Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in jblum's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
10:35 pm	Well, despite my best efforts at denial, a bunch of my friends on LJ noticed that I was having a birthday today. And made me feel all appreciated and NOT AT ALL OLD, even now I'm now officially out of the most desirable demographic! Thanks, guys. You rock. I know I haven't been the most communicative lately, but I'm really thinking of all of you. And the old creative neurons might be beginning to fire again... I'm beginning to have ideas about a short film I could do. which would be a great excuse to get to see people... (19 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 4th, 2008
2:37 pm	The Poison Sky Aw *YEAH*! In fact, that basically sums up my reaction to series four of Doctor Who so far. It's not stretching itself as far as the last couple of years, but what it's doing it's doing damn well, and with tremendous heart. And I hope to God Wilf gets a trip in the TARDIS. Just once... (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 3rd, 2008
3:57 pm	The best thing about revisiting Time Rift is realising just how much fun we had. Even after I'd bungled my romance with AC, we're still there laughing and carrying on on-set, with Cary keeping us all in good spirits. The worst thing is seeing how much we didn't know what the hell we were doing. We were surprisingly professional and copeful, but still making basic errors of judgement like thinking we could get away with vast amounts of background noise, and only re-recording some of the lines. And I've just had to wade through Episode 2 Scene 7A: twenty-two takes across two shots of the most hideous exposition known to man, drunkenly shot and mumble-mouthedly delivered by yours truly with a rapidly slipping grip on my lines. I swear I was clean-shaven when we started and stubble-ridden by the end. Badly written, badly acted, badly shot, badly logged (perhaps perceptively, I didn't label any of the takes on these shots as "best"), and the EDL page was missing so I had no idea which takes out of this morass I needed to retrieve. Only about half of this scene even made it to the rough-cut... large chunks were re-shot with inserted close-ups, and what was left was split into two bits with something hopefully more interesting between them. But the original was nearly three minutes long, and lurched from topic to topic in a way which even at the time I knew was desperate and amateurish. I'm including the un-re-edited version in the Deleted Scenes segment as a warning to future generations. But don't worry, Aaron, you won't have to clean it up! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 2nd, 2008
11:49 am	Well, it's been one of those put-your-head-down-and-your-bum-up kinds of weeks, as Kate's mum would say. On the plus side, yesterday I did a bit of writing for the first time in ages... Angel Express has ground to a halt, but I'm beginning to have thoughts about that spec script again. But my spare time has been taken up once again with Time Rift. Y'know, back when I first decided to do this DVD version, the one thing I was absolutely clear on was that I was not going to re-edit this thing from scratch from the raw footage. That would just be an insane amount of time -- much more sensible just to go back to the rough-cuts and save a couple of VHS generations. But the FX shots I'd do from scratch... and then there were the new pickup shots I was doing... and the final scene had such bad sound and needed a complete reconstruction anyway... and then there were just a few problem scenes where even the restored sound wasn't good enough, and I'd really get much better results from sound that hadn't already been fiddled with... and just a few shots where the generation loss meant the picture was too flickery... and now that I've fixed this scene and that scene, it'd look really odd if I don't clean up those few shots in between... and... and... and... Well, the upshot is that now it looks like about a quarter of the story will have been recut from scratch. Yes, I'm a fool. So I've basically spent the past week in a frantic blur of ripping and cutting, so I can get the last batches of assembled raw sound files to Aaron the Cleanup Guy before Kate puts her foot down and takes the VCR away from my computer. (Not just on general principles -- she needs it to watch a documentary for the story she's writing.) But is it worth it? Well, see for yourself.( Read more... ) Current Music: Ray Charles, "I'm Busted" (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
