BAFTA Television Awards Nominations 2013

Full list below of BAFTA Television Awards 2013 nominations. This year sees shows like Game of Thrones, Twenty Twelve, Homeland, The Hollow Crown and The London Olympics Broadcast. 

Leading Actor

Sean Bean – Accused (Tracie’s Story)

Derek Jacobi – Last Tango in Halifax

Toby Jones – The Girl

Ben Whishaw – Richard II (The Hollow Crown)

Leading Actress

Rebecca Hall – Parade’s End

Sienna Miller – The Girl

Anne Reid – Last Tango in Halifax

Sheridan Smith – Mrs Biggs

Supporting Actor

Peter Capaldi – The Hour

Stephen Graham – Accused (Tracie’s Story)

Harry Lloyd – The Fear

Simon Russell Beale – Henry IV Part 2 (The Hollow Crown)

Supporting Actress

Olivia Colman – Accused (Mo’s Story)

Anastasia Hille – The Fear

Sarah Lancashire – Last Tango in Halifax

Imelda Staunton – The Girl

Entertainment Performance

Alan Carr – Alan Carr: Chatty Man

Ant and Dec – I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!

Sarah Millican – The Sarah Millican Show

Graham Norton – The Graham Norton Show

Female Performance in a Comedy Programme

Olivia Colman – Twenty Twelve

Miranda Hart – Miranda

Jessica Hynes – Twenty Twelve

Julia Davis – Hunderby

Male Performance in a Comedy Programme

Hugh Bonneville – Twenty Twelve

Peter Capaldi – The Thick of It

Steve Coogan – Welcome to the Places of My Life

Greg Davies – Cuckoo

Single Drama

Everyday

The Girl

Murder

Richard II (Hollow Crown)

Drama Series

Last Tango in Halifax

Ripper Street

Scott and Bailey

Silk

Mini-Series

Accused

Mrs Biggs

Parade’s End

Room at the Top

Continuing Drama

Coronation Street

EastEnders

Emmerdale

Shameless

International

The Bridge

Game of Thrones

Girls

Homeland

Factual Series

24 Hours in A&E

Great Ormond Street

Make Bradford British

Our War

Specialist Factual

All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry

The Plane Crash

The Plot to Bring Down Britain’s Planes

The Secret History of Our Streets

Single Documentary

7/7: One Day in London

Baka: A Cry from the Rainforest

Lucian Freud: Painted Life

Nina Conti – A Ventriloquist’s Story: Her Master’s Voice

Features

Bank of Dave

Grand Designs

The Great British Bake Off

Paul O’Grady: For the Love of Dogs

Reality and Constructed Factual

The Audience

I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!

Made in Chelsea

The Young Apprentice

Current Affairs

Britain’s Hidden Housing Crisis (Panorama Special)

The Other Side of Jimmy Savile (Exposure)

The Shame of the Catholic Church (This World)

What Killed Arafat? (Al Jazeera Investigates)

News Coverage

BBC News at Ten: Syria

Channel 4 News: Battle for Homs

ITN/Channel 4

Hillsborough – The Truth at Last (Granada Reports)

Sport and Live Event

The London 2012 Olympics: Super Saturday

The London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony: Isle of Wonder

The London 2012 Paralympic Games

Wimbledon 2012 – Men’s Final

Entertainment Programme

Dynamo Magician Impossible

The Graham Norton Show

Have I Got News For You

A League of Their Own

Comedy Programme

Cardinal Burns

Mr Stink

The Revolution Will Be Televised

Welcome to the Places of My Life

Situation Comedy

Episodes

Hunderby

The Thick of It

Twenty Twelve

Audience Award

Call the Midwife

Game of Thrones

The Great British Bake Off

Homeland

The London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony

Strictly Come Dancing

Olympus Has Fallen Review

The Plot:

A disgraced secret service agent finds himself at the center of a terrorist takeover of the White House 18 months after he failed to save the First Lady during a freak car accident. With the FBI, Navy Seals and Homeland Security outgunned and outsmarted, the President and his young son are both taken hostage. Now one man is a nations only hope.

