Happy New Year, one and all!

My yuletide has been quite special this year, with family all at our house for the big day last Sunday followed by a few days of snow (the most we’ve had here for ages I think). So it was a good time for snowman building and sledging with our son who is now old enough to enjoy these things.

The only downside to the week has been a dreadful ear infection I’ve had which has rendered me deaf in my left ear and in quite a bit of pain for a week now. Not much fun.

It’s been a very restful time, I’ve barely touched my Mac apart from to check the weather updates to see when the next snow shower is passing through. But I have been reading a lot.

I finished David Ball’s ‘Backwards and Forwards’, which, as promised at the Kent Screen seminar the other week, is a fantastic book – he probably packs more useful information for screenwriters and film directors into 95 or so pages than Sid Field, Robert McKee and all the other illuminaries pack into their thousands of pages. And he’s not even specifically writing about screenwriting. The book is actually about reading plays to direct them on the stage, but so much can be translated to the screen.

Now I’ve just started Alexander MacKendrick’s ‘On Directing’, which again, having only read the intro and the first chapter, is promising to provide a bounty of useful information. I think it will be a good partner to ‘Backwards and Forwards’.

No word back from the Zombie film crew yet, they wrote briefly to say they would be examining the submissions over the Chistmas break, so we shall wait and see. I’m eager to start a new film from scratch to try out all these new ideas I’ve gleaned in the past week or two.

I started my film viewing year tonight with Alexander Payne’s ‘Sideways’ which I enjoyed very much. But as the subject matter (wine, not getting laid before marriage) was very close to my heart, he’d have had to make a real duffer for me not to enjoy it. In fact if he’d thrown in a cameo by a packet of Twiglets and a Cadbury’s Double Decker, I’d have been in Nirvana.

As it was I thought it decent movie, possibly a bit flabby in the middle, but with some really nice touches. The only downside for me was that there were times when I really wasn’t sure how to feel about the main character – he seemed a bit too dour for the first part of the movie and didn’t really seem to want a great deal, apart from to show his mate a good time at the expense of his mother, who, for whatever reason, he’s neglected. It wasn’t until the second bombshell from his ex-wife at the end that I really felt for him.

I’m on babysitting duties tomorrow, so I’ll watch it again with the commentary on…