2009 was my third year of reviewing all of the (non-work-related) books I read and films I watched here in my journal, and my second year of also doing the same for Classic episodes of Doctor Who. My overviews of 2007 and 2008 are at the links, and the same for 2009 follows below.

( Books )

I saw this on Wednesday evening at the Cottage Road Cinema with ms_siobhan, planet_andy and big_daz. Classic film nights are a regular feature at the Cottage Road Cinema, and it's not just the film itself you get to see, but a Pathé news reel and some period adverts as well. It was ace! We saw news items about a new cable-car being opened in Wales, and another about Russian ( Read more... )

Seen at the Cottage Road cinema with ms_siobhan

I must admit that I went to see this with a kind of train-wreck mentality. From what I'd seen on trailers and posters, it looked destined to be pretty awful - a CGI-heavy Gothic horror fest with little subtlety and no resemblance to the book beyond the title. I was braced for something which was to Wilde's ( Read more... )

I came across this film c. 12 years ago, while channel-hopping on what was quite probably a Bank Holiday weekend. I'd missed the first twenty or thirty minutes, but got hooked into the perilous-trek-across-the-Sahara storyline, and the tensions between the three main characters. Although the desert setting is physically expansive, its extreme ( Read more... )

Watched on DVD from Lovefilm.

This is my second Visconti film in the last month, and like Il Gattopardo it is again very slow-paced. The technicolor look of the earlier film has largely been left behind in favour of a more neutral colour palette, which is partly imposed by the stones of the Venetian setting anyway, but also suits the sombre, ( Read more... )

Seen with edling in Oxford ( Read more... )

IMDb page here. Watched on DVD from Lovefilm.

This is a long, slow epic of a film; large and grandiose, but with a great deal of small detail and personal intimacy, too.

I watched it partly because one of the main characters is played by the delectable Claudia Cardinale. Indeed, many moons ago I made this icon of her character holding a fan to ( Read more... )

Seen at the weekend on DVD. I've watched quite a few Fellini films before, but not since I've got into the habit of recording everything systematically here. So, for my own reference, the other ones I've seen are La Dolce Vita (1960), Fellini - Satyricon (1969) and Roma (1972) - amongst which the latter is probably my favourite ( Read more... )

Watched this evening on Channel 4, after recent posts by dakegra and ashavah reminded me that I'd always been mildly intrigued by the character of the Roman soldier (Octavius, played by Steve Coogan) in the first one ( Read more... )

After re-watching the film yesterday afternoon, I followed up this morning with the DVD extras. That's not normally something I would expect to want to blog about - but it turns out there were three deleted scenes included on the DVD that really would have made a massive difference to the film if they'd been left in. So now I feel the need to write ( Read more... )