movies: early man

I've always been quite fond of the work of the Aardman animation studio... from The Pirates! Band of Misfits to Chicken Run to the later Wallace and Grommit cartoons, and Early Man continues in that vein.

I'm not sure that it's their best effort though.

Maybe that's partly because this is the first time time Nick Park has been solo in the director's chair, maybe it's because it's mostly a movie about soccer. I don't know.

Don't get me wrong, it's a fun movie, and very much in the Aardman oeuvre... it just didn't wow me.

I do wonder how well it will go over in America to be honest... even compared to the Wallace and Grommit movies, this feels the most English of all their features for some reason.

Standing in as the Jurassic versions of Wallace and Grommit we have Dug and Hobnog, a boy and his boar (sabretoothed pig?), part of a tribe of, well, idiots to be honest. And their simple life is interrupted by the coming of the Bronze Age, in the form of a whole civilisation who uses bronze for everything, worship soccer and seem to be quite a bit French, before French was invented.

Eddie Redmayne voices Dug, while Parks provides the pig noises for Hobnob... and Tom Hiddleston is Lord Nooth, ruler of the city. But there's also a queen, who rules over... I'm not sure... everything else?

A number of English comedians lend their voices to Dug's tribe and Maisie Williams appears in the role that's usually the love interest but isn't in this movie for some reason. And her character, Goona, looks like a very early ancestor of Lady Tottington from the Wallace and Grommit wererabbit movie.

There are fun moments, the story isn't bad and on the whole it looks great. On a few occasions it did seem more obvious than usual that characters were against a greenscreen rather than being in the environment, which is understandable when they're crowd scenes, but was still a little jarring.

So, yeah... good, not great.

yani's rating: 3 stone footballs out of 5

photo saturday: below the surface

This week has been all turned around.

Monday was a day full of cleaning before the rental inspection on Tuesday. I'm really not sure why it is that cleaning the bathroom and mopping/cleaning the floors takes so fucking long. I mean I know that part of it is because I really hate doing it, so I'm not exactly rushing, and because I have to move some of the furniture around in order to mop properly, so then I have to wait for bits to dry before I can do other bits... but still... it takes for-fucking-ever.

By the time I was done I was pretty much fried, I'd managed to kill my mop (mostly because of shoddy construction) and possibly knacker my vacuum cleaner (because it was full and I got a bottle lid caught in the intake part... so it overheated, and since I had my headphones on I couldn't hear it complaining... hopefully it's okay, I should check on it at some point). That was the point at which I should have said "fuck DnD for tonight", but I didn't...

And I just wasn't feeling it. It may have been okay, but everything just felt more unorganised than usual, everything was annoying me, and the choices for modules weren't where my head was, so I ended up turning around and leaving.

It was probably a good plan, I just came home and vegetated.

Tuesday I got out of the apartment around 9 after making sure everything was ship-shape and ready to be inspected. I ended up spending the morning at the library in town working on a project, then went to the movies.

And I still don't know what I need to do to get an "excellent" rating on my inspections... but whatever, I don't really care, it's over for another few months.

Wednesday was the usual DnD session... well, not really because I ended up running a game, which I hadn't planned on, but it was a module I've run a bunch of times.

Thursday I had a guy coming to check on the smoke detectors, supposedly between 9am and 11am. So I went for my walk, stopped off at the supermarket, etc, first thing... hoping it would be over and done with by the time I got back. No, you guessed it, he showed up at 11:15am.

Granted he was only here for about 5 minutes, but still, it's the principle of the thing.

Thursday night was also DnD... but the usual Thursday group were all busy being not at DnD, so I played with... I don't want to say "randoms" because I'm played with and/or run for all of them... but randoms in a Thursday sense. It was actually a good adventure, partly because they were mostly better behaved.

Friday, being Good Friday, I basically just did a massive amount of nothing.

Today wasn't terribly exciting... and a lot of it felt like trying to avoid the nine thousand people who always go out to shop when the stores have been shut for a single day.

The supermarket portion of the day was pretty much what it was... I didn't really buy all that much, so we'll see how well that works out later in the week.

After shopping, we once again didn't really have any plans, so we decided to head down to Marion and go to the movies. The usual wandering was somewhat hampered by the aforementioned nine thousand people, plus the fact we were mostly just killing time until the movie.

Afterwards we grabbed some food and then called it a day...

Also, and this is mostly a note to future me, a conversation was had this week. A conversation that will in all likelihood amount to absolutely nothing, but if in the very unlikely event it amounts to enough of something at some point, I want to remember that it started at this point.

Okay, enough of that... that's it for this week.

Current Mood:

movies: call me by your name

It's been a while since I've been as blown away by a movie as I was by Call Me By Your Name.

Everything about this movie is just beautiful and perfect. It's not big or flashy... if anything, it's an incredibly sensual and languid movie, taking it's time with it's 132 minute run time.

It also avoided a lot of the tropes I'm used to from this kind of story... and I don't think it qualifies as spoilers if I say that there's no great manufactured conflict and resolution, there's no exposure/outing, there's no villain. These are people, not plot points.

Between them director Luca Guadagnino, writer James Ivory (he of Merchant Ivory fame, and adapting the novel by André Aciman) and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom have constructed a film that all feels incredibly real, and grounded, and amazing.

Armie Hammer as Oliver and Timothée Chalamet as Elio both do amazing work as the leads, but it's Chalamet who absolutely blew my mind. In every scene you can see the character feeling something, be it jealousy, passion, sadness, contempt, fear... he puts it all on his face and in the way he moves.

The camera is absolutely in love with him as well, between the cinematography and the lighting and the (often lack of) costuming, there is definitely a focus on his body in ways that there aren't with Hammer as the object of his affection/obsession. I wasn't sure if I was just imagining it until a scene about half way through where there's a discussion of ancient statues and Elio's father says that they're "daring you to desire them"... which is what I think the movie is doing with Chalamet as Elio.

Or that's just me.

