11.11.09

The 1,514th most regularly updated blog in Shropshire

Posted in Films, TV at Wed 11 Nov 2009 by Stavros

Good day. Welcome. You are currently reading the 1,514th most regularly updated blog in Shropshire. Make yourself comfortable. I hope you are a patient reader.

I often blog about music, obviously that’s in relative terms, but not so much the other arts. Let me change that. I used to watch lots of films when I was a student, and even arranged my course around some excellent Film Studies modules. However I can’t seem to get excited over movies these days. I rarely watch them at all truth be told. When people talk of a must-see film I silently scoff, snobbishly imagining an explosion-heavy high octane prequel of a sequel of a comic. It sometimes is of course. Either that or Barry Magic. But it’s not exactly as if I spend my time consuming the celluloid canons of La Nouvelle Vague or Italian neorealism in my spare time instead. I’m sure I’m missing out on shitloads of flicks, not least I suppose Up and The Bicycle Thief.

The Buggles were wrong. TV killed the Videostar. At least for me. See the everyday domesticity of the violent New Jersey underworld of The Sopranos, the all-immersive crime and corruption of The Wire’s Baltimore, the contradictory almost bipolar 1960s New York in Mad Men. The sheer hours of character and story (and location) development means to me these are worlds that no two-hour film has ever so completely submerged me. The mournfully cancelled Deadwood and brilliant gritty French series Spiral did similar things too.

Never having been a big watcher of television (again hear the snobbish snorts of derision at Eastenders or X-Factor or Gok fucking Wan), I am trying to catch up on drama that may have slipped below my radar - or EPG. In the last couple of weeks I’ve watched the Red Riding trilogy and State of Play, both excellent large scale British dramas. Both sadly and unlike their US equivalents, only a few episodes long.

Strap your good selves in, here comes a point to this rambling

So, I hoped you, yes you, the crowd-sourced mind of a million thoughts, could let me know if there’s any great drama I may have missed over the last ten years or so. Anything British and ambitious, or any imported series the calibre of The Sopranos or as all-emcompassing as The Wire or as fragrant with poetic cussing as Deadwood? Or shameless comment whore that I am, tell me why I’m so wrong about film.

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