1:41 pm	One of those good-news-bad-news things In the spirit of ISIHAC, and a tribute to Humph... The good news is, the long-discussed film version of Edge of Darkness is back on -- with Martin Campbell (Goldeneye, Zorro, Casino Royale, and the original Edge of Darkness) attached as director. William Monahan (Kingdom of Heaven) did the adaptation. The bad news is, Mel Gibson is playing Ronnie Craven. ...Okay, we're not exactly talking The Dark Is Rising level of f***ing-with-a-treasured-text-ness. But it's a big step down from Bob Peck... (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
11:59 am	Every so often Doctor Who fandom can still astonish me. After this last week -- which was probably the most old-school story yet, UNIT verus a Sontaran invasion, familiar objects like satnavs and emissions controllers turned lethal, all the most charming cliches of the Pertwee era in one neat package -- I've seen old-school fans complaining that the new show has got it wrong because: ( Read more... ) Now, obviously Doctor Who appeals to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. But all these "my Doctor would never have done that" bits are just so, well, completely and utterly factually wrong that I'm finding myself resorting to the great cliche: What show were you watching again? And I'm just wondering where some of those ideas could come from -- most of all, their idea that the Doctor used to be nice. (Sorry, folks -- he was brilliant, funny, caring, astonishing, brave, wonderful, and quite frequently an asshole.) I think a fan just gave me a bit of a clue with something they said about him: "He didn't go around judging people and he didn't hate people unless they were the baddies." Now, this fan said that completely obliviously of the huge judgmentalism right there in that statement. But more to the point, it made me think of the kind of people they missed him judging, the ones who the Doctor saw as beneath him... who are quite often the ones the young fans would have thought were beneath them too. ( Read more... ) But of course those special bits of your childhood when you were sure you were the Doctor's best-friend-in-waiting couldn't have been a lie -- so he must have changed, not you. And that's how people can accuse the Doctor of having become "one of the cool kids" -- not recognizing that the arrogance of the cool kids and the arrogance of the geek squad are just two sides of the same coin. This is rather a lot of words for Livejournal, so I'll try to compress this thousand into an icon: it would be a rotating series of pictures of the Doctors, from the first through the tenth, with text reading "CHANCES ARE HE WOULDN'T LIKE YOU". And I should probably throw House and Sherlock Holmes in there as well! (31 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 27th, 2008
10:41 am	Been having a non-stressful and healing weekend with Kate; we spent some time wandering around the maritime museum and realising just how much of our knowledge of naval protocol comes from Hornblower and Battlestar Galactica, and I had a lovely dinner with our old friend Anna. Also been continuing to watch UFO, which has reached new heights of competence. There are still a scattering of episodes which serve mainly to showcase overlong model shots (Close Up was disappointing, it had a clever twist but way too much faffing about with hardware in the lead-up to it), but a surprising number of more human stories -- Kill Straker!, a nicely executed brainwashing episode, E.S.P., in which John Stratton goes slowly over the edge as a man developing psi powers and finding out about SHADO, the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin-but-rather-cleverly-at-that Court Martial, and Ordeal which is effectively disturbing up to the cop-out ending and bizarrely long tag-scene. A lot of them suffer from saggy '70s pacing (even compared to contemporary Doctor Who), but episodes like Sub-Smash are still genuinely effective. The show was also really bold for an SF series in 1970, in that they've already done a completely FX-less and alien-less episode entirely about the breakdown of the lead character's marriage (Confetti Check A-OK), and a story with an unredeemedly bleak ending (A Question Of Priorities). The big draw has to be Ed Bishop as Commander Straker, deeply unusual for an SF hero of the time -- thoroughly Type A, obsessively driven, buried in his work after the loss of his wife and death of his child (and not at the hands of the aliens attacking Earth as you'd assume), capable of cold-blooded decisions with barely a flicker of remorse, endlessly stressed, claustrophobic, so rigid you can see when he's bound to crack... and quite possibly, completely psychotically insane. Yes, he's always got a good reason for playing head-games with a new recruit, making a recalcitrant general sweat at ground zero of an alien attack, or stalking a brainwashed Paul Foster