Hammer has been fantastic in everything I've seen him in and he continues to be here, although much more of an enigmatic character since the story and camera is most often focused on Elio.

I also have to give a giant shout out to Michael Stuhlbarg (most recently seen in The Shape of Water as the scientist) in the role of Elio's father. There's an amazing speech that he gives at the end of the movie that just totally wrecked me, not just for the words, but also for what it means in the 1983 world of the movie.

What I'm also incredibly glad about is that I now have the novel sitting on my bedside table, waiting for me to start it, so I can immerse myself back into the world of Call Me By Your Name.

yani's rating: 5 peaches out of 5

photo saturday: trees and feathers

Today was nice and simple... which is exactly what we needed after Fringe.

This week however has been all about getting ready for my rental inspection. I mean it was all stuff I could probably have crammed into a single day, but it's nice that I'm able to space it out and do a little bit each day (or not if I wasn't feeling it) in order to get ready. It also meant that I could tidy things up properly and sort some stuff out.

All I need to do now is clean the bathroom, mop the floors and then just do any last minute stuff on Monday, and we're good. Annoyingly there is also someone coming to look at the smoke detectors on Thursday... but that's hopefully only going to be a five minute thing (and if I'm really lucky, I'll be on my walk anyway).

Otherwise DnD continues to be DnD. Although note to self, don't just assume you have the right modules in your bag, actually check that shit. Also it's fun when characters just give themselves personality traits without you realising it's happening.

Like my half-elf archer is a little bit racist when it comes to goblins. I mean I don't really blame him, his first adventure was a demonic underground circus full of them, then he met a player character who was one of the most irritating goblins ever, and this week it was goblins once again (and more demonic shit). So he kind of hates goblins.

My noble dwarf wizard got to show the other side of her personality this week after being irritated and angry about everything for the last weeks worth of in game time. She does have a habit of fully flirting with men in positions of power though.

But enough of that...

Today was, as the start of this post said, nice and simple.

I was ready when Ma arrived, which was a nice change, we went and did the supermarket thing, although I didn't really buy all that much of anything, because I keep buying stuff and then never using it. Of course this week I'll want all the things and not have them.

When were were done and had come back here for the unpackery, we didn't really have a plan, but there also weren't any movies we really wanted to see, so we settled on a trip to IKEA. Before that though was a brief trip to drop some old books I no longer wanted/needed at Oxfam on Hutt Street (because they're always appreciative, and it's easier than finding somewhere that want to buy them).

IKEA was... well, IKEA... although for some reason we spent a lot more time looking in their little sample rooms... maybe because this is the first time we've been since they updated them all, but there were a lot of things I really liked about a lot of the rooms.

Mostly I wanted yet another photo frame, but we found a couple of other things along the way... nothing thrillingly exciting to be honest.

After we'd done the full wander we called it a day and Ma dropped me off here before heading off home.

I'm not gunna lie... it was nice to not have to fill in the rest of the afternoon.

Current Mood:

post fringe round-up 2018

It's that time of year again... no, the other time... when Fringe goes away and everything seems that little bit less bright and exciting.

We only saw 18 shows this year, originally it was 17, but then we were fortunate enough to get to see The Man In The Mail for free, so that was lucky (especially since it was a good show).

Venue-wise we were pretty much back to our usual haunts, although we did get to visit the Wine Centre, The Kings Head and Marion RSL, all of which were new for us. We were also generally very spread out this year... Gluttony being the main place that got multiple visits as always.

I managed to invoke Rule 3 at least three times this year, which I love to do whenever possible... plus I got a hug from one of my favourite circus performers and a short-lived balloon animal from another. Plus a Le Gateau Chocolat hug, which is always a bonus.

I finally remembered to start scoring my Fringe reviews out of 5 (and just like I do with the movie reviews, they all got a cute little nomenclature assigned to the score depending on the show) and tailoring my review tweets a little more, although the fact that I ended up posting most of my reviews at about 1am (regardless of what the individual posts say) was an issue.

It also became very apparent very quickly that my usual refrain of "the top X number of shows are all barely separated in quality" is pretty apt given the scores I ended up giving most of the shows... 13 of the 18 shows are either a 4 or 5 out of 5.  I've included the ratings in the round-up below.

I was kind of surprised this year that I never fully hit that "I need to go hide in a hole away from people" mood that usually hits me towards the end of Fringe, but that may be due to a) not seeing as many shows as usual or b) not having to deal with people all day every day in my regular life.

So...

1. The Displaced
   "This is absolutely the kind of show I could watch, leave and then turn around and go back and see again right away. And Time in Space Circus have proven that they're a force to be reckoned with." - 5/5
   
   This was my "mention it to everyone because it blew my mind" show for this year's Fringe. And it wasn't just because the company had matured and was so very different to the last time I saw them, this was genuinely the most amazing circus show I saw this year.
   
   
2. Flesh and Blood
   "The show goes from hilarious to moving to thought provoking and back again at the flick of a switch and had me welling up towards the end." - 5/5
   
   And this was usually the second show I mentioned to people. The writing and the characters here were exceptional and I'm not surprise at all that this took out the overall Best Theatre show in the Fringe Awards and the Week 1 Theatre and Week 3 Critics Choice awards.
   
   
3. Intoxication
   "And there's a lot of great writing and performing from Bryant, but I think that the thing that really pulls the whole thing together into a consistent whole is that sense of intimacy. Because it's hard not to really hear what someone is saying while they're looking you straight in the eye and you're looking back." 5/5
   
   I wasn't really expecting this show... I threw it on the list because I always like to keep something gay themed in my Fringe, but I got so much more than I bargained for.
   
   
4. Kaput
   "With this type of show the comedy and seemingly "out of control" nature of it often belie the skills of the performer, and while the character is often losing control, Flanagan maintains it beautifully." - 5/5
   
   I'm not going to lie, the fact that Ma ended up as part of the show made this even better, but Flanagan really is a master of physical comedy.
   
