Archives: Day-to-day

This week, so far, I’ve seen 3 movies at the cinema, two of which provided the perfect lesson in contrast between special effects handled well and believably and, well, not.

First off, though, I feel obliged to encourage all of you to go check out Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging – or at least all those of you who can remember what it’s like to be a teenager.  I have to admit I didn’t have high hopes going into this one, but K wanted to see it and so we decided to take our niece along to check it out (having a nearly-teen niece is a great excuse for watching flicks you feel like you shouldn’t be seen at).  To my complete surprise, I absolutely loved it.

It’s incredibly honest and true, with just the right amount of whimsy without making itself over-the-top of unbelievable.  If you remember what life was like when you were struggling for the guts to ask out that girl you fancied, or struggling to make that gorgeous guy realise you existed, this is totally a movie for you.  But it goes beyond simple teen-dom to encompass the battles that parent’s fight, too.  Being stuck in a weird age-group that’s no longer teenager, but not yet a parent, I found myself more than able to sympathise with both sides of the arguments.

As opposed to the majority of teen movies where controlling, embarrassing parents are the clear-cut bad guys of Teen freedom, this paints a much more subtle picture, showing the adults as they really are – just people who used to be kids trying their hardest to do what they think is right and make sure that they bring their children up properly.  Yes, their embarrassing and occasionally misguided and hurtful, but you can see that it’s all with the best of parental intentions and never just to spite the kids.

It must be said that the film is helped massively by a fantastic cast.  Some of the girls can be a little drama-school-y, very well spoken and enunciating carefully all the time, but nonetheless convincing in the majority of what they do.  Alan Davies proves that he’s more than just a comedian who did Jonathan Creek and the rest of the adult cast round out the film nicely.

The two effects-heavy films of the week provided a stark contrast not just to Angus, Thongs, but also to each other.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army is a fantastic, fantastical sequel to the original Hellboy.  Directed again by Guillermo Del Toro, this time feels very different as, off the back of the inimitable and remarkable Spanish-language Pan’s Labyrinth, he’s been given a much more free-role to create the monsters and the world he wants to create.

The effects work in this film is stunning.  The majority of the creatures are created with a combination of practical (ie – man in suit or puppet) effects and the more common and oft-overused (see below) CGI effects.  What’s remarkable, especially to someone like me, for whom CGI and effects in general are often such a bug-bear they ruin the movie (see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), is that it is almost impossible to see the joins.

So photo-real are the CGI effects that, similarly to The Dark Knight, it is hardly possible to spot the when they are using practical on-set effects and when they’ve resorted to CGI.

On the other hand, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is very much the other end of the scale: stacked full of CGI which looks, funnily enough, just like CGI.  How the producers haven’t learned their lesson from the execrable effects at the end of The Mummy Returns is beyond me.  The first Mummy movie made a real effort towards photo-realism and although it looks slightly dated now, was something of a bench-mark and a wonder at it’s time.

This time round we have to contend with an almost 100% CGI Jet Li doing all kinds of craziness.  I understand that most of what they did they couldn’t do practically in terms of shape-shifting and such, but there are much simpler things they could have done to help sustain the audiences suspension of disbelief at least a little longer than the first shot of a sequence.

Practical make-up effects are undoubtedly making a come back as producers and studios realise that audiences are growing tired of the artificiality of CGI that is being churned out at speed in a lot of movies, but there are still a large amount of films using poor-quality CGI thanks to rushed post-production periods enforced upon them to hit their release dates, which are often set before the film even starts shooting.

What frustrates me about the current crop of CGI-heavy, story-poor movies is that the effects houses that are working on them are very, very good at what they do.  But the truth is that they can’t work miracles.  They are artists and you have to give them sufficient time to finesse their artwork before you put it on display.  Like all art, if it’s rushed, it shows.  While that may be fine for a Jackson Pollack, it doesn’t work when you’re dealing with supposedly photo-realistic bad guys who are supposed to be able to scare you by making you believe they exist.

And don’t even get me started on the Yetis…

Today has been a pretty impressively brilliant day.

It was another Harefield appointment, my first in six weeks after MC told me that it was a bit pointless coming back until they had clear data on whether my CMV had retreated for good or not.  So he had sent me away with instructions to send in bloods every 2 weeks to keep a check on things and that if I hit the 3 month mark with no adverse effects or without showing anything above a zero on my CMV then he’d take me off the Valganciclovir I’ve been on since May and see if my body will cope without it without submitting to CMV again.

