Avatar (in 3D)...

Introduction:

Straight into my Top Ten of 2009, and most likely my favourite film of the year, comes Avatar - in freakin' 3D as well.

The triumphant return of James Cameron has happened, and in 3D to boot with the biggest budget ever attached to a feature film - territory that isn't unfamiliar to JC, as he was both the first to break the $100 and $200 million barriers. To kick off, I'm going to address some of the up-front issues that have been incessantly talked about by the mass media (the extent of which is unfair and needlessly focusses on only a select few eye-catching things).

3D:

Anyway, to get them out of the way, let's first start with the 3D technology utilised in Avatar. I hadn't seen a movie in this new fangled 3D tech before - those clear-lensed plastic framed glasses that make everyone look like Buddy Holly - and indeed I was saving myself specifically for Avatar. I had a brief moment of pondering going to see My Bloody Valentine 3D, but soon came to my senses (indeed the film itself was pish, and unsurprisingly the original movie is superior). I'm pleased to say my eyes didn't hurt, nor did I get a headache, and there was no blurring to the image - only at times a sort of juddery look to some of the faster moving elements in the foreground. There'll be more technical words to describe and illustrate whatever that issue was, but they're beyond me ... fortuntely the few times that happened didn't detract from the whole.

So there we six were in the cinema, four of whom (myself included) had never seen one of these 3D movies, all thoroughly weirded out by the first jolt of 3D trickery - some advert involving a giant head thing with nuts (or something) flying through jungle. At that point I'll admit I did instinctively duck out of the way with not a hint of irony or mockery. Indeed, such trickery was throughout Avatar - but in a far more subtle way.

For example, holographic computer screens peering in at the edge of the frame, on-screen text, glowing seeds floating on air currents, or burning embers drifting through the shot (convincing enough that I almost started trying to swat them away before realising). As such however, these moments did cause an amount of distraction (especially with this being my first foray into 3D cinema going), but never enough to spoil anything I'm pleased to say.

Mercifully James Cameron (naturally) avoided such ludicrous 3D spectacles as poking anything and everything including the kitchen sink into the camera lens, and anytime a spear or machine gun lunged at us it was in a shot that would have been composed as such regardless of the 3D.

Is the 3D required the tell the story? Far from it, and it never will be. So it's really only there to add to the immersion, but again this isn't truly necessary as I've so often found myself fully immersed in 2D movies on a television screen. Indeed, JC's Aliens continues to leave me utterly gripped throughout when watched in 2D on a 20 inch TV. It's the quality of the filmmaking that counts, not the flashy gadgets on offer.

That said, in the case of Avatar, the 3D did help to add an extra layer of immersion that made visiting JC's Pandora an extra special experience. Seeing this movie in 3D was a treat in itself, and might possibly be a one-off for me. Do I want to see Pixar movies in 3D for example? Not really. The quality of the storytelling and the animation is what matters in a Pixar movie. Avatar was however, an exception, and while it will most likely work just as well in 2D, I was utterly willing to go that extra mile just for James Cameron.

The budget:

The next common issue to be gang-humped by the mass media is the budget. Yes, it's large - officially $230 million (with a further $150 million for advertising) - but so what? JC has broken budget barriers before, and he still is. Move on already, sheesh. The budget doesn't make the movie (well technically it does, because it pays for everything, but you know what I mean) - just look at Transformers 2. It cost a packet and it was stupid ... a guilty pleasure sure, but really, really, really stupid.

The CGI:

Next up - the CGI - sitting there watching Avatar I had a thought. What's the big problem with CGI that some people have? It has it's place, just as long as it's utilised correctly, and indeed with this flick it's totally necessary. Without CGI you couldn't make Avatar. The only thing that practical effects (like a puppet) has over CGI is that you just know that it exists in the same physical space at the same time as the actors. Indeed this can sell the puppet better than some CGI (especially the earlier stuff) which can look utterly pish. However, even a puppet is fake. It's materials cobbled together (with skill) to make something that doesn't exist. Similarly, the CGI work of Weta (who did fantastic work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy) is a case of just using a computer to make things that don't exist.

