Having finished the first draft of a script for what was supposed to be a “little miniseries” (43 pages?), I decided to dig into a couple science fiction treats I’d been looking forward to. They did not disappoint. But first, my only gripe so far with Celtx.

While I have been very happy with Celtx’s private collaboration feature which allowed me to work on this script from multiple locations with great ease, I find its print features to be the first disappointment this terrific software has brought thus far. Margin settings are not saved, and the page breaks which automatically appear in scripts are not fully honored by the program’s print system. Oh they appear, alright, but the pages are not sized appropriately by default, so when I printed my first copy of the script, the last line or two of each page ran onto a new page… and THEN the page break happened. As a result, 43 pages became 86, a most unfortunate number for anyone like me who comes from a restaurant industry background. Hopefully they’ll improve print features in future versions; their forums tell me I’m not the only one to have noticed.

Anyway, on to the sci-fi. First, I took in Kar Wai Wong’s 2046, which was gorgeous and tragic. Ziyi Zhang was particularly impressive, and not only for her beauty, but for the range of emotion with which she portrayed this character. Probably her best acting to date; I haven’t seen every film she’s been in, but this performance was leaps and bounds above her roles in Crouching Tiger, Hero, and Geisha (which I really enjoyed). To learn later that this was filmed entirely without a script is a testament either to the director’s genius or insanity, but boy did he make it work.

The second film I got to enjoy this week was Aeon Flux. I came to this one knowing nothing about the MTV animated short on which it was based, hadn’t seen any previews and didn’t know anything about the movie except that it starred Charlize. I confess I didn’t have high expectations. But early on, the movie gave a pleasant surprise with the introduction of New Zealander Martin Csokas, who is one of those actors that - literally, every time he appears on screen, no matter what movie - I find myself uttering “Oh man, I love this guy!” But the real stars of this film were the story and the sets. For the first half of the movie, I was really scratching my head and struggling to keep up… but then the revelations came regarding what was really going on, and it was a tremendous payoff for all that suspense. Very engaging themes and ideas played with in this one; it’s a shame that Hollywood will probably not be able to resist giving this film the indignity of a bad sequel, because it really needs to stand alone. Highly entertaining. The action and the tech were superb and surreal, and nice soundtrack too. I don’t know what fans of the original series think of it, but I was most impressed.