Seeing him today with a month-and-a-half of clear results, he was suitable pleased and happy for me to drop my Valgan and continue with everything else, albeit being very much more aware and careful about the first signs of CMV infection, necessitated by the fact that CMV can very rapidly kick-start rejection of the not-very-good kind, which could do my serious damage.

That said, though, he came out with something I wasn’t expecting to hear at all.  Although I may feel like I’ve had a fair number of blips, he thinks I’m doing incredibly well and – going by his experience of CF patients post-transplant – thinks I now stand a better-than-average chance of 5-year survival.

At the time of my transplant, I was quoted statistics saying that 73% of people make it through the first year, and within that 27% that don’t are included people who may die on the table or suffer serious post-operative complications.  Once you stretch the survival period to 5-years, the odds stand at 50/50, but MC now believes that for me the benchmark can be shifted from 50/50 at 5 years to 50/50 to make 10 years.

Another decade of life is better than I think many of us dared to hope.  I said before my transplant if I’m given just six months of a new life I’d be happy.  Time enough to play with my Godsons, experience the things I’d not been able to do for breathlessness and lack of energy, learn to do things on a whim again.  Having slipped past that stage back in May, albeit in the middle of a CMV/EBV attack, I’ve felt contented with my lot, whatever is thrown at me next.  To know now that there’s a very real possibility of a future worth planning for is too incomparable for words.

I’m aware every day that someone, somewhere has lost someone they loved very dearly.  I just hope I can make enough use of the extra time I’ve been given to show them what a truly wonderful gift they have given not just me, but my family, too.

Today we spent another brilliant day in the company of K’s cousins Agi and Tibi, over from Hungary for the week for a break fomr their competely hectic work lives.

Last weekend we had taken them off on a tour around MK, taking in the sites of the snowdome, Borders, bowling at the MegaBowl and dinner in the Hub.  Today we went off to be proper tourists and see Shakespeare’s birth place.

We arrived in the late morning and immediately set about seeing what there was to see.  I’ve only been to Stratford one before, when I was in my early teens and probably not all that interested in tatty mementos and old buildings – certainly not interested enough to remember it at all.

This time, though, I was much more aware of what I was there to see, which was largely old buildings and tacky, tatty mementos.  Not to mention the world’s largest collection of shops, pubs, clubs, amusements and activities with “Shakespeare” in their name.  There is a serious lack of originality to Stratford, which is ironic (or fitting, depending on your perspective) considering it’s place in the story of Britain’s Bard.

Rather than pay through the nose to stand in an enormous queue through some fairly attractive gardens before spending 5 minutes being herded through an old house that’s only claim to fame was having a playwright born there, we instead opted to jump on the hop on, hop off bus tour of Stratford, which would take us outside the city limits and off to Anne Hathaway’s cottage.  And yes, we were looked at strangely for jumping on a bus whose intention is for hopping, but we like to be different.

The Hathaway’s cottage, quite apart from being a lovely old building in a beautiful countryside setting, is fantastic entertainment.

The “tour” of the cottage (which actually has, I think, 6 bedrooms and lots of other things too (you can tell I was listening hard, can’t you?)) consists mostly of one man standing in the parlour explaining the history of the time and about a dozen English phrases which were coined from habits of the time, including “cold shoulder”, “stop-gap” and “turning the tables”.  This lead, rather unwittingly, to a running joke between us for the rest of the day about how certain phrases came about.  Hence the phrase “running joke”. (well, it was funny at the time).

The majority of the “tour” – and it really does have to be placed in inverted commas – is taken up with the guide explaining that, essentially, Shakespeare would never have lived there and may have visited while they were courting, although it’s not certain, just a decent supposition.

Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare, his slim volume on the life of England’s greatest poet (again, depending on your views), is esstially a collection of all the published wisdom on Shakespeare through his life and amounts to a slim non-fiction novel explaining that we actually know absolutely nothing about Shakespeare whatsoever.  In fact, there are only three point in Shakespeare’s life when we know with 100% certainty where he was – the day he was born, the day he got married and the day he died.  The rest is all pure specualtion and guess-work.

Hopping back on the bus (doing it the proper way this time), the heavens had opened and forced us onto the lower deck.  After five minutes riding down there, though, I decided it was too much like a normal bus ride, missing as we were our knowledgeable and informative personal guide from the first bus and reliant instead as we were on a pre-recorded, barely-audible audio description which semed to mostly cover sheep, the most enlightening section of which anounced that Warwickshire in Shakespeares time was a farming county, as opposed, we surmised, to the now infamous Buckinghamshire pole dancing county.  Unimpressed as I was and seeing that the rain had stopped, I shepherded us on the the open-top upper deck where we all coated our butts in fresh rainwater from the seats, whilst giggling like schoolgirls all the way back into town.