The Good:

Gerard Butler has been largely treading water for the past few years, in rom-coms like Playing for Keeps and P.S. I Love You. An easy way of keeping the actor well paid and consistently on screen. It’s been a while since his breakthrough performance as King Leonidis in the brutal graphic novel adaptation 300, but it’s good to see him back on form here as agent Mike Banning.

Apart from a few dodgy accent slips, it’s easy to see him as a high profile security guard who has a charismatic relationship with both the President and his son. He brings an everyman quality to this performance which makes him more convincing in the role. Butler is thankfully self-aware enough to recognize when he’s delivering a particularly cheesy line. A playful glimmer in his eyes let’s audience know he’s definitely in on the joke

Accompanying him in supporting roles are Angela Bassett (Secret Service Director Lynn Jacobs) and Morgan Freeman (Speaker Trumbull). Having actors of this understated caliber helps counterbalance the ridiculousness of some of the scenes and forces a sense of credibility into what we’re watching.

Rick Yune is perfectly cast  as the villain of the piece. Amidst all the chaos of the epic take over scene, the criminal mastermind is cool, calm and calculated. It’s almost sinister how relaxed he is, and you automatically think back to his Bond villain Zao in Die Another Day. You find yourself intrigued as to what happen will happen next with him. As an actor, Yune really does play the ‘less is more’ card very well.

The Bad:

Olympus Has Fallen is a guilty pleasure, unashamedly packed with patriotic cliché’s.  There’s far more American flag waving and triumphant exclamations of “God Bless America” than most international audience will appreciate. You almost feel a little bit naughty for enjoying the film in spite such obvious flaws. However, Olympus has Fallen is still a very enjoyable film.

Director Antoine Fuqua is best known for gritty police drama Training Day. That film proved to be an Oscar winning vehicle for Denzel Washington. Fans misguidedly expecting anything similar from Olympus Has Fallen will obviously be left disappointed, alhough Fuqua does certainly tackle the new action genre with uninhibited and violent enthusiasm.

The Ugly Truth:

Overall, the film is a combination of cheese, violence (in parts verging on ultra-violence) and an almost worrying example of the most protected building in the world being overtaken by terrorists. Despite lacking some of the gravitas of a classic action flick, it’s really worth a watch. The fight scenes are exciting and you almost fear for your own safety a little when the terrorist takeover begins. Apart from a few dodgy lines Olympus Has Fallen makes for an engaging and solid watch – definitely one for the boys though.

Red Carpet Video Interviews below with stars Gerard Butler & Aaron Eckhart and the European premiere in London:

The Lords of Salem Review

The Plot:

The Lords of Salem is the latest offering from Rob Zombie (Halloween, Halloween II). The writer, director, composer and rock music icon brings to screen a “chiller” film which follows the story of Heidi (Sheri Moon Zombie), a radio station DJ, who receives a wooden box containing a record given as “ a gift from the Lords.” Heidi listens to the ‘painful’ music, and eventually plays it on air during her show, which sends both herself and other ladies listening in Salem into a trance like state triggering flashbacks of the towns violent ‘witch riddled’ past.  Something is definitely afoot in this historic town, and as the film develops we find out whether Heidi is going mad, or if the Lords of Salem really are coming back to reek havoc and revenge on Salem.

The Good:

The film starts out in quite a compelling way. Expectations aren’t high as horror films in general are very subjective depending on how much you take to the genre, but within the first thirty minutes the film seems relatively accessible to all. We follow the central character Heidi – a recovering drug addict, with a minor level of local celebrity due to her position as a well known DJ as she sets the scene of her everyday life: sleeping, struggling to wake up at a decent hour, living in a managed apartment block and working in quite a cool job covering the late shift with two other DJ’s.

There’s a good level of intrigue into how the story is going to progress, and Sheri Moon Zombie holds her first leading lady role quite well. She represents a character who isn’t flawless, but not too damaged at the same time. She doesn’t dwell obviously on her previous past addictions, yet we are aware of it. She lives a relatively solitary life, yet is friendly to those around her and so you believe who she is, and why the story is centering around her.

