New Blog

Hello all. I've decided to try out a new home for my blog. It's over here:

http://mariephillipswriter.tumblr.com/

I hope you like it.

Please adjust your settings. Of course, I may decide that I don't like it after all, and that I'd rather be posting back here, or somewhere completely different, but for now I'm hoping that you'll follow me over there. There's a good story about snot quite early on.

Doctor Who: The Doctor's Wife

Apologies: much work to do = short review.

In a word: frustrating. I so badly wanted to love this, and from the looks of all the reviews, you all did love it. The Tardis's soul takes on a human body: what's not to love? And my answer, alas: everything that was not the Tardis taking on a human form.

Which is not to say that I hated it, not at all. But patchwork people, and a talking asteroid, and an Ood, and some running along corridors - although you do need some running along corridors - they are not the Tardis in human form. And every time we were away from the human Tardis, I just wanted to go back to her. Frankly, I would have been delighted with just the Doctor and the Tardis in a room, talking, for an entire episode, but as a wise friend of mine pointed out, that doesn't exactly scream "kids' show". Fair enough. Still, she was magnificent, and we only got her for one episode. I could have done with more. I don't suppose this is anybody's fault, exactly. (I also could have done with this being a David Tennant episode. I just think he would have done it wonderfully. Which is not to say that Matt Smith did it badly. But even so.)

Also, about those Tardis (blue box) scenes. A whole lot of corridors, not a lot of rooms. Not how I'd design a spaceship. And I am beginning to wonder how often Rory can die without it starting to take its toll. Surely it can't just be lazy screenwriting? He dies EVERY WEEK. It had better have some significance, or it is seriously going to dent my "Doctor Who is not rubbish" argument.

Blog playlist: songs about wanking

Just a quickie, as it were. I love this Bowie cover of the Pixies' Cactus - here preformed live in a duet with Moby:



There's no tactful way to say this, even on a blog read by my mother: this is a song about masturbation. Spotify playlist ahoy! I've kicked things off with Turning Japanese and I Touch Myself. Any more for any more?

NB: this is a playlist for songs ABOUT. Not songs CONDUCIVE TO.

Doctor Who: Yawn Ho Ho (may not actually be called Yawn Ho Ho)

Well. That was a bit boring, wasn't it? And for a Doctor Who episode about pirates and supernatural supermodels, it was VERY boring. Boring like an apparently bloodthirsty siren eating away her way through humanity turns out to be a rather nice hologram of a nurse. Boring like half an episode spent in a volatile gunpowder store, with not only no explosions but not even the suggestion of a threat of an explosion. Boring like hiring Lily Cole and then making her only communicate by the sound of ghostly humming. Boring like setting up a massive coincidence whereby the Tardis, a pirate ship and an alien spaceship are all adrift in the exact same bit of space, and nobody so much as mentions that it's a bit odd. Boring like the Doctor not being able to figure out what the hell is going on and therefore having nothing at all of interest to say. Boring like no River Song. Boring like Rory dying AGAIN (is anybody keeping count of how often Rory dies? that's got to be at least three times so far), and Amy giving up on resuscitating him after about two minutes (despite his confidence that she'll "never give up") and then he comes back to life anyway. Boring like a murderous pirate who'd risk the life of his own small, Rada-educated son for a shiny crown not getting any kind of comeuppance and instead getting to spend the rest of his life flying around space with said son in a gigantic spaceship which was previously staffed by aliens but is apparently easily flown by a 17th century human. You know. Boring. And maybe a smidge unconvincing.

I liked Amy swashbuckling, though. It seemed to come naturally to her.

Doctor Who: the Impossible Astronaut, and the other one I haven't had time to look up the title of.

We're now in our second series with Matt Smith as the Doc and Steven Moffat pulling the levers behind the scenes, Wizard of Oz style. I felt quite gratified recently when I read an interview with Moffat saying that he'd began by writing a Tennant-ish Doctor and had only gradually made his way over to writing for the character developed by Matt Smith, as that was absolutely how I'd experienced the last series (she writes, not actually checking her episode reviews to see how that tallies with reality - feel free to check, and to mock me for my inconstancy). This series has started so Smith-esque it now feels impossible to imagine Tennant playing the role, which is exactly as it should be.

