Screen update

I finished watching The prisoner of the Chateau d'If, and did finally feel something (and there were a couple of songs that I actually liked, though I'm not sure why there were any songs in it at all, as this isn't a musical and there were only a handful of random songs at wide intervals throughout). The reason why there seemed to be "an awful lot of plot to be covered in the final episode" turns out to be that it is much longer than the other two, which are about 65 minutes each while this one runs about ninety minutes...

Even so it still seems quite rushed, and I don't see the point of including such characters as Valentine de Villefort and Maximilian Morrel when the subplot involving them has been entirely removed (also an issue, as I recall, with the Robert Donat version!) I was able to follow more of what was going on in this episode thanks mainly to my familiarity with the original plot, although where departures from this took place I was quickly confused. ( Read more... )

( Soviet Musketeers music )

I watched the first episode of the BBC's new drama "This City is Ours", mainly because it *was* the first episode and I often miss the beginnings of things and then have no interest in watching the remainder. But I shan't be bothering with any further episodes, I'm afraid. ( Read more... )

The second half/series of Sous le Signe des Mousquetaires was actually very intriguing as a set-up, because since they had (like the BBC "Musketeers") abandoned canon and were apparently writing their own material using the established characters and setting, pretty much anything was up for grabs and you couldn't tell which way the story was going to come out. ( Read more... )

At least d'Artagnan has finally confessed to lying to his friends about Milady's supposed death (although Athos nobly points out that, having, as I had suspected, guessed the truth some time previously, the fault was as much his in not speaking out earlier; even though he doesn't share the background of Dumas' character, this animated version of Athos is actually one of the few who looks and feels 'right' to me)

Wet, wet, wet

I have been needing to water my pots again over the last couple of weeks, since it hasn't been raining, which means more carrying of water up the stairs. This morning I discovered that my big six-pint water carrier (a.k.a. supermarket milk bottle), which I had filled up but haven't actually been using since I don't currently require more than a couple of pints of water at a time, had been gently leaking most of its contents past the protective plastic sheeting and into the parquet floor underneath :-( Fortunately I don't think the wet patch had reached all the way under the music cabinets, where it would be quite impossible to investigate -- I have removed all the heap of gardening equipment from that corner, mopped up what I could, and it will just have to dry out naturally. The joints are all darkened but the wood hasn't actually lifted....

The modern supermarket bottles definitely don't last as long as the ones I originally started using, presumably because the manufacturers are trying to cut down on the amount of plastic used in their manufacture; they are much flimsier to handle. Sadly, as with a hot-water-bottle (and mine are about due to have perished by now...), there is no way to tell when the seams have gone until the water actually starts to ooze out.