Ulla’s Amazing Wee Blog

Peter Buckley Hill and some Comedians XI
Peter Buckley Hill’s Free Fringe

Before attending this crammed comedy event, i have never before realised the subtle different degrees and tastes of humour. Peter Buckley Hill warms up the audience with randomly chosen noises to welcome every guest comedian and also delivers some silly songs about Scotland’s national dish – the flying Haddock with Chips and Peas.
The first guest comedian from Gateshead pocked fun at the absurdities of his home town when it lost out to Liverpool in the “City of Culture” contest.
The second comedian totally and unexpectedly hit my taste with his wonderfully absurd, spontaneous and intelligent humour. I laughed till I cried.
Finishing off the comedy evening was the slightly deranged Barbara, who got us all praying to an alien god living in some orange sweets.

Canongait, 4 -25 Aug , 9:30 pm (11:35 pm), Free Non-ticketed, eff 82.
Rating 4/5

Edinburgh’s Old and New Towns Walking Tour
Saints and Sinners Walking Tour

This sightseeing tour leads up the Royal Mile, down the Mound and via the New Town and St. Andrews Square finishes up on the Bridges about two hours later. Four different guides offer this entertaining walk under the Saints and Sinners Banner; however, here the topic is more generalised into explaining also the negative side of Edinburgh; and not just the bright side. We are treated to a whole lot of facts and figures, historical dates and some illustrations, amusing tales and unusual stories. I liked the various changes of narrative; from factual – informative to the subjective first person tale to how the the tour participants would have coped with fashion in the Middle Ages.
Very enjoyable and informative.

Scottish Storytelling Centre, 4 -26 Aug, times vary, £7.50 (£.6.00) (£4.00 C), eff 119.

rating 4/5

Run Granny Run

Marlo Poras / USA / 2007 / 77 min

We all love underdogs (well at least here in Scotland), who fight the good fight. So Granny D. is straight up our road, with her 94 years and who is running in the election for senate against the hardcore conservative. At the same time, she is campaigning against funding from special interest groups,too, and walking through the US and her state in protest. The film is a light-hearted, for all audiences enjoyable documentary about people power.

The film has a good pace, is never boring and is nicely cut and edited. However, I feel the story is kind of superficially presented, when there could be so much more to say and tell. Granny D’s husband had Alzheimer’s, now her daughter has got it, but these circumstances are brushed over. Also we never really meet the grandchildren of Granny D. or get to know the original aims of her decision to stand for election against the unbeatable famous Republican.

rating 4/5

Garbage Warrior

Oliver Hodge / UK (England) / 2007 / 86 min

The film is about Michael Reynolds, an architect in New Mexico. Well, almost! Whilst the film starts like a typical character study of this environmental rebel, it later on broadens out to include a little bit more about the “earthship”, his invention of self-sustainable housing