Finished writing...

...for now at least!

Got no internet at home at the moment as there are problems with our broadband connection. This is annoying - especially the other night when I needed to get the 3rd draft of this script sent off to the producer & director. I ended up having to put it on a CD to hand it over in person like we used to do in the olden days. Also had another important e-mail to send regarding another project which I then had to send on my lunch break at work. And this is exactly the kind of exciting blog action you'll be missing out on while my internet is down!

I have managed to get reconnected on dial-up. It's painfully slow but functional.

Not that I've been blogging much anyway - this last script has been pretty much all I've been doing the last few weeks. I was pretty happy with how it turned out in the end. I think I've compromised on a couple of things (some possibly for the better) and I've had some interesting debates over what the film is really about, but overall it feels pretty solid and it's great to get a script to this stage. It was tough going straight into the 2nd draft straight from the 1st, and from there going immediately into a 3rd draft (which was more of a polish), but in some ways I prefer that to my usual method of going back to a script months later. It's nice to get some distance on these things sometimes, but it's also good to get things finished. As stated before, the feedback I received from friends was incredibly useful as were the discussions we had about that feedback - I don't think I would've been able to get it to this stage so quickly without that extra help. It will need more work at some point, but for now it's ready for people to read. I'm really hoping this one gets to the stage where I'll actually be able to talk about it but we'll just have to wait and see.

I have managed to fit in a few films over the last few weeks. I wanted to blog about The Strangers which I thought was really good even though everyone I've spoken to hates it, but my blog would've just been that sentence expanded into paragraphs of ranting. I also saw a really interesting film called While She Was Out which I want to call a revisionist slasher film, although I'm wary of using such an over-used phrase when all I really mean is that it has some original bits. It's flawed in many of the same ways The Strangers is flawed (both don't really have enough narrative juice to justify an 80 minute running time and would've been awesome at 50 minutes long - but then they wouldn't be films) but worth checking out for a genre film that tries to do something different.

Last night I finally saw JCVD which I loved and was so much better than I expected. Aside from the subject matter and Van Damme's performance (which is awesome), it's just a really well made film. And it's got so much more going on than the premise would suggest - it's a film about film-making and how stars are taken hostage by the system and their audience and I think it may actually be one of the most interesting films I've seen this year. It reminded me of Irma Vep which did a similar thing with Maggie Cheung, in that it too was a film about film itself.

Then I watched Mirrors which was...well, I just hope Alexandre Aja makes something else soon as his films prior to this one have been among my favourites of the last few years. Had some nice moments and a great visual style, but all it did was remind me how good the original was.