   
5. Sound and Fury's Cyranose
   "Cyranose was barely controlled chaos. Again, in the best possible way." - 5/5
   
   Sound and Fury on the edge of a total nervous breakdown was something I didn't realise I needed in my life until this show. And even when there's only a third of the original cast present, it still shines.
   
   
6. A Simple Space
   "They're the gold standard as far as I'm concerned, both in the way they put their shows together but also in how they interact with each other and with the audience." - 5/5
   
   Gravity and Other Myths are my OG circus act... they were one of the first (if not the first) we ever saw... and watching them from 2011 to now continues to be pure delight.
   
   
7. Box and Cox
   "The three of them are wonderfully over the top and ridiculous in that Victorian farcical way but everything they do suits the material perfectly." - 4/5
   
   This show is quintessentially Fringe... funny, something you didn't know you wanted more of until you saw it and not quite what you expected.
   
   
8. The Man in the Mail
   "Phillips does a small number of tricks, but does them well and with a lot of personality, including a couple that I really haven't seen other people do before, one including balancing on sticks and the other including a door." - 4/5
   
   This isn't the first time that a show we've been lucky enough to see for free has been excellent, but in this case it's a very sweet show and well put together.
   
   
9. A Night At The Musicals
   "This show, as Woo and Chocolat proudly proclaim, is where "musical theatre goes to die", and if that's the case, then it's a good death." - 4/5
   
   Le Gateau Chocolat, my other OG Fringe star who just keeps getting better and better, even if I've seen the show before (Johnny Woo is also great, but let's be honest, I'm in if for the Chocolat). And any show you can sing along with is a good one.
   
   
10. Attrape Moi! (Catch Me!)
    "The trampoline routine that closes the show was my absolute favourite... the way they dive from the structure down onto the trampoline and then just step back into position as though they hadn't flung themselves into space is breathtaking to watch." - 4/5
    
    Bouncy Canadian circus performers... do I need to say more?
    
    
11. When There's No Strength In Men
    "Lorien excels as Rosalind/Ganymede and steals almost all of her scenes while pretending to be a man. In fact everyone seemed to be on top of their game in this section." - 4/5
    
    I always enjoy bite sized Shakespeare, and it would be fun to have this crew put on one of the comedies since they do those so well.
    
    
12. That Daring Australian Girl
    "Hartstone does a fantastic job embodying Matters, not only through a very proper British accent (even more difficult because Matters was a trained elocutionist), but also through a very energetic physicality." - 4/5
    
    This is one of those shows were you come away both knowing more than you did when you walked in, but also wanting to dig a little deeper.
    
    
13. 6 Quick Dick Tricks - A Dirk Darrow Investigation
    "He's here to amaze us with his keen mind and powers of deduction. Also puns... terrible, horrible, groan inducing puns. I mean they're funny... while being awful. But there are a lot of puns and dad jokes." - 4/5
    
    A master of misdirection and magical manipulation, but with more than his fair share of awful (possibly great) puns.
    
    
14. By A Thread
    "It's an elegant show though, a beautiful show. From the choices of costumes and colours to a lot of the staging and a number of the tricks... it's at times ethereal and weightless. Other times it's bold and flashy." - 3/5
    
    I still maintain that this may be one of the prettiest and most elegant shows we saw this year... it just needed a little more heft at times.
    
    
15. Circus'cision
    "Maybe some days or in some places there's a little more skin, and I won't lie that I was hoping for a little more, but it was still a fun show." - 3/5
    
    The problem with a show with a rotating cast is that you can never know what you're going to end up with... and while it was nice to see some "old friends", I think I was expecting a little more circus. But the circus I did get was great.
    
    
16. Grimm Tales
    "While it may not have been as dark as I was hoping, it does manage some distinct black comedy at times." - 3/5
    
    There were definitely great moments in this show, but a different venue may have helped.
    
    
17. Heathers: The Musical (High School Edition)
    "Camryn Jordans is spectacular in the role (of Veronica), not only does she have an amazing voice that can really belt out the big musical numbers, but she has some serious acting skills and great comic timing. And she makes it hard to look anywhere else but in her direction." - 3/5
    
    To be honest I didn't realise this was going to be a teen cast until after I'd bought the ticket, and it was definitely uneven, but there are a couple of names and faces I'll be keeping my eye on.
    
    
18. The Bridge
    "I feel like they have an interesting, if slightly short, story here, it just needed something more." - 2/5
    
    Definitely interesting... but it just didn't hit the mark for me.

And now there's nothing much to do but wait for Fringe to roll around again.

Current Mood:

fringe: by a thread

By A Thread is seven performers from One Fell Swoop Circus and a long, long length of white rope.

In essence the rope is the eighth performer in the show and changes moods and style along with the rest of the cast.

One of my favourite things about this show is that (almost) any time the rope is being held (or based) by any of the performers, they're on stage, where it can be seen. It becomes as much about the performers providing the support as it does the ones doing the tricks.

The other thing I really liked is that the women seem to act as bases as much as the men do, and conversely it's not just the women doing "pretty tricks"... sometimes it's the men doing pretty things and the women showing raw power. That always gets the thumbs up from me.

I did have the feeling that I'd seen at least a couple of the performers in other things, but I couldn't easily track down who was who or what they'd been in before.

It's an elegant show though, a beautiful show. From the choices of costumes and colours to a lot of the staging and a number of the tricks... it's at times ethereal and weightless. Other times it's bold and flashy. There was more than once where they introduced the rope into a trick I've seen in multiple other shows, which completely changed what happened. And a couple of interesting narrative moments. There are also a couple of "catch your breath" moments.

But I think that's the problem... there are only a couple of those moments. I know that I'm a little bit of a circus snob, but I also feel like I'm a little bit of a "connoisseur" (in inverted commas though) at this point, having seen a hell of a lot of circus acts over the years.

And while One Fell Swoop is very, very good... they're not outstanding. For the most part I was just content to clap, not gasp or hoot and holler like I've done for other shows.

