ClaRK! Kent

Two top-10 appearances for Liam Neeson? Goodness gracious.

Still living? What the heck, I'll confine myself to still living... 10. Angelina Jolie 9. Nathan Fillion 8. Bruce Willis 7. Ellen Page 6. Cate Blanchett 5. Hugh Laurie 4. Michael Sheen 3. Martin Sheen 2. Leonardo DiCaprio 1. Jack Nicholson 1-3 were close there, but in the end I decided to opt for the sheer longevity and canon of work from Jack as opposed to Leo, who is the best actor working in the world right now. And Martin Sheen is just Martin fucking Sheen. A slightly longer list, or one that was just movie stars as opposed to throwing a couple of TV actors in too, would have probably included De Niro or Kevin Spacey. Or Rachel Weisz, come to think of it.

EDIT: Apparently Rod is so awesome he needs a double post. Also, I find it a little worrying that at the age of 23, my default reaction to problems with women is still to listen to The Smiths. How cliche.

Rod Stewart, specifically the albums Every Picture Tells A Story and Never A Dull Moment. He was really never this good again afterwards, they're masterpieces.

I did quite like that episode, very similar in tone to the first-ever Silurian episode they did way back in 1970. Smith was nicely offbeat - I liked his "love a big mining thing" line and the callback to the sonic screwdriver 'not doing wood' - and Amy was fun when she was trapped in that glass box/coffin/cell thing. Actually quite liked Rory in this one, he was only okay last week and he wasn't given much to do in the vampire story, so nice to see him actually doing something properly and doing it well. Next week's looks like fun, too. Definitely the second-best thing I watched yesterday.

It is not. I liked that DS9 episode, though.

Genuinely good episode there. Next week's looks a lot less mental than an episode called "Amy's Choice" set 5 years later with her married and pregnant originally sounded. Ho hum.

Sadly (as an episode of Who at the horses would be awesome) it was Asgard, of Norse mythology fame, where they picniced.

I thought it was a fairly 'bleh' year in movies, to be honest, I probably only went to see like a dozen... Anyway, here's my top-10. It is clearly accurate, and if you disagree with it then you are wrong. Or something. 10. The Girlfriend Experience 9. The Damned United 8. District 9 7. The Hurt Locker 6. Moon 5. Inglourious Basterds 4. A Single Man 3. In The Loop 2. Watchmen 1. Star Trek Feast and enjoy.

"Oh no, I hate those episodes where they have the Daleks in them, there's 1 every season pretty much!" Move on, get over it. One of Bill Hartnell's seasons had 2 entirely separate Dalek serials in them, and they were all like 4-8 week-long serials back in those days. Doctor Who is the Daleks and the Daleks are Doctor Who, as much as the TARDIS or sonic screwdrivers etc, so I can't really begrudge them the chance to retool the Daleks for the new 'era' as it were. Loved the redesign, they look both retro (very much like the ones from those old-school Peter Cushing movies) and futuristic, loved the touch of having an actual living eye at the end of the eyestalk, and they look actually big and nasty now compared to the others, like tanks compared to 4x4s. The episode itself was fairly standard WW2 fare, Ian McNiece played a good Churchill and all and Matt Smith's holding the Daleks hostage with a Jammie Dodger was a very Tom Baker-ish move ("stand back, or I'll kill him with this deadly jelly baby!") but it was good fun, although the last 5 minutes were obviously what we'll need to remember through the series, with the Daleks surviving, Amy not knowing who the Daleks were, and of course another ominous-looking crack in space/time.

That might be my best game as a Spurs fan in years.

