The Expendables are sent to explode a small country

Or at least, that's what they end up doing. They're a bunch of mercenaries hired to overthrow the island's dictator. Stallone's character, who seems to be in charge of The Expendables, goes there once to kill the baddies, but then goes back to rescue a woman he met briefly. He also brings his friends along, who all have very big muscles and very big guns and very big knives. The baddies also include a rogue CIA agent, and Stone Cold Steve Austin. The film was marketed as a nostalgic throwback to eighties action films, although I'm not sure these films ever went away. Jason Statham is proof enough of that. He turns up here with his usual 'muscular head', as Mickey Rourke says. At times it's more of a guest list than a film, hiring old muscley men and new ones that might be out of work. Van Damme turned down a role because of the lack of substance or character development. This doesn't seem to worry anybody else. It's a film that knows what it is and isn't ashamed of it. Unfortunately, this honesty doesn't stop it being rubbish. For all the violence and carnage to be interesting, you have to vaguely care about what's going on. Or it at least has be stylish. Here the explosions last forever but don't have any impact. Your mind begins to wander, and you wonder if Stallone has dyed his moustache, or why his eyebrows are permanently raised. There's sudden decapitation every few seconds, which is entertaining enough, but it only happens to the poor foreign army. Mown down in their hundreds. I bet some of them weren't even baddies. Just nice men who didn't really want to be in the army, but all the fishing jobs had been taken and they needed to make a living somehow. They are the real expendables.

There'll probably be a sequel with an even larger cast list. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It's still sort of fun to see these people making something so honestly stupid. That fun doesn't last for the whole film. About a minute of thinking 'look it's Arnold Schwarzenegger' and wondering who Dolph Lundgren is. A good minute though.

Well done everyone, we're halfway out of the dark

With the Christmas special, Steven Moffat again proves that the best episodes of Doctor Who are the ones that are full of ideas. Here a man watches his past Christmas Eves being changed as the Doctor introduces his younger self to an annually-defrosted woman. It's a version of Dickens' Christmas Carol, and this man is Scrooge, refusing to save a plummeting space ship in the skies of his planet. And there's flying fish. The story's not made up of lots of running around, but clever ideas expertly stuck together. With each Christmas Eve that passes, the mean old man gains new memories and new experiences. The woman that comes out of the ice every year teaches him that the world isn't so bad after all, and that the massive flying sharks are nothing to be afraid of if you've got a good singing voice. Doctor Who can work these seemingly random ideas into one episode without feeling messy. It takes skilled writing to make something like this seem coherent. It takes extraordinary writing to make it good. Yes, it uses plenty of dubious Who logic to reach its conclusion, but where there's a sonic screwdriver there is always a way. The usual companions are mostly absent, screaming somewhere up in the sky for the Doctor to save them. Instead there's Michael Gambon giving speeches like this: 'On every world, wherever people are, in the deepest part of the winter, at the exact mid-point, everybody stops and turns and hugs. As if to say, well done. Well done everyone. We're halfway out of the dark.'

The reason I write so much about Doctor Who, more than any other TV show anyway, is that every episode is a new story, a new little film. They can't be grouped together and summarised in a few sentences. Doctor Who can do anything it wants and, in the new season, it probably will.

Grow and crack big trees in ten seconds

This is the part of my writing where I get a bit loose with things like punctuation and grammar. It doesn't make perfect sense, but then it probably doesn't need to. It's from a short story called 'The Average Colour of the Universe', which is mostly a lot gentler than this.

The universe is beige, apparently. A beige called cosmic latte. Another name for it is 'skyvory'. This doesn't actually have a lot to do with the short story, which is all over the place, but it's nice to know. The idea of a forest moving up and down on fast forward has been turned into something else since I wrote this. Something that reads less like the scrawls of a mad person. The structure of screenplays can be good. I'm less tempted to make everything explode.

The boy who said there was a wolf but there wasn't a wolf

This is from a screenplay called, at the moment, 'Big Moon Forest'. Here two boys are walking to the forest to see something. It turns out Rhys is telling the truth, but it's not really a monster. And I couldn't resist the 'trees' comment, even though it's a pretty bad joke.

I was told that I shouldn't write about children, because my style is too obvious a fit for them. For some reason I'm not listening, and am writing two stories about children. They start in the same place but go off in wildly different directions. This one involves a bit less of the surreal. A bit.

'The Boy Who Cried Wolf' has been attributed to Aesop. So this is something clever my university lecturers would have called 'intertextuality'. Maybe. I could just be making it up as I go along. What other way is there? Like everything else, the story is summed up in The Simpsons, when Bart tells lies about a test, and is then chased around school by a wolf.

Is the idea of 'a minute a page' true? Doesn't seem accurate to me. Some pages can go by in half that. Some could be about three. I'll play along with that idea if it makes things easier, but I don't believe it. A script of a hundred and twenty pages would be two hours long? Okay then.

Digging a hole through the world

Here's a link to a website that actually lets you dig through the world. Or at least find the other side. You'll be lucky if you don't end up in the sea.

This is something from a novel, working title 'I don't know what it's called'. As there's a high chance it'll take five years to write and then be thrown away for something else, I'll put a bit of it here to make it exist more. Other things are happening, like a screenplay, and shorter bits, but this'll do for now. It's about holes in the pavement - not the entire story, just this bit here.

I always struggle naming characters. Are they meant to mean something, sound like something? I don't know. So here there's James, a random name, and Boy, because he's a boy. This might change. Although it hasn't yet and I'm thousands of words in. Never mind. He can be Boy.