Following a late luch at a pub surprisingly not named after anything Shakespearean, we crossed the road to a large carousel K had spotted on our way past.  After spending 5 minutes larking around on pogo-horse which disappointingly failed to pull a Mary Poppins and leap from their confines off into a fun, colourful world of animated penguins, we all began to get somewhat bored and spent the follow 5 minutes of the seemingly endless merry-go-round wishing we could just jump off.  Tibi did manage to switch horses mid-stream though, which was pretty impressive and not unentertaining.

Strolling back through Stratford towards the car, we stopped in at various little shops and authentic-looking buildings which have now been turned into banks, coffee bars and Woolworths.  Sad, but sadly not uncommon.

After getting home and dining with K’s ‘rents we had jsut enough time to have a gander through Agi and Tibi’s pictures of the week (including todays) before we shot off home and clambered into bed for an early night before busy days tomorrow, K at work and me back down at Harefield.

I’m not having much luck, artistically, at the moment. Not personally, but in my viewing choice. Following last week’s Mama Mia debacle, I was in London tonight to catch an Edinburgh Preview of The White Space’s Yellow Wallpaper show.

Back in the olden days, the days of rubbish lungs and MK Theatre, Suze picked up The Yellow Wallpaper, a 19th Century Gothic horror about a women suffering from traumatic post-natal depression in the days before women were “allowed” to have depression of any kind, let alone post-natal. Locked away for her own safety in a nursery she slowly starts to see shapes in the wall and a woman emerges, taking her place in the outside world during the day and then torturing her mind at night.

All the basis, one would have thought, for a fantastic piece of Theatre.

Sadly, not the case. The whole show was prety disastrous from start to finish – the acting was soul-less and devoid of all emotion, the staging and lighting were, frankly, beyond amateurish and the less said about the sound the better.

Suze and I went along, with K and Suze’s friend G, thinking we might catch a gem, but well aware that this sort of thing can turn into a stinker. Which it did.

Still, as Suze put it on the way home, it makes you even more determined to do your own stuff, safe in the (cocky?) knowledge that you can do better.

Sorry all.  Having been chastised for not updating the blog, I have just posted a couple of film reviews for you, but will endevour to fill the gaps on the past couple of weeks as soon as I get a decent chance.  I’ve been a trifle busy.  In a good way.

Sorry if I scared anyone!

I may just have spent my day today watching the best film of the year, swiftly followed by the very, very worst film of the year.

The Dark Knight is so unbelievably brilliant and above my sky-scraper-high expectations that after watching it yesterday morning, I headed straight back in for the first showing today and it only managed to get even better over night.

Mama Mia on the other hand is so incomparably bad as to warrant a new classification below second-rate, third-rate and any other -rate you can think of.  To call it sub-par is an insult to average films around the world.

It’s not just the tacky scenery which looks like it may have been lifted straight from the stage show, complete with appallingly bad “summer” lighting, interrupted by the occasional use of a Greek island to try to sell the artifice.  It’s not even the fact that the majority of the cast can’t actually carry a tune, or that the story is so ham-fisted and spends most of its time bending double to try to line itself up with a vague reference to ABBA lyrics which can kick off a song.  Beyond all of that it’s just plain bad.  Bad shooting, bad lighting, bad singing, bad choreography, bad film.

It’s hugely disappointing to see actors of the calibre who have signed to this film being forced through the most tortuous of musical hammery.  It may work wonderfully on stage, but if the recent film musical boom has taught us anything about the way to make them work in the cinema, it’s that theatricality doesn’t work.  You can make it slightly surreal and artificial (see Chicago) if that’s the way you want to go, but you can marry realism in one part of the scene to over-the-top hammery while singing.  Emoting every lyric with a pained expressions on your face and your hand clenched into a fist as if you’re grabbing an imaginary floating cow’s udder just doesn’t do it for the filmic adaptations.  And it’s 100% the director’s fault for letting those moments creep in.  If you don’t have the strength to tell Meryl Streep she looks like a muppet you shouldn’t have cast her in your movie.