At times some of the creatures do look 'too CGI' (for example the Hyena-and-Panther-like creatures during one night-time ambush, which look rubbery in a CGI way), and you're fully aware that it's all a lot of CGI going on ... however, for the most part you buy it. You indulge your imagination - just like you'd do with a rod puppet, or fake severed limb. The world of Pandora and its military & corporate occupiers are mostly constructed from CGI, so it all works in the end. It's how this film is supposed to look - this isn't a case of chucking a bit of CGI into a live action movie. Indeed, this is more a case of throwing a bit of live action into a CGI festival.

Is this a bad thing? Not in the slightest - like I said, this is just how Avatar is supposed to look, and thus it works.

Further to the issue of CGI is the Na'vi themselves. When I first heard about Avatar, I was a bit "eh?" about the whole 10ft tall blue aliens with tails thing. Fortunately the more I saw the more I become invested in the idea, and by the end of the movie (indeed within minutes of being introduced to the Na'vi in the cinema) I was a true believer in the Na'vi. They felt real, even in the (wisely few) scenes featuring humans and Na'vi.

What sold it? The human emotion of those performing the parts. Indeed, the motion capture utilised in Avatar is a runaway success. These blue aliens feel like real beings, and being able to see the people beneath it all further adds to selling you the idea. Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver and Joel Moore's avatars all look the spitting image of them, and while (for me at least) Zoe Saldana's Neytiri looks less like their human counterpart than the others (perhaps because I'm less familiar with her, and she doesn't have Moore's distinctive features or Weaver's individual smile), I'm still utterly drawn into the eyes of her.

Neytiri is a fully realised being, a charming and attractive character - you can see exactly why Worthington's Jake Sully is stunned by her and ends up falling in love with her. You're along for the ride through the eyes of Jake Sully, and you can never quite take your eyes off Neytiri as she guides you through the lush world of Pandora.

Twitches of the nose, minute movements in the mouth, the movement of the eyes - in all of the Na'vi you can feel that there is something much more going on that just some flashy CGI. You feel like they're real. Mission accomplished, Mr. Cameron.

The story:

Some of the more sarcastic and derisive members of the press and internet public have snidely commented about Avatar as being 'Pocahontas/Fern Gulley/Dances With Wolves in space', or even a rip-off of that Delgo movie (or whatever it was called - an arsey little comment which makes no sense whatsoever when Avatar had been dreamt up long before it existed and was indeed shot and half-rendered by the time that flop was released).

Personally, I've never seen any of those movies, so the comparisons are meaningless to me. Indeed, they should be meaningless to the masses too. Orson Welles himself stated, when being lauded as an original, that all the stories you could possibly do have already been covered. He said that he himself was making stories that had already been told. Indeed, it's all about the way you tell the chosen story, and what you do with all the minute details.

What Cameron does with the story is tell it his way, and while you'll know most of what's going to happen long before it does, so what? It's a joy to see it happen when it finally does. That said, the 161 minute running time is a bit much on the respective arses of the cinema going audience, but it's a damn sight shorter than Titanic (with a stronger plot to boot).

By now you'll know what the plot of the movie is, so I won't bang on about that. However, is it bluntly told? Having heard the review by Mark Kermode I was expecting something that would bludgeon me over the head. Fortunately I didn't watch that movie. There are moments of blunt-as-you-like exposition which are, of course, necessary for the audience, but they're written in such a way that doesn't make an awful lot of sense for people who know full well what they're talking about. People who have been living on Pandora for a very long time. The epitome of these moments of bluntness is a scene where Selfridge (Ribisi) moans at Augustine (Weaver) about why they're there - Unobtanium (a silly name, no matter how you slice it) sells for stupid amounts of money per kilo. Sure, we need this info, but do tell us in a better way. But like I said, the majority isn't like that at all, even if you can predict the general arc of the story.

However, how many films can you predict the plot arc of? Countless numbers, that's how many, so why people are bemoaning Cameron for it is beyond me. Like I said, a handful of story types told in innumerable ways. The fun is in how it's told and what you see along the way; to invest in the characters and watch their story unfold.

