Old bones

Predators is a time travel movie that takes you back to an age when action movies were bloody, the monsters were some guy in a suit and the digital effects were a bit askew. The original moved the action genre forward a step by being two movies in one. Ahnuld's Predator started off like Ahnuld's Commando, giving the neck-and-pec fans all they wanted from the star in the first quarter hour (one liners, exploding ethnic stereotypes, the star lifting a truck with his bare hands). Once the special ops team had done their stuff and it was revealed they themselves were being stalked, only then did the ten little Indians countdown begin. Predator was an Alien rip off that has aged better than its source, partly because sci fi has diversified but largely because of that stylistic shift. No matter how many times you watch it, Predator is a great bait and switch.

Tasked with a sequel in the shadow of the truly awful Alien vs Predator mash ups, Nimrod Antal / Robert Rodriguez have made a faithful and loving remake in the plural, Predators, that is less daring than Predator and less tense-making than Predators II. Sticking to a single story line and tone, writers Alex Litvak and Michael Finch move the same pieces around the board to much the same effect. Instead of noble Native American soldier who faces off, knife in hand, with the invisible beastie, Predators has a noble Japanese yakuza with a samurai sword (in a fateful field of long grasses, conjured up by the alien world as surely as a Chaucerian knight's longing for a castle will make same appear around the next corner). Instead of a square-jawed tobacco chewing southern state gatling gunner it has a square jawed Russian gatling gunner. Instead of Elpidia Carrillo's "men of my village" speech it has Alice Braga giving a "men of my village" speech. Stumbling on a bad thing the humans escape the same way as Ahnuld did in 1987, falling through the bushes and into a body of water. (It's a stunt worth repeating: Jake Sulley does the same in Avatar. The sequence matches Predator almost shot-for-shot.)

Instead of Ahnuld Predators has Adrian Brody who does a pretty good job balancing knowingness and 'roid rage. It also has similar continuity problems: the troops break cover long before anyone thinks to look up and notice the alien sky, and the aliens have varying degrees of mortality, but with these lies come the satisfying "gotcha" moments, and a bullet count, and a fun cast and some parts when it's almost scary, thus balancing the filmmakers' goal of getting back to action movie basics while meeting the needs of a modern audience whose idea of mystery is a Tumblr link. Recent movies such as The Hangover change gears five times to keep people watching; if modern cinema is any indication then audiences have not been this restless since the Monkees' Head.

Predators is way more fun than Avatar. The movie has been shot on what looks to be a live set, and looks great: the digital effects are often tacky, and the old soundtrack and sound effects have been retained, to its benefit. I stopped counting the references to the previous Predator movies and Alien because it made me feel old, and because I was having fun watching it. There's a lot wrong with it and a couple of things brilliantly right with it. The irony is that this is how movies used to be before the movie that inspired it came along.

The premise of a human hunter who is himself hunted by an alien was the subject of a 1953 short story 'The Ruum' by American SF writer Arthur Porges. When a game hunter in the Canadian Rockies stumbles on the alien's eerie gallery of life specimens, the ruum pursues him to add to its collection. I read the story when I was 11 in R. Chetwynd Hayes' 1975 anthology Tales of Terror From Outer Space; years later when I first saw Predator I immediately wondered if it had been the movie's inspiration. Porges' alien is also liquid, like a rolling bubble of mercury, and morphs into different tool shapes to pursue its prey, just like James Cameron's T-1000 in Terminator II. Someone owes that writer lunch.

The Green Parrot

Start of the working day. La Perruche makes it.

Work in progress

Back to work on the Manuscript I Never Finish. No idea whether I'll finish it this time. Maybe, or maybe not.

