Before Christmas we managed to grab a couple of tickets to see an outdoor movie recently in the Botanic Gardens. Tried to do this last year but all the tickets for all the showings sold out in 45mins. This year I was prepared and got them just after they went on sale. The screen is actually in the water, and you get to watch the film with the city and opera house in the background. It was pretty cool and the weather was perfect, but I actually preferred last years one. It was much more rough and ready (just and inflatable screen on a cricket pitch and everybody brought they're own chairs). We arrived this year prepared, with extra clothes in case it got cold and snacks and dressed for a Saturday morning. However when we got there were loads of people dressed up for the night, people were eating and drinking at a wine bar set up for the occasion (I think some people stayed there for the movie too) and the seats were packed in together. Lots of people looked like they'd just stepped out of their high-flying financial jobs in their 30th floor offices. When we arrived early I thought there were lots of empty seats but practically all of them had been reserved - one person would just reserve 10 seats for his friend and in such a way there was almost no where to sit. The movie itself was pretty good (black swan) apart from the audience busting out laughing at one or two bits that I don't think were supposed to be funny.

I've never gone to a drive-in movie, or watched a film outside for that matter, so it was pretty cool to sit out under the stars (and the awakening bats) and watch Sherlock Holmes in a cricket ground in North Sydney. Back in December I tried to book tickets for this but they sold out within an hour of going on sale. Just as with the New Years fireworks, we arrived completely unprepared, whereas the locals were packing fancy picnic baskets and expensive fold-away chairs. There was plenty of BBQ food sizzling away and on sale anyway so it didn't really matter that we didn't bring anything. And though the backdrop was perhaps not as spectacular without Opera House and the Harbour bridge, but it was pretty cool nonetheless.

Continuing the awful tv streak, "Supernova", a surprisingly bad tv disaster movie set mostly in Sydney, was the best thing on. Awful CGI, unbelievably bad or incoherent Australian accents, and to top it all off, 90's superstars Luke Perry and Tia Carrere. Comments from IMDB (3.6 stars) almost do it justice: "Everything in this movie is absolutely shocking. Ridiculous scenarios, stupid characters, mundane dialogue, if it's bad, this movie has it. But the funniest thing in this movie has to be the massive errors in geography. As has already been pointed out, no one in Sydney seems to have an Australian accent; they're all British, American or badly pseudo-Australian...A section of the film is supposedly set in the Maldives. The Maldives lie no more than six metres above sea level, yet there are gigantic mountains covered in lush rain-forests. Obviously, no research went into these geographic aspects of the movie". There's even a shot of Cape Town's table mountain at the end which kind of shows, along with African housekeepers, that it probably wasn't filmed in Australia, yet alone Sydney. Luckily the world doesn't get burned up in the end as Luke Perry made a mistake in his calculations - using a "+" instead of a "-"

If you're going to go see the new Batman flick, I can really recommend going to see it on perhaps the biggest IMAX screen in the world. The film was pretty good in its own right, but watching a full length film (and not some crappy 3D documentary) is a whole other experience. As the lights went out and the screen came on, the ads only took up about a quarter of the screen and I thought the film might be the same. Then suddenly, whoaah, the whole screen (and thus my entire field of view) was taken up by the frame. I had to move my neck and head just to see things happening down in the corner. In fact I'd almost say the screen was too big as at some points I couldn't make out what was going on. But that might have been the films fault as well..

Salon have a pretty upbeat revie of Once, the small Irish film with the lead singer from The Frames, and a lot of his music too. I saw it when it was on in here a couple of months back and thought it was pretty good for what it was, seeing as to some extent it just amounted to a long music video.. link