I mean think about it, how many people out there in the real world are living exactly the same lifestyle as many others? Exactly. Get off your soap box and just enjoy the world James Cameron has invested himself in and presented to you.

Problems:

There are some problems with the film though. The odd line is eye rollingly in-your-face, particular the one about "shock and awe" and ultimately the one about having to "fight terror with terror" (or something like that) - since when were the Na'vi performing terrorist acts on the mining corporation?

The action, unlike Aliens or T2 for example, never gripped me like those movies did. I enjoyed the hell out of it, but I was rarely moved to the point of finding my fingernails embedded in the arm rests. Meanwhile T2 still astounds me, and Aliens still leaves me wide-eyed, fist-pounding and breathless. That little extra something was missing from the muscly thrust of Avatar, and so the action set pieces didn't pummel as I'd thought they would. Even the final barrage, which Cameron talked about recently, didn't grab hold of me and shake me like a rag doll. Aliens (again) on the otherhand, did so during the four big set pieces.

The depiction of the Na'vi as 'typically Native American' is a bit on-the-nose, I'll admit. However, it never bothered me personally. Although it does feel a bit 'stereotypically tribal' ... but you could also say that the bastards in the mining corporation (such as Ribisi's Selfridge) are stereotypically git-like with their 'flea-infested tree dweller' dismissals of the Na'vi.

Indeed the corporate-versus-nature allegory is also a bit on the blunt side. However (again), that said, I never felt pummelled by it (unlike how I felt by the blanket coverage of the recent Copenhagen Climate Conference cop-out talking shop). Cameron does succeed in winning the audience's hearts & minds in favour of Pandora and the Na'vi. We learn about them and their culture as Jake does, and as such we are (perhaps unsurprisingly) on the Na'vi side when the final battle comes around ... indeed on the positive side, dare I say it, I was a little bit devestated when the Na'vi are left to flee their home (a feeling much-inspired by Saldana's honest, gutteral, heart-broken wails of sorrow - all beautifully rendered in pitch-perfect CGI motion capture).

Colonel Quaritch is a kick ass character, a chest-thumping gorilla of a man, but he's annoyingly one-dimensional. It would have been great if he was even the slightest bit questioning of his own methods, or just had a different side to all his gut-toting. Even still, you can't help but feel a bristle of neck hair when he brazenly fires upon an escaping aircraft.

It's interesting, but in a movie where the minute details of the CGI 'emotion capture' are so important, there is a distinct lack of the minute details woven throughout the script. The motivations and feelings of the main characters are often glanced at, but never excavated and picked apart. If there was some more of that it would have helped sell the human side of the coin better. Fortunately the Na'vi are covered quite thoroughly, albeit mainly through Neytiri. It's understandable though that Cameron might have become distracted by this rich other-culture and alien people, but it is still a shame that the human characters were left out in the cold a bit. To have been a bit less black & white would have been nothing but positive, although with the overall plot arc it's hard to see how that could have been achieved.

Conclusion:

Despite cursory problems, the odd quibble, and a slightly flabby feel, Avatar was a great experience. I loved visiting the world of Pandora, realised in such loving detail by JC and his team, and no sooner had I left the cinema than I wanted to return. I wanted to feel the subtle use of 3D again, I wanted to get to know Neytiri all over again, and I wanted to see Jake learn to love Pandora again.

Avatar is a different kind of film from JC. You can see a shift in his mindset and the influence of his documentary projects. Typically James Cameron throughout (central love story, pioneering technology, powerful female leads, record breaking budget, masterfully crafted and designed in-film technology, and so on), Avatar is the film to see in 3D. It's a welcome return of Cameron, and while it was never going to pull in the box office figures of Titanic, it is easily a better and more interesting film (my relationship with JC's Titanic has been a rollercoaster unto itself), and is without a doubt worth your time and money.

I'm very much looking forward to the DVD release, and hopefully it'll be a features-packed extravaganza. I want to delve into Pandora all over again, and I want to see how it was all put together.

