The Shining could be a much better film. The dialogue is poor, the plot is incohesive, and the acting is often wooden. I feel that way about may Kubrick movies. Loads of potential, but could do better.

Make no mistake, I think it's great. Beautifully designed and shot, there's rarely a frame that doesn't look fantastic. But it's not quite good.

With Kubrick films, to me, it's always about style over substance. And what style it is, it must be said. His movies are sumptuous visual feasts that you dive into and luxuriate in. But the plotting is usually paper-thin.

But sitting here on my luxurious plum chaise longue, watching as Scatman Crothers drives to his demise, I can't help thinking that maybe that's deliberate. Maybe Kubrick thought that good acting and writing might distract fromhis art. As always, dunno.

"Wendy, I'm home."

We spent last week in a theme park - a pretty city centre, with wide open streets and a Heineken on every corner, with trams to get you from one place to another, but with no actual rides.

In Amsterdam, I have learned that:

• I like slices of lemon and lime in lager.
• Van Gogh painted copied of Japanese Woodblocks
• There are five virtually identical paintings of sunflowers, and I've seen three of them. They all look the same.
• The red-light district is the prettiest part of the city. It's only a matter of time before it's taken over by coffee shops, and all of the red lights are forced to move out.
• Anne Frank hid in a huge house with her name outside in letters a metre high. It's surprising that she wasn't caught.
• A weekend city-break is significantly enhanced by avoiding RyanAir.
• The food in the Irish pub on the Rembrandtplein is better than in any Irish pub in Dublin.
• Garlic ice cream isn't that good.

The flip-flop is an appropriate shoe for a beach, or ideally for a short walk to a beach, where it can be slipped off and concealed. It is not a city shoe. This is why.

1. It offers minimal support to the foot.
2. It exposes the foot for others to see. This is fine if, like 0.0001% of the population you have stunningly attractive feet. If you do not, then why on earth did you paint your toenails?
3. The connection between flip-flop and foot is minimal - usually a small slip of plastic between big toe and whatever-the-next-toe-down-is-called. This means that to walk in them, you usually have to curl your toes. This is bad for your feet, and looks silly.
4. Because of the lack of contact with feet, they slap against your heel every time you walk. This is bad for the feet, obviously, but also draws the attention of passers-by to your feet. You really shouldn't have painted your nails that colour.
5. And if you stand in something, then you're completely screwed.
6. Fluroescent yellow is not a good colour for a shoe. Or toenail.

Thank you.

I recently had the pleasure of watching Ant and Dec (does anyone else remember Ant and Bee?) presenting a show in which one could, potentially, bluff ones way to a million pounds. The denoument of the show was a ten second test of nerves. They've been answering questions for an hour, racking up cash, and they both have over £60,000. That's now at risk. They've got ten seconds to decide whether they take their money and run. If they do, their opponent wins a million pounds. If they don't, and they've got the most money, they win the million. If they don't decide to take their money, but their opponent has more, they leave with nothing.

I can't remember their names, but let's call them Phil and Kirsty. Now Phil had a strategy. His strategy was basically never to fold under any circumstances. He told everyone this, and he couched it in phrases that made it clear that it was something he'd read in a book or been on a course about. Self-actualisation. The idea is that if you visualise success, and do not believe that failure is an option, then you will succeed. Not actually a bad idea, really, but it shouldn't be something that you ever say in conversation. Hi, I'm Phil, I'm a success, failure is not an option, nice to meet you. He had a strategy, and a personality. Kirsty just came across as a nice person.

He's probably very successful at his job, but in this instance, he kept his nerve and went home with no money. Kirsty took away her million pounds, and is going to use it to help her family, probably. Which is nice.

Phil didn't win the million pounds, but he was still a winner. He went in with a game plan, and he played the game his way, and that could only ever lead to him winning a million pounds or nothing. He came out with no more than he went in with, so didn't really lose financially. But he did come across as really, really annoying.

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a big old botched up mess. Some people will love it.

There's a lot going for Superman Returns. It looks great, it's well acted, the music has huge chunks of the John Williams score, and it's got enough touches of the original movies, and updating of them to make you believe that this film wwas made with respect, with reverence, perhaps even with love.

However, if you put aside the gloss, the nudity, the occasionally heart-stopping action, is it actually any good? No. It's a bit disappointing.

It's a time for reboots of film series. Batman Begins dumped the colour coded catastrophe and Crash Bang Pow of Batman Forever and brought us sepia grit. Casino Royale is about to give us a Bond that is more like the character from the books than Roger Moore could ever hope to be. On television, Battlestar Galactica has emerged triumphant from the laughing-stock of cult television history as a meaty character-led show with sexy killer robots. So what do we get with Superman Returns? Pretty much a straight sequel.

