REVIVAL AFTER A 15 MONTHS ABSENCE.

Not sure why I put the pen down, so to speak, and stopped this bog, but I thought I'd return to it. Perhaps, I was inspired by my friend, Darren, whose set up his own blog/website? Maybe my job was getting to me and I withdrew into myself? I'm not sure, but I'm back to burn, so to speak (again) and hopefully, this will be a more constant affair; cathartic, if nothing else.

Anyway, after a long three-weeks, I have my monthly long-weekend. I spent most of Friday just gone at the cinema. It's what I enjoy doing most in life. After all, everyone has their passions, and this keeps me off the streets and out of trouble.

Anyway, whilst I'd seen "True Grit," the Coen Brothers' remake already, I went to see it again at the Cineworld Haymarket and enjoyed it just as much second time around. "Brighton Rock" at Cineworld Shaftsbury Avenue was up next. Didn't like this much. Changing it from the 1940s to the mid 1960s didn't make much sense. Sam Riley as "Pinky" wasn't really that credible as a sociopath. The atmosphere of the picture was rendered quite successfully- scuzzy, badly lit under passes creating an air of menace. But the film felt wrong and didn't need a remake. Last on the billing on Friday was "Gnomeo and Juliet"- decent enough animated take on Romeo and Juliet produced by Elton John and his husband. Some decent jokes in the mix, but it ran out of ideas pretty quickly, with the last thirty minutes your basic run-of-the-mill chase, crash and burn sequence, with pathos lifted from a hundred Pixar movies. A whole movie of Elton John songs got annoying too. As did the chavvy mother that came in thirty minutes late with her two brats. I passed comment. She tutted. We had a few "words" at the end of the film. A credit to humanity she wasn't. Ho hum, I guess it takes all sorts to make a world. Unfortunately, that kind of negative diversity can turn good people into bad or recluses.

Well, that's it for the moment. Did absence make the writing better? Who knows?