Up and running

I think I can consider myself a film producer! A very new, very junior, lots-to-learn producer, but everyone has to start somewhere. Wednesday's meeting was very successful, in that Kirsty the very helpful Arts and Culture officer said she should be able to give us "a few hundred" pounds to support "Echoes", and also gave me the names of other people I should contact who might also be able to help. So, it looks like we've got a start - we still need to raise more money, but once there's a little bit in the pot, it proves someone believes in us, and hopefully will lead to other people thinking we're worth supporting. We should know by mid July about our main bid, but meanwhile we keep finding people who want to be involved (last week Darren got a PR/Marketing person on board), and continue to search for finance. It's all pretty exciting really.

Some pages of the play got done - not as many as I would have liked, but still, there's more of it today than yesterday.

Finally got round to seeing "Da Vinci Code" - I'd expected it to be worse than it was, given the reviews, but in fact I didn't think it was that bad. It wasn't great, by any means, and I won't be rushing out to see it twice, but it had its moments. Most of those were the bits when Ian McKellen was on screen - IMO his was easily the best performance. I think it was almost too faithful a rendition of the book - some parts of it felt like one of those essays where you can tell the student has done masses of research and is bloody well going to get it into the essay whether needed or not - that made it feel rather too stodgy and slow, and for a chase movie the chases just weren't thrilling or threatening enough (although the backwards Smart car segment was pretty neat).

I also saw "Brick", which I really liked. Quite quirky, not sure it will have quite the cult status of films like "Donnie Darko", but it has some great elements. I loved the old fashioned dialogue and music, which really set it apart in tone from other films that might fall into a teen genre. I was also determined to see it because my local Cineworld usually gets such a limited slate of films that to see anything remotely indie on the programme means I feel I have to go, just to prove that there's an audience for non-blockbusters up here in the arse-end of nowhere. Not that I hate blockbusters; I don't, at all. I just want a choice.