The Dalek Invasion of Earth Starring William Hartnell as The First Doctor A BASIC SYNOPSIS - The Doc, with granddaughter Susan and teachers Ian and Barbara, lands on Earth in 2164 AD, and it's been entirely overrun by Daleks. Oh dear. The Daleks, with their brainwashed Robomen servants (who do all of the menial stuff, like anything involving the use of thumbs), rule with an iron fist, but there's a rag-tag band of resistance fighters out to save the day. The Doctor and the gang get split up, with half of them helping the resistance and some of them investigating the Daleks' mining operation. After a great deal of travelogue and scene-setting (far more than we'd ever really get again, entire sequences devoted to saying 'look how the world is now' and such), we climax with the Daleks unveiling their master plan, only for the Doctor and the gang to help the resistance overcome the invaders and send them packing. At the very end, Susan leaves, having fallen somewhat hastily in love with one of the resistance gang. THE REVIEW - Okay, let's get the easy stuff out of the way first - the effects are fucking silly, and anybody familiar with the 'established' continuity of the Daleks from Genesis of the Daleks onwards will be left scratching their heads, because let's face it, Terry Nation had no idea it'd take off like he did. Effects-wise, we've got wobbly Daleks, spaceships clearly held up by pieces of wire and 'flown' over a drawing of Big Ben, backgrounds painted onto stage flats (and a few Daleks too, to make the 6 working Dalek props stretch a bit and look like an actual invasion force) and a creature in episode 4 that seems to have no apparent purpose other than to scare Ian and a local for a bit, and then fall into a well. And it's made out of bubble wrap, apparently. Aside from the crappy effects, this is actually a really good story. If you don't own any William Hartnell stories, or if you've only seen the emo Daleks from the new series, this is well worth checking out to see where the Daleks came from, and for the slightly morbid humour of watching an actor succumb to arteriosclerosis on screen. Well, I laughed. There's a real sense of fear from the outset, the TARDIS lands under a bridge with a huge poster proclaiming "It is ILLEGAL to dump bodies into the river" which just creeps you out, although does raise the question of how the Daleks can put posters up with sink plungers. I digress. Also cool are the numerous scenes of Daleks in London, buzzing about the Thames bridge and St. Paul's Cathedral, all of them using the plungers to make psuedo-Nazi gestures, which feeds into Genesis of the Daleks quite well and would also have been a pretty convincing visual cue for 'evil' in 1964. 3:10 in, Susan sprains her ankle, which is one of the longest times she's been present on any planet before injuring herself. You can see why Carole Ann Ford wanted to leave after a lack of character development, because from very promising beginnings as an 'unearthly child' she rapidly became 'second screamer' behind Barbara, and mostly was there to look sexy and swinging. Which she does very well, of course, and her performance in this episode was actually outstanding once she met love interest David Campbell, a gruff but sensitive young resistance fighter who helps her survive while she teaches him about fun and stuff. They even kiss at one point, but the Doctor walks in and they spring apart as if he'll tan her hide. Which Hartnell's Doc probably would've done. By this story, much of the original characterisation of the Doctor, which I remember from watching An Unearthly Child and 100,000 BC on VHS, has gone. Originally, he was a sinister anti-hero with uncertain motives, but by now he's mellowed into a slightly irascible old grandfather who knows lots of interesting things about magnets and stuff, which is nice too. He gets Ian's surname wrong no less than 3 times in this story, which would be a record until he started to really suffer from his illness the following season. Speaking of suffering, Hartnell is entirely absent from episode 4 after ill-advisedly allowing an extra to carry him down the entrance ramp of the Dalek ship in an escape scene, only to be dropped and bump his hip. So, David gets most of the Doctor's lines, which is slightly unusual for a 'nice but uneducated' human living in post-invasion London. How the bloody Hell does he know what melts polycarbide anyway, he's the one making the tea! Actually, he's not, the women do that, because it's the 1960s. Sexism is rife at first here, as Ian goes off to explore with the Doctor, leaving the infinitely more mobile Barbara dealing with Susan's sprained leg. They are, predictably, whisked away by the secondary characters for exposition and emoting, whilst the Doctor comes up with theories and Ian fights Robomen, which is far more interesting to watch. Anyway, they head back off to find the girls, who are by now hearing all about the resistance without knowing who it's against. Surely that'd be the first thing they got told? Back at the riverside, Ian and the Doc are confused about what happened here, only for a Dalek to come up out of the river in a HUGELY ICONIC SHOT, and make it all very clear. The plot gets very silly after episode 2, really. Everybody's split up and given lots to do, as Ian thinks everybody's dead and journeys to Bedfordshire to find out why it's beng turned into a giant mine, Barbara looks after the wheelchair-bound resistance leader with another