Sequel Rage

Not the best start to the year in terms of resolutions then. Although for all you know, dear reader, I may have been unable to update these pages due to my incessant scribblings elsewhere. It could be. It isn't, of course. Once again real life has crept up behind me, put it's clammy hands over my eyes, spun me around five times and set me off in a different direction.

In fact I have done some work. I need to quite drastically restructure one script (following advice from the reasonably priced and damn clever Bang2Write script reading service) and have done very well in doing so.

I've also finally started using Final Draft, an event so epoch marking that it could probably be compared to the first caveman hefting a rock in his hand for a moment before bashing his brothers head in. What a fantastically useful tool.

Emma and I are in the middle of sorting something incredibly exciting but which I refuse to talk about here due to my crippling fear of jinxing myself. More on that soon.

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After years of hearing lots of people going on about how bloody marvellous the new Battlestar Galactica was I finally got around to watching the initial miniseries last week. It's excellent, full of interesting characters with complex relationships and hidden agendas.

Incredibly it's hardly about the Cylons or a war between species as much as it's about the last humans struggling to survive near-genocide. Great performances too, especially from Edward James Olmos and Katee Sackhoff. I'll be tracking down the first series imminently.

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On the other hand I finally watched 28 Weeks Later last night and how I wished I hadn't bothered. Oddly Chip seems to have watched it at about the same time and has mentioned pretty much everything that was wrong with it.

The frantic, confused camera work (something which seems to be a feature in almost every new film I watch these days) meant that I was so frustrated at not being able to tell what was going on that I was probably poisoned against the film within the first twenty minutes anyway.

Robert Carlyle's unthinking zombie was a lucky old fella wasn't he? When the army locked up all the survivors (forgetting about the unguarded door at the other end of the room - d'oh!) he managed to find a find a way in. When the US army decided to kill everyone - infected or not - he managed to escape a bullet and even when they napalmed the Isle of Dogs, and not before time, he still eluded death. Oddly his strain of the rage virus made him lurk about staring at his kids a lot when every other infected ever seen could no more stand still than I could resist a bourbon cream to go with a cup of coffee.

There were some good ideas and a few nice scenes that I liked (mainly the section where the two kids escape and go back to their old house) and Imogen Poots and Mackintosh Muggleton were compelling as the children; in general though the ham-fisted direction and lack of subtlety rendered the film virtually unwatchable. It's more an insult to 28 Days Later than a sequel.

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That's all for now, dismissed.