craigoxbrow

Hrm.

Liked the setting more than the plot. Bit muddy on the moral. Only pulled the anachronistic humour trick once, so it felt kind of out of place. Only really laugh-out-loud funny here and there. While it had some big emotional moments for the characters it didn't utterly stomp on the audience at any point like we know Pixar can. Looked lovely. Quite a few jokes that I imagine people who haven't lived in Scotland will find utterly baffling.

Odd one. More a Rataouille than an Incredibles or a Wall-E or an Up.

May not have been in the mood for it.

Trailers: Frankenweenie, Paranorman, Hotel Transylvania and a couple things that aren't about monsters.

Cameo, tomorrow afternoon, 1.30pm. With a showing of Tintin afterwards as well, it being a double bill.

For those who weren't there, Neil Gaiman Talks With Audrey Niffenegger.

Direct mp3 link thing.

The weird outlier of the Festivals here is the Television Festival, which runs for a single weekend and can only be attended if you spend a couple hundred quid on an all-in ticket. But this year, in a bit of a spinoff, the Filmhouse has been showing some selected previews of relevant shows.

Let's Kill Hitler! sold out in minutes, despite being a preview by twenty-seven-and-a-half hours, but I was able to get a ticket for the pilot of Once Upon A Time which will air here... maybe sometime, somewhere, probably once the first season is completed, and that doesn't start in the US for two months.

It's a very low-key urban fantasy, apart from some big "wow" flashbacks to the storybook world most of the cast hail from, with nothing much fantastical bleeding into the real world... yet. Still, the people who have been trying to adapt Fables to TV must be spittin'.

And Robert Carlyle said hello in a twenty-second video intro. I imagine if he'd been there in person it would have gotten a better screening time than 11am. He plays Rumpelstiltskin in full scenery-chewing panto style, which seems appropriate.

Thanks to Cat attending GenCon, I now have The One Ring, about which more later, and a funny Doctor Who T-shirt that I won't spoiler you on.

We were at the Book Festival to see Neil Gaiman talk with Audrey Niffenegger about fairytales, how myths decay into fairytales, how characters in fairytales generally only have one defining characteristic - "this character eats people! And you don't really ask why..." and how heroines have to be brave and clever and patient while heroes tend to just inherit things, and about stories getting away with you and how that was informed by ten years writing comics and how "you have let the cool stuff in", and about how Steven Moffat stopped the "hypothetically speaking..." part of the Doctor Who writing conversation "by saying "Oh, Rude Scottish Word it, you know." ... Yes, it was fuck." And aout why Amy and Rory didn't think to hold hands, which he discusses in the DVD commentary.

It then took a mere hour and a half to get through the signing queue. Picture by kind person behind me, who I hopefully managed to likewise photograph on her smartphone. I resisted the temptation to post the one that caught me looking up at the ceiling as the rain really started hammering.

'Edinburgh appears to be the only city currently being terrorised by affected youths, rather than disaffected.'
Paul Sinha

Even when it isn't like this outside.

Opening day at the refurbished Royal Museum of Scotland, 15000 people in the door, loads to see and do, dinosaur skeletons, sarcophagi, squid in jars, medieval weapons, Stevenson lighthouse mechanisms. On a quieter day I'll go through and pick something from every gallery to Who about.

Had a nice day. Learned a new charades gesture. May be a bit scalded on top.

Well, that's five months in a row we've had snow. Six in Linlithgow.