I think that about covers it ... for now at least.

I'm absolutely barging this script...

Yes, it continues to go well - in fact, last night I had a midnight sesh that just kept going and going, with me sat there with The Dark Knight soundtrack (among other stuff) feeding into my brain through my head phones - it was one of those cases where you say 'oh I'll just finish this little bit off here, then stop and go back over this whole bit' ... but that doesn't happen.

Instead, you do that part, then find yourself writing a few sentences more so you have a good lead-in for the next section, to allow yourself a smooth re-entry into the script, to pick up where you left off, if you will.

However, this cycle just kept happening. I'd write a bit to set myself up for another writing session, then I'd have to write another bit to link in, then I'd have a great idea and have to write that, then I'd remember about a character, then another character and then another character that needed to be placed in the ensuing chaos, and then I'd have to flick back and forth, and at one point I had to re-write a couple of sentences to allow one character to get to a certain location to allow another sequence I had in mind to play out.

Oh yes, chaos indeed - both in what's being written, but also in how it was being written. I was glued to the keyboard hammering away, completely gripped, with the text on screen flying across the glowing monitor at practically 88mph.

I was planning on tying up the end of Act Two, and lying the foundation for the start of Act Three, but instead I not only finished Act Two, but wrote half of Act Three straight away!

Today I tidied up on scene I left aside from last night (as it was truly getting quite late), and so then I'll head back to page 93 (prior to which I've already been through and refined a few days back), have a little tidy up - I'll no doubt lace in certain characters here and there - the trouble with such an ensemble of protagonists is it's easy to lose track of them, so I sometimes have to fix that on my hook back around to refine what I've just written throughout an act.

So once that refining is done, I'll be back to do the second half of Act Three - or indeed, the eighth of eight segments as per my previously mentioned brainstorm map of the whole script.

How many pages now then? Currently I'm about half way down page 116.

I have written a script this long (indeed longer) before, although that wasn't in Final Draft, and it wasn't in a traditional three act structure (it was almost a sort of catharsis for myself in developing ideas, and debriefing myself from my three years at university) ... so really, this is the longest proper script I've ever written (I mostly do short scripts, but my previous feature lengther was 90 pages), and it's most certainly the most complex script I've ever written.

It's been a battle (in the best sense) to write a script with a broad ensemble of characters, covering an epic story, with a considerable amount of action - as well as ideas, and zombie fan nerd wish-listing - but it's been a great experience to write this.

If I'm lucky enough to get the opportunity to actually develop it further, I'll no doubt seek to add things, change things, manipulate certain ideas and so on further than I currently am - but then again, right now I'm coming from nothing on the page at all to something quite big all written out in first draft form (technically second draft, considering that I go back over what I've written each act, and refine ... fettle, if you will). So aye - if given the opportunity to develop it, then I'd already have a very deep, complex, thought-out structure to complete the 'build' upon, so-to-speak.

What's to be written next after this? Well, I might have mentioned some time ago about a horror script I had in mind - related to an allergic reaction I acquired from dodgy clothing dye - in fact I was initially planning to write that before this feature length zombie epic (which is specifically designed for a big budget - well, relatively speaking - and use of CGI, and sets, and kick ass professional gore, and actors and so on ... essentially "The End" is being written as my own ideal zombie film with no budget in mind - or at least a budget infinitely beyond my current, and near-future abilities).

Anyway, yes, where was I? The horror script - that's what I was on about - yes, I'll be looking to write that, and that will be a fair simpler affair (less characters, less locations, an over-all simpler 'potential production'). In fact, I plan to be quite inspired by the up-coming Mum & Dad, a new British horror flick in the vein of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (it's not even out yet, and the Daily Mail has already had a whinge ... or was it the Daily Express? Anyway...)

Yes, this horror script would be designed for an indie budget, and indeed a British setting.

So with my scripts, I write shorts that I can film, and I write shorts beyond my means when I have something I need to get onto the page. I write really short-shorts for quick ideas, or for sending to certain groups (like the London Film Academy, although they didn't dig the script I sent - no doubt too anti-government for them ... incumbent Labour government anyway).