with a gun... but you also get a sense that he's really enjoying the chance to get off the leash. (Especially in the last, where his comments about how Foster has been challenging his command ring just a little too true.) When Foster accuses him of empire-building in Kill Straker!, it's supposed to be a product of Foster being brainwashed by the aliens... but it's actually quite possible that he's right. Given time, I could see this character building up into a cross between Avon from Blake's 7 and Hannibal from The A-Team: both relentlessly cold and calculating, and a cigar-chomping military man whose sense of judgement is off its fucking trolley. I'd love to see this guy put in the "Orbit" situation from Blake's 7... who would he chuck overboard for the sake of the mission? Most of the rest of the cast are the usual Gerry Anderson robots, though George Sewell puts in a nicely rumpled performance in the second-banana role, and a wonderfully bizarre man named Vladek Sheybal keeps popping up as an unnerving psychologist/interrogator, an Eastern European suspiciously named "Doug Jackson". (Hmm, wonder if they picked him up at the same post-World-War-II fire-sale where they got Wernher von Braun.) But there are flashes of a show which goes above and beyond its surroundings, and those are enough to keep us interested. Oh, and we've also decided that SHADO is Torchwood One circa 1980. Secret underground base... Morally dubious... questionably competent... trashes your personal life... retcons people with hilarious results (The Square Triangle)... the name of their secret organisation emblazoned on the sides of their (half-track) SUVs... token American in command of a largely British (though officially "international") team... then again, Jack Harkness would only dream of the string-vest uniforms on the submarine crew or the spangly silver Moonbase outfits. Now if I could only edit the Torchwood intro text into the teletype screens in the ultra-funky title sequence... or get Eve Myles into one of those purple anti-static wigs... (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
11:31 pm	Humphrey Lyttleton RIP Humphrey Lyttleton, jazz trumpeter (who inspired "Lady Madonna") and broadcaster extraordinaire, host of BBC Radio's antidote to panel games I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, died the other day. He wasn't able to make the first recording of the latest tour season of ISIHAC, so he sent a recorded message: "I'm sorry I can't be with you today as I am in hospital... I wish I'd thought of this sooner." In character to the last. I've lost count of how many evenings Kate and I have been lulled to sleep by his ruthless deadpan. So sadly the lovely Samantha will never again be able to sit on his right hand... We'll miss you, Humph. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
1:12 am	Thanks Thanks to everyone, and Kate finally getting out of the house with me, and a bit of time out on my own with friends (who are threatening to teach me Mah Jongg), I'm feeling substantially better. Not properly writerly head-focusy again, but not quite so trapped and despairing... (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, April 25th, 2008
11:24 am	Wake-up Call Wow, that's the first time in as long as I can remember that I've woken up crying from a stress dream. I found a posting months ago where I said my pattern was that things were going well, I didn't post, but when they were going badly I bemoaned my fate at length. Well, that's done a complete bit-flip lately -- now I haven't been talking because things have gotten so miserable that I can't even seem to have a moan, because (A) I don't seem to have the focus to articulate my thoughts, and (B) I'm convinced everything I'm feeling is utterly boring and repetitive anyway. But I'm really having a hard time coping at the moment, with Kate's illness and all the ordinary grown-up stuff, and trying to feel like anyone thinks I'm worth looking after or paying attention to. Not that I feel people are being malicious towards me, just oblivious or disinterested. And the silence about how bad things have been has made that a nice little vicious circle, I suppose... (8 Comments |Comment on this)
10:55 am	Okay, so Sky One, the UK channel which co-produced Battlestar Galactica, appears to be reacting to its ending by trying to revive Blakes' 7. As B7 revivals have spent nearly a quarter century being legendarily doomed on a par with revivals of "The Prisoner", it's early days yet... But this could really be fun. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