There were a few times where what felt like they should have been relatively simple tricks didn't completely come together, or couldn't be maintained for more than a few seconds. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, they're at the end of their run, maybe they're not at their collective peaks, and it wasn't everything (mostly the tricks not being suspended from the rope), it was just every now and again. And this was the last show we're seeing this Fringe and it had been a long day, maybe I just wasn't feeling it.

If someone was going to see it and asked my opinion, I'd say that it was a beautiful show, and worth seeing, especially if your circus show experience is limited... but I'd probably also suggest at least three other circus shows that they should see after this one.

Don't get me wrong, they are very, very good... and I'll definitely be putting them on the "let's see what they do next" list, they just didn't blow my socks off this time around.

yani's rating: 3 white ropes out of 5

photo saturday: cloudy beach huts

Okay... so not really your usual week (or my usual week for that matter) this week.

Monday was a public holiday... which of course means both diddly and squat to me right at the moment. DnD was still on on Monday night, which I kind of didn't expect, and it seemed like a bunch of shops were open, so, weird, but sure okay.

We had a very young, first time Adventurers League DM (he'd obviously been running for quite a while, just not for AL), who was fairly impressive overall. I mean his miniatures and terrain were definitely more than I've ever seen for an AL game ever, but very cool. The only downside was he had to leave before we finished the module, so that's a bit of a pain.

I mean there was also the fact that we were originally going to be a small (and good) party of 3, and that would have been good... but then we ended up with 3 other players, a couple of whom fall more into the "let's try and be humorous but mostly come across as annoying" genre, the other one I'm just over in general.

Tuesday I made a pretty good risotto, especially since I was half following half of a recipe I found online and half making things up.

Wednesday was my actual birthday, much of which I covered in my birthday post. I'm still not sure if I would have preferred to play the DnD game I went into town expecting to play, or the one we ended up with... I think it was probably a swings and roundabouts kind of situation, although I would have gotten home earlier if it was the former.

Thursday wasn't much of anything, during the day anyway... but in the evening I ran my "birthday game" of DnD... only in so much as a) it was the game I'd selected within a week of my birthday to be able to give out additional items and get extra things for some of my own characters and b) was the day after my birthday.

I did get a brief rendition of Happy Birthday from the reprobates I usually either play with or run for on a Thursday, so that was nice. But I will say that as a party, and this includes my own character, we are so fucking overpowered at this point. And we're not really that high a level. We're just kind of ridiculous as a group. Which is great when I'm playing... slightly less so when I'm trying to run for the little sociopaths (and I mostly mean the characters... mostly).

Friday was a general exercise in "you have a thing you need to do later tonight, everything else is just killing time until then". Annoying, but true.

And by the time I saw the show, which was running late, resisted the urge to kill the group of homosexuals who were lined up in front of me because they were essentially vacuous, came home, wrote it up and whatever else, it was getting on for around 2am, which also explains why I didn't wake up this morning until after 8am.

So that threw any possibility of me getting to Norwood and voting early out the proverbial window.

It was also a weird old morning... cloudy by with a very warm wind, especially following on from all the rain we had yesterday. Methinks the autumnal weather is asserting itself, finally. It usually comes in with a vengeance about a week after Fringe where we suddenly go from weather suitable for shorts to weather suitable for hoodies within the same 7 day period.

But I went and voted... which was much less well organised than last time. And it seems like we're about the have a change in government for the first time since 2002... to which I say... m'eh. Not a fucking thing will change, because it never does... but I do know that people I used to work with will be very busy once the usual reshuffling gets announced. And having lived through several variations of those shufflings before and after 2002, they are welcome to them.

And that's the maximum amount I will talk about politics for the next however many years.

Ma was getting her hair did today, so I was voting and shopping on my own, which was useful given how super late I was running. And on top of that I had to remember to actually buy enough stuff to see me through the week, since I won't have pre-Fringe dinners to prop me up this week.

Anyway, I got home in enough time to unpack, do some tidying up and then watch some stuff on YouTube before Ma arrived.

The problem was that we had a whole day (well, from around 11am until about 6:30pm) to fill and nothing to do. Which will be the one up side to the Fringe ending... we won't have to fill in time if we have nothing we want to do.

But fill it we did, between stopping off at the Market on Flinders (mostly disappointing, although that stall at the back that sells all sorts of random things from estate sales is pretty much my kryptonite), then scoping out some street art cubes in Hindmarsh Square, before wandering down the Mall "looking at things", stopping off in the odd store or two. We figured that, all things considered, it seemed silly to leave a perfectly good car park to come back to my place for a couple of hours, then have to try and find one again. So we, in essence, loitered around.

We went back and sat in Hindmarsh Square for a while until it started to rain, then we took refuge in the car for a while before heading down to Max Brenner for some chocolatey goodness.

Then we headed down to Gluttony and just hung around for a while watching the people go by. Okay, that partially included being very interested in the nice people from one of those places that take reptiles and other animals to schools and whatnot... because snakes.

Until finally it was showtime... or at least "show lining up time". And, as always, the lining up part of Fringe is the part that I will not miss.

After the show we considered stopping somewhere for pizza... but Rundle Street, on the last night of the Fringe, which also happens to be a Saturday and happens to be St Patrick's Day... forget about it. So we stopped at Fasta Pasta instead.

And that, as they say, was that. Both for the day and for the Fringe.

Sometime next week I need to sit down and work though my round-up post... in between preparing for my rental inspection the week after this one.

Current Mood:

fringe: circus'cision

Circus'cision is what happens when the boys from Elixir invite their friends to come and play...

And because it's a rotating cast depending on the day, the show I saw may not be the show you see. With the exception of the Elixir boys, Cal Harris (acting as the MC), Thomas Gorham and Rowan Thomas.

Oh, and when Harris asks the audience if anybody needs a cuddle during his opening spiel I'm never NOT going to put my hand up. The audience seemed amused and I got a hug from one of my favourite circus performers, so everybody wins.

But back to the show.

Tonight's line up started with Chelsea Angell and some beautiful work on the hula hoops... not to mention excellent music choices and a sassy attitude.

