Magnum

I have them all on Japanese import DVD, so yes, I'm up for this.

IMO, there's almost no point in (A) not showing the Hound actually die and (B) saving the Mountain, if they're not going to fight at some point. Somebody has to kill the Mountain, and their whole back story is pretty pointless if it was only for one half-arsed confrontation in the first series.

I didn't think that episode was that great, by the very high standards of this series. Just too much going on in there, and not helped at all by the fucking stupid Bran Stark storyline. Aside from getting pushed out of the window by Jaime, the series would be a lot better without Bran, for my money.

Not sure if this has been mentioned in the thread yet, but I just got through Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States. It's Oliver Stone, so the politics of it will appeal more to those who, like me, don't have a particularly high opinion of America's foreign policy or leaders in the first place, but it's also not very informative about some of the perhaps more genuinely 'heroic' figures on the fringes of American history.

On a similar note, does anyone know where I can find an English language/subtitled version of either Comandante or The Last Yugoslavian Football Team? I've been looking for these two for ages, but the only ones I can find have French/Spanish subs.

I met him in a pub once and he said he hadn't been invited back for season 2 because (he reckons) he was playing the character too loudly, and they had to keep telling him between to say his lines more quietly, but he didn't. Apparently!

That seems strange, as he is basically a very loud, overblown character. I probably couldn't take him seriously now as a fearsome warrior anyway after he got his ear bitten off in Newcastle. Lord Bolton wouldn't get his ear bitten off.

He was off with the wildlings for the whole of S3, IIRC. But that seems a moot point anyway, as the majority of the Night's Watch storylines that happened in that time took place at Craster's or out beyond the Wall.

I think Pedro Pascal's been great as Oberyn. I was almost disappointed to see how good he was in the role, knowing he wasn't going to be around long. His fighting style was cool as fuck too, very 'Vega from Streetfighter 2'. A wonderfully gory ending, though. The Mountain is such a cunt, but a great villain.

Speaking of which, I've said this before, but I love the Boltons. They've been used sparingly this season, but their scenes are always ace, especially the ones with the two of them together.

Get to fuck! When she commanded the Unsullied to slay their matters and then gave the order for Drogon to burn the Good Master- that was brilliant.

That was a great scene (and pretty hot). However, I do agree that Dany's storylines have been pretty poor on the whole since the end of season one. In my view, there are a couple of reasons for this: firstly, it's been pretty nailed on for a while that there's going to be some kind of climactic battle between dragons and white walkers, and as such, they need to keep Dany out of the way until the white walkers get their shit together. So, while you're on tenterhooks with the fate of just about every other character, Dany's storylines lack that sense of tension. It just seems to be a series of smallish tasks she needs to complete - get gold, get some ships, raise an army, etc.

Secondly, I think it's partly to do with the old wrestling cliche that a babyface is only as good as the heels they have to work with. The Lannisters, the Freys, the Boltons, even the Night's Watch mutineers all have a reasonable backstory and depth to them, and thus they make for more engaging villains. The heels in Dany's story arc are all 2-dimensional pantomime villains who you know are going to be dragon bait sooner rather than later.

Ric Flair is just an inherently ridiculous man. Hating Flair for turning out to be a chaotic, womanizing spendthrift would be like somebody deciding all of a sudden that they hate Jose Mourinho for being a gobshite and a bad loser. Neither of them are as well turned out as they used to be, but they're still just doing exactly what it's always said on the tin.

The only beef Flair fans could really have with him is the way he's made a complete arse of the big, heartfelt retirement angle they gave him, but even that whole thing relied on taking enough of a leap of faith to ignore the previous 10 years or so when you just wished he'd retire. Flair's one of those blokes who'll die either in the ring or in a massive, credit card-fuelled orgy in the penthouse suite of the Gateshead Hilton, but in many ways I'd be disappointed in him if he went any other way. The big characters can always get away with it - Oliver Reed or Keith Richards or Charlie Sheen turning out to be shambolic mental cases is always going to be easier to forgive than, say, finding out one of Ant & Dec refuses to give their mam anything towards her heating bills or asked the police to move a tramp on. I'd easily pay a couple of grand to hire Ric Flair to come round pubs with us on a stag do, but I'm not sure I'd fork out another

Just about every one of his booking ideas in that book are horrible. He plays up the injustices about the stuff that didn't get used, and then when he lays out his grand, groundbreaking plan for what ultimately should have happened, you just sit there thinking "right...and?". It's like thinking about what a disappointment the Invasion angle was and how anybody who put business interests over petty revenge could have booked it better, and then hearing Jim Cornette lay out his idea for Hogan vs Dusty Rhodes at WM18 and thinking "well, maybe not". It's the point when you realise, this guy might like to moan a lot about Vince's bad ideas, but when it comes down to it, his own stink twice as much.