2:57 pm	I've really begun to notice that my friends fall into two distinct groups: the ones who you can't get together with unless you book them two weeks in advance, and the ones you can't be sure you'll be able to get together with until less than a day in advance. Both of which really suck if you ever want to plan for the weekend on a Thursday! (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
5:22 pm	Okay, random Doctor Who - and Torchwood-related speculation for next year... not actually SPOILERS for anything, but if I'm right, it could be huge... ( Read more... ) (10 Comments |Comment on this)
3:46 pm	I saw this meme going round ages ago, never answered it, but found myself thinking about it again, because I'm in sort of a reflective state right now... Name three things in your life you absolutely can't live without, and one thing you'd like to live without! ( Read more... ) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 6th, 2008
6:19 pm	Doctor Who: Partners In Crime (no SPOILERS in post) This reminds me why I adore this show so much. Forty-five minutes of sheer gleeful invention, playfulness, and unbridled optimism. Donna Noble is suddenly the new Sarah Jane Smith... which just makes the fact that we've still got the old Sarah Jane Smith in her own show as well all the more delightful. The Doctor gets a couple of significant character beats, showing that he's beginning to realise how oblivious and hard he's been. And that one moment towards the end was a sheer "they're not -- they can't -- they ARE" heartstopper. So when do I get my squeaky-toy Adipose? (There may be SPOILERs in the comments, but none in the post itself.) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 4th, 2008
11:47 am	Last night Kate and I were talking about the Steptoe And Son play from a few years ago, Murder In Oil Drum Lane, which starts from the premise that Harold Steptoe finally snapped and killed Albert and is now being haunted by his ghost. This prompted a whole series of other sitcoms we'd like to see wrapped up in such a fashion -- starting with the made-for-TV movie Napalm Strike On Gilligan's Island; a crossover between Are You Being Served and Dexter; the suicide-pact Very Special Episode of Three's Company; the goat going berserk on The Good Life; and "This week's special guest star on Mind Your Language: a large tube of antimatter..." (Said tube, we decided, would have the words "Squeeze Me Please" written on the side in large friendly letters.) Current Mood: weirdly relieved (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
9:48 pm	UFO: A Question Of Priorities Okay, now that's more like it. A really elegant treatment of a simple, powerful idea. I love the fact that Straker didn't make the crucial decision... but when it was made in ignorance by someone else, he went along with it... and that was enough for the tragedy to happen. Full marks for bravery, and great performances drawn from very spare and stark dialogue. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
9:02 am	UFO Okay, it's the tail end of the Sixties, and you've got a team of purple-wigged women wearing tinfoil on a moonbase, a submarine that launches a fighter-plane from the seabed and a crew in string-vest-tastic uniforms, a secret underground base buried beneath a film studio with operatives riding around on little buggies and prancing in more skintight uniforms, a moon-shot rocket-plane and supersonic jets, a hardass boss fighting off secret UFO attacks to a score by Barry Gray... ...how can you make this dull? But sadly that's what's been dominating my sense of the first four episodes of UFO -- there's so much material which should be delightful, but it's absolutely crushed by terrible pacing. It's not just that it's 1970 -- put it up against even contemporary stuff like the Tara King Avengers or The Persuaders! or Star Trek or even those years of Doctor Who, and their events move along so much faster, and with so much more personality. Derek Meddings' modelwork is gorgeous, but the editing is so limp, and the live-action they intercut with it is so often monotone shots of astronauts moving controls. In terms of plot-developments-per-running-time, the first half of each episode usually feels at least one beat light. I can't fault the cast -- when they get a chance to breathe, and display a bit of personality, they rise to the material, and Ed Bishop is already showing what a sharp cookie Straker is: clever, relentless, and perhaps the tiniest bit unhinged. But so far, it's really making me appreciate Space: 1999. I'd love to see this show cut to a modern syndication running time -- keep all the same scenes, just tighten them up to 42 minutes rather than 50, and it'd feel like a whole different show. Still, next episode is "A Question Of Priorities" -- I've been told this is a good one... (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 30th, 2008
