And of course the minute you show up you wonder why you’ve been away for so long – it was lovely to see everyone again. Folk that fancy turning up for a Monday evening of public keyboard hammering before eventually sighing “I’m spent!” and then having a bit of a drink and a giggle can check out the details here.

The other thing that I wanted to do and then did was see The Woman in Black. This was a bit more problematical. The movie looks great: an atmospheric confection of greys, blues, and muted greens. Radcliffe is convincingly pale and damaged as the widowed lawyer left with a young son. The supporting cast is bolstered with the likes of Ciaran Hinds and Janet McTeer. There are a few genuine shocks as the titular Woman appears in reflections and zoetropes and graveyards and train stations located on the far side of the grave (shades of Harry Potter for Daniel, it seems, wherever he turns).

The Woman in Black (2012)

Spoilers ahoy…

So felt like a wasted opportunity, which is a real shame, as while I can’t be arsed with torture porn you can’t beat a good ghost story.

I also saw Man on a Ledge. The most I can say about that is, if you’ve seen the trailer, you don’t have to bother seeing the movie.

In attendance were the usual T Party suspects  – Tom Pollock,  Gaie Sebold, Sarah Ellender,  Gary Couzens, Peter Colley, Denni Schnapp and her husband, Sara-Jayne Townsend, Martin Owton, Terry Edge, Mark McCann, Jack Calverley, newcomer Jim Siddle and Rosanne Rabinowitz (the organiser of the night) amongst others. We were also joined by Ben Okri, Booker winner, who was a very nice man. He urged Sara, our chairperson, to give a speech, which she did, and then Gaie said a few words as well. Gaie was fresh off a fabulous reception for Babylon Steel at the SFX Weekender, where the book sold out, so what with that and all the other good news about cover art and uncorrected proofs, it was a fairly upbeat do – except of course I’d missed the SFX Weekender, and had to listen to everyone’s stories about how great it was and how the disco was great and the panels were great and how it was great to be anyone but me. (*Sighs long-sufferingly*).

But in all seriousness, it does sound like it was fab and I was very sorry I missed it.

It’s been a good year for the T Party Writers Group (who will not be changing their name despite the bunch in the US, as apparently “we had it first”). They’ve been going for 18 years now, and in the last two years there have been a series of novel deals for people. And after years of running writing workshops at Eastercon there are now to be a slew of T Partiers moderating panels at Olympus 2012.

Global domination beckons.

So all in all, not bad. Here’s hoping for more good news this year.

It was every bit as fun as it sounds, and it’s carried off by a great trio of performances in the three teenagers. The POV character is Andrew, who has the worst life the movies can throw at a character – he’s a bullied geek regularly beaten by his alcoholic ex-fireman father, who is himself falling apart as his wife and Andrew’s mother is dying painfully from cancer, and there is no money to afford proper pain relief. To distance himself from his life Andrew takes to compulsively camcording it.

Persuaded to go to a party by his cousin Matt, he ends up filming Matt and Steve, the ultra-popular and (oddly in an American movie about teenagers) likeable and brave class president hopeful as they explore a mysterious hole in the ground which leads to contact with something not of this world. Before long the three of them find they possess growing powers of telekinesis, and can lift objects and eventually even themselves using the power of their minds. They plan to see the world together. But Andrew, damaged, hostile, and suspicious, can’t escape the horror unfolding at home and can’t trust the newfound friendships and opportunities that his power opens up to him, with, as you can probably guess by now, tragic consequences…

I absolutely loved this – it was just wonderfully done. The early part, with the boys discovering their powers, just radiates bonhomerie and enthusiasm and is full of laugh out loud moments, which makes what follows seem even darker. They are the heart of the movie and they deliver in spades. There is also an attention paid to the relationships other characters have to them – you can actually feel sorry for Andrew’s drunk violent father, for the girl that ends up ruining Andrew’s tiny, nascent glimmer of self-confidence. And it has some great touches – the revelation that Steve has discovered flight, for instance, is just handled really well.

In fact all of the special effects, rendered through camcorders and security cameras, easily give Cloverfield a run for its money. This is a story that, at the end, though presented in a very domestic way, goes very very big in its climax.

Admittedly, there are a few creaky moments – Matt’s love interest also has a camcorder fetish and records private conversations that no normal person would, simply because they have to be in the film, but this is just carping.

In short, it’s great: see it.

Currently reading: Screen Burn by Charlie Brooker

I’d been kind of stoked to see Young Adult since last year – despite the fact that I have kind of a love-hate relationship with Diablo Cody. I loved Juno, but thought that while there were some really well-observed and sharp exchanges in Jennifer’s Body, there were also an awful lot of things that were quite poorly done.

Young Adult is more Juno than Jennifer’s Body. That said there are places where it fails to convince – the set piece party meltdown for one. What it does have, however, is Charlize Theron bringing her A-game in a big, big way.

Young Adult (2012)

She plays Mavis Gary, the dissolute YA authoress whose Sweet Valley High-esque series is now ending, and on which she has been little more than a ghostwriter anyway – writing to a strict “series bible” that has been drawn up by the woman whose name actually ends up on the cover. Drunk, depressed, and staring 40 in the face, she has never grown beyond her high school persona, and when she receives an email announcing that her old jock boyfriend and his wife have had a baby, she immediately resolves to go back to her little hick town and “rescue” both him and her golden youth.

It’s a lot of fun, but the really great moment is when she realises that what she has thought of as “our song” with her high school beau now has a completely different meaning for him, and her bewildered increduality, all rendered purely by her expression, just tells you all you need to know about Mavis.

There’s also a fabulous device, whereby Mavis narrates her novel as she writes it, and her current appalling life events are transmuted into trashy prose starring the impossibly perfect heroine of her YA series – the golden “Kendal Strickland” who bewails the fact that it is so lonely to be so beautiful and popular when surrounded by envious dullards. The prose is filled with the dialogue and voices Mavis pilfers from teenagers at the mall, and watching these bits reminds you, uncomfortably, that to write is to be a hairs-breadth from exposure every day of your life.

So, in a nutshell, problematical but so worth it.