Then of course, feature scripts - again, beyond my means at the moment, but set up for the future - it's best to have an idea, which is written out fully and stored away, than to have an idea that's still in your head years down the line when you get the opportunity to put it out there - a time when you might (and hopefully should) be busier than you are (or indeed I am) at present.

Although I'm not exactly twiddling my thumbs either, far from it. So indeed - feature scripts in themselves, which I write, come in different genres, on different scales.

For example, there was 'GenPro' (short nickname title for it), which was a comedy of an indie production level. Now there's 'The End', which is a zombie horror of a big budget production level. Then there will be 'Un-named Horror Script', which will be horror again, but of an indie production level, and a different topic entirely.

I've rambled on long enough, tatty-bye-bo (as Adam Buxton might say).

Oh - and Merry Christmas to one and all (or indeed whatever holiday you enjoy at this time of year).

How's the writing going? Good! So it is...

Been a while since my last script update, it's going swimmingly however, so that's good.

I'm currently on page 94, the first act has been given the polishing treatment, and I'm now about to embark on polishing up what I've got of act two so far.

Yes, page 94 and still in act two - but remember than act one took more pages than usual, just because of the sheer volume of detail to explain. However, act two thus far - between page 49 and 94, a lot has happened - I've even added scenes that just sprung to mind and weren't planned at all.

As I'd said before, part of my planning for the script involved a brainstorm layout of the entire script in its simplest form, on which were eight segments. Five of those eight segments are now done, and there's one more to do to finish off act two.

But, I'm going to hold up for a moment, go back to page 49, and work my way through - fettling away, trimming any extraneous fat, adding anything I've neglected, or what have you. I've really gotten into this script writing lark recently, so it's all flowing very freely now, it feels great to be writing this well, especially after I had such a prolonged period of writer's block/malaise prior to finally opening up Final Draft and setting to work.

So yeah, I'll polish up what I've got of act two so far (three of four segments), and once that fettling is done, I'll finish act two and either A) continue into the third act, or B) fettle that one remaining segment of act two.

How long is that fourth of four act two segments gotta be? No more than 15 pages, I don't want to go any higher than 109 pages for the end of act two - and ideally, a little bit shorter than that.

For the script over all, an absolute maximum of 139 pages is my target, but ideally I'd like to clock in at 130 pages...told you it was a zombie epic.

It's been enjoyable to work on this second act, having spent a fair amount of time plugging away at the first act, which was mainly about one thing, whereas act two has a whole variety of stuff going on. There's action, there's a lot more dialogue, there's different locations, there's new ideas, there are montage moments (I need to show the passage of time at certain points, which helps make the whole situation - and certain things that happen during act two - more believable).

So yep - going rather well indeed. I don't know when I might get it finished to the 'draft 1.5' standard that I seek, but it might not take too long - but on the other hand, the Xmas season is coming up shortly - will I get it done before then? Unlikely. Will I get it done before New Year's? More likely, but perhaps not a sure thing. Mid-January would be an easy target to achieve mind you, but I'll hopefully finish it earlier than that.

There's still some final editing to do on Sexual Ethics Part One (the second part will be sometime later, possibly winter 2009), and the next educational DVD I'll be setting to work on hasn't gotten going yet beyond script pondering, so I've got a nice relaxed gap in my day-to-day schedule to really seize the opportunity and write like the wind - in fact, this time last year I was in the midst of writing Generation Procrastination, which became a 90 page graduate comedy...with a surprising (to me) amount of romantic comedy elements ... but surrounded by swearing and discussion about things like public toilets.

Indeed ... anyway, onwards to Final Draft, version number unknown!

Time for some fettling...

Well, the first draft of act one was finished a couple of days ago now, and yesterday I started fettling away at it, thinning it down, trimming off the fat.

I'm 20 pages into this, the second draft of act one, and I've so far managed to cut away 4 pages of waffle, so that feels good - plus it reads better, and looks better when staring at the page as a whole - again I'm taking inspiration from that recent Charlie Brooker Screenwipe special about writers, on which one of them said about keeping the writing as simple and punchy as possible so you hopefully avoid the reader's heart sinking when they see great big chunks of text all over the coming page.

