Nicholas Galitzine - Julianne Moore - Tom Victor - Frances Coke - Sean Gilder - Jacob McCarthy - Alice Grant - Niamh Algar
Credit: Sky
Mary & George is inspired by the unbelievable true story of Mary Villiers, who moulded her beautiful and charismatic son, George, to seduce King James VI of Scotland and I of England and become his all-powerful lover. Through outrageous scheming, the pair rose from humble beginnings to become the richest, most titled and influential players the English court had ever seen, and the King’s most trusted advisors. And with England’s place on the world stage under threat from a Spanish invasion and rioters taking to the streets to denounce the King, the stakes could not have been higher.
Prepared to stop at nothing and armed with her ruthless political steel, Mary married her way up the ranks, bribed politicians, colluded with criminals and clawed her way into the heart of the Establishment, making it her own.
Mary & George is a dangerously daring historical psychodrama about an outrageous mother and son who schemed, seduced, and killed to conquer the court of England and the bed of King James.
STARVE ACRE (2023) Reviews of rural British horror
Starve Acre is a 2023 British horror film – a couple’s idyllic family life is thrown into turmoil when their son starts acting strangely.
The movie is written and directed by Daniel Kokotajlo (Apostasy), based on a novel by Andrew Michael Hurley.
The House Productions movie (partly funded by the BBC and BFI) stars Matt Smith, Morfydd Clark, Erin Richards, Matilda Firth, Robert Emms, Sean Gilder,…
TL;DR – There are moments of absolute joy and action, but it does get bogged down in a story that does not reach the heights of the world’s potential.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
Disclosure – I paid for the Netflix subscription that viewed this episode.
Shadow and Bone Review –
A while back, I caught up on some of the Fantasy series I had missed and stumbled upon an exciting delight. It…
Behind the Scenes of The Christmas Invasion (Part 37)
Excerpt from the Radio Times, 17-30 December 2005, interviews by Nick Griffiths
Even Time Lords need a little combat training: "You do swordfighting in drama school, and I've done a few fight sequences before, mostly for the RSC," says Tennant. "But I'd only done a broadsword fight once before, in a version of King Lear a few years ago, and it's much harder work. With a foil you can be very dramatic, very quick, very sharp, very Three Musketeers. With a broadsword you need to get a bit of weight behind it; it's a slower process building that up into a fight."
He and Sean Gilder's Sycorax Leader had several rehearsals. Tennant explains: "It starts - cut to head, parry to head, parry to shoulder, parry to leg. Then you try to speed it up, iron out the creases and hopefully add a little acting somewhere along the line.
"I got bashed in the leg a couple of times. I had some padding on my backside for the falls backwards, but we were more or less OK."
So he's adept at swordplay? "I won the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama's Stagefighting Award back in 1991," recalls Tennant. "It was only £15 or something, but it helped to pay off some debts as I headed into the real world."
Doctor Who? Real world?
For more, see [ part one ] of the Christmas Invasion Behind-the-scenes posts (although [ part two ] appears to be the most popular one in this set…), or click the [ #whoBtsCi ] tag or the full episode list [ here ]
On why Certain Events for the Crows were adapted for SAB Season 2
Spoilers for SAB S2 below and an interview from Eric Heiserrer:
The link is above but the pertinent question that gets answered (brilliantly, imo) is this: why did they choose to adapt so many elements of 'Crooked Kingdom'?
Heisserer explained that using the storyline was "the result of hundreds of hours of discussion with the writer's room," and was not a decision they came to lightly.
"I don't think I can really properly encapsulate all those hours of intense discussion and debate," he said. "But I can give you the highlights, which is that we knew that they needed to face the consequences of betraying Pekka Rollins in Season 1 and we also knew that they'd be in trouble with Dreesen [Sean Gilder], and so all of that sort of gave us the ingredients going into Season 2 of the type of consequences they had to face.
"For the kind of stories that we explored that pitted Kaz against Pekka Rollins, what we discovered after a lot of trial and error was we were essentially just treading water. We were sort of just running in place for those characters, because we were worried about changing something later on that got us too late to, or too early, in their development.
"We also realized that holding them in place so that they were essentially on pause to jump into a Six of Crows storyline meant that the characters didn't grow at all. There were no arcs and our poor actors would be like, 'Why? I'm the same person I am at the end of the season and at the start,' and you never want to hear that."
He went on: "When we realized that we did need to pay off something and advance the story with Pekka and Kaz, and have it mean something—and we also had to explore for a thematic unity Kaz's trauma [and] his back story, which is also deeply tied to Pekka— it felt the best for us to use a canonical story that happens in Crooked Kingdom.
"But we only made that move after we knew what we were going to do in both the Crows and Crooked Kingdom stories, were we to ever get the privilege to explore those."
It may not have been a decision the writers came to easily, but they have already thought of how it could shape the characters' future in the franchise.
Heisserer admitted: "There was, of course, the little small panic in the back of our brains of 'will we ever get to Crooked Kingdom? Maybe, maybe not.' So, this may be our one go to explore that.
"But if we do get there, oh my god, The Wrath of Kahn level [story of] Pekka out of Hellgate [prison] and on a f****** bender to kill all the Crows is going to be amazing."