Tomatoes for Star Trek

95% on Rotten Tomatoes and only 81% for Serenity? Conclusion: Rotten Tomatoes is wrong.

Ok, so it's good, and compared to TV Star Trek it's excellent. It's a successful reboot of the franchise, but take away all the history and the 'significance' and it's just a pretty standard Hollywood sci-fi film. A pretty good standard Hollywood sci-fi film. There's no need to love it just because it makes a nostalgic (not for me, obviously) series cool again. Although I do admire how they've unwritten the entire future of Star Trek with a clever bit of timey-wimey stuff. Alternate realities are always a treat.

There are animals out here

I've been around, and around, the place looking for a location for Talk to Hoshuu. It's not that easy. I can't just turn on a lamp in a dark room for this one. It's going to involve the outside world, which means there are endless possibilities for things to annoy me. Like birds, and sheep. Sheep that move and edge into shot and start becoming magic-transporting-sheep. I'm sure it'll all be fine. I'll think of something before filming starts. Yes. Probably.

The Third Film

The third film, Talk To Hoshuu, will go into production in the next few weeks. And when I say 'go into production' I just mean me, making it.

Let the Right One In

Let the Right One In (or it's stangely similar Swedish title Låt den rätte komma in) is disturbing. Not because it's unrelentingly cold or bleak, or because of all the vampirey killing. It's disturbing because I know it's better than I thought it was. It's clearly an excellent film, but next to others in the genre that it has been compared to - Pan's Labyrinth, The Orphanage - it didn't effect me at all. I missed the vibrancy of Guillermo del Toro, even though I knew it didn't need it. I'm distrurbed that I wasn't disturbed.

It was worth trying to get out of The Most Confusing Car Park in Wales though. And walking around an eerily empty shopping centre. Zombies? No, no zombies.

Growling in Gran Torino

It wasn't the film I thought it would be, and that made it better. The trailer makes it look like Clint Eastwood is just going to go on a grumpy-old-man-rampage, but it turns out that's only about a quarter of the film. Walt (Eastwood) grows to like his Asian neighbours and becomes only affectionately racist. His mentoring of Thao includes some wonderfully funny scenes that you don't expect to find in a film about gang violence. But it works - you like these characters, and when the violence happens, it matters. There's also a good amount of Eastwood growling.