So yeah - this fettling away makes it read better, and look better. I'm tightening the dialogue, fixing the odd sentence that needed changing/removing so that it made sense when something happened/was described later on.

But mostly it's about trimming down the descriptive stuff, taking out extraneous words, shortening words (so "zombie" becomes "zed", or a vehicle type becomes simply initials), that sort of thing.

It does take quite a while, staring into the void of white on screen, pocked with thin black text ... but it feels really good after a session of fat trimming.

As before, it's coming along nicely, and as you can see I forced myself to pause at the start of Act Two, head back to the beginning, and set about trimming away (it also helps to get your head into everything that has come before in a more condensed fashion, you remind yourself about what has happened, about the characters etc, and thus it helps when you get back to the beginning of the following act to continue writing anew).

This said, I do look forward to getting onto Act Two, there's a lot more happening in Act Two, in terms of variety - Act One was two segments on my brainstorm, while Act Two is four segments - and hopefully I won't be writing as long as I did for Act One. I think that first act just had a shed-load of action to describe, lots of visual elements to establish, to get the reader into the world at hand...it reads a little longer on the page than it would on the screen, is what I'm trying to say.

Aye, I don't bother doing a second draft of my blog posts, who's got the time and boring amounts of patience for that? Blogging is like emailing, it's rash and instant!

...

In other news - next week I'll hopefully be ordering my new PC, which will become my primary editing rig ... oh I do look forward to rendering Magic Bullet nice and fast, and yes - to finally getting to play STALKER: Clear Sky, which was sadly just too much for my current rig, a rig which will remain in constant use for all my other tasks - like script writing for example.

Tatty-bye!

I've got tha' feev'ah...

...the writing fever that is.

Have had a good couple of days hammering away at the keyboard in my spare time, I even managed to clock up 10 pages yesterday, so it's coming along nicely - I'm now at page 40.

Like I said before, this is still only the first act, so it's running long at this point, but I'll be going back over Act I after I've finished the first run through, and look to trim it down a bit, tidy things up.

I'm really starting to feel the script writing vibe now, I'm feeling much more fluid in my operation of Final Draft again, my fingers have regained their memory of how it all works - as I said before, it's been a while since I've written a script, so it's about getting my head back into it again - but that seems to have happened and it's going well ... have I said that it's "going well" enough times?

One more - it's going well.

In other news, I'm looking to get my ass a brand new computer specifically for the task of editing this month. I need some extra oomph to feed my Magic Bullet addiction, plus I just need to separate the editing side of things from my existing rig on which I do everything else.

For the past few months I've been researching for my custom spec, getting into the jargon, finding out any potential flaws, seeing who's the current tech leader, and generally getting my brain melted by the confusing world of knowing what you want to put inside your rig - off the shelf this rig most definitely is not.

Ooh I canny wait to get my mits on it! Getting a new computer, plugging it all in, booting it up for the first time, and generally creating your own nest of familiar software (and giving it a thorough run with a flashy game), is one of those joys in a guy's life ... like getting a new car and huffing that new car smell like it was going out of style, hell yeah.

...and the writing continues!

Yepperooni, the script writing is coming along nicely. It's been a week now (typing away in spare time amidst other things to do) and I'm approaching the 30 page mark very, very soon.

It's going well, I'm just writing the ideal zombie movie in my mind, tapping away on the keys what I see in my head and getting it onto the page. There's a lot of description abound, so many of the pages are quite heavy at the moment, there's a lot of visual information to be laced in. It's important to convey as much of that information as possible, I'm even loosely editing how it would look if it was on screen, creating a loose rhythm to certain scenes or moments to help further illustrate what I have in mind.

I'm rather chuffed with it so far, and just as a zombie fan myself, I'm chuffed with some of the stuff I'm writing in - I'm getting to 'see' things I haven't seen yet on screen, and I'm getting to 'see' crowd-pleasing zombies (and zombie kills), I'm 'seeing' a world which hasn't been explored before (or far from properly anyway) in the zombie genre.