Next up was Paul Dabek who we've seen a couple of times before with a brief magic/comedy act that I think just whizzed over a few people's heads. I think I've said before that he sets the speed of his show at about 100 miles per hour and it's either get on board or get run over.

Then Harris and Gorham did a slightly sexy, slightly disturbing take on season 1 of Game of Thrones... which was one of those moments when I kind of wished I'd sat at the front of the stage rather than the side.

Next up (and I know I'm probably screwing the order up at some point) was a female juggler whose name I unfortunately didn't catch, but she was very good... more of a bouncing juggler than a throwing juggler, but damn she was fast.

After that I think Harris came out and did something weird and a little bit gross, but still interesting with a balloon.

From there it was a gentleman by the name of Squid with acute hypermobility, who proceeded to pass his whole body through the stringless head of a tennis racket. He reminded me of Captain Frodo from La Soiree to be honest, although I suppose there are only so many ways to contort yourself through a racket.

Then finishing up was Thomas and his cyr wheel. I know I've mentioned this about 100 times before, but I honestly think that the cyr wheel is the sexiest of all the circus equipment (as well as the most potentially lethal)... and the fact that Thomas proceeded to strip (to, of course, You Can Leave Your Hat On) while using the wheel certainly didn't hurt.

He also humped my head very briefly at one point... not the first time that's ever happened during a Fringe show, to be honest, I can think of at least three times of the top of my head, even though one of those was a puppet.

And as promised on the poster, there is a brief moment of full frontal nudity when Thomas flashes the audience before disappearing back stage. Maybe some days or in some places there's a little more skin, and I won't lie that I was hoping for a little more, but it was still a fun show.

yani's rating: 3 balloon animals out of 5

fringe: the man in the mail

Every now and again the Fringe drops a show in my lap that I would never have otherwise seen by being in the right place at the right time.

The Man in the Mail was that show for this year's Fringe.

This solo show by Joshua Phillips is incredibly sweet and cleverly conceived and executed, with Phillips playing "the man in the box" who started as "the boy in the box" but then travelled the world having increasingly fanciful and exotic adventures and now finds himself here.

One of the tiny details that I love is that as far as I can remember, Phillips never leaves the space bounded by his wooden box once he opens it to the audience's gaze. It's a tiny thing and one that's easily missed, but once i realised it it made me smile.

The design of the box and all it's props is likewise wonderful, with everything perfectly placed, and containing a number of small details that never really get shown off, but are there anyway.

Part play and part circus/physical theatre, the show sometimes takes its time getting from A to B, but given the theme of the show, it's definitely more about the journey than the destination. Phillips does a small number of tricks, but does them well and with a lot of personality, including a couple that I really haven't seen other people do before, one including balancing on sticks and the other including a door.

I did find myself a little more involved than I've been in most of the shows this year as I was called on first as "chair passer" and then as "hat catcher and thrower", which as anyone who knows me can tell you is not my forte. And it's remarkably difficult to get a hat to fly in a straight line. But I didn't do too badly overall.

This is definitely a show that it's worth your time to get better acquainted with.

yani's rating: 4 black top hats out of 5

fringe: sound and fury's cyranose

Many, many times when watching Sound and Fury's previous shows I've wondered to myself just how in control Richard, Patrick and Ryan really are at any given moment and how close to spinning off the rails the show really is.

In the best possible way, you understand. It's one of the things I love most about them.

Tonight I think we came as close as humanly possible to that. And it was glorious.

With the lovely Clayton subbing in for Ryan on this tour and Andrew, aka the emergency version of Patrick (who had to unexpectedly head home due to an emergency a few days ago), who had a whole four shows under his belt and his script firmly in hand, Cyranose was barely controlled chaos. Again, in the best possible way.

Clayton is a perfect fit for Sound and Fury, and did remind me of the illegitimate lovechild of Richard and Patrick (is it any wonder given how they're looking at each other in the poster image)... He also reminded me a lot of Patrick performance-wise (that barely controlled comedy whirlwind I always associate with my favourite redheaded Fakespearean... so that's definitely a compliment), and I can only imagine a show with Clayton and Patrick together would have been something to see (pssst Richard, please bring Clayton again another time).

He's also incredibly cheeky and charming and very easy to look at, which never hurts. He also had the "quick change after quick change after quick change" role in the show, and did very well.

Andrew is still white-knuckling his way through the show right now, but that's not without it's own charm and moments of pure improvised/unexpected comedy, but for basically picking up the script at the last minute and this being his fourth or fifth performance, he's doing incredibly well.

And poor Richard has to keep this train on the tracks as it careens around the corners at breakneck speed. But he does it as stylishly as always and in verse more often than not (which I didn't realise was a feature of the original play they're riffing on).

This show does to Cyrano de Bergerac what they've previously done to Hitchcock, Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes and the entire fantasy and fairy tale genres. And between jokes about the letter N and the invention of sarcasm, I can't quite decide if it became funnier because the show threatened to dissolve at any moment or if this was already one of their better shows or some combination of both, but I did laugh myself silly more than once.

As always the show hovers between the very high and the very low brow, which is how I like it, and I would definitely say that as far as Sound and Fury shows goes, this one is more than a little unique, so get in and see it before this trio goes their separate ways.

Also, we're sending much love and thoughts to Patrick and hope to see you again next year.

yani's rating: 5 croissants out of 5

it's my (44th) birthday

It's a repdigit birthday... I always like those. Although I didn't actually know there was a special name for the numbers until I looked it up just now.

And as always, happy birthday to those gentlemen who happen to share my birth day and month... including basketballer Stephen Curry, Johan Paulik, Jamie Bell, Taylor Hanson, Michael Caine, Chris Klein, Albert Einstein, Corey Stoll, Daniel Gillies, Ansel Elgort and Demetrius Joyette.

Today was fairly standard for a Wednesday, a day during the Fringe and as far as my birthdays go to be honest.

I headed into town this morning for DnD, picked up my free birthday Boost Juice on the way in, had an extra long but not uneventful game of DnD (not the game I was expecting to play, but that DM couldn't make it in today), came home to find Ma waiting for me along with my presents, then we headed into town, had some dinner and headed off to a Fringe show.