Rob Zombie also eases the audience in to Salem’s dark history with flashbacks to a group of women (The Lords) practicing demonic rituals back in 1692, and provides the link from history to the modern day story by showing these women ultimately casting a curse over Salem and the descendants of the Judge condemning them to death. These flashbacks appear periodically throughout the film, helping the story move along, however feel more and more surreal as time passes.

Throughout the film you realize that Heidi herself is directly affected by the history of Salem, and particularly when she hears the music from this record that she cannot help but play again and again. It’s interesting to see her natural human inquisitive nature to this strange gift and how the symptoms she experiences force her to question her sanity and well-being and puts her own history with drug addiction back in the forefront of both her own mind and that of those around her who care about her. This slow demise keeps the audience engaged and inquisitive enough to keep watching the film, but unfortunately, it’s at this point that Rob Zombie decides to inject his own movie “rock n roll”, which sadly makes the film much more problematic than it actually needs to be.

The Bad:

One of the great problems, of The Lords of Salem is its spiraling tumble into absolute absurdism. You know it’s never a good sign when the audience burst out laughing during a horror/thriller movie. The two just don’t normally go together, but sadly was the case during the Lords of Salem. As the ‘Lords’ get closer and closer to returning to Salem and completing the curse, the characters that come with them get more and more bizarre. The landlady of Heidi’s apartment block seems initially as a sweet and caring aid, but with the appearance of her “multi-accented” sisters, they almost become a comedic trio, full of stereotypes reading palms, tea leaves and minds….

The flashbacks also become more absurd and begin using every demonic reference in the book – previous devil spawn incantations, burning witches on pyres, goats, upside down crosses phallic symbols and references and lots of unnecessary nakedness. The problem here is that although these are obviously referenced in history books or occult resources, they don’t all need to be featured in one film and certainly not for the sake of being featured. Time and time again the audience found themselves looking around at each other as a lot of this didn’t make sense. The grand finale of The Lords of Salem felt very likened to the LSD scene in the musical Hair. It featured lots of oversized characters that just seemed to have been raised from the pits of hell for no real reason other than to provide an eclectic setting to finish the film, which frankly left the majority of the audience baffled.

The Ugly Truth:

Overall, if you’re after something surreal then maybe The Lords of Salem is one for you. It doesn’t build tension enough to feel like a true horror/thriller film or provide enough believable reference to make you feel that given the history this film could be based on any sort of fact – or made to look like that. It’s not a hard watch and it certainly will keep you guessing, but whether that is guessing in a good way or bad way remains to be seen.

Game Of Thrones Sophie Turner Interview

Red carpet News caught up with beautiful Game Of Thrones star Sophie Turner on the red carpet at the the European Premiere of new Gerard Butler movie Olympus Has Fallen. Sophie spoke about the much anticipated third season of the HBO fantasy series. She also reacted to the recent news that the she has been officially confirmed for a further 4th season.

Sophie revealed how excited she is about the ‘game-changing’ third season, which promises to see a dramatic change in the fortunes of many of the shows lead characters. In particular she reveals that her own character Sansa Stark will finally go form being a pawn to a player in the Game of Thrones this series.

Sophie also shares her own choice for favorite character and explain just what she thinksmakes the show overall so awesome. She finally leaves us with a wonderfully giggly message for devoted Game of Thrones fans

Full Video Interview below:

Transformers 4 To Film In China

Paramount have reached a landmark deal with two major Chinese media companies, an offshoot of state broadcaster CCTV and streaming service Jiaflix, to partly film sequel Transformers 4 in China.

China is now officially the second largest market for films in the world with box office revenue of $1.8 billion in 2012 alone.  Western studios are increasingly keen to exploit that booming box office and are beginning to specifically target films for the Chinese market. Iron Man 3 being a recent example, with a specific version of the film being made for Chinese cinemas to include additional scenes shot in Beijing and relevant product placements.

State run China Movie Channel have described the deal with Paramount as “The beginning of a new era of collaboration with Hollywood studios”. The specific deal for Transformers 4 will see the Chinese companies contribute to the cost of production in exchange for a share of the eventual box office revenues.

Michael Bay will once again direct Transformers 4, ensuring that audiences in China and around the world will definitely have plenty of pretty explosions to enjoy. After all, there’s truly no language more universal than CGI fighting robots.