The Dark Knight (aka Batman 2, or 6 depending on your view) on the other hand is a classic example of masterpiece filmmaking.  It’s also the first time in as long as I can remember (with the *possible* exception of Iron Man) that a film has actually repaid my rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth excitement and optimism.  Ever since the War of the World’s debacle of 2005 I have struggled – and mostly failed – to keep my excitement for the summer event movies in check.

I’ve been fairly successful from time to time, but at the end of the day I’m a movie geek and even if I don’t know the source material of the comic adaptations inside out, I still can’t help but join the gathering momentum of the summer storm of blockbusters.

Christopher Nolan has been one of my favourite directors since I first saw Memento and looked up his debut, Following, a super-low budget thriller which plays with timelines in much the same way as Memento, the film that got him noticed in Hollywood.

Too often as a film fan you spot an up-and-coming director you want to keep your eye on and they head off either to disappear into the ether and never re-emerge or end up churning out studio tosh that they take for the paycheque.

Nolan, though, is an exception.  After proving his metal with Hollywood’s finest in Insomnia he took on the resurrection of one of the cinema’s most succesful but most derided franchises and turned it around in a way no one expected.  Not only was Batman Begins a great Batman film, it was a great comic book film, but not only that, it was just straight up a great film.  Not many adaptations achieve that.

The Dark Knight, Nolan’s first sequel, is a triumph in every sense.  It is bigger, bolder, darker, scarier, mmore emotional and more horrific than the first.  And it’s better.  Much better.  I didn’t think it would be possible for Nolan to top the enjoyment I felt absorbing Begins three years ago, but he has.  From start to finish, despite coming in at 2-and-a-half hours, the film is not only gripping but rawly emotional and darkly funny in places.

Heath Ledger has been gaining plaudits right, left and centre for his out-of-the-box, out-of-this-world
performance as the Joker and rightly so.  This is what people call a “career defining” performance, sadly not for the reasons it should be.  But for an actor of Ledger’s stature to disappear so completely into a role of this kind is uncanny.

The same could be said for many of the supporting cast, who are seemingly queuing up to work with one of Hollywood’s hottest directors of the moment.  Most of the original cast return, along with a handful of new faces played by familiar faces, all of them on the top of their game throughout.

I cannot stress enough how good this movie is or that you should go and catch it at your earliest opportunity.  It is, quite simply, awesome.

And  in the words of the world’s deadliest Panda, “There is no charge for awesomeness.”

Tonight I popped down to Euston station in London to meet with the director of the film I’m producing on Sunday.

I was pleasantly surprised that he was much more prepared than I expected him to be. There were a lot of questions about the shoot I hadn’t asked him and was expecting pretty negative answers to, but he answered all of them and showed himself to be very ready for the mini-battle ahead over the weekend. He even offered me a place to sleep for the two nights of the shoot, which was great.

I have to say I’m very excited to be involved in a film project again. It’s been a long time since I last was and although I’m not in my ideal position of directing, I’m loving producing at the moment. It’s all very logistical and analytical, which is really good fun and suits my skillset really well. It’s also a lot more creative than people think, since if I come up with a problem that I think we need to get around, it’s my job to think up alternatives and present them to the director for discussions, rather than simply highlight the issue and get him to do the donkey work.

I’m a little sad I didn’t get involved in this project earlier, but I clearly missed his first call for a producer. It’s no the end of the world, though, and coming on board now means I’ve got the fun part of the shoot to deal with and be there for then I get to over-see post-production, where I hope to learn a lot more about certain aspects of it, before heading off to trail the film round the international festivals, if we can admission. Should be great.

I figured I’ve taken enough time off fitness and exercise since my admission with CMV, so I’m back on the treadmill and all the other torture devices at the gym in a bid to make sure that all the weight I’m currently putting on goes on in the right ways, not just around my stomach and face as seems to be the case at the moment.

I surprised myself at how little of my aerobic capacity I had actually lost, I did a lot better on the bike and rower than I thought I was going to and then fitted in a really good upper-body resistance workout, which I’ll be aiming to do twice a week and also a twice-weekly lower-body work out on the day after the uppers. That’ll be Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday so I have 2 days rest between weights sessions for specific areas and then the weekend off.

I actually really enjoyed the session today and I hope that I’ll quickly pick up the gym-addiction that I had started to develop before my incarceration.

I also did a second Untouched photo-shoot with a friend from the Theatre today, which went really well – he’s very photogenic and we came away with some good shots and some fun ones, too. I’m really liking the look of the natural light and the challenge of getting the shot I need right there and then. I’m also getting more and more used to the intricate settings of my camera – learning how to use things I’ve always had on automatic before, but which now enable me to better control the image, which is vital when I can’t play with it after the fact.

