It is a membership organisation, which works to improve the quality of life of people affected by dementia in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Many of the 25,000 members have personal experience of dementia, as carers, health professionals or people with dementia themselves.
On 16th May 2010, I will be taking part in the Great Manchester run which is a 10k run around Manchester city. Self explanatory really.
If you’re someone who knows me, someone whose family has been effected by dementia or you’re just someone who stumbled on to this site by accident looking for Doctor Who slash, if you have just £2 to spare please click on the link below to sponsor me. Last year I raised over £230 and it would mean a lot to me if I could hit the £250 mark this year.
The guys and gals at doctorwho2009.com had a dream. Their dream was to fill in the Tardis sized hole left by the partial hiatus of Doctor Who. Thirteen episodes of fan filmed goodness to air on the internet via their website.
That was back in April.
Five months on and fast approaching the real Doctor’s new special, Doctorwho2009.com has finally got round to realeasing the first episode, Fire and Ice.
This fan project has faced a lot of criticism on the fan forums. Many have cried foul on the reasoning behind making a full series of stories. These people seeing the show as being more to do with the cast and crew having something to put on their showreel than giving something to the fans. Others have wagged their fingers at the blatent copyright infringmant, ignoring the fact that Big Finish first found it’s legs through Nicholas Briggs selling made up Doctor Who stories on C90 cassette. Also, if very fan film was to be destroyed there would be no need for Youtube.
In short, a lot of kicking off before anyone had actually seen an episode… Ooh, a bit like every time something comes out about Matt Smith!
Anyway, I made my way through this fan film last night and was quite impressed with the overall package. Before I continue, if you do fancy watching this, I’d make your way over to the site and download before reading on. I will be spoiling things.
Right, finished watching? Good. Formed an opinion? Excellent. Here’s mine. I should point out that I’m making these opinions based on how it entertained me and not how it fits in with Doctor Who canon. Even Doctor Who canon isn’t canonical, so I’m not going to start ripping into this.
The Good
The Doctor: The Doctor looks suitably doctorish. Long coat, 70’s tie and 80’s trainers. It seems to work. Also, whilst this fan film was made in America, Kenneth Raymond Moore makes a more than adequate stab at an English accent. Not that it would make any difference if he was American. As I say, this isn’t canonical.
The special effects: You’ll really believe someone is about to be eaten by a bunch of polygons. Plus, the Ice Warriors don’t look too bad…
The ending: The ending was one of the stand out moments of this episode. In the last ten minutes, we have the usual scenes of the Doctor inviting the new companion to explore the universe. Alice, the new companion, says yes on the understanding that she will be returned to Earth only a few seconds after she left. When the Tardis leaves we witness over the course of a few months, Alice trying to find her friend before packing up her house and finishing off her diary for her with the words Alice never returned home.
Where is Alice and why hasn’t she returned like promised? Who knows, but it makes a dencetn contrast to the usual happy endings of a season opener.
The Bad
The music: There is so many times you can hear the theme from Doomsday… This fan film proves you can. It felt like it was on every five minutes… Ooooooh, ooooh, oooOooOoOoOOOOooo. Mostly when we see glimpses of the Doctor. Shame really because I was pretty damn close to turning it off because it was quite irritable.
The Doctor: Yeah, he’s in both lists, but I am quite undecided. In the third act, the Doctor finds the Ice Warrior base and, using a homing beacon, leads UNIT towards it too. In five minutes, the Ice Warriors are wiped out as the Doctor stands back smiling. Then as soon as the head of the Ice Warriors is shot, the Doctor is suddenly remorseful before shrugging his shoulders and walking away. His personality jumps about too much to make sense…
Is this the youngest member of UNIT ever? When did they start hiring 12 year olds
Why exactly did Alice pakc her tennis rackets when making a break for it? When you’re on the run, how often are you going to get the chance for a quick game of doubles?
Can they really pull this off for 12 more eps? I’m not so sure.
But, yeah, overall, this wasn’t incredibly bad, but it wasn’t brilliant. Still, a valiant effort and hopefully the next episodes will up a lot sooner.
If you’ve seen the episode, leave a comment and let me know what you think.