Then because it turned out that our tickets to that show also got us free tickets to another show in the same venue about half an hour later we stuck around for that.

So I basically walked out of the house around 9am and came back long enough to put my DnD stuff down and change my t-shirt before I headed out again and got home at about 11pm.

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fringe: that daring australian girl

Muriel Matters was an "Australian born suffragist, lecturer, journalist, educator, actress, and elocutionist".

And given that 2018 is the 100 year anniversary of when women in Britain ("over the age of 30, meeting certain property qualification") were granted the right to vote, this one woman play written and performed by Joanne Hartstone and directed by Nicholas Collett feels all the more appropriate.

Especially since she was a name I wasn't familiar with, and she was born and raised here in South Australia.

On a related note, I also had no idea that women in SA had the right to vote and were the first to be able to stand for parliament in 1895.

Hartstone does a fantastic job embodying Matters, not only through a very proper British accent (even more difficult because Matters was a trained elocutionist), but also through a very energetic physicality.

Initially I was worried that the story was jumping too quickly from one moment of her life to another, but the initial jumps just lay in who she is before the show really gets down to explore it. Also by the end of the play you realise that while Matters had passions that lasted throughout her entire life, she also jumped quickly from one thing to the next, so it feels appropriate in that way.

Tom Kitney's production/set design is great, allowing Hartstone to use and adapt pieces of set dressing into other items as she tells her story... it feels very theatrical, but in the best possible way (especially given that Matters definitely had a flair for the dramatic).

Likewise the costumes by Nikki Fort seem period appropriate but also allow for various costume and character changes throughout the show.

I also need to give Hartstone addition kudos for finishing the play after it was halted for a good half hour when a woman in the audience was taken ill. Not only did she calmly stop everything and get the woman assistance (and kudos to the staff at Holden Street Theatre for everything they did), but she came back once the situation had been taken care of and picked up right where she left off.

yani's rating: 4 sashes out of 5

fringe: a simple space

Gravity and Other Myths and I go all the way back to 2011 when we saw Freefall... then it was A Simple Space in 2013, 2015 and 2016 followed by their Festival show, Backbone in 2017... then this year we went back for another viewing of A Simple Space

To put it simply (pun entirely at your discretion), A Simple Space is a show I could watch 100 times and not get bored.

Not only because the show keeps evolving, even if only in small ways, or with the addition of new performers, but because I love being a part of the energy that GOM has, if only for an hour at a time.

I've said if before and I'll say it again (and in fact I said it to someone while waiting in line), GOM are the group I judge all other acrobats against. They're the gold standard as far as I'm concerned, both in the way they put their shows together but also in how they interact with each other and with the audience.

And there's also the fact that they're all so goddamn talented.

Joining the original cast of Lachlan Binns, Jacob Randell, Martin Schreiber and musician Elliot Zoerner once again are Lachlan Harper and Joanne Curry along with new(er)comers (both of whom were in Backbone) Meike Lizotte and Jack Manson.

I know I say this every single time, but the Lachlans remain my personal favourites... Binns because of his cheeky energy (and I was very lucky enough to get given an excellently rendered balloon dog from him during the show... although thanks to an unfortunate picnic table accident after the show it didn't live long enough to be photographed) and Harper just because of the way he moves through space (and those backflips... so many backflips).

The fact that they're both so damn gorgeous doesn't hurt in the slightest.

It was interesting to see some of the tricks I'm very familiar with performed by different people, made it all feel fresh again.

I also love the way they ramp the energy up the longer the show goes on, especially during the sequence were the female performers are being tossed from hand to hand, they should all be exhausted by that point in the show, but the chatter back and forth really lifts the energy in the room (doubly so because of how damn hot it was during the midday show).

I could ramble on all day about this trick or that trick or how great a particular sequence was, but at the end of the day they're always excellent, they're always worth seeing and there are too many reasons to list as to why they're my gold standard for circus and physical theatre.

So if you've never seen them, you have 7 chances left this Fringe... don't even wait, just do it!

yani's rating: 5 balloon animals out of 5

photo saturday: green grafitti

This week was fairly busy all things considered.

Sunday I had two Fringe shows, not quite back-to-back, but close enough together that I just hung around in the city between them. And then I went and misbehaved for a while afterwards, which was nice, since it's been a while.

Then Monday was DnD, which wasn't perhaps as bad as last week's game... although the more I play the more that either Munchkinism (in the less pejorative sense) or Min-Maxing bothers me. I mean I get the idea of putting together a character who does the very best they can, but those people who don't really have a character with a personality, they're just a collection of stats, tricks and a massive amount of damage... that bugs me. Suffice to say there was one of those players in the game on Monday.

Also, those people who barely pay attention to what's going on until it's their turn bug me too. I mean why are you even playing the game if you're not interested in the game.

But anyway... nerd related whinge over.

Tuesday was Haircut Night... and the first time I've driven up to Tink's place in the hills in the evening... which wasn't too bad, all things considered. The haircut was the same old same old, this time was a colour as well... perhaps not quite as silvery as previous attempts, but still good.

Wednesday was also DnD, where my character who is trapped in Barovia got her finger bitten off by a werewolf. This is the same character who has also accidentally been turned into a werewolf (temporarily), died and been resurrected with the Dark Gift of an upside down male face on the back of her head, magically aged 20 years (not so bad for a dwarf who was essentially in their version of her 20's)  and had a streak of white appear in her hair (I could have made it all of her hair, but this suits her aesthetic better). I mean it's not the worst Barovian experience I've seen or heard about, but she's definitely been through the most trauma of all my characters.

Yeah, creative storytelling...

Then after DnD, Ma and I had a Fringe show, so we went to dinner at the Empress Restaurant around the corner from my place. I've been meaning to go there since it opened just after I moved here, but never got around to it... which turns out to have been a mistake since it's really, really, really good.

