There are a few of laughs peculiar to the cinema. There’s the stifled, back-of-the-throat rumble. There’s the quick “ha!” and the long giggle. There’s even genuine rolling-in-the-aisles, uncontrolled mess of laughter that filmmakers actually have to anticipate and incorporate pauses into the movies for. This is one the true joys of coming to a cinema, the ability to have your silly laugh literally drowned out by everyone else’s silly laugh.

Then there are the fake ones. You can spot these very easily because they always come a half second after the genuine laughs - or worse, a half second before - and are always too long and theatrical. It’s painfully obvious that this person is trying to show to everyone else that they get it,‘it’ being some kind of joke; usually an unfunny one that wasn’t worth laughing about in the first place.

So I've gone and ruined my June by signing up for Script Frenzy, a month-long dash from the people who brought you NaNoWriMo. The difference here is that the wordcount is significantly less (20,000) but of course this time it's not padded, prolix prose we're all attempting, it's cut and cleaned movie/stage scripts.

I have no idea why I sign up for these. Perhaps the hallowed memories of ferverishly spending the better part of three days typing non-stop back in Two-Thousand-freaking-One have given me an itch that must be scratched every tme Chris Baty drops me an email (quite what I did to resist it in 2004 I'll never know). Perhaps it's so that, should the world come to an end the month after next, well, at least I can say I finished one project I took up.

What would you define as a good movie?

Award Winning? Critically Acclaimed? It has your favourite star in it? All your friends like it?

For me, it's a movie that entertains me, plain and simple. Now, entertainment is a broad term that can be very subjectively defined. For instance, I never let professional critics' opinions sway me from watching 'bad' movies -- in fact, more often than not I find these bad movies to be highly entertaining, and yes, even good.

There's a special type of 'bad' movie I love, that doesn't follow any rules or logic and usually makes it to people's 'Top 5 Worst Movies' list. These are movies that are so off-the-wall, so zany and silly that they put off most people, but I'm forever glad that someone had the good sense (or a lapse of it) to put some money behind them and get them made. These are the kinds of movies that, even on paper, don't sound like a good proporistion.

These are also some of my favourite movies, and here's my top 5 list. If you've never heard of them, or have heard of them but in a negative way before, I hope this list will do a little to change your mind and get you to see them:

...I can't believe I just gave my money to these people.

Like I mentioned in the previous post, I had gone to the mall to watch Music & Lyrics. We usually don't go to the mall on weekends as getting a parking space even in the enormous Mall of the Emirates parking lot on Friday can be a problem. However, it was not yet evening and with nothing else to do, we decided to chance it. The parking lot was quickly filling up, but we did manage to get a space.