The Man with No Time

It's another Warwick Student Cinema film catch-up review. This time around I'll be taking a look at RED 2. I watched RED on one of the postgraduate film nights that we used to hold in the Astronomy group up in St Andrews. It was surprisingly entertaining, and really rather funny. I wasn't expecting a sequel to be made, but was pleasantly surprised when I saw that there was one. It wasn't top of my list of films to see, so much like After Earth  I didn't make too much of an effort to go to a "proper" cinema to see it, but when it was on at the student cinema I thought 'why not?' What a cast! For this kind of film you wouldn't expect it to work necessarily, but somehow it does. (Credit: joblo.com)

It's a funny thing, but over the four years that I've spent in St Andrews I've only been to the Edinburgh Fringe festival for one day. Even that was only because a friend was up in Edinburgh and asked if I fancied seeing a couple of shows. I think it's one of those "you could go anytime, so you never actually get around to it" things. Well this weekend, with my girlfriend visiting St Andrews for the last time, I decided to do something about it. We spent most of the weekend in Edinburgh, and managed to see nine shows over two days. Since there's so much happening at the Fringe, we decided to limit ourselves to comedy shows., and to stick to free events as much as possible. We had a quick look through the website on Friday and picked out a couple of things we wanted to see.  But we weren't prepared for just how busy the Fringe was, how many people there would be, and how early we would need to start queuing for some of the shows! (Credit: s...

And now for something a little different from the run of Hollywood blockbusters and superhero films. Simon Pegg is back with the last in the 'Cornetto' trilogy, which means that it's comedy time. A loosely thematic trilogy rather than a story-based one, the 'Cornetto trilogy' comprises films that each involve a different colour, i.e. a different flavour of Cornetto. The 'red' film was "Shaun of the Dead", an excellent zom-rom-com (as Pegg termed it) that I've seen many times. The 'blue' film was "Hot Fuzz" which I'm told is an excellent buddy-cop style film. I own it on DVD but, to my chagrin, have never watched it. The final film is the 'green' instalment: "The World's End". Figuring out why it's the 'green' film is part of the fun, but the film as a whole is an excellent experience that had me laughing out loud the whole way through. I love this poster. It's so old-sc...

On my way to Le Mans I stopped off in Birmingham to see Bill Bailey’s latest tour, Qualmpeddler. I’ve wanted to see Bill Bailey live for quite some time now, but have always been out of luck. Either I’ve been busy during the convenient dates, or I’ve found out about it too late to get tickets. This time I was able to find out about the tour far enough in advance to make sure I got tickets. The poster for the Qualmpeddler tour. (Credit: billbailey.co.uk)