girl, because they're women you know, whilst the Doctor and Susan investigate some sewers for shits and giggles. They probably had a good reason, but you never know because they're too busy with silly camera angles and stock footage of alligators. Anyway, the Doc gets a bump on his head and disappears, until near the end of episode 5 when everybody decides to go off to Bedfordshire too. They're all there by episode 6, which makes one wonder just what Ian was doing as it took him most of episode 4 (and lots of exposition) to get there. It turns out - in the most scientifically-bankrupt plot hole of all time - that the Daleks are planning to mine out the magnetic core of Earth, replace it with an engine, and pilot it around the galaxy. Because clearly, those flying saucers are less convenient than a planet full of armed and angry natives. Oh well, the Doctor saves the day and bamboozles the Daleks, whilst some miners (led by a young Mr. Rumbold out of Are You Being Served?, no less) rebel against the Daleks. They're really far less impressive than the Doctor always gives 'em credit for, you know. Ecclestone said, in 2005's Dalek, that a single Dalek could kill 12,000,000 people in Salt Lake City on its own, but these ones get thrown around like footballs by a load of malnourished, angry Northerners. Bah. Speaking of the Daleks, they're actually quite bizarre here. The original voice artist, Peter Hawkins, is on fine form and probably does the voices better than anybody else - he's the only one who really thought about what it'd be like to be trapped in a metal box all one's life, and the angry cries are masking a deep layer of panic and fear which is beautiful. By contrast, Roy Skelton just sounded like Zippy when he was doing it. The Slither (the bubble-wrap creature) is revealed to be an escaped pet of the Black Dalek... which is just fucking confusing. Although it does conjour up a nice image of the Dalek coming home from a hard day's killing and wearily feeding the Slither, before curling up on the couch to watch Neighbours or something. Another weird thing is the presence of chairs here and there on the Dalek ship, long before they resorted to human allies (a fact satired in the BBC Comic Relief spoof The Curse of the Fatal Death of course. I'll explain later) and that they all seem to be a bit drunk, sometimes bumping into doors and veering around, but this was very early in the series' run and the props were notoriously difficult to deal with, so I can let it slide. And, at the end of the story - Susan leaves! Wail! Weep! Say it ain't so! This one is quite weird, because she doesn't really choose to stay. Instead, Hartnell locks her out of the TARDIS and speaks to her on the intercom, claiming that he's been very selfish by keeping her with him, failing to notice she's become a young woman, and can't offer her a real life. David, a broke revolutionary with the odd scar who's only real skill so far has been shooting at stuff, seems like good marriage material to the Doc, so he leaves his granddaughter with him on a war-torn, ravaged planet to rebuild it from scratch. Still, they play it emotionally and it's quite poetic, so that's a bonus. The Doctor claims he'll come back for her one day, but he hasn't yet and it's been like 40 years and counting, not even taking into account that the Doc's age jumps from 450 in the Troughton years to 900+ by Tennant's Doc. He's left her for over 500 years relative time! When the Hell was he planning to go back?! Either way, despite the dodgy effects and sometimes-bizarre plot, this is a really good story. Lots of excitement, the original Doctor in good form, screaming galore from the girls, and some really good character development that probably would've convinced Carole Ann Ford to stay on if she'd been getting those kind of lines since day one. THE DVD - As far as the DVD edition of this story goes, it's not bad. It has an option to watch it with improved CGI effects, which is nice although I think it takes away from some of the charm of the story really. Also featured are the usual links and bits from other shows (including a Blue Peter where you get to learn how to make Dalek cakes!!!) a documentary about making the episode from everybody who's still alive, except any of the main cast, producers, or crew. Basically, it's the supporting cast talking about how nice Verity Lambert was and that Bill Hartnell was grumpy. The commentary is pretty poor, because they're all quite old and much of the time, any question that might lead to an interesting or amusing anecdote is answered by 5 seconds of talk and then "...gosh, do you know, I can't remember?" Also, people keep disappearing and re-entering between episodes, presumably to go to the bathroom. Old people, weak bladders you know. RK'S RATING - 7/10. If you don't own any Hartnell stories, or you're trying to collect some Dalek serials, this is a great one to go with, but it's not the best place to start a collection because it is really quite slow-moving, very 1960s in its pacing and set-up, and Hartnell probably isn't the best Doctor to start with, ironically, if you're unfamiliar with the show. Still, a good romp and a nice little Dalek story. Incidentally, they turned this into one of those awful Peter Cushing movies, so don't make that mistake on Amazon or you're going to be very sorry indeed. HERE'S SUSAN! Next Time on The Doctor Who Project... Racism! Kilts! Americans! Patrick Troughton! Cybermen! It's Tomb of the Cybermen!

