Festival Report VI

Last weekend saw the last 3 films of my Edinburgh International Film Festival attendence. Friday was a rather strange French film based on a Japanese novel, The Ring Finger which incidentaly is also my 500th film reviewed on the site. Saturday was half documentary, half fiction movie How is your fish today?. And Sunday was my last film, Al Gore's environmental documentary An Inconvienent Truth.

Festival Report V

Wednesday was the biggest day in our Film Festival line with a bumper three shows in a row (12,13 &14). They seemed to view in decreasing order of enjoyability and rather strangely were all mostly character driven, seems this year most of the Film Festival films have either been character driven or black comedies. Anway, the films were Luxury Car, Midnight my Love and 3 Degrees Colder.

Last night (Thursday) was Horror night at the Cameo with show 15 being the rather good The Lost during which a woman next to be screamed then ran away. Show 16 was the disappointingly boring H6: Diary of a Serial Killer. Again both films were character driven rather than having a plot, so I'm kind of hoping tonight's film is along a more straightforward line, but it is French, so could be pretentious art-house toss :)

Festival Report IV

As pretty much all my Festival shows are Film Festival ones from now on, I restrained from writing an update each day as the films are all reviewed on my website anyway. So to recap since Sunday afternoon, I've been to another 4. Sunday saw show number 8, Little Miss Sunshine, a dark comedy about a dysfunctional family taking a road trip.

Monday night I went to show No. 9 which was Mirrorball: Made in Japan; a series of short films and music videos from Japanese directors. The show got off to a good start with two videos from Electro-J-Pop outfit Polysics featuring some bodypoppin' schoolgirls, things from there on were a little sketchy, some decent shorts (including an MTV one featuring robot JCBs under attack from seals!), some terrible Japanese boy bands "Your life is super entertainment", far too much Rip Slyme for one evening. All in all, a bit of a mixed bag, but worth seeing.

Last Night was shows 10 and 11 at Cineworld, first one was Shut up and Shoot Me another Black Comedy, this time about a man who can't cope with the loss of his wife, so tries to pay another man to kill him. The idea was alright, but the movie wasn't amazing. Second up was Hotel Harabati. Again the premise sounded promising, a couple discover a left bag full of money at a train station on their way to Venice and decide to keep it and skip the trip. To be fair, the film was pretty good up until it ended with large parts of the plot left deliberately unexplained.

Gigaton

Way back in June last year, I wrote a post about how amazing the Japanese Metal scene sounds, one of the bands I talked about was Gigaton and their slogan "Ultra High Speed Death Thrash Attack". About a month ago, I emailed Gigaton to see if there was any way I could get my hands on a CD and T-Shirt from the band. I got a mail back from Abe, the lead singer, he didn't know of any way I could send him the 3000 yen for the T-Shirt/CD so he came up with a pretty good plan, he'd send me the Gigaton stuff and in exchange I would send him a CD and T-Shirt from an underground band in the UK.

He was pretty quick at sending the stuff and soon I was the proud owner of 2 Gigaton T-Shirts (one with blue writing and one with red), both sporting the "Ultra High Speed Death Thrash Attack" slogan and a copy of their Album "Warning" on CD. The album is pretty good and the T-Shirts rule. I had a problem though, I had to find an underground UK band that Abe would like who had both T-Shirts and CDs for sale.

After a couple of weeks of searching, I had come up with a band called Sylosis who I had seen supporting Pitchshifter and who were pretty good. I pre-ordered their E.P. from their record label website and crossed my fingers that I'd be able to get my hands on a T-Shirt. Alas, the CD was released and sent to me but there was no way of buying a T-Shirt online, so I had to find another band for Abe.

This was proving a little difficult as it was now a good 6 weeks since I had received the Gigaton stuff and I was beginning to feel a little guilty. I finally discovered another band on the same label as Psylosis; Architects. I promptly ordered a T-Shirt and CD, waited a couple of days for them to arrive, played the CD, sighed with relief when it was quite good, popped it in a jiffy bag and it winged its way to Japan.

Luckily it all arrived in Japan fine, and Abe liked the CD so everyone's a winner!

Festival Report III

A little late in the write up due to the Amplifico Highland Safari, but last Wednesday saw festival shows 6 and 7, another 2 Film Festival showings. The first, Art School Confidential which was a reasonably good comedy affair from Bad Santa director Terry Zwigoff. The second was a director's showcase for Bong Joon-Ho's latest movie The Host an amazingly fun, scary and darkly comic Monster movie.

Festival Report II

Well, last night was Festival shows 4 and 5 for me, first was the EIFF and Chinese film Summer Palace (Review Here). After the movie, Rosie and I headed down to the EICC to see Bill Bailey.

His latest show "Steampunk" covers a variety of subjects, including; Star Wars, Existentialism, Post Modernism, Celebrities and the old comedy favourites Politics and Religion. I've only really seen Bill Bailey on TV in shows like Black Books/Never mind the Buzzcocks where he plays roles in which he is a bit weird and is the butt of a lot of the jokes, so I didn't really know what to expect from him as a stand up comedian. I was pleasantly surprised, the content of the show was high brow and interspersed with comic music numbers, Bailey is hilariously funny whether he is talking about his loath for J-Lo, or post modernism. I highly recommend anyone with a chance go see the show.

DS Lite vs Netgear DG834GT

I've got a Netgear DG834GT router, which kind of worked with my original DS (Didn't work with WEP but worked unsecured. A couple of months ago after my brother bought an imported DS Lite, he came round, tried to connect to my router which completely jammed it up. Once I power cycled it, I found that it had completely reset (which wasn't so good since I didn't have my ADSL username/pass stored on my PC (my ISP had emailed it to my web based email account)). I thought nothing of it and assumed it was a one of thing.

Well, yesterday my mate Neil comes round with his DS Lite, tries to connect, jams my router, I power cycled it to get it working again and it had reset back to factory settings again. (I didn't learn my lesson the first time and still didn't have my username/pass stored on my PC!). So it appears my router doesn't like the DS Lite.

I checked tonight and if I power cycle the router without attempting any kind of DS Lite connection and when it came back up my settings were kept. Therefore I can only assumit's something to do with the DS Lite that causes it to reset back to its factory default.

Festival Report I

Last night I attended my third Festival show for the year. The first two were Acoustic Edinburgh and Nizlopi. The latest show is the incredible "Jump", a Korean martial arts comedy. The show loosley tells the story of a couple of robbers breaking into the house of a family of martial artists. The comedy comes mainly from visual gags and slapstick and the whole show is made up of a number of routines, combing dance, gymnastics and martial arts. Some of the moves are amazing and there is constantly something hilarious or awe inspiring going on. I saw "Jump" last year and the show is pretty much the same but still stunning to watch, if you haven't seen it already, book your tickets now, one not to miss.