As for these opening episodes, I was largely delighted and also fairly largely confused. But then the confusion added to the delight, because since the very first of the rebooted Who series, all I've wanted is a proper series-long arc, not just some blink-and-you'll-miss-them clues which are hastily resolved in the finale as per every other season. So although this was allegedly a two-parter, we're left with some colossal questions: how are the companions going to stop the Doctor from dying? Who was in the space suit? What's River Song's secret? What's going on with Amy's pregnancy? Who is the little girl? Who is the woman with the eye patch? And just when you thought you had plenty to be getting on with, WTF IS THE LITTLE GIRL DOING REGENERATING AT THE END?????

I have theories aplenty. I don't think River is Amy's daughter, because GROSS - does he just wait sixteen years and then pounce? - and also it seems unlikely that Amy and Rory, knowing River Song, would name their daughter River Song just in case. The little girl could be Amy's daughter, though in that case what is she doing regenerating? - just sort of caught it off the Tardis? because she was conceived in the Tardis? Which is also GROSS, because the only nookie that should go on in there is *see paragraph one* or maybe the Doctor and River WHO IS NOT A BABY. The person who kills the Doctor is totally the Doctor. Or River. Or Amy. Or Rory. No, not Rory. Or the little girl, who then sucks up the Doctor energy and regenerates back into him by the bins next to the homeless bloke. Maybe.

Some of the details of the episodes themselves actually pale a bit against this speculation. On the whole I don't think Doctor Who should ever do America, as it's never convincing - bad accents, bad sets, bad comparisons with better, more expensive American Sci Fi shows - and reminds me of those episodes when Eastenders go to the seaside. I also can't help but wonder why, if the Silence (scary, nasty, evil - good stuff) have had control over this planet and everything on it since the dawn of time, all they've done with that power is get themselves a nifty spacesuit. I do wish Amy would stop getting captured, though it was seriously creepy this time, and I desperately, DESPERATELY want Rory to be less wet. At the moment it's like having a heap of algae on the Tardis. (Cute in his disguise specs, though. Costume department take note.)

However, however. Let's not go overboard. It was disorienting and frightening and properly unpleasant at times (the evil orphanage? *shudder*), big points for that, though a few points minused for not considering that your own face is a stupid place to put marks that are meant to remind you of something. It was a great set-up for the series as a whole. And basically the more River Song kicking arse and flirting the better, in my opinion, and not only because I'm closer in age to her than I am to Amy and therefore makes it easier to fantasise about *see paragraph one*. I can't pass judgement on the blafflingness of various baffling bits because they may become less baffling as the series progresses. We'll have to reconvene on that one.

Verdict? All in all an excellent start. I am agog as to how it will resolve.

Firestation Book Swap: Thursday April 21st

Roll up roll up roll up! (Roll up what? Or on the ground? Or fold yourself into a ball and roll towards me? You decide. But anyway - ) It's going to be a stonking book swap on Thursday, featuring as it does the most excellent Stuart Evers - book journalist and writer of Ten Stories About Smoking which will almost certainly probably not make you want to start smoking (again) but will entirely entertain you in every way, and Jake Wallis Simons, who aside from being the author of The English German Girl and The Exiled Times of a Tibetan Jew (those are two separate books, though the amalgam is intriguing) AND being a superstar journalist, once had the great privilege of working with me at Daunt Books. We both survived.

All details here. Indeed why not join our Facebook group? That way Scott will email and tell you when there's a book swap, rather than you having to rely on me remembering to trail it here.

As ever it's free if you bring cake. Not as ever, it's the day before my birthday. What I'm saying is if you were dithering over cake, bring cake.

(As an aside, did you know that you can listen to the book swap on iTunes? Just do a search for Firestation Book Swap. I am amused to note that there's an 'explicit' warning. YES. THAT IS HOW WE ROLL (UP).)

Spiral: an update

I think I just voted with my feet. Last night I got home just as Spiral was starting and I had the following thoughts in quick succession: "Spiral is starting!" "Oh, god, no."

I think you are going to have to watch this one without me.

Blog Playlist (sort of): songs that make you cry

Everyone's talking about songs that make them cry. And when I say everyone, I mean some people who write for the Guardian and a girl I follow on Twitter. Everyone.