Yes, it's going well, even though I've still not got fully into the groove - such as operating Final Draft (still getting used to which keys to press at what point, and getting a real fast flow going on - it's been a while since I was last writing anything you see).

Currently one of eight segments (I did a basic brainstorm of the entire script as part of my copious planning and mapping out) is done, and the second of eight (which will constitute the first act) is about half way done.

I'm writing it long at the moment, partly due to additional information that the reader will need to know to understand what's going on, but mainly due to the sheer amount of visuals I have in mind - and the detail of said visuals. What I'm seeing in my head is mostly quite clear ... so yeah, once that second-of-eight segments is done, I'll pause - go back to the start - and sweep through that first draft of the first act and tidy it up - tighten things, add things, remove unnecessary things, clarify things, and give it a general tidy up.

This is what I did when writing "Generation Procrastination" a while back (in fact that was about a year ago now), and by the end of it what I had was a first draft that was in fact a second draft, ha! Plus it really does help to clarify things in your own head, and you get to catch up on what has come before in a far more condensed space of time - say over a day, rather than possibly two or more weeks (depending on available time, writer's block etc) that it took to originally hammer the keys in the first place.

One thing I will say, the current segment I'm on involves a lot of characters, and I'm having to learn fast about how to deal with so many characters at once - as well as realising that there's only so much you can do too - I even came momentarily a-cropper when I realised my detailed notes for the segment (all segments are fully laid out in note form) didn't include character names (e.g. "one vehicles goes here, the other stays there") - I had to figure out who was where and who dies when, etching in their names at every instance throughout my notes - but the momentary crisis was averted and the segment made a lot more sense to me.

Mind you, on the soon-to-come sweep through, I'll be looking to add a lot more dialogue and get the myriad of characters involved a lot more - even something as simple as finding an opportunity for the characters to use each other's names at least a couple of times (so a potential viewer of the potential film would know who is who by name), is in itself a task.

But aye - it's going well, I'm seriously digging the script when I step back and fully engage 'zombie nerd mode', factor 9, full speed ahead with The Gonk as the anthem in the background.

There Will Be Blood...

As far as epics go for the 2007-2008 period go, my top slot has already been assumed - as you might well know by now - by The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, an absolutely spell-binding, myth-meditating western.

However, there is another heavy weight contender out there - PT Anderson's There Will Be Blood. Mark Kermode has ranted and raved about this film with similar passion as I have for The Assassination of Jesse James (or as my fellow online movie nerds would say, "flat out flaming for it").

It's a timely movie, considering the fuss surrounding oil - the black, liquid gold. It's a tale of ambition, greed, deception, corruption, attempted redemption, anger, murder, capitalism unbound ... basically it's bloated with the sheer volume of narrative themes.

Admittedly, I found the last 40 minutes or so to, not drag, but just lose some of that special something - for me anyway. What preceded this sedate third act (or indeed fourth act) was gripping to say the least. Beautiful images, weighty performances, direction of absolute craft and obsessive precision ... I guess the comparative stroll of the final scenes didn't strike me as hard as they might have done. However, there's always the second viewing, which will no doubt confirm the power of these final scenes for me - not that I deny this now. Perhaps I was personally just beginning to tap out a smidge by that stage, there is a fair shift in gears for the final act.

As already said though, it's a film of brutish strength in all its creative extents, a coming together of artists, which culminated in a modern epic (see also Into The Wild). It seems that amidst the cheap ideas, remakes and MTV-sucking tat, that there is a bit of a renaissance going on somewhere inside Hollywood. Those with plenty of clout (such as PTA and Brad Pitt) are pushing the boundaries of artistic filmmaking, they're trying to seek out something more, something epic, something meaningful. Today it seems, after the inspiring renaissance seen on the small screen during recent years, the 'New Hollywood' era is making a come back.

Such bold entries into the annals of cinematic history will never go away, but will hibernate from time-to-time, now though - the grizzly has awakened, and it's impressive.