I've been reading it for the whole train trip home. All 800 pages of it. Pretty terrible book.

I read The Guns of Navarone the other week, mostly while I was tootling around Adelaide. It was a fun book. Good adventure, with the pleasant taste of literature. Far less transparent and thick-witted than someone like Tom Clancy, but just as entertaining.

Zohan was two hours of cheap shots at Arabs, Jews, women and Mel Gibson. But there were plenty of bad bits too.

Sigur Rós made the best video clip ever. It's all naked people running around a forest for several minutes. Totally wonderful. Good song too.

We just watched George Romero's original Dawn of the Dead. It was fully sweet. I really loved the remake, but this was great in a whole different way. It wasn't as funny or smart, but it was quality. And interesting, which isn't something one tends to say about zombie films. Except 28 Days Later I guess.

It was real good but. Good gore spatterings. Lots of gore spatterings. More than you could reasonably ask for in one film.

Libby and I are going to Sigur Rós on the 2 August 2008. They are pretty damn good.

I thought Hostel was meant to be good, so I made myself sit through it. It wasn't very good, or interesting, or even very scary. Bits of it were kind of gross I suppose, but that's all you could really say.

Was very funny. Although I slept through possibly half of it.

Beowulf was winner. Good battles and fun mythology. They even threw in a dragon at the end. I like Ray Winstone too. And I love Crispin Glover, who did an awesome job of Grendel... except for one part where he possibly whined a little too much while he slaughtered villagers. I felt like it should have been more of a growl. Even a frustrated whinge would have been OK. But this was a self-pitying whinge, and it didn't fit in with head-munching.

On my third attempt I finally got to watch the end of Night Watch. It was one cool film. So nicely shot and different. Good characters. Lots of fun Armageddony moral ambiguity. I really love the last scene. Why is it that every country in the world except for the US has a sense of irony? Or at least, every major film-making country. A few Latin American countries are a little light on irony as well. But all the European and Asian film-making countries make winner ambiguous films.

And I like fighting. Almost any film with fighting I will enjoy. Even if there aren't any guns. There weren't any guns in this film. But there were some good weapons. Swords made of spinal columns and that sort of thing. Pretty nifty. And good fights. I like good fights.

Alone, I went to see Rambo 4 last night. I thought it might suck a lot, although I was hopeful because Tom had liked it so much. And as it turned out, I did too. It was pretty intense and visceral and you couldn't really say it romanticized violence. I don't feel like the Rambos are about glorifying violence in any sense. I reckon their just trying to make us think about that side of ourselves. The bit with the rock at the end didn't feel like it was trying to demonstrate that violence was right and necessary, just that everyone has a breaking point.

The fourth film looked much, much better than the others. I think they took a lot more care. It was still a simple film, without a lot of nuance. And it is the same ideas, but then the issues haven't changed that much. A lot of stuff happens in this film that looks like it's demonisation because it is so unbelievably barbaric. I don't know much about Myanmar, but having read a little about the Khmer Rouge, I didn't doubt that any of the stuff that happened in this film was based on true stories.

Most people would probably hate it, and there's plenty to hate. And plenty of killing. I'd reckon only about half of it is done by John himself though.

A bunch of folk went to see Pivot at the Arts Factory. Nice place. Winner band. They really were super cool. Although major dags. It makes me happy to see bands play who are their own favourite band. Musicians who would rather finish the song then ever have sex again.

When I see good bands, I feel like running around the world trying to find more good bands would be a pretty good way to spend life. Like Sal & Dean did back in the olden days. I think Pivot tonight were the closest I've seen those new-age sythnsters come to jazz.

Fracture was a pretty good film. Very Hollywood, but not bad considering.

I went and saw There Will Be Blood by myself last night. That was a bad idea. I thought it was a very bad film. And the film was very long and it started very late. Daniel Day-Lewis was totally fantastic and the script was rather mesmerising, in a good sort of way. I was enjoying it a lot at first, just for the dialogue. But the story and characters didn't make much sense to me at all. There were a lot of WTF moments. I did fall asleep for a few minutes at the end, but I don't think that made the difference.

I think the problem came down to not having a hot, busty love interest. Bust is a great device for binding plot strands into a coherent story. It's a staple of American cinema, even historical oil-fossicking stories. This director thought he was clever enough to make an oil film without any bust in it, but he was sadly optimistic.

This director, Paul Thomas Anderson, did Punch-Drunk Love, Magnolia and _Boogie Nights. I reckon all three were far better films than this.

A disturbing piece of trivia - it appears that our chum Paul directed Boogie Nights when he was 27. Gee golly. I am almost that old, but certainly not almost that clever.

Libby and I are going to Cat Power on the 9th of March. Hurray for Cat Power. She is a champ. And hurray for jobs that give you money.

Emmeline and I spent our Valentine's Days eating suburban pizza at No. 1 Alberto's Pizza and watching Vanishing Point. It's my third seeing of it, and it doesn't get any worse. What a lovely film. And there are a few great scenes that I really love. Even Emmeline thought it was reasonably alright I think.

I spontaneously watched The Kingdom with a soporific Mathew last night. It was rather brilliant. It was sufficiently like other American action movies for me to occasionally yell out loud at the crapness of Americans. But I ended up deciding that this was a choice the director made rather than obliviousness to the crapness of Americans. If you were in doubt about that, I think the final scene made it clear. The movie-goer was there to observe the Americans more than empathise with them.

