TrueGentleman

Regeneration is the Time Lords' way of cheating death, so it's only superficially like dying. Yes, they get a different cellular structure, but as the Tenth Doctor explains, in what, for my money, is the best post-regeneration scene, "It's still me".

On the other hand, when Russell Davies was wallowing in bathos, he had the Tenth Doctor say, "Even if I change... It feels like dying. Everything I
am, dies. Some new man goes sauntering away, and... I'm dead." That's a cheap play for sentimentality if it's intended metaphorically (and Davies was nothing if not sentimental about leaving Doctor Who), but if it's taken any other way, then it just muddles up the program's already messy and contradictory canon.

The Doctor doesn't - or rather, he shouldn't unless the producers are doing their job badly. Upon regeneration, the Second, Fourth, and Fifth Doctors, for example, made it quite clear to everyone around them that they were the Doctor in spite of everything. On the other hand, the Sixth Doctor, basically everyone's least favorite, was supposed to have some kind of psychological breakdown during his regeneration, one of producer Jonathan Nathan-Turner's worst ideas.

The fundamental continuity of the character, despite the different actors and different personae, is essential to the series. It's the single most important thing for new viewers to understand.

An outlier opinion, then. There's rarely uniformity in matters of taste.

Well, that's flat-out wrong. He's always the same person, with the same memories and fundamental character, but a different persona.

Yes, that's a much better place to start than, say, either the 1996 movie or any of the other Doctors' first post-regeneration stories. But feel free to skip about once you're comfortable with the show.

Good lord, no. The first three Doctors were older actors, so any kind of pairing with young companions would have been dramatically unacceptable. Tom Baker, the youngest yet at the time, was romantically linked in real life to the actress Lala Ward, who played the second incarnation of Romana, a Time Lady companion toward the end of his run, and his replacement, Peter Davison, was chosen in part because of his boyish good looks (though his was probably the most chaste-seeming of all Doctors).

Can we all agree, as Doctor Who fans of either the Classic or New series, that the "End of Time" was a terrible coda for Russell Davies's run?

It's the serialization that makes the biggest difference between Classic and New Who. In the former, a given storyline would stretch over four or more episodes that were individually half the length of a New one's and typically ended with cliffhangers, all of which makes for completely different pacing and narrative style. (Classic Who also lacked the kind of seasonal arcs that New Who dabbles in.) While both revolve around travels in time and space, Classic Who is concerned with suspense and investigation, and New Who, adventures and relationships.

For those coming to Classic Who after being first exposed to New Who, the switch in styles may seem baffling. Instead of watching an entire Classic Who story at once on Netflix or DVD as though it were a New Who equivalent, it's best to pace it out over nights or, if trying to re-create its "old school" charm, weeks. The best of these from the first half of Classic Who's run include The Dalek Invasion of Earth (Hartnell), The Tomb of the Cybermen (Troughton), Inferno (Pertwee), and Pyramids of Mars (Baker).

There's even a role for Colm Meaney.

Oh well. As I wasn't waiting for any kind of music video, "The music video you've all been waiting for..." didn't attract my notice.

With a hood, or a belt, or a sleeveless one.
Doesn't count, that's a vest called a jerkin.

Serkis is a flat-out brilliant character actor, one of those rare talents whose individual performances are memorable yet whose identification is always under the radar. He was great in 24 Hour Party People as an eccentric genius of a Mancunian record producer in the 90s and Topsy Turvey as a natty Victorian dancing instructor, but you'd still have to be reminded it was him in those roles. He doesn't need CGI to immerse himself utterly in his characters. (Alfred Molina has a similar quality, but he's a little more physically identifiable.)


Wiki's citing the OED earliest definition for that, but the term's meaning has since evolved into an actor who plays various prominent but supporting parts (and does it well), as opposed to a leading man/lady or a marquee movie star. It's the difference between a Peter Lorre and a Clark Gable or a John Wayne. For my money, they're usually more interesting.

IMDB's list is as reasonable a mix of these types of actors as one could hope for a popularity contest, I suppose. The "wisdom of the crowd" idea hasn't exactly been wholly supported by the Internet.

A gross error compounded by the pandering inclusion of Family Guy, a show whose jaw-dropping comedic laziness was definitively deconstructed by IGN's #4 pick, South Park.

