On TV...

The exciting event of last week was that Pooja Shah who plays Amy in Ten Dead Men was on Nuts TV on Tuesday night talking about the film. She gave a good interview and mentioned the film loads, and they showed a couple of clips. Pooja has been a really strong supporter of the film and it was great hearing people talk about Ten Dead Men on TV – something which probably wouldn’t have happened for a while otherwise.

I finally finished the Ten Dead Men continuity script and sent it off, although I’m going to have to have another pass at it once the final sound mix is done. I’m now spending four solid days on Hit the Big Time and will hopefully make some headway into the first draft. Although at the moment I’m procrastinating by importing my ideal Hit the Big Time soundtrack onto my PC, which I keep telling myself is obviously an essential part of the process.

As usual there’s more work piling on. There’s a possibility of some paid work, but the deadline is so tight I’m not sure it’s going to happen. And on top of Vicious Circle, Phil is asking for ideas for an ultra low-budget film to shoot over summer. I’m trying not to think about it at the moment.

Finally, I don’t know if I’m going mad but I watched the Jet Li vs. Jason Statham film War the other day – a film that barely got a theatrical release and is generally regarded as being terrible – and I really liked it. Not even just ‘oh it wasn’t great but better than everyone said’ liked it, I really liked it. This was partly due to the amazing supporting cast. The film is about a war between Triads and Yakuza and if you asked me who would be the ideal actors to play the leaders of each group I would probably say Ryo Ishibashi and John Lone, who play them in the film. True, that’s because they are the obvious choice and have played those roles before, but the reason for that is they’re both really good at it and seeing them in the same film is fantastic. So for me Ishibashi vs. Lone was more exciting than Li vs. Statham.

Another reason I liked it, and this sort of justifies it being here although I may be undermining the legitimacy of this being a serious writer’s blog, was the script. The dialogue and characters were nicely written, it was well-paced and the story was a lot more interesting than your average shoot-em-up. Yes, there were clichés and plot-holes as the twelve-year-old critics on imdb are fond of pointing out, but it had a better script than most of the other big-budget action films I’ve seen in the cinema the past few years.

Final reason I liked it – the Japanese characters actually spoke Japanese! With subtitles and everything!