Andrew Collins's Blog, page 68

Wowgate

Edinburgh. Day 3, show 2, full Sunday lunch 1. Richard has had his first review for Christ On A Bike, sold out thus far at Assembly. It is positive. You can read it on Spoonfed here.I got up relatively late for me, due to late finish last night, and just had time to eat some yogurt and squeeze in a walk to Foodies cafe for a bagel and the nicest smoothie in Edinburgh (well, the only one I have had twice in three days, anyway). I like it here: friendly staff, free wi-fi and a really big...

Royal Smile

NB: Sorry this is so long, but it's more like a diary entry for two days than a standard blog entry.

You are here. Actually, you may not be. But I am. My Edinburgh Fringe 2010 has begun. As is now fairly well documented, I first visited the Fringe in 1989. I came again in 2001. Both times with a show – President Kennedy's Big Night Out and Lloyd Cole Knew My Father. But from 2005, I think every year, I've been up in some capacity or other. (In 2005, it was for the audience pilot of Banter...

Je t'aime … moi nonplussed

I've seen two French films in two days at two different Curzon cinemas, one I enjoyed and admired, one I didn't. But hey, as much as I am drawn to French cinema, I can't like everything they produce, can I? That would be insane. (I don't like Camembert either.)

On Sunday I saw Catherine Corsini's Leaving (or Partir) at the Curzon Mayfair. It's Kristin Scott Thomas once again playing an adopted Frenchwoman wreaking domestic havoc with her bone structure and soft eyes. In Phillipe Caudel's...

Fat lot of good

To be fair, this story was broken in the Sunday Times yesterday, which is where I read it, but I don't have the paper with me, and as the Times website seems to have mysteriously disappeared, I'm having to quote from the Mail online. The facts seem to be the same. Susan Jebb [left:], Head of Nutrition and Health Research at the Medical Research Council, and a senior adviser in the Government's "battle against obesity" (how's that going, then?) has been found to have pocketed thousands of...

What are they building in there?

Anyone else seen this new Canadian sci-fi horror movie Splice? It's not my usual tall glass of soya latte of a Saturday night, but what the heck? Although I could see where it was coming from, stylistically, what I enjoyed most about the experience was seeing something at the cinema which I knew very little about in advance. I knew it was about gene-splicing and that it had Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley in it: both capable and intelligent actors (and she, of course, the impressive first-time ...

Boo! Hoo!

I was sad not to actually cry my eyes out to Toy Story 3. If I hadn't read all the advanced publicity and, frankly, hype, about grown men being reduced to tears, I wouldn't have gone in with that expectation, and would have been happy enough just to be entertained and, toward the end, choked up a bit. But I went into the Curzon and strapped on my 3D glasses with the certainty that I would cry all over the inside of them. And yet … I didn't actually release tears from my willing tear ducts.

Boo...

I love 1983-87

The latest slice of 60s/70s/80s TV folklore to be opportunistically remodelled for a restless modern cinema audience – after Starsky & Hutch, Charlie's Angels, Bewitched, Lost In Space, Miami Vice, Dukes Of Hazzard, The Fugitive, Inspector Gadget, Scooby Doo, Mission: Impossible, I-Spy- is an unsubtle update of the 1980s teatime action series (1983-1987) about four military mercenaries in a van: The A-Team. Though the "team" dynamic is identical, by ratcheting forward the special-ops action f...

Laughter-funded

This is a poster advertising a comedy gig on Wednesday in London which has been organised to help fund Peter Buckley Hill's Free Fringe, specifically the events programme, whose costs were not initially met by ad revenue, as expected. It's a simple cause: come to a gig with three amazing headliners and support us, and you will be helping to ensure that 3,513 performances of 230 shows take place, for free, within the Fringe at Edinburgh this year. The very existence of the Free Fringe is...

Alan Moore knows the score

Northampton, Northampton, Northampton, middle of England! Can I just pay tribute to my home town? Saturday saw what was, for the inexperienced me, the culmination of a week of Edinburgh previews for my show Secret Dancing. In other words, I'd done one in London on Wednesday, and one in Brighton the next time, and this was my third. (I know, it's small fry compared to, say, Richard's Christ On A Bike previews, which seem to be happening pretty much every night. But his is a far more...

WHY I HATE QUENTIN LETTS!

I write in measured response to the full-page opinion piece in Wednesday's Daily Mail by pet columnist and sketch writer Quentin Letts, which was so important it was advertised in a colourful banner running across the front of the paper: WHY I HATE SQUIRRELS! it blared, next to a sweet cut-out of a grey squirrel. WATCH OUT, TUFTY, QUENTIN LETTS IS GUNNING FOR YOU Page 23. Well, it certainly caught my attention. The piece is here if you wish to read it for yourself, but I shall precis.

Quentin ...