I draw with the TV on in the mid distance, so I glance at it enough to stop getting a close-work headache, like screen-breaks for a computer. For pencilling I can't have anything interesting on -- too distracting. That's MTV time, old Clint Eastwood films time, world cinema favourites with the subtitles turned off time.

Inking is different. Inking is dull, just marking over and over the same line, making it deep enough and right enough that other people can see it. But I need the screen because my nose is about two inches from the paper and after an hour of that I feel very weird. So that's my time to catch up on all the movies I ought to have seen but haven't, off that hypothetical long list of everything that sounded kind of interesting.

Last night, American Beauty, what a crock that was, a movie so annoying you can argue with it, like Radio 4. Oh, don't get me wrong, it's well shot and acted, and the music is lovely, but what's with that fat-arsed story? Just the safest little corner scraps of Donnie Darko and Fight Club little magic realism filips, but nothing too challenging. And that irritating central character! Hi, I'm alright, I'm good, I'm a fine upstanding all-american middle-aged man and everyone else is a psycho bitch-assed whining drug-dealing pinko commie gun-nut nazi homosexual out to kill me and/or shag me because, hey, I'm that good. It couldn't have been pandering more to the prize-givers if it had got down on its knees and yelled, "Oscar me, baby!" I was hoping he'd die of a heart attack while screwing his daughter's friend, but no, the repressed nazi homosexual got to do it. How radical that wasn't. Definitely a movie saying nothing useful or new, but saying it well -- but maybe that's what's fashionable now. After all, Lost in Translation was saying a lot of the same things. Heck, it was practically the same movie ... Me, I'm getting a little bit sick of people pointing at the status quo and claiming it's some sort of deeper truth. It isn't, it's just laziness.

Followed by Blow Up, another of those iconoclastic 60s style pieces. That'll be where Austin Powers got his photographer personality from, then ... it's an odd thing, a sort of car-crash of stoned ramblings and a really sinister thriller. Fluff meets grit. And another very annoying central character. I kept wishing he was Cary Elwes (whom he vaguely resembled) or anyone with charm. He was handsome, though. And though the framing was flashy, (for a film about photography) the colour and quality of light were appalling (though that may have been the print, I suppose), all greyed-out flesh tones (which flattered the dolly birds not at all) and flat toneless landscapes.

In an attempt to finish the bottom of the page, I also watched the Futurama christmas special ... and gave up on panel seven. Eh. Tomorrow.

Should I buy Labyrinth on DVD for £3.99?