I didn't know the Tudors was back on until it was on. What a lovely treat that was. I love it.

I've been watching the heck out of Mad Men over the past week, catching up on last season's episodes via On Demand. I know it there were threads about it on the old board, but was there a discussion here? The new search function is pretty bad when it comes to a title like that.

There was a cursory discussion of it on pp7-9 of this thread. Feel free to reactivate it!

I spent the entire weekend watch the first series of Mad Men. So I'd be up for a thread about it.

If someone wants to start a thread about it, I'd definitely chip in. I just never start threads myself, being crippled with nilophobia.

I've given up on Man Men. I watched the whole first season and Episode 1 of number 2, but just couldn't be bothered after about 10 minutes of 2:2 last night. It moves at such a glacial pace. I just don't care anymore. Am I a bad person?

No. But you obviously have the attention span of an earwig.

C'mon! I sat with it for a whole season waiting for something to happen. That's a lot of attention, I think.

I don't think it's really the pace that bothers me, but the characters. I dislike them all. Except the gay guy.

I certainly agree with you about the guys, I think the lack of positive male traits might be one of the series's faults. The gals are OK though.

Le Diner de Cons which I had never seen; I looked forward to it so much that it couldn't live up to the level of hilariousness that I had hoped for, but nevertheless it was pretty damn funny. A nice old fashioned one-set farce.

and the first decade or so of Inland Empire. I thought initially that it was just really, really bad-Lynch (shrieking singing; weeping women dripping mascara everywhere, bad motel room decor, strange focus pulls, bizarre close-ups, footsteps running away in the shadows that you somehow know belong to a deformed dwarf) but it was keeping watchable as well. Experience suggests that it may not have been going anywhere, I shall have to wait and see.

Inland Empire was awful, awful, awful. I can't actually remember if I bothered watching it to the end - I think I did - but it felt like forever anyway.

Le Diner de Cons was indeed very funny. It's a few years since I saw it, but I still recall that it had me in real fits of laughter. I am a fan of farce, which seems to be pretty unusual these days. Many reviews seem to dismiss it as a genre.

Atonement. Same problem as the book, really, which I guess is worse on film: after the section in the country house, nothing happens. (I realise that's the point - that it ruinously defines everyone's lives - but still.) The film does benefit from having to heavily edit McEwan's endless, research-heavy sections in France and in the hospital, but what it's left with is a bit cursory: you don't feel that there's a huge amount at stake as Robbie tries to get home, and Briony's stint as a nurse doesn't really have a point to it at all.

Worth seeing for the first section, though, which I thought was superbly directed and edited: there's some very economical, stylish visual storytelling, a tasteful use of sound and music (often there isn't any), and I liked both McAvoy and Knightley when they weren't doing their silly who-can-talk-quickest thing. But it does telegraph SPOILER who the rapist is (later on, its heavy-handed, in retrospect, treatment of BIG SPOILER Robbie dying - "You won't hear another peep from me" - doesn't matter so much because if you don't know the story you wouldn't guess that the next morning is a fiction).

I'd go along with all of that. Except the second half had Dame Vanessa being...well, quite magnificent.

I am a fan of farce, which seems to be pretty unusual these days. Many reviews seem to dismiss it as a genre.

Do you think that's why no one really knows how to do it anymore? I sometimes think so. I watched Death at a Funeral recently which, I realised afterwards, is essentially a farce, but is far too static to raise anything but the odd titter. Farce has to snap, timing is everything, you just can't have dead expositionary bits, or have people sitting next to each other in cars having conversations. Most of all under no circumstances can you be given time to think about how ludicrous it all is.

Frasier had a pretty damn good go at it a few times: springing to mind are the one in the ski lodge with the French bloke called Guy, and the, if you will, verbal farce of the one where Daphne's ex, Clive, comes to dinner.

Something a bit bad has happened; I switched the tv on and became almost instantly addicted to Last Choir Standing.

This can't be a good sign.