaddaya know. The show turned out to be monumental triumph, with none of the predictable flaws of the hour-long TV drama. A brilliantly written, well acted season-long thriller with not a single dud episode in the entire series, which has gotta be a first for TV. Whenever the show looked likely to go into a cliche, it didn't, constantly remaining interesting, tense, fresh and evolving. With the exception of a hammy performance by a well-known actor who appears late in the series, pretty much everything in this series was absolutely spot-on. It's hands-down the best weekly TV drama ever made: it feels like a long mini-series (and yes, that's a compliment), with genuine cinematic scope. I'm also willing to bestow upon it the ultimate compliment: it doesn't feel like a TV drama. I can't recommend it enough. It works better on DVD as well: widescreen pictures, no damned commercial breaks to spoil the tension and a better "flow" between episodes. Don't let anyone give you any details on the plot though. It works much better when you don't know where the show is going. My compliments to
all involved: 24 rocks. Ducati have been testing
their new MotoGP v4 bike at Phillip Island. Some clever git with a video
camera snuck in and videotaped
the bikes. The file is a 4 meg download, and man, those Dukes sound
great.
The Daily Mirror has a deliciously hysterical editorial;
Mmmmkay. Your pixie
dust and incense should be arriving soon...... Tom
and Murray
at Silent Running have a few things to say about some peabrain
academic's opinions on Gallipoli. Aaron Oakley at Bizarre
Science makes an interesting
observation. |
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I've
seen something this week which has blown that theory out of the water.
Last week I purchased the boxed set of 24 - the assassination/action/espionage
thriller where each episode covers one hour of "real time",
and the whole series covers just one day: the day of the California presidential
primary.