Have you got anything left to say before I shoot myself

The above is poster advertising a book (or 'printed entertainment') as displayed on the London Underground. The book - that's it down there in the corner, see? - is titled Even. I'm guessing Even is a story of revenge, probably starring Agent David Trevellyan who is motivated to seek revenge when someone steals his life. Because Agent David Trevellyan's life is his - not theirs - he's angry but instead of getting angry like you and I might do, Agent David Trevellyan will get even. Sure enough, Even is the title of the book. That's probably Agent David Trevellyan talking in the poster - or rather, quoted, because if he was actually talking you would hear his voice in your ears above The National on your iPod. Agent Dav - oh, look, I can't be bothered typing it again because there are so many letters in it omg it goes on 4eva but Even, it's called and it's about this guy who gets even. Do you follow? If you can't, try reading the poster again. But don't move closer to read it because then you would fall on to the tracks, and that would delay the Northern Line.

I like a thriller as much as the next man but if the people you're selling the book to are truly this hard of understanding then reading the thing will be fucking hard going, unless it has a lot of pictures in it, or the pages are blank.

By contrast, drinkers are approached with this level of sophistication:

You don't need to be smart to drink. Why do you have to be a moron to read a book?

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

In a funny kind of way Philip Kaufman is one of my favourite directors. He's made some great adaptations: Rising Sun, Henry and June, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a remake of the B-movie classic. Invasion is such a perfect story that it's become a template for a genre I always think of as the Twilight Zone format: everyday setting, big concept and a tidal current of consequences - sexy, unavoidable, bleak. All this is based on a writer's idea: Jack Finney who wrote the original story as a serial for Collier's magazine. You've never heard of Jack but the idea he had feeds into everything from Close Encounters to The X-Files.

The Black Dahlia

First saw it in France, with subtitles, which is the best way to see a Brian De Palma movie: the text is a constant tap on the shoulder, reminding you that it's a "film" and framing its artifice as, well... artifice. The movie version is monstrously inferior to Ellroy's novel, which in turn runs second to the author's White Jazz and American Tabloid: a seething, self-loathing, tangle that twists towards multiple resolutions, and is the greater for it. If you can survive the first 100 pages you will be hooked and rewarded.

David Fincher developed the movie version before being replaced by De Palma; I've always considered Fincher's lengthy, multiple-storylined Zodiac to be the modern imprint of how his Dahlia might have been. De Palma reduces the novel's layers to tight, trademark sequences that belie its multiple twists. Josh Friedman's workmanlike script makes a similar mistake, structuring the story with such concision that the main characters' emotional dips and dives - faithful to source - seem irrational and even silly. Josh Hartnett's Bucky is especially undermined, tearing up in almost every scene; Scarlett Johansson's Kay seems spoiled and childish rather than the complex mirror-of-the-Dahlia victim that she and all the other females in the novel become.

Still, even without subtitles I'll go the De Palma version for Scarlett's voice - a menthol woodwind cracking wise - Hillary Swank's ice-cold Madeleine, De Palma's steadicam introduction to the inbred Linscott family, and Fiona Shaw's extra crazy Ramona. For all the movie's (studio trimmed) gore and savagery Shaw provides its most ghastly moment using just her face and two fingers. Aaron Eckhart holds up his end as Lee Blanchard but true to 40s noir the men are redundant: it's the women who drive. Mia Kirshner plays the saddest girl in the world. The movie was much longer before the producers cut it down: it would be a dream to watch the version De Palma intended. Until then The Black Dahlia is a movie that could have been: a beautiful corpse, in pieces.

What do you need, a road map?

The NBR is putting on a happy face by saying Peter Jackson's co-review of the NZ Film Commission "hit the spot" with producers. The lawyerly SPADA press release conspicuously avoided mention of the report's recommendation that the NZFC bypass producers in the early stage of development and instead funds writers directly, a suggestion which the NZ Writers Guild liked very much.

Reading Jackson's report is emotional for any NZ writer who has experienced what is charitably termed "the development process", i.e. bullshit about writing by people who can't. I don't have a dog in that fight (and won't again) but liberating experienced writers will make for better New Zealand films, period.