Join me on a journey to the heart of Doctor Who, celebrating sonic screwdrives, jelly babies, great stories and terrible special effects A couple of years back, I tried to do something similar to this, which would've involved me watching every episode of the classic Doctor Who I owned up to that point and reviewing it for you, the gentle reader. For whatever reason, I forget, it didn't quite pan out that way, but I've got a lot of time to myself lately with Mrs. RK being away and I've decided to give it another whirl. Having been a fan since basically forever, I've accumulated a lot of knowledge, folklore and general stuff about Doctor Who, from the new series to the old, and seeing as everybody knows all about the adventures of Christopher Ecclestone and David Tennant I figured we'd start from the beginning, with Doctor #1, and work our way on from there. So, over the next little while I'm going to be taking 2 serials from each of the first 7 Doctors, plus the much-maligned TV movie, and watching them with a critical eye and a bumper-sized packet of jelly babies. After each one, I'm going to write a review. If you love the show - ie: if you're English - then it should be fun, we can discuss who was cool and which episodes were silly/genius/rubbish. If you've only watched the new series, then hopefully this will inspire you to check out the older stuff. And if you've never watched the show before, then hopefully this will convince you exactly what you've been missing and what all those crazy people are talking about when they enthuse about the show so much. Every now and then during the Project, if/when the mood takes me, I'll watch an episode of 'nuWho' and throw a review up, entirely out-of-sequence and on a whim, just because it might be fun to examine the new stuff in the context of the old, maybe. Anyhow, as I said I'll be taking 2 serials from each Doctor, because by now my collection spans 3 shelves and would take approximately 4 months to review in total (assuming I did one a day), so these are the ones I've chosen... THE FIRST DOCTOR The Dalek Invasion of Earth - The second Dalek story, and the first-ever 'rematch' (ie: recurring villainy) in the show's storied history. It's notable, among other things, for the departure of original assistant Susan, a completely ludicrous plot, scores of meaningless guest characters and a creature made out of bubble wrap. And shitty effects. Always those. The War Machines - William Hartnell vs. A Giant Evil Computer. Quite. This one pits the Doctor against WOTAN, a computer hell-bent on world domination, and features the debut of two new companions who would be with him until after his eventual regeneration. It's got bad effects, silly computer voices, and Anneke Wills. THE SECOND DOCTOR Tomb of the Cybermen - Cybermen! In a tomb! Probably the best Cybermen story of all time, with mystery, suspense, tension, and a cosmic Charlie Chaplin pulling all the strings. It has Jamie (aKa the best male companion of all time) and a Victorian girl (called Victoria) adjusting to life in the TARDIS, plus creepy guest stars. The Seeds of Death - In the future, mankind is totally development on a teleportation system for all its travel. Which is fine, until Ice Warriors take over the base of operations and use it to spearhead an effort to cleanse Earth of humanity. Oh dear. Including a frankly bizarre sub-plot about the space-race, and Wendy Padbury in the obligatory 60s-sci-fi-catsuit. THE THIRD DOCTOR The Three Doctors - The 10th-anniversary special, featuring all three Doctors thus far uniting to take on an evil Time Lord hell-bent on... well, that bit's actually not that well-explained. A hugely-entertaining romp, with Troughton on excellent form and Pertwee kicking ass. Hartnell, a few months away from death, is a bit wooden, but otherwise it's a good one. The Green Death - You know, the one with the giant maggots. That one. This story, foreshadowing the new series, is set in Wales and features an ecological allegory as an evil petrochemical comany (run by an evil computer) does lots of evil things, and the Doctor has to team up with some local hippies to save the day. Groovy. THE FOURTH DOCTOR The Brain of Morbius - Tom Baker and the production team do space-age Frankenstein, with a dead Time Lord employing a mad scientist to stitch him together a new body. A local tribe of creepy shaman women also feature, although I'm not sure why, and Sarah-Jane Smith is your assistant, so yo know it's good. Classic from end-to-end. City of Death - Written by Douglas Adams, this story is right out of his style - a Parisian epic starring time-splintered alien aristocrats, a dim-witted private detective, and a cameo from John Cleese. It's about destiny, the importance of art, and Tom Baker being gleefully silly with Romana in probably the coolest Doctor/assistant duo around. THE FIFTH DOCTOR Earthshock - Camp Cybermen! Beryl Reid! Adric dying! A cracker of a tale, with Davison's Doc on fine form and his laundry-list of assistants getting cut down to size in tragic fashion as the fate of the universe is left to an irritating boy with a maths badge. He saves the die, dies, and causes the extinction of the dinosaurs... but who's counting? The Caves of Androzani - Davison's finale, and you know it's a tough one when you're infected by a deadly disease in episode one. Cue a race against time to find a cure, whilst also trying to negotiate a peace between a vicious government and a terrorist hiding in some caves. Always caves. Notable for a great regeneration, and Nicola Bryant as Peri before she got all whiny. THE SIXTH DOCTOR Attack of the Cybermen - The Cybermen, ever the optimists, try to invade Earth again, but they didn't bank on Colin Baker and his amazing technicolour dreamcoat standing in their way. Cue an epic tale spanning several galaxies with weird aliens, partially-converted half-metal people, and a bank job gone wrong, with lots of explosions and grisly deaths. Revelation of the Daleks - A 1980s twist on Power of the Daleks, with a disembodied Davros harvesting dead people at a space-age mausoleum, where Alexei Sayle works as a DJ playing rock'n'roll for the stiffs. No, I didn't make that bit up. Peri whines, the Doctor blusters, and a half-crippled bounty hunter steals the show out from under everyone's noses. THE SEVENTH DOCTOR Delta and the Bannermen - This one is just weird. The Doctor and Mel win a trip to Disneyland in 1959, but get dragged off-course and end up at a holiday camp in Wales, populated by rock'n'rollers, bee-keepers and an alien princess on the run from the invaders of her homeland. Notable for Hugh Lloyd, the music of Buddy Holly, and Sylvester McCoy slow-dancing with a girl half his age. The scamp. Ghost Light - Possibly the most convoluted, inpenetrable plot of the classic series, this one is nevertheless awesome for exploring Ace's character, and the character of a mad 19th-century game hunter trying to assassinate the Queen. A story of an alien survey mission gone wrong, evolution as the enemy, and the Doctor manipulating everyone in the production for his own ends. THE EIGHTH DOCTOR Doctor Who The Movie - Paul McGann's Doctor stars in this failed attempt to reboot the series as an American co-production, sharing the stage with great special effects and an excessively-camp Master. He also kisses the assistant, which was a huge deal at the time but is really quite tame by Tennant's standards. Not that bad in its own right, although the continuity blasphemies are puzzling. That's a lot of Who. So yeah, feel free to comment on my selections, or whatever else, and await my review of the Dalek Invasion of Earth, coming tomorrow. In the meantime, here are some pictures of the lovely assistants to whet your appetite...