The problem lies in what it's a sequel to. It's a sequel to Superman Five.

You probably don't remember Superman Five. It's the one that ends with him uncovering his old Kryptonian spaceship, hopping in it and flying off to look for the remnants of his homeworld. The audiences were left begging for a sequel. This is that sequel. Only they never actually made Superman Five, so there's a line before the music starts at the beginning, and then the first half an hour of the film is a complete garbled mess if you don't know what happened before. And most people don't.

So there we are, first half an hour is a waste of celluloid. You just spend it wondering when the good stuff is going to happen, because it's a choppily cut mess that doesn't flow well. And you know what - all it would have taken was one solid flashback. Five minutes recapping what would have happened in Superman Five and you could have given the film the emotional heart that it was missing. Because it tried to play with themes of heartbreak and loss, but it did it by looking at the impact of a return. Bloody difficult to do if the audience doesn't care about the characters yet...

But does the audience care? Can you use shorthand to get them to think they care? After all, he's Clark Kent, she's Lois Lane, blindest woman in christendom, they're meant to be together and so on and so forth and everybody knows that because it's now taught at pre-school. It isn't? My mistake.

As to the middle of the film - the action's good, the homages are fine and not over-intrusive, and the final confrontation is completely and utterly missing. Gone. I assume that on the day that they were going to write the climax the sun was shining so they went out to kick a ball around instead and then went for a jalapeno burger, wicked, man. And then went back in to the office and just wrote down the quickest resolution they could think of and figured that it had a really big special effect in it, so it had to be cool, and then went home to play video games.

The last five minutes of the film are a bit schmaltzy, but that's not really the problem with them. The problem with them is that they are stretched out over twenty minutes. It's like a slow torture wondering when and if the film is going to end, wondering if any of the test audiences mentioned this to the film-makers, or if they were thinking that maybe the last twenty minutes were going to explain the first half an hour. Don't worry. They don't.

So, would I recommend it? Depends. Turn off your brain. Don't expect it to make sense, but expect it to look fantastic and take a hanky for when they play the John Williams music. Sit in a seat behind a five year old, so you can get running commentary. And try to sit next to comic nerds who can discuss the relevance of the Eradicator and the Cyborg all the way through until you wonder if they've even been watching the movie at all. It's enjoyable and often stunning, but it won't win any awards for the script.

If there's one thing I've learned from the last few years, it's that experience and hands-on knowledge mean absolutely nothing after a certain point. Nor does the ability to focus on one thing at a time. No.

What matters is knowing a tiny little bit about everything, getting someone else to pull together a lot of reports about what other people are doing and pretending it's your own work, and belittling people. It's the belittling that gets to me. It's not big, and it's not clever. But if I'm going to advance in my career, I'll basically have to stop being nice to people I respect and stab them in the back.

Understandably, this isn't a good mood to be in, most days.

There's so much to annoy me about my current job, but I suspect it would be the same no matter where I worked unless I was to throw in the towel and become a knitting inspector. Or something like that.

My malaise has a name, I suspect. Mid-Life crisis.

Oh, it's interesting, can I say that? My web page, my rules, course I can say that. For the last couple of years I've had a creeping dis-satisfaction that I couldn't point at one thing and say "this is what is making me unhappy." It's been much easier to find a few islands of happiness floating in a sea of humdrumity. Not - it must be said - the ideal way to feel for a man of my age.

It's the age thing that's a give-away, that makes me think that it's a mid-life crisis. Half way through my three score years and ten, and I have an urge to escape from the rat race and go and live on a commune in Penge, knitting my own pasta and recycling printed circuit boards as dandy little bits of jewellery. Maybe I'm over-reacting.

Cool.

I think that it's fair to say that changes are afoot at my current place of employment. The last two weeks have been affectionately described as the night of the long knives, and my formerly loyal sidekick Minion has been one of the casualties.

I say formerly loyal but I should also say formerly sidekick. For the last six months, whenever I try to get her to do anything, she tells me that she's too busy. And I don't want a stand up row with her, no matter how close I come. And I come close quite often. But for six months I've been the person she runs to when she needs an ear. In the last two weeks she's been running a lot.

She's young. She's scared. She's full of bravado and fire and fury. And when she sulks, it's an emotional vacuum - she sits there in a dark pool of anger, draining me of my will to exist. I've been feeling... beseiged for a while now. She doesn't help.