Music doesn't make me cry. It doesn't have long enough. Like someone who needs a lot of foreplay, I just can't reach tearful climax in three minutes or less. On the few occasions I have cried listening to music, it wasn't the music on its own that did it. It was the soon to be ex boyfriend sitting next to me or the recent loss of a beloved friend or - well I don't know why I cried listening to Coldplay play Clocks at Glastonbury, but the weather was really bad and I'd been standing up all day.

There is just one song I shouldn't ever listen to in public and it's Ruby's Arms by Tom Waits. I find it heartbreaking. Just getting the video on YouTube, I had to switch it off after the first few bars. In fact I just tried reading the lyrics to see if I could quote some here, and I only got two thirds of the way through. It's devastating. Listen to it and you'll see what I mean.



The Guardian have their own Spotify playlist of sad songs and you can contribute to it here.

Spiral S3 ep 1 & 2

Well. That was grim, wasn't it? My first mental note was: do not watch this and eat at the same time. In the first two minutes we had WHORES! TITS! BLOW-JOB! EVISCERATED CORPSE IN A BIN BAG WITH HER TITS CUT OFF! The Killing this isn't. God, wasn't The Killing nice? I mean, sure, it didn't end well for Nanna Birk Larssen, but oh to be in a nation so sleepy that mayoral debates are apparently televised every night, where the worst vices the police can muster up are nicotine gum and junk food, and even the murdered takes time out from his killing spree to go shopping for puppies. By the end of two episodes of Spiral, we had another girl in a bin bag (tits yet to be accounted for), a paedophile with a Terry Thomas moustache, several buckets of chicken blood, a small child ripped to pieces by a dog (off camera, thankfully), a corrupt lawyer getting shot three times at point blank range but surviving (the head, people! aim for the head!), a nasty posh lady in a Chanel boucle two-piece and a particularly ugly broach getting done for drunk driving, the judge's bitch-mum having a stroke, the police inspector hating her home life so much she's sleeping in her car, some casual betrayal, a really skanky nightclub, a teenager getting accused of sleeping with her own dad, a shoe-collecting vagrant smoking dope in the park, occurrences of corruption too numerous to mention, one of the most repulsive double chins I have ever seen, plenty of child neglect, did I mention the buckets of chicken blood, entire buildings crammed with illegal immigrants and homeless people, a missing earring, and my own particular favourite moment, an innocent suspect being punched in the stomach by the police until he vomits and then rolled in his own sick. Did I miss anything out?

Being half French, I can help you out with some of the things you might have found confusing. Judges in France, for example, don't wait around for the evidence to be brought to them in court. They take an active role in the investigation, and at the trial they retire with the jury and, unbelievably, direct them on their verdict. They are all-powerful super-crusading mega-judges in other words, and thus favour full hairstyles with silvery highlights. Defense lawyers and prosecutors are similarly up to their necks.

Also, you may have missed the full force of profanity which has been toned down for the subtitles. I can only imagine the meeting at the BBC4 translation unit where they decided how many shits and fucks they were going to allow per episode. But you can bet that when the subtitles say "Get off my back," what the character has actually just said is "Stop riding my arse, you cunt." To their boss. My favourite French swearword has no equivalent in English. It's "bordel", which means "brothel", and can be used in almost any context. "What is this brothel?", "This situation in which I find myself is a brothel," or just plain "Brothel!" when under duress, sometimes supplemented as "bordel de merde!" ie "Brothel of shit!" If we can get the British walking around saying "Brothel of shit!" then Spiral's work will be done.

To be honest with you, I'm not sure I'm going to make it to the end of twelve episodes of this. I'm exhausted already. And we can't even play along with "find the suspect" because there aren't a lot of useful candidates hanging around, wearing knitted beanie hats, being suspiciously good at teaching, or appearing on televised mayoral debates. Plus, no jumpers. I guess it's not that cold in Paris. What did you think?

The Killing: US Trailer

While we're on The Killing, let's take a look at the trailer for the US remake which starts next week (thanks to the Medium Is Not Enough TV blog).



At first, it seems to be an essentially pointless shot by shot remake, with a Sarah Lund impersonator as Sarah Lund, complete with jumpers and ponytail, investigating an identical crime in Seattle, with nicely-chosen Nordic character names as a nod to the original. Even Theis and Pernille's kitchen is EXACTLY the same.

And then you see who they've cast as Morten. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha I love America.