10:52 am	Oh, where to start, where to start... Since getting back from the NZ con, we've been various degrees of wiped-out; Kate's been up and down the rollercoaster of energy levels so many times she's almost seasick. But we had a lovely time with my parents in Sydney, ate far too much good food, and are only now getting the house back into some kind of tidy shape. Much to my surprise, I've found myself writing the first couple of scenes of Angel Express, a novel proposal which has been hanging around in hazy form for about three years. I still don't have a proper outline. Plus there's that whole spec-script thing I should really be finishing first... but this is the first bit of writing in ages that's moved me, that's come from the gut. I've got to run with this while I can, I think. I've also, for the first time ever, burnt DVDs of Time Rift. Yep, fifteen years on, my old college film project is now about 95% restored, and almost ready for a proper DVD release -- these copies are for the cast members I'm bringing in to dub various stray lines. If there's anyone who really wants to give feedback on the film before it's completely locked down, let me know! Other random cool stuff: they're actually making the pilot for Caprica, the long-delayed Battlestar Galactica spin-off! And Spooks is doing their own Torchwood -- a BBC3 spin-off called Spooks: Code 9, set in the near future after London has been evacuated from a nuclear attack, with a bunch of young, hip MI5 agents all living together. Ah well, any market's a good one. A year or two ago I would have been over the moon about Caprica in particular; maybe my enthusiasm will perk up once the latest season of BSG begins! The bigger perk-up was that, by freak chance, I found a box set of UFO for $50... I've been meaning to get this show for literally years, and seeing it for less than half-price was basically a Message From God. Expect lots of '70s moonbase flashbacks and string-vest submarine action here shortly... Oh, and Bill Baggs has finally released Zygon, apparently with all his extra added bits on view. I haven't seen a copy of the finished product, but I've been assured my name is not on the credits or the box. (I'm hoping to find it on a check soon, though... we'll see.) Now the first reviews are turning up on the net. "Kopyion" over on Outpost Gallifrey gave it perhaps the best review I can imagine, in part: It didn’t need to have been gratuitous, but the impression is given that whenever anyone behind the camera saw any naked flesh they started giggling like naughty schoolboys and lingering on it as long as possible. However, beneath all the naked frolicking, there’s a real good, but badly mauled, script that Jonathan Blum was quite right to defend. Oh, and: But if you’re thinking of buying this purely because it looks pornographic then don’t: buy some actual porn instead, because it’s usually better shot. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
9:13 am	One of the advantages of doing a reading at Conjunction was that it reminded me what I liked about our earlier work, on a sentence-by-sentence level. Where The Prisoner's Dilemma was -- as befits the style of the TV series -- rather dictatorial in tone, a surface layer of cool-and-commanding description covering an almost hectoring relentlessness, and full of detail to the point of being overwrought... Fallen Gods was much more viewed from inside. The scenes were sensual enough that you could feel the sweat on the characters' foreheads, but concise and playful, and most importantly emotionally driven. These are passionate characters, fully engaged with a wide range of emotions. In the five years since then, I think I've been erring too much on the side of making my characters grounded in the real world; that actually gives them more of a sense of distance and cynicism, because I've been equating real life in recent years with the passionless side of existence: the eternal Day Job, the cycle of quiet disappointments caused by Kate's health problems. Bernice in Nobody's Children is fighting against feeling numbed, but fundamentally she has been numbed. But even a somewhat cynical and hardened character like Alcestis (the way she starts out) is cynical because she's feeling her bruises -- what you get is not a lack of engagement, but the aftershocks of engagement. The stuff I've been writing lately, particularly the spec scripts, have been me trying to have fun -- focusing on being slick, polished, and a bit playful. I can do good work that way... but I'd like to do great work again. So I've got to work out which project I can find that heart in. I'd better go back and look through The Decision Tree, and I'm finally beginning to figure out how to attack Angel Express... (5 Comments |Comment on this)