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