Also chatted to J, the model, about setting up some Theatre/Film projects in the not-too-distant future: he’s like me, looking to occupy himself and to experiment with things in a small environment, but he’s on the acting side and I’m on the behind-the-camera side, which is quite a useful combination. I also think he may be as driven as I am, which will definitely help us spur ourselves along.

This afternoon I met with two of the old MK Youth Theatre who have set up their own project called In Vitro for their own production company, Thrust Theatre Company, which I’m incredibly impressed with. They’re very on-the-ball when it comes to the money side of things, having worked out a completely balanced budget and ways to raise the money quickly and easily. Budgeting is one of the hardest things to learn and get right when you don’t know a lot about production in theatre, so I’m really pleased that they’ve paid it so much attention and not just gone in blind with the hope they can put on a play somewhere.

The play itself, written by one of them and to be directed by the other, is also very good. It’s very “issue based”, but that’s no bad thing for a young people’s theatre group aiming at a certain market, and they have things to say on the issues which need to be listened to by some of the adult population in this country.

They’ve asked me to be involved, which I’d very much like to be – I’ll be going along to most of the rehearsals and being a sounding-board for their ideas and helping them through the process in any way they need, sort of like a mentor, I guess, which is a little scary as I’m sure I’m not old enough to be a mentor to anyone.

Still, it’s another project, another little bit of variety in my life and it’s something else to be interested in and excited about. Can’t wait.

Mini-landmark day today, as I signed on to produce a short film for a director names Kieron Clark.

I subscribe to a filmmakers’ daily newsletter called Shooting People that contains all sorts of information and advice, as well as carrying job adverts.  Yesterday I saw an ad from Kieron looking for someone to come on board his short film, Polar Bear, to oversee the post-production process following next weekend’s shoot.

Although in the long term I see myself much more following the route of writing and directing, taking an opportunity to be part of a short film in any capacity is worth doing.  As a producer, I’m confident in my abilities with all the knowledge that I have of the role, plus all the experience I have organisationally through my work in the Theatre, which I think sets me up quite nicely for the producer’s role within the film industry.

It’s only a two-day shoot, which will happen next Saturday and Sunday evenings, then during post-production I’ll be liaising and organising the various elements and then once it’s complete, I’ll be responsible for gathering interest and submitting it to film festivals, which will hopefully garner us some awards or at the very least a little appreciation.

I’m excited about getting involved in a film project after trying to set up a few of my own, which are progressing but moving very slowly.  Hopefully with Polar Bear in the can I’ll be able to kick-start a short for me to direct and then move on to bigger and better things as the year flicks past at a tremendous rate of knots, such as it is.

Today saw the first photo shoot of the Untouched Photography project, using former Youth Theatre veterans Elaine, Bruce and Katie as my first experimental models.

I’m actually really pleased with the way things turned out. It was a lot harder than I’d first thought, as leaving the images free of manipulation means you have no kind of post-shoot fall-back if you didn’t get the shot quite right. There’s no adjustment of lighting, no option to lighten a slightly dark image up a little, and no chance to crop the image, even slightly, to take out something which may have crept into the edge of the frame.

What all of that means is that it’s really important to make sure that you’ve got the shot you want before you move on, to check the images you’ve taken. I nearly scuppered myself a couple of times with slightly off-kilter images, but caught them in time to shoot an extra couple of more precise frames.

It’s a great creative exercise, though, knowing that you have to get what you need there and then and have no safety net for the picture afterwards. And today was the first time I’ve worked in this kind of way – an organised shoot with models – as opposed to just happy-snapping family and friends on days out.

What pleased me most about it, though, was how much I enjoyed it. This is clearly going to be a lot of fun, so I’m looking forward to the rest of the process now and seeing what I can get from people. Anyone interested in modeling who hasn’t contacted me, feel free to drop me a line.

On a more every-day note, it was great to see the YT guys again, as it’s been over a year since I last saw them and I was looking considerably worse then than I am now.  It’s always great to see people’s reactions when they see me for the first time since the op.

When I was ill I got used to the frustration of people telling you that you look really well when you’re feeling like rubbish.  I never quite knew whether they really meant it (albeit in a relative sense) or if they were just being nice about seeing my huffing and puffing with oxygen specs up my nose, but either way it always bothered me.  Now when people tell me I look great, I get to tell them I feel great too – it’s a whole new world  that I’m still not getting tired of.

Let’s have more of it.