Being Charlie Kaufmann

There's a persistant clanking noise outside and I can't concentrate. It sounds like a hammer being struck against a lampost. What is it??

Oh well. Another weekend over. Started packing for our house move this weekend, which - combined with associated chores - pretty much took up all our time. Still, there was always 'Carry On Matron' on the telly and the distinctly odd 'Adaptation' on video, which starts off brilliantly, loses it's way with a boring sub-story and veers alarmingly into chaos as the script effects a clever joke towards the end. Nicholas Cage plays a script-writer struggling to adapt an uneventful book and writing himself (and a perhaps-fictitious brother who serves as a kind of successful doppelganger) into the story, eventually writing himself out of a hole by handing over the script to his conventional side, the side which satisfies with bombastic Hollywood cliches, not finely-wrought micro-dramas. So the film ends in the same way, complete chase scene and happy ending. It's a tremendously over-clever concept and one that doesn't work at all. I don't like a film that I have to sit and figure out afterwards (without Pete's pointing out, I would have missed the handing-over-the-reins element of the story entirely, to be honest), or at least, not this one. Ah well. At least Carry On avoided feints and twists, and was much the better for it :-)

I won't go into last night's telly consumption - this must be really boring, and I'm ashamed. Suffice it to say, you offer me clever-clever art films? I take I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. I can't explain.