The weekend of a writer who should really be at home finishing a script goes a little something like this:

Friday night - go to George Orwell's 1984 at the Melbourne International Arts Festival. This is one of those things I never would have thought of myself, but Rita thinks of most things for me and this was a present from her. The adaptation, by Michael Gene Sullivan is quite brilliant. It was directed by Tim Robbins and performed by The Actors' Gang. That's a pretty impressive line-up, just quietly.

The reason I say I wouldn't necessarily have seen the play myself is that 1984 is about the role of the powerful in society. It's extremely clever, but once you've read it, you get it, right?

But this play makes your head explode because it's clearly about today's society. It's about terrorism and Guantanamo Bay and people in power lying about wars, and it's about the economy working only when there are lots of poor and uneducated people. There's a torture scene that, even though the play was in the State Theatre and it was the opposite of claustrophobic in there, you really just wanted to leave. Some people did. So, quite a brilliant Friday night thanks to the always thoughtful Rita. My only quibble would be that they needed microphones (even just a central overhead mic would have been helpful). Everytime someone coughed, I wanted to clock them over the head.

Saturday, I went shopping. I hate shopping more than I hate the two major political parties in this country, and more than brussels sprouts. I had to recruit my friend Claire, who found me an entire new wardrobe within an hour and a half.

Saturday night, well as I've said somewhere here before, everyone in commercial radio gets stuff for free. I got a call from my mates in radio who had lined themselves up with a four course meal and unlimited booze for an entire evening because a restaurant was opening in East Melbourne. It was an increasingly hilarious evening and it took me an embarrassingly long time to recover on Sunday.

Sunday night, went and saw Little Miss Sunshine, a ridiculously farcical but funny and sweet film which was perfectly cast, very well performed, and which features many frankly alarming scenes shot in a real life beauty pagent for teensy tiny little girls tarted up to look like nineteen-eighties hookers. The film is very much a case of "what could possibly go wrong next in this hilarious dysfunctional family", but the characters are actually cleverer than that, and anyway, it's a fun ride, so shut up.

But the writing? Didn't get to the writing. Thinking I might get onto that now. Right after this cup of tea.

Last night I went to the Shed Warming at the Arts Festival, where I had a few drinks and decided I liked Kristy Edmunds, if only because of the Artist Card policy, which encourages artists to come to the festival at a slightly discounted price. This is obviously a good idea for the festival, because artists are going to want to go to the festival and they're not necessarily going to be able to afford it. So make them go to more stuff, make them bring more friends, and there's your (satisfied) audience.

Which brings me to the question of how come rich people get stuff for free?

I've never understood why people with money get invited to stuff for free and that's supposed to make the rest of us want to go. When I worked in radio, I got everything for free. Movies, CDs, concert tickets. Now that I have a wonky income? I pay full price for everything. I know it's about power and influence and fame and so on, but are they serious? They seriously think that if they can get, say, John Travolta to turn up for five minutes before the opening night screening of Swordfish, that's going to make anyone in that audience tell their friends to go and see the worst movie of 2001 all because John Travolta turned up, looked embarrassed, and then got on a plane to L.A? I'll tell you what they're going to do. They're going to do what Stitzy and I did, which is hang out eating the free food and drinking the booze and saying how turd the movie was.

People aren't stupid. It even works the other way. Bad marketing can't stop something genuinely good from working. Look at Kenny, the Australian comedy feature (and haven't we learned to love those words) released several months ago. I personally think that the marketing concepts for Kenny were terrible. I mean, it got a lot of pre-publicity, and the website is slick and everything, but they were marketing the wrong thing. Anyone with a healthy fear of dumb-Aussie-bloke-orientated films (and I don't think I'm on my own here) was not going to be enraptured by a poster featuring a dim-looking chap with a dunny brush surrounded by toilet paper.

But Kenny is a gorgeous film. It's not really about poo, or dumb blokes, or loveable idiots with hearts of gold. It's not even about comedy, really. You never once feel like you're being fed a gag, you're just getting to know a character. So what made me go from heart-sinking disappointment at the sight of the poster, to paying good money to see the film?

Two things: word of mouth, and Kenny. I was watching TV at gym one time and Kenny came on. Completely ad libbing in some mindless TV interview, it was hardly the environment in which anyone can shine. But shine he did, and I had to slow down the treadmill while I watched him sensitively describing the flushing mechanism on a toilet.

So, look, my point is, audiences are going to work it out. Kenny shouldn't have been marketed like that. I still know women who won't see it because "it looks terrible" or they're not interested in "toilet humour", and I think that's bad because women are actually who a lot of it is aimed at. So they got it wrong. But after two weeks, everyone had two friends telling them they had to see this new Aussie film called Kenny.

So dear distributors and production companies, please stop giving free tickets to people who never pay for anything anyway and who own three houses and two boats. Give the free tickets to the people who can't afford them and watch your audiences grow with the good films and sink with the lousy ones. It's really not that complicated.

I know, I know. I should really be running the country.

By the way, if you're going to see Kenny, here's some advice: see it in a HUGE cinema. Think of the biggest cinema you've been to and see it there. Do NOT see it in a teensy weensy cinema where the hand-held camera is so bad that several of you have to leave the movie and go outside and spew. There is a sign up at the Nova in Carlton warning people prone to motion sickness to sit up the back. Sit as far back as Fitzroy North would be my advice.

Last night I saw The Devil Wears Prada. It was a film that rang many bells for me, because it is about being a small fish in an industry that thinks it's important. It's also about working for arseholes, so yay for that.

It's a very silly film that makes you realise how much Sex in The City has to answer for, with pretty people prancing about drinking coffees and being shocked by changes in their own behaviour ("It was then that I realised..." etc). However, it has a sense of humour about its (very predictable) self, and what more can we ask from Hollywood fashion movies?

Speaking of pretty people swanning about thinking they're more important than they are, I'm off now to the Shed Warming for the Melbourne Arts Festival.