Tagline: They share more than the same prescription…. They share a mother
Synopsis: Four men meet in the lobby of a cinema each wearing the same pair of black rimmed glasses. We discover they are brothers who haven’t spoken to each other for an extended period of time.
David (Play by Will Ferrell): A brilliant journalist who has a crippling addiction to cocaine whose wife doesn’t understand him and is having an affair with Alan.
Alan (Played by Bill Murray): A brilliant gynaecologist who has a crippling addiction to Nescafe Half and Half coffee, whose wife doesn’t understand him and is having an affair with David.
Colin (Played by Colin Farrell): A brilliant English teacher who has a crippling addiction to Buckaroo whose wife doesn’t understand him and is having an affair with Haley Joel Osment.
After leaving the cinema and acknowledging that they are back in each other’s lives, they decide to let their mum know they are not actually dead. We learn in flashbacks that this was a prank that went horrendously wrong and led to each of their crippling addictions.
Their mother lives in Blackpool, UK, England, and so they make a perilous journey from California to the north of England via a first class ticket on Virgin Air. The flight is played out in real time and, it is here, we begin to appreciate how much their middle class lifestyle is bringing them nothing but dismay. Colin, unable to cope with his own genius, ends up having an affair with the pilot. Alan kills himself but then decides against it, comes back from the dead and tells everyone he’d been hurt in a fencing incident.
This ennui is emphasised further during a monumentally touching scene where Will Ferrell masturbates on the plane to The Darjeeling Limited in slow motion and to the tune of Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah. See he has money, but he’s unhappy. No further explanation is needed. If you don’t appreciate the sub-text, then you clearly don’t understand what it is to be middle class. The whole scene is played out in HD and audience members will wear 3D glasses so they actually feel like Will Ferrell is crying in their faces.
When they arrive at Blackpool, we discover they remember that they don’t have a mum and they’re not related. However, in a way they are brothers. Everyone looks inside themselves, and realises they’ve learnt something. Credits roll and we play some obscure track that no one outside of the film would really listen to, but it’ll end up at number one on iTunes a week later.
Oh, and one of them writes poetry as well the whole time. Real emotional stuff that first year students will recite in the Student Union when they’re trying to getting laid.
Director: Wes Anderson
Notes: Alan’s addiction to Nescafe could lead to big bucks when it comes to sponsorship. It didn’t hurt Nightwatch.
A while back, my partner took me off for a jaunt around Australia. On the second day there, we decided to do nothing more than a simple day’s shopping. Namely the Queen Vic Market. In the guidebook it speaks of how you’ll be able to purchase everything from fruit and veg to leather jackets to jeans. What it negates to mention is the copious amounts of ‘BUGGER! I’M IN AUSTRALIA’ t-shirts and what became my personal favourties… the Mexican bootleg toys.
Nearly every stall had playthings of a dubious plastic nature. Nearly all of them distilled from the latest blockbuster or child fad. Of the many that were on offer, some of my favourites included:
1. The Spider-Man dress up kit… Which came with a Spider-Man mask and a light up sword similar to a light sabre. The packaging claims the toy is ‘crafted for kids and made for your pleasure’… No, I have no idea either.
2. Another Spider-Man dress up kit… Like above but with a shotgun…
3. The rest of the Spider-Man 3 toys… SO MANY! Most of them basically badly painted dolls of Venom. Most of them coming in packs of three, because everyone needs a third Spider-Man in thier lives. One for the working week and one for Sunday best. If you were really lucky you could find ones packaged with Venom on a motorbike. I prayed that Spider-Man 3 did actually have Venom in some sort of vehicular form and that Spider-Man would have a shotgun. Unfortunately, Sam Raimis chose not to go down that path.
4.The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers Mystic Force Hero figure set… That was the actual wording by the way. This was a pack of several figures who, together, helped to, and I quote, ‘vanquish the bad person’s person’. The pack that caught my eye the most contained Mr Fantastic, Spider-Man, two Batmans, Superman without his cape, Anakin Skywalker and Zorro. You’ll note the complete abscence of any multicoloured spandex clad power rangers. Either way, I’m sure you’ll agree with me that this would make a fucking amazing movie.
The reason I bring this up is just a cheap way to promote one of my favourite websites, the Undiscovered Playthings. Everytime I’m missing Australia, I just pop this website on and the happy memories come flooding back.