Jimi Mistry has been in Corrie for a few months now playing a personal trainer. They've been building up a storyline with him and Leanne, which culminated last night in him stepping in to save the day when the shirtless waiters failed to turn up at the bistro for a hen do.

They can't have known what sort of shape Jimi Mistry was in when they scripted the episode, though. The entire episode featured the female characters hinting about what a fantastic body he has, and then whooping and swooning when he got his shirt off like the woman in Ravishing Rick Rude's WCW theme. This, obviously, completely disregarded the embarrassing fact that he looked just like any other flabby 40-year old bloke whose only exercise is the odd kickabout in the park. When he turned up to film that scene, the Corrie writers must've felt like Hogan did when Sting turned up at Starrcade '97 looking like he'd never seen a gym or a sunbed for months.

I've said it before but Foley's fall from grace has been truly staggering. When he first lost that retirement match to Triple H I was genuinely heartbroken that he wouldn't be around anymore. Now I couldn't care if I never see or hear from him again. I'm not sure I buy into the idea that he was always a complete twat though. I'm more inclined to think all those concussions have played their part in his current mental state.

Couldn't it be as simple as a combination of (a) overexposure, and (b) success giving him an elevated sense of his own importance? When he first 'retired', you could look at it as a bloke who seemed to be genuinely peaking in terms of both popularity and match quality, so of course people were sad that he was bowing out. And when his first book came out, he did come across as legitimately funny, engaging, and the sort of bloke you sincerely wanted to do well for himself.

But, for me, a big part of Foley's appeal both as a wrestler and a personality was that underdog factor. His first few comebacks didn't do much to harm his image, because the programmes with Orton and Edge were both qualified creative successes that helped to put over future stars - in other words, he did what he did so well back when he was a full-time wrestler. Where it started to fall apart was that ECW run, coupled with that hardback love letter to Melina. That was the point when his self-indulgent streak stopped coming across as endearing, and started to be counterproductive, in both his books and his wrestling appearances. His comebacks and books since have been the shits. He's lost the underdog factor, the image of the brave creative voice trying to be heard against the odds, and now has the air of someone who demands to be taken notice of because of the success they've had in the past, disregarding the failures they've had in the intervening period. I don't think concussions are to blame - he's not Benoit-mental, he's just a bit pissy, huffy and entitled. I think Foley's a simple case of someone who should've quite while they were ahead.

The scene with Tywin was pretty great. The detachment with which he spoke about Joffrey in front of his grieving mother came as close to eliciting some kind of sympathy for Cersei as I'm likely to get. At the same time, his coldness in doing so was absolutely justified - this was him symbolically taking Tommen away from Cersei, evidently blaming her influence for the way Joffrey turned out and determined she wouldn't ruin the new king in the same way.

I'm glad we're going to get a showdown between the Night's Watch and the mutineers at Craster's Keep. It'll be good to see Rast and his mates get some sort of comeuppance for killing the Old Bear. I think the introduction of the Thenns is doing a good job of reasserting the nastiness of a lot of the wildlings and why we should see them as a threat, after Tormund and Mance Rayder sympathised them so much last season.

Na, Beecher was likable.

Lord Bolton is easily my favourite character in GoT. Michael McElhatton is even more villainous looking than Charles Dance, so I hope last night's great scenes at the Dreadfort were an indication he's going to become more prominent this season. Bolton, The Bastard, Locke/The Brave Companions and weird little Stockholm Syndrome slave Theon are a pretty great heel entourage.