Does anybody use any of the myriad editors for FM, and could they recommend me a decent one? FM-Base, which is well good for logos and kits and stuff, has maybe 3 or 4 editors and all of them are punctuated by various "run-time error blah can you help?" or "doesn't work" comments. So yeah, recommendations.

I got this today, am really enjoying it so far. Have mostly just been messing about on Exhibition mode, trying out all the weight classes and several different fighters (current faves include Frank Mir, Brock Lesnar, Anderson Silva, Roger Huerta and Georges St-Pierre), a lot of fun has been had with Mir grounding people and then pounding their faces into KO time and time again. Starting a career with my CAF, Leonard "The Doctor" McCoy (), going for the 'headkick until KO' school of thought, mixed with some BJJ for ground stuff. That said, as yet I've had a bit of difficulty getting to grips with the ground game, so striking might be the way to go for now.

Okay. So I've got a PS3, the 40GB model IIRC (emulates PSX games but not PS2), had it for approximately 18 months give or take. It's worked like a charm 'til now, but today I turned the machine on and it just... did nothing. It does the opening "Sony Computer Entertainment" thing with the ribbony-graphic and the whiny noise, but then... nothing. Just stays there. With a game in, it doesn't load the game, and without the game in it doesn't bring up the menu screen. The only thing I've done differently today is own UFC Undisputed and a Dual Shock 3 controller, and the controller wasn't even plugged in. So yeah, any advice/help/diagnosis would be nice.

I get it because enjoyable.

Just saw it. Loved it. Almost every single minute. Some people said it started kinda weak, but for me it started brilliantly with the whole pre-credits sequence... Spoiler: Click here to view ...I was genuinely invested in the Kelvin (largely due to how fucking awesome that was, stylistically, on so many myriad levels) and George Kirk in less than 5 minutes... ...it did plateau off a bit after that, before kicking into high gear the moment they got onto Enterprise and pretty much staying there from then on. Loved the ending, and the characters were all brilliantly done (with the POSSIBLE exception of Sulu, who was really just generic helmsman guy and could have been any other officer apart from the combat sequence) and combined the old-school portrayals with a new, fresh approach. And Keef, stick with Enterprise. For my money it's the most underrated Trek series, certainly better than all but the most awesome (few and fucking far between as they are) episodes of Voyager.