I'd heard that it was politically incorrect. But I think the intensity and brashness of the film was meant to wake us up more than to titillate. Although titillate it certainly also does. I feel like that is more because it's a fascinating country with all sorts of crazy shit happening, than because Peter Berg over-dramatised it. And more than that I felt like it was fair. Obviously I know less about Saudi Arabia than plenty of people, but I know a little bit and none of it felt wrong.

I love explosions and battles, and all of those scenes were great. There is an huge, intense scene in the first bit which is so well done. The film was a long series of cuts between culturally insensitive comments from Americans and grand, beautifully choreographed battles. Even though I got excited about everything blowing up the film was pretty careful to make sure you kept worrying about all the stuff you didn't see. Some of that was totally overt, but I think that there was more subtle stuff there as well. There was zero sense of conquest or success in it. It was all just shitty. But also interesting and great.

After a bit of reflection I decided I didn't like Lust Caution. It had a couple of interesting sex scenes - interesting in the interesting sense more than the erotic sense - but apart from that it was rather plain. It felt to me like it was produced by a committee of film students. All the sets were so perfectly settish. The script was so artistically sparse and perfectly conceived. The plot was so neatly structured and unfolded so smoothly and inevitably. The ending was appropriately uncompromising.

Throughout the whole film I felt nothing. Apart from perhaps the occasional crossness at the director - which is certainly better than nothing at all. But despite their best and intensest efforts, I don't think the characters convinced me of anything. I felt more for the baby in Shoot Em Up. Bless his heart.

Juno is a fantastic film. Robert and Jenny have clearly been kidnapped and their blog passwords tortured out of them. Who knows how long their captors have been blogging in their place? Let's hope they are still alive.

I think maybe Shoot Em Up is close to my favourite movie ever. It was awesomely violent and clever and funny. We had so much fun.

If it were up to me, every movie would be set in an era without mobile phones and Google, every movie would put the hero in a situation where he could not call in an air strike via his BlackBerry but would actually have to slit the terrorists' throats and strangle their frothing dogs with his bare hands.

Sydney Morning Herald

I think this fellow makes a good point. The practical aspects of life are so much more straight forward for people these days, and that doesn't make for good stories. Or perhaps it just makes for very different stories we haven't worked out how to tell yet.

We saw Ngapartji Ngapartji last night. It was a beautiful story that took me a bit by surprise. The actors were conscious of the problem with a bunch of black guys coming and putting on a play for a bunch of rich white guys. It wasn't a white play done by black people. Although perhaps it isn't my place to decide that. Either way it was brilliant.

It started out really well. Everything about it was quality. There were lots of interesting scenes. Will Smith was great. The dog was great. The visuals were great. The empty New York city was very cool.

Then it went down hill. The vampire zombies were cheap and corny. Dodgy CGI and lame head-stretching CGI screams. It's like all the CGI horror movie modellers have read the same B-Grade Horror Movie CGI Techniques for Dummies book.

After that I felt like it totally lost it. The last half was hopeless. It didn't make much sense. The dialogue deteriorated. The main character became way less good and interesting. As with most Hollywood movies they seem to invest a lot of effort building characters and plot, just to fritter all the hard work away at the end with some traditional anti-climactic ending.

I think it's reaffirmed my belief that there isn't enough time in one film to do good action and good character development (unless you're very good or make a long film). I think when Hollywood makes action films it tries to compromise by sticking in character development as well. The outcome is mostly a wash out.

Lars von Trier needs to be cloned many, many times over. His clones must then be sent out into the world to do their extraordinary work and thus save the world from itself.

He makes the most satisfying, important and complete films I have ever seen. Dogville and Manderlay have to be two of my very favourites. He's rather like the J.M. Coetzee of movies. Brutal and unrelenting and brilliantly terrific.

Matt and I spontaneously decided to watch something violent last night and we came home with The Protector. It is a strange low-budget, Thai movie set in Sydney and is about some elite Muay Thai fighting farmer lad who comes to Sydney to find some stolen elephants. Almost everything about it was totally stupid. Terrible plot, tempo, script, acting. With the exception of the fighting which was totally awesome. There is a 5 minute long, single-cut shot where the lad fights his way up five stories of some restaurant. It's one of my favourite movie scenes of all time.

Despite all the non-stop awesome fighting, Tom is probably the only person I'd recommend it to, and he thought it was shit. And Matt fell asleep in it.

The Frames were awesome even before Glen got depressed. I've never properly listened to their early albums. Dance the Devil is just as good as the new albums but exchanges emotive for peppy.

There are so many middle-age women parking in our street tonight.

I am off to join them at the Enmore.

Update: The Indigo Girls were cool. All through the concert a kept feeling rushes of fondness for lesbians and the sorts of boys to stand up and dance at Indigo Girls concerts.

Did anyone know that Muzak is actually the registered trademark of a company from the 1930s who sold the stuff?

We are going to see Sufjan in January and Sufjan is great. Although both Sufjan and our Tassie trip are in "mid" January, so I may have to give my ticket to someone else. Much like I had to do with White Stripes when I went to Tassie last time. Stupid Tasmanian wilderness.