Tenby was lovely, since you ask. Effortlessly straddling the line between picture perfect and proper-working-town. Beautiful, chilly weather, friendly people, and a cinema - the Royal Playhouse - so handsome I was almost tempted to see Meet the Robinsons. Almost.

A quick heads up for Flyboys, due in June. It's the story of the young America lads who, before the US entered the First World War, volunteered to fly in defend France from the air in the Lafayette Escadrille, whose biplanes were made out of rope-soled footwear. That's the last cheap joke I will make about a film that is old-fashioned and uncomplicated in its approach to heroism, and which somewhat disarms criticism by the fact that each of the flyboy characters is based on a real figure, including the black flier who was the son of a slave, left racist America for not-quite-so-racist France where he became a boxing champion, flew with honour with the Lafayette, and was then denied the chance to join his country's air force after the war.

So it's a bit hackneyed? The dogfight scenes are superb, evoking the chunka-chunka-chunk of basic machine guns chewing up the fragile planes, which, like the men inside, were pretty much "all skin". There's something fitting about the fact that a film about volunteer flyers should have been made by a bunch of flying enthusiasts (propellerheads?) who raised the money to finance it themselves. It'll probably get snippy reviews and enjoy a long life on the afternoon schedules of the movie channels.

Talking of movie channels, have those of you with Sky ever flicked through the alphabetical schedule of films just to see what's coming up? Had I not done so before going to Tenby, I would not have been able to record The 300 Spartans, an earlier version of the Thermopylae battle on which the critically divisive 300 is based (and thanks for the post, Katrineholm, I agree). I would also have missed Paul Bartell's Death Race 2000, because it was on Movies4Men2, a channel I very rarely look at. This very witty cheapo exploitation film was produced at great speed (in every sense) by Roger Corman to steal the thunder of the dreary, plodding Rollerball. I watched it again, having first seen it in my teens at what was then the NFT with my dad, then hired a knackered old video from a shop when I was ill at my girlfriend's flat when I was 20. I was glad to see the race scenes are still exhilarating, the dialogue just as funny. ("What's that?" asks Simone Griffeth's Annie of David Carradine's ace driver Frankenstein, pointing at the bomb built into his false hand. "It's a hand grenade," he says.)

Serious film point of the week. Thinking again about Danny Boyle's flawed but rather wonderful Sunshine (you can sort of see the budget run out at the end), I was struck by the thought that cinematic science fiction thrives best at times when society is paranoid and uncertain. Think of the 1950s nuclear paranoia of The Incredible Shrinking Man and the anti-commie fear underling Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Think of the Nixonite dismay behind Silent Running, Soylent Green, Capricorn One, Close Encounters... even Logan's Run. Even Star Wars fits neatly into the scenario, a fairy-tale corrective as simplistic in its way as Flyboys or the most gung-ho of Wayne Westerns. When I was describing Sunshine to a colleague, I was struck by how much it reminded me of those other 70s movies mentioned above, with their doomy, lonely bleakness. It's subtext is that even if we all work together - and the bickering crew are almost as carefully ethnically representative as an episode of Sesame Street - we'll still screw up the world, if not the universe. No argument there.

Finally to John Giotta - yes, I did bail out on Ghost Rider because I found a grinning skull inexpressive. Then at home last weekend I thoroughly enjoyed the skeleton battle in Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts. Despite my defence of CGI last week, there are times when only stop-frame will do (as the producers of Flushed Away may well be reflecting). Or maybe Nic Cage was the problem....