But really, isn't the 'Of All Time' List Broken Up Into Multiple Segnments for Page Views becoming a rather tired web article tactic? This one's geographic and historical unevenness only highlights its shoddy desperation. Despite nods to some UK comedies, The State beats out Canada's Kids in the Hall? I Love Lucy's token inclusion only underscores the absence of The Honeymooners and The Ernie Kovacs Show in the black-and-white era category. Most remarkably, despite the blinkered IGN editors' assertion that their list spanned "almost 60 years of television", an entire decade apparently vanished from cultural memory, to judge by the omission of such Sixties standouts as Get Smart and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour?


P.S. I'd complain about the lack of inclusion of Mr. Show with Bob and David, but its fans are used to its slighting at this point.

EDIT: Despite the IGN editors' criteria for "legacy factor, impact on the genre, re-run factor", their choices seem short-sighted and parochial in their deference to contemporary sensibilities. The Odd Couple, Bob Newhart Show, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show are all incredibly whitebread, but they're undeniably among the the best written and funniest TV shows. Do we really believe that Futurama will be considered better than them in another "Of All Time" list a decade or two from now?

Well, maybe not all memory.



But yes, a terrible, terrible movie overall.

Then again, to count as a comedy it would have had to have been either witty or funny. Apart from some visual flair, it was neither. Much of the blame lies with Jonathan Gems's screenplay, but the underlying challenge of parodying a trading card series probably doomed it from the start. Not that it serves as an object lesson to the upcoming movie tie-in projects such as Battleship, Candyland, and Stretch Armstrong.

It's certainly not in the same league as either Ghostbusters for sci-fi comedy or Bettlejuice as a Tim Burton movie.

Mediocre is being rather kind, although its disappointment probably makes it seem worse. It's a movie that should have had all three major factors in its favor - cast (Sigorney Weaver, Ron Perlman, Brad Dourif, Dan Hedaya), director (Jean-Pierre Jeunet), and screenwriter (Joss Whedon) - yet it still managed to be the worst Aliens movie that didn't involve a Predator.

That kind of letdown trifecta is reserved for such filmic fiascoes as 1941 (director: Stephen Speilberg; screenwriters: Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale; cast: Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Christopher Lee, Ned Beatty, Toshiro Mifune, John Candy and Joe Flaherty).

I suppose I'm unsure even what kind of an argument to make. I mean, how many great actors* are there who have made only good movies - how much worse are the odds that they'd all be cast together? Enough good actors make bad movies over the course of their careers that talent pile-ups occur regularly.


* Even, say, John Cazale distinguishes himself from his co-stars Al Pacino and Robert Duval mainly through dying tragically young.

It's useful to consider a counterfactually cast Star Wars in this thread as an example of a film with a good cast that could have turned out terribly. Imagine a Star Wars with actors that were Lucas's alternatives: Christopher Walken as Han Solo, Sissy Spacek as Princess Leia, and Toshiro Mifune as Obi-Wan Kenobi. That roster would have looked impressive on a casting sheet, but the odds are that they wouldn't have worked out in the final production.

The OP's "presence alone" factor really isn't enough to decide a film's quality, even though that's the way most are marketed these days.

EDIT: Looking over Walken's and Stallone's CVs, I realize that they were still more or less unknowns at the time of Star Wars and broke out only a few years later. Kurt Russell was probably the biggest name down for Solo, and he'd probably have been pretty good.

Because many elements of them are absolutely terrible and anticipate numerous problems with the awful prequels? A couple of wrong turns at any point in Star Wars' development* would have produced a turkey and ensured a very different course in movies.


* e.g. Casting Sylvester Stallone as Han Solo as Lucas once planned, Fox green-lighting Lucas's third draft of the screenplay instead of requiring more rewrites.

Bloody peasant!


If the old ruling class in America were WASPs, shouldn't the equivalent in CoH be VIPERs? (Or would that offend the Children of Enos?)

Guinness made Stars Wars. Without his delivery, which drew on both his classic theater training and his comic talent, Lucas's dialogue about the Force would have taken down the entire film a notch or two. ("Great special effects, but what was that hippy philosophy BS?" instead of kids repeating, "Use the Force, Luke." and "These aren't the droids you're looking for.") Oh, and they convinced him by giving him 2% of the gross.

Please note that the merely serviceable Liam Neeson was utterly unable to rise to that challenge in The Phantom Menace, which, with its solid cast of Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Samuel L. Jackson, Brian Blessed, and Terrance Stamp, probably should be considered in this thread as well.