As I lay there in the darkness with a pistol by my side

I can't remember much about The Maid but Resident Evil: Afterlife is memorable, if only because I've seen everything in it before. John Carpenter invented most of the action sequences, from the plane landing on the skyscraper (Escape from New York) to the killer darting across the camera foreground (Halloween) to the dog that splits into a set of jaws (The Thing). Paul WS Anderson moves things forward by landing a plane on a skyscraper surrounded by millions of zombies, or the the killer darting across the camera foreground underwater, or the dog that splits apart into a set of jaws with another set of jaws inside that, dude. You can count the movies inside this movie like Russian dolls but rather than being trapped it's somehow entertaining, mainly because of its innate sense of fair play - it is based on a game, after all. Milla Jovovovovich's (sp) physique almost justifies 3-D. Costumes are by David Cronenburg's sister Denise, video diary aesthetic by William Gibson, there's Crouching Tiger Hidden Bullet Time and the tanker from Waterworld and the staggering-into-the-sunlight kids in white from Logan's Run / THX 1138 / The Island... Oh, the list goes on. Cheap, cheerful and unpretentious. Hard not to like.

Joy

White tea is the new thing. Secondhand books finally arrived from Amazon: one for research (France) and one for fun (old crime thing) . Time has a great cover story on the Tea Party. I want to see The American, The Town and The Social Network very much but who knows when they'll open here? Aaron Sorkin talked to New York magazine about his writing style:

"I'm really weak when it comes to plot," he says bluntly—a startling self-assessment from the creator of three television series. "With nothing to stop me, I'll write pages and pages of snappy dialogue that don't add up to anything. So I need big things to help my characters—a really strong intention and a really strong obstacle. Once I have those, I feel I can write."

So yeah, want to see it. I liked Studio 60 a lot - anyone who can use Final Draft formatting as a plot point gets my vote. And also there was Dolphin Girl. Scored a ticket to Bertolucci's BFI appearance in October. And Mad Men is on, even if Burn Notice is ending soon. So no wonder the new draft is clicking. And everything's good, right? How could it not be? Everything is fine.

Now playing

Revisions finished. Typing them up now. The MS breaks down perfectly into 30 chapters, which is a nice sign. Things on my mind so it's all Duffy, all the time. Duffy comes complete with Dusty Hand™.

Crime inc.

Philip Matthews' recent weekend feature article on New Zealand crime fiction is now online at Kiwicrime, thanks to the earthquake-defying efforts of Craig Sisterson.

People who need people

From The New Yorker article on Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook and the Aaron Sorkin (w.) / David Fincher (d.) movie The Social Network:

Sorkin said that creating Zuckerberg's character was a challenge. He added that the college students were "the youngest people I've ever written about." Sorkin, who is forty-nine, says that he knew very little about social networking, and he professes extreme dislike of the blogosphere and social media. "I've heard of Facebook, in the same way I've heard of a carburetor," he told me. "But if I opened the hood of my car I wouldn't know how to find it." He called the film "The Social Network" ironically. Referring to Facebook's creators, Sorkin said, "It's a group of, in one way or another, socially dysfunctional people who created the world's great social-networking site."

I'm interested in Sorkin's comments about his unfamiliarity with the people or the material because the early reviews are raving about the movie and how natural and authentic it feels. Good writing is good writing. I wrote about Sorkin here, and I'm still not on Facebook.

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