For the last post of the year I haven’t been able to finish a review, but here’s a TV recommendation instead: after the huge success of the Shaun the Sheep Movie, Aardman has produced a brand-new half-hour movie called The Farmer’s Llamas for Christmas! The premiere broadcast is on Saturday, December 26 on BBC One at 18:10 with repeats on December 27, 09:05 on CBBC and January 1, 16:05 on BBC One again (all GMT times). It will also be shown on German television on Friday, January 1, 17:05 on the children’s channel KiKa with repeats on Saturday, January 2, 08:45 on WDR and again on KiKa at 13:20 on the same day (all CET times).

There’s a short trailer and a featurette with more footage on the Shaun the Sheep Youtube Channel promising all sorts of shenanigans involving the new farm arrivals and the BBC is also airing a new, hour-long Aardman Documentary on Saturday, December 26 on BBC One at 14:25 GMT following an airing of the classic Wallace & Gromit debut A Grand Day Out.

The Farmer’s Llamas will also be released on DVD in the UK on February 8 and in Germany on March 10 – although the prices are a bit steep for just an half-hour movie. This is one DVD I will not be buying, but instead I will finally get the boxset of Series 3 & 4 soon, which has already been released in October and I only just found out about – I haven’t even seen those episodes yet!

Since this is the last post of the year for DVDLog, I’d like to wish everyone Happy Holidays – I will post some more season’s greetings soon over on my blog. I’m not sure when I’m going to start up DVDLog again, but there will be a Winter pause until early to mid-January, although there could be some occasional posts in the meantime. Stay tuned! :-)

First of all, I won’t be able to see the new Star Wars movie until the home video releases are out sometime next year, simply because going to the cinema to see the only showing of the original English version in our region would be much too expensive – but I’m in no rush and I can wait. Don’t get me wrong – I really hope that the movie turned out well, but I’m still skeptical about the whole hype. Now that the first reviews of The Force Awakens are out, I’m beginning to suspect that the press might be a little bit too enthusiastic and I fear that the same has happened as with the new Star Trek movies – everybody loved them, but I found them absolutely terrible. And both times J.J. Abrams are involved plus the addition of Disney in the mix make me wary, so pardon the pun when I say I have a bad feeling about this…!

The movie is welcome to prove otherwise in a couple of months when it comes out on DVD… until then I’m just not going to say much about it. You don’t need to worry about spoilering the plot to me, though – I actually would read the film script if I could get my hands on it, but sadly the days of screenplays available freely on the web are long over. Meanwhile, what I’m much more looking forward to is the DVD release of The Martian early next year – and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to write a final review of the year for DVDLog, but if it happens it will probably something from the archive, maybe one more round of Futurama. Which I actually prefer a lot over any incarnation of Star Wars!

This Tuesday on 11:03 GMT, three astronauts will be launching to the International Space Station – Timothy Kopra from NASA, Yuri Malenchenko from Roscosmos and Timothy Peake from ESA, the first Briton to go to space under a British flag. For this occasion, the BBC has pulled out all the stops and will cover both the launch and the docking on Tuesday with two special editions of Stargazing Live, hosted by Brian Cox and Dara O’Briain. According to several news reports, they will be joined by Helen Sharman, the first British citizen to go to space and visit Mir in 1991 and  former Canadian Astronaut and ISS commander Chris Hadfield. BBC science presenter Dallas Campbell will also be reporting live from the Baikonur launch site. Here’s the schedule as of Saturday, December 10:

• 10:30 GMT on BBC One: Blast Off Live is going to cover the hopefully not delayed launch scheduled for 11:03 GMT for 45 Minutes.

• 19:00 GMT on BBC Two: Brit in Space will not be able to cover the actual docking procedures, which are scheduled for 17:24 GMT, but will be right on time for the hatch opening and welcoming starting at 19:25 GMT. This program is scheduled for an hour-long time slot.

• Update: I completely missed that there was a Tim Peake Horizon Special on Sunday evening. This is repeated on Monday evening at 23:15 GMT on BBC2 if you want to catch it again.

As usual, NASA TV will also cover the launch, but the BBC coverage will probably be much more interesting with lots of interviews and much more. Stargazing Live will also return for a new regular series starting on January 12.

I’m not really looking at DVD or Blu-Ray release dates nowadays anymore, but here’s one I’ve been really waiting for: Andy Weir’s The Martian. According to a Space.com article from today, 20th Century Fox will first release the movie in the US as a digital streaming release on December 22, while the DVD and Blu-Ray will follow next year on January 12. There does not seem to be a UK release date yet, but according to Amazon.de the German Blu-Ray and DVD releases are on February 18, so a British release might be around the same time. There are absolutely no words on the bonus materials yet, but there will probably not a lot of them. I’ll probably get either the UK or German release, because when I order the US disc, it will probably arrive only after the European ones come out.

Just as a side note, I have actually not yet seen the movie except in trailers and some featurettes, but I’ve read the book and liked it very much for some very simple reasons. First, it is less science fiction than science future and seems almost entirely plausible. Second, no aliens or some etheral forces are mucking about. Third, Mark Watney may have to suffer more than John McClane in all of the Die Hard movies together, but nobody actually dies in the story! There is a bit of emotional baggage in the book that may or may not have made it into the movie and there’s quite a lot hair-raising excitement, but it seems far away from the drama-fests of Gravity and Interstellar. Despite the huge NASA hype around it – which only really started midway through production – I think the movie is what a proper space adventure should be all about.  I’m sure the movie will be fun, but I will do a merciless review when I’ve seen it!

While everybody’s waiting for the home video release, here’s a throwback to the beginning of this year: author Andy Weir was on the Weekly Space Hangout back in January before he got very busy with the promotion of the movie and was totally in his element. It was a great conversation and he even joined in for the rest of the hangout – it’s very much worth watching!