MY MOVIE WEEK with Mike Shaw

It's a laughing matter at the seaside

This weekend sees the latest 2 Days Laughter short film competition. As ever, the challenge was for filmmakers to shoot and edit a short comic film in just 48 hours, including various lines and props to prove that it was made for this competition and wasn’t just an old film that had been kicking around on a hard drive.

Those films are then given to a panel of judges, which this year I am privileged enough to be on.

On Easter Sunday there will be a public screening at the Theatre Royal, Margate before the winners are announced. The event is always really good fun, although this year it’s a bit different as it opens with the first film ever shown in Margate’s Dreamland Cinema in 1935, Laurel and Hardy’s Them Thar Hills.

This rare archive film screening will be introduced by guest speaker and all-round good egg Dr Oliver Double from the University of Kent, where he lectures on stand-up comedy.

Entry is free, but you do need to be 18 or older because some of the films have guts and swearing.

Go to www.2dayslaughter.co.uk for more details.

Ever since Danny Boyle adapted his novel The Beach for the screen, Alex Garland has been gradually working his way further and further into the movie world, including writing and producing last year’s superb Dredd.

For the first time, however, he’s sitting in the director’s chair for robot thriller Ex Machina.

Garland wrote the script for the film, in which a billionaire chooses one of his employees to spend a week at his remote estate, but it’s all part of an elaborate test designed to help with his latest invention – an artificially intelligent female robot.

Garland has a knack for adding dark drama into his scripts, so this sounds like it could be an excellent, uncomfortable slice of sci-fi.

Another perfectly good Disney classic has been earmarked for updating. This time, it’s Pete’s Dragon that has been targeted, with writer/director David Lowery hired to co-write a new take on the musical combination of live-action and animation.

The original Pete’s Dragon was released in 1977, starring Mickey Rooney and Shelley Winters among others and telling the story of an orphaned boy who arrives in a small town with his magic dragon in an attempt to escape his abusive adoptive parents.

The new version will take place in the modern day and will not have music. Except for the crummy soundtrack featuring “uplifting” original songs about “spreading wings and flying” by whichever terrible boyband popular at the time.

Is U.N.C.L.E Tom's next mission?

For some reason, in my head, Mission Impossible and The Man from U.N.C.L.E are interconnected, so to me, it seems logical that Tom Cruise, the star of Jack Reacher and the Mission Impossible films, should also be the star of a planned Man From U.N.C.L.E movie.

A big screen remake of the 1960s TV show has been touted for a long time, but despite Steven Soderbergh and various leading men being attached, the cult spy show never went anywhere. However, now director Guy Ritchie has stepped in and it sounds like Tom Cruise may add yet another big espionage franchise to his CV.

The Cruiser is in early talks to star in the film, which would see agents Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin fighting evil organisation Thrush as part of the United Network Command for Law Enforcement.

This could really work. Tom Cruise can obviously lead a big budget movie and it'll be nice to see him in a more light-hearted role (unless the film goes in a more serious direction), while Guy Ritchie has proved with the Sherlock Holmes films that he can handle action with aplomb.