I've read the schooling explanation before (maybe on here), is that from the books or is it just a way of trying to explain it, and really the accents are the way they are purely because of casting? There must be some thought put into the voices, because Liam Cunningham plays a Geordie for some reason.

It's not something I've ever seen mentioned in the books, though there is more emphasis on that kind of 'finishing school' tutoring that Sansa and Arya have to go through. It's purely speculation on my part (beyond the possibly more likely explanation that they're willing to trust the older actors with accents more than the youngest ones).

Liam Cunningham's accent is specifically a Boro/Teeside one, btw, and a very good one at that. I'm not sure of the significance of that, other than to mark his background out as someone who came from a deprived area and doesn't really fit in with the other lords and knights (though his accent isn't one that seems to have come from King's Landing, where he supposedly grew up).

Also why the Stark girls have different accents to the boys, although was that already explained somewhere?

Although it's not something I can ever see them referring to specifically, I reckon it's something to do with the way girls have been schooled in the ways of 'being a lady' (likely including proper enunciation and the like) by their septa from an early age, whereas the lads education has focused more on swordplay and the like.

Doesn't explain Bran's accent, though. Maybe something as simple as whether they were closest to Ned or their mother?

I was sure I'd heard it mentioned in the TV show that Joffrey was 17 (I remember this specifically because I nearly fell off my seat when I found out the actor was 22). I looked it up, and the GoT wiki puts him at 19 now:

Tyrion states that Joffrey is 17 years old in Season 2, "The Prince of Winterfell"

I know they're younger in the book, but obviously they've aged them all by 3 or 4 years in the show so it's not too Harry Potter and we don't feel too guilty about perving on Dany.

I'd put TV show Arya at about 14. With Sansa/Joffrey at around the 17/18 mark, that seems about right.

What about Eubank? I know boxing isn't that far removed from wrestling in terms of using gimmicks to promote yourself, but he really seems to live his. I remember listening to the old Danny Baker radio show years ago and him telling a story about how Eubank used to block traffic in London with his big juggernaut, honking the horn loudly and shouting out the window "EUBANK IS HERE! EUBANK IS HERE!". I also remember a NOTW expose with his wife after their marriage broke down. I was hooked as soon as I saw the blurb in the middle of the article:

I knew things had gone too far when Chris found a tramp and brought him home to live with us

Calvary : I didn't like The Guard, and I didn't like this. Decent performances by Dylan Moran and Gleeson - and it was nice to see Killian Scott pop up on the big screen - but this was even more boring than The Guard and it's attempt at dark Oirish humour was just fucking mortifying.

I went to see this today. Unlike you, I loved The Guard, but Calvary is a hell of a lot bleaker. I thought it was pretty powerful, and I think there's a lot I could say about it with my film studies hat on, but it wasn't an especially pleasant or easy watch. Low points include the dog (a warning to Butch or Astro from the other film thread, in case either of them fancied it), and Aidan Gillen doing the Littlefinger voice again. On the plus side, Brendan Gleeson is fast becoming one of my favourite actors. I could watch him in just about anything.

Cheers. I've seen that episode umpteen times, but never clocked Ned's scabbard.

Question: What was it that Tywin took the sword out of and then hoyed in the fire at the beginning? At first it looked like a big direwolf's head, like the one that was stitched to Robb's body, but when he chucked it in the fire it looked like a much smaller animal.

OK, deleted the reference to book storylines altogether - I hadn't read the books this time last year, so couldn't remember what the protocol in this thread was prior to that.

We've gone past British air date, so no need for spoiler tags in my book.

Good opening to what's sure to be a massive series. Interesting scene to end on - I thought that scene with the Freys in the final episode of last series was going to replace the one at the inn, but obviously not. I think the general creepiness of Arya's coup de grace on Polliver was a subtle indicator to her becoming a more morally grey character, though I'm not sure if that entirely went over with the audience at large judging by the memes I've seen floating about today. I love that The Hound just twats people in the face with his sword during fights.

http://2.8hourslater.com/

It's one of these events where people mince across a city centre trying to avoid actors dressed as zombies who are out to tag them with invisible paint, or some such thing. Though how they're going to do it anywhere near Newcastle city centre on a Friday night in June without having being overrun by pissed head-the-balls is anyone's guess.