Thursday was more DnD... and I had been intending to check with my regular group to see what we were doing, but I figured they were all big enough and ugly enough to make their own decisions... which of course didn't happen. And so I ended up running. Because of course I did. I mean I didn't mind, and I did put the module in my bag before I left the house because I had a feeling. And I got to run for someone who I think of as a great DM, and who has DMed for us a lot in the past, so that was nice. Plus I'm in love with more than a few of his characters, and this was a new one that was no exception.

Friday was mostly a whole lot of nothing, but I did have my chiro appointment in the afternoon... which was a bit of a pain just because the weather is a bit rubbish (ie too damn hot again) at present.

Today has been... actually not terribly exciting overall to be honest... but we did have two Fringe shows, including a midday maintee.

This morning was a little bit of a blah shopping expedition... neither of us really bought a whole bunch, which isn't really surprising given the amount we've been out and about of late.

Before the first show, we had a bit of a pointless wander around town, saw the show, grabbed some lunch and came back to the car only to discover that the car park fee had accumulated up to $30... which, can I just say, is a big case of fuck the fuck off.

Then we came back here to kill some time in the air-conditioned comfort of my place (after a brief stop off at Haighs to get our Easter shopping sorted) until it was time to go to dinner before the second show. I mean dinner was a complete disaster and we should have gone back to Empress instead of the incredibly crappy place we ended up instead.

There was also a bit of drama during the show when a woman was taken ill towards the end and the show was stopped and we all went outside while the ambulance came, but the performer was able to finish her show eventually for those of us who were left.

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fringe: box and cox

Mrs Bouncer has a room to let. Mr Box is at work all night and home all day, Mr Cox is at work all day and home all night. Mrs Bouncer sees an opportunity. So long as they never meet, what could possibly go wrong.

Box and Cox is a one act farce written by John Maddison Morton (based on a French original) in 1847 and performed in 2018 by Maniacal Arts.

Or more specifically by Jake McNamara as Box, Declan Carter as Cox and Emma Austin as Mrs Bouncer.

The three of them are wonderfully over the top and ridiculous in that Victorian farcical way but everything they do suits the material perfectly. Carter is wonderfully pompous and McNamara is equal parts sly and dimwitted.

I do wish that we'd seen a little bit more of Austin, as she regularly stole every scene she was in, which is no small feet up against McNamara and Carter.

The play itself holds up impressively well for being over 170 years old and reminded me more than once of something like The Importance of Being Earnest (although perhaps not as sharply written as Wilde, but still good), with all the kind of ridiculous happenstance and coincidences that abound in farces.

The staging is simple but effective, I did wonder initially if we, the front row of the audience, weren't a little close to everything, but once things started it didn't feel that way at all.

yani's rating: 4 lucifers out of 5

fringe: intoxication

Christopher Bryant's show, Intoxication, is a very intimate show. Especially when it's his last show and there are only ten people in the audience. And it's a very small room.

But mostly because Bryant gives a lot of eye contact, regularly, and throughout the show.

Intoxication is the result of a traumatic accident and an addiction and finding a way out of bad relationships.

According to Bryant's prologue the show is pieced together from numerous bits of writing he did while recovering from the accident and the addiction. It's part stream of consciousness, part yell into the void, railing against those parts of the modern world that make us closer and further apart at the same time and part break-up letter to a self involved asshole boyfriend.

And there's a lot of great writing and performing from Bryant, but I think that the thing that really pulls the whole thing together into a consistent whole is that sense of intimacy. Because it's hard not to really hear what someone is saying while they're looking you straight in the eye and you're looking back.

There is also a lot of the show that is as relevant to a 20-something self confessed millennial like Bryant as to a 40-something like me and I found myself wanting to nod in agreement at a number of the things he said as he made eye contact with me.

While some of the things he talks about come from a specifically gay sensibility, others are just about people trying to work out what love is and why is it so hard.

If this hadn't been the last show I would be urging people to go and see it right now... but if you run across the show anywhere else, go and see it.

yani's rating: 5 sequinned jackets out of 5

fringe: 6 quick dick tricks - a dirk darrow investigation

This is the third time I've seen Dirk Darrow.

The first time I was the last part of the show. The second time I made $5. This time I didn't get picked for anything at all.

But I think this was the most I've seen an audience screw up their participation. And I'm saying this as someone who couldn't read the time on a watch correctly.

I don't know if it was the fact they were a Sunday crowd, or an afternoon matinee crowd or a post car racing crowd or all of the above... or what... but wow. Not least of all because people were still showing up 15 minutes into the show.

But on to the show itself.

Dirk Darrow (aka Tim Motley) is still a hard-boiled 1940's detective who... fell through a hole in the space time continuum and ended up in Miami? I think. I'm not sure exactly... I know he started to tell that story at one point, but I feel like there was a gap between him in the 40's and the Miami thing.

He's here to amaze us with his keen mind and powers of deduction. Also puns... terrible, horrible, groan inducing puns. I mean they're funny... while being awful. But there are a lot of puns and dad jokes.

Unlike the previous two shows, this one feels a lot more broken up by the tricks of the title (and for the record, it's "dick" as in private dick aka detective... not the other kind). Which isn't bad... there's still something of a throughline but it's a lot more focused on the tricks themselves this time.

When he can get people to actually play along properly, Darrow/Motley is good at what he does. Every time I go to see this kind of show I come away from it with the shape of some of the tricks... I know that for this trick I've just seen to work, these three elements have to have happened. And I might know how one of them is done... but there's always something were I just have no idea what the hell happened. Or at least how it got from A to B. And sometimes I know precisely what has to have happened. But I never saw any of it.

And I like that... I like being able to feel the edges of these tricks, because then if you can do all of that and I don't see any of the seams, you're putting on a damn good show. Which is exactly what Motley delivers.

yani's rating: 4 gumshoes out of 5

fringe: when there's no strength in men

Following on from last year's Hamlet and Shakespeare's Ménage a Trois, the Raw Shakespeare Project returned this year with When There's No Strength in Men.

Shakespeare has a lot of strong female characters, and characters from three plays are on show here, Lady Macbeth, Katherine of France from Henry V and Rosalind from Orlando and Rosalind.

In fact there's a double dose in the Orlando and Rosalind section, as they take the cross dressing and deception of Shakespeare to the next level by having Orlando also be a woman disguised as a man.

Leah Anderson reprises her role as Lady Macbeth from Menage and while she does well, I still find her a little stiff, although clearly that's an acting choice. Her habit of delivering much of her dialogue very fast through clenched teeth however does make some of it difficult to understand. And it's odd because she's a lot easier to understand in the comedy roles.

Russell Slater makes for a good Macbeth, and I think the first one I've maybe ever seen wearing a kilt.

Isabella Shaw is impressive as Katherine of France, a little like last time she commands attention whenever she's on stage, and I was most impressed that she was managing not just Shakespeare but Shakespeare in French during this sequence. Slater makes for a menacing Henry during this sequence and Damien White has a good turn as the foppish King Charles of France.

Then after the tragical and the historical, it was time for the comical. And a play I am mostly unfamiliar with, As You Like It. Shaw returns as the genderbending Orlando while Amelia Lorien becomes her Rosalind.

Lorien was also doing brief interludes between the sections, singing various sonnets and a part of Loves Labours Lost with musical accompaniment from Kim Orchard. She has a beautiful singing voice and Orchard is a skilled musician, so they were quite lovely sections.

But Lorien excels as Rosalind/Ganymede and steals almost all of her scenes while pretending to be a man. In fact everyone seemed to be on top of their game in this section... Lorien and Shaw as the lovers, Anderson as first Rosalind's cousin and then a slightly lusty shepherdess, White as the fool, Touchstone and Slater as the lovesick shepherd.

The staging of the whole production was interesting... presented not so much "in the round" as "in a line between two banks of audience", the set was virtually non existent, being two standing boards at either end where the actors could duck away and a central lighting rig (and more than once I'm sure the actors semi blinded themselves by looking directly into those lights), but it all works.

I'm hoping at some stage they just put three of Shakespeare's comedies together... that would be a fun evening.

yani's rating: 4 maidens fair out of 5

movies: black panther

While the overall quality of Marvel movies is pretty high, every now and again they absolutely hit something out of the park.

Black Panther is that something.

Writer/director Ryan Coogler and his co-writer Joe Robert Cole have put together a story that both fits the mould of a Marvel movie but at the same time breaks it. It's an origin story without being an origin story since everything you need to know about the origins of the Black Panther is covered in the opening narration.

And for once there's a villain character that actually has a personality and more of a backstory than any of the previous ones.

A lot of this is the story, some of this is the directing, but I think that a lot of it comes down to the fact that Coogler has put together an outstandingly talented cast. There really isn't a single bad performance from anyone in this movie.

Chadwick Boseman showed us what he was capable of in Captain America: Civil War and he continues to do that in this movie but at the risk of having the internet beat me up and steal my lunch money, as good as Boseman is, he's probably one of the least interesting (major) character in Black Panther.

And a lot of that is because of the women of Black Panther... Danai Gurira as Okoye, Letitia Wright as Shuri, Lupita Nyong'o as Nakia... hell, even Angela Bassett as Ramonda... these are strong, capable women with personalities and dimension. For me though, it's all about Gurira, she manages to make the warrior general of the king's guard interesting, funny, graceful, strong and magnetic. And watching her and some of the other Dora Milaje when they're being bodyguards... they never stop looking around, scanning everything and everyone. It was a tiny detail but they got it so spot on and it added so much.

Michael B. Jordan plays, I think it's safe to say, the most interesting Marvel movie villain yet. And the one who looks absolutely amazing with his shirt off too. But the character has actual reasons for what he's doing and while what he wants to do is bad, he's doing it for the right reasons.

That's one of the things that struck me about this story to be honest... there are many conflicting viewpoints and some people clearly want to do or are doing "the wrong thing", but almost everyone is coming at it from the exact same place or as I said before, for either right or understandable reasons... which is fairly unique is superhero movies in general and Marvel movies specifically.

And speaking of beautiful men... Winston Duke sprawled on his throne in his mountain lair is a beautiful man. But again, M'Baku is the kind of character you don't expect to be who he turns out to be. Which just proves how much Coogler understands character and story.

I also think the fact that Coogler brought people he's worked with before over to work on this movie, including cinematographer Rachel Morrison, production designer Hannah Beachler and composer Ludwig Göransson... which was obviously a very good choice. Especially the former two, because this movie looks amazing.

From the aforementioned mountain lair throne room to all of the costumes, weapons, buildings, all of the graphic design, basically everything visual. It's all so, so good.

If I had any quibbles, it would be the very, very, very minor one that I kind of prefer the Black Panther costume from Civil War, mostly because of how much I was in love with the first helmet. But they've changed the Captain America suit, what, like five times now? I'll survive.

Given how much money this took on it's opening weekend, I'm not sure I need to suggest to anyone that they should go and see this movie... but just in case... go and see this movie.

yani's rating: 5 vibranium gadgets out of 5

photo friday: brick faces

I'm am definitely running out of photos that easily match up together...

This week has been less full... only three Fringe shows... Sunday, Wednesday and today.

And three fairly functional games of DnD. None of which I've had to DM because the group who I promised to DM for have disappeared, which is fine. We did finally finish a module we started back at the beginning of November, as that group hasn't really all been in the same place at the same time since.

The rest of the week was very uneventful. And one of those weeks were I really couldn't get my ass into gear particularly well.

Today was a long day... we probably could have made it less long but we didn't. Our only Fringe show was at 8pm, but Ma still came down first thing in the morning so we could go shopping... and then we had like 10 hours to fill.

We managed to fill them by going to Marion (since the Fringe show was in Marion), wandering around Westfield and then going to the movies. Then we grabbed some dinner before heading off to the show.

That's literally my whole week. Seven paragraphs, two of which ostensibly have nothing to do with the week itself.

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