Saw Rob Newman tonight - he was very funny, educated and smart. But his show would definitely have worked better as, say, four 1-hour documentaries, shown by the BBC. I hope someone gives them to him. Photos Below
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Having been in early to work a couple of times recently and had _two_ films at the festival finish after midnight, I was a tad tired yesterday.  Also, by (a) working hard and (b) being smart, we've finished all of the things that needed to be done to get the latest version of our software into production.

I therefore took this morning off, and am still in my dressing gown at 11am.  I'm going to pop in this afternoon to do a last few things before the weekend, but getting 10 hours sleep last night was _great_.

In the meantime, I can highly recommend that you all avoid The Sun, which despite having a post on which the words "Gripping" and "Genius" appeared was so dull that Erin and I left after 20 minutes.  The Aristocrats, on the other hand, had us in hysterics for an hour and a half, with the director's Q&A session afterwards also being very funny.

Erin, of course, got to see the actual film, and see the stars afterwards.  There's no spoilers, except for Joss's dancing skills.  Go read it here.

This post is about Serenity.  If you have no interest in Serenity, Firefly, Joss Whedon or the general idea of Westerns In Space, you should be hitting page down about now.  Everyone else should be clicking on the picture link...

Erin and I went to see Guy X, which was a pretty good movie about a soldier accidentally posted to Greenland rather than Hawaii, and what happens to the people stuck up at this outpost at the edge of everything, where it's daylight half the year and night the other half.  Worth going to see, if not quite as good as Buffalo Soldiers.

Anyway, we came out, perfectly timed (thanks to Erin's detective efforts) just as the cast of Serenity were arriving on the red carpet for the world premier.  We were on the inside, they were on the outside, and the walls of the cinema are made of glass.  I only had my camera-phone with me, which explains the low quality of the pictures, but we had a really good look at them, huge grins plastered  on our faces.

Eventually someone noticed that unlike everyone else about, we weren't VIPs, so we got shuffled out the door onto the concourse, where the _huge_ queue was.  Which was just fine by us, because 7 seconds later, Adam "Jayne" Baldwin stepped out the same door, causing a spontaneous, simultaneous orgasm in the first 70 feet of the queue.  The queue was about 15 feet back, so he waved at them (causing more moistness) and went for a wander down it.  It was on his way back that Erin, unencumbered by being behind the queue-barrier was able to pounce on him and get him to sign her autograph book.

We then watched the rest of them go past and into the cinema (Mal and Simon arrived after we were shuffled out, and Wash didn't seem to be there at all), and then they let us back into the cinema.  Erin sprinted for the returns booth, they made her form the start of a queue (with the 5 people who arrived moments behind her) and then said "Do you have a concession?", which, although she didn't, was possibly the best thing they could have said to her.  I didn't get a ticket, largely because I already felt somewhat nauseous and headachey from the earlier film (damn handicam!) and partially because that was the only one they had at that precise moment - the other people there were almost certainly much bigger fanboys than little old me).

I took Erin and her prize golden ticket to the queue and stood with her for 10 minutes, bumping into fandom grandee Ian Sorensen and his harem, and also Debs from work (another rabid fan).  And then I headed for home...

The photos, by the way, are here.  Warning, I was taking them with a phone, through a glass wall, which had earlier been rained on.  The quality is not high.  But I've labelled them carefully, so you can tell which blur is which.

Tao: Martial Art of the Drum was great - 5 male and 4 female drummers go wild on a variety of Japanese drums and a pair of flutes.  Very skilfull, incredibly fit, and rather cute in places.  Well worth a look if you can get to it.

Bill Bailey's band "Beergut 100" were bookended by a few snippets of his comedy music, straight from his stageshow.  But in the middle they were a rather good punk covers band, playing a selection of punk and ska favourites, with the occasional silliness thrown in (including "Tomorrow" from Annie), and cameos from various friends of the band from around the festival - including Rob Newman on ukelele.  Should you like mainstream punk stuff, and have a sense of humour, recommended.

Mirrormask - Neil Gaiman (writer) and Dave McKean (director and artistic genius) produce a modern version of Labyrinth (although it's even close to Coraline, as surliminal pointed out).  It's gorgeous, but the plot and themes are both incoherent to say the least - even compared to Labyrinth.  Very much worth a watch, with brain turned off.  Personally I liked his short films more - I'm looking forward to their forthcoming DVD release.

Thumbsucker - winner of Andy's "best film of the festival so far" award.  The director (there afterwards with Tilda Swinton and Lou Taylor Pucci (the star)) said that people kept comparing it to Garden State and Donnie Darko (this after someone in the audience compared it to Donnie Darko).  It certainly has Donne Darko's 'nobody understands me' teen feel, but it was more like Garden State in it's reality.  Most of all, however, it was its own film - intelligent, funny and sad pretty much all the time.  It's the kind of films actors want to be in, which explains why Tilda Swinton, Vincent D'Onofrio, Vince Vaughn and Benjamin Bratt were all in it.  This is the kind of movie I love.

Lilian stayed over last night, and so we had _loads_ of time to make it into town to see the Reduced Shakespeare Company. which meant that we arrived in town with nearly, ooh, 13 minutes to spare, and half a city to cross. We parked at Old College, leapt from the car and made a beeline for the Assembly Rooms, about a mile away.

We arrived there 17 minutes later, a mere 4 minutes late, and ready for our hour of compressed humourosity. Lilian checked the tickets (which she'd bought and was holding on to, as I'm clearly not competent to do so) to see which of the rooms we were in.

At which point she discovered that it had been at the Assembly Rooms _last_ year, and that this year it was at the Pleasance, which is about 3 minutes from where we parked the car in the first place, or 20 minutes back across town.

So we gave up, bought some nice food, and went and sat in Princes Street Gardens, loafing in the sun with papers instead.

Also today - me forgetting my ticket for Thumbsucker (movie I'm seeing tonight at the film festival) and Lilian kindly driving me all the way home, and then back to Erin's (where I've spent this afternoon, tending to her hangover and piles of unopened mail). Oh, and Hugh phoning in the middle of all of this to tell me that los parentes offered to buy a board game for me, and would I mind buying it myself, as he was a tad busy. That might have made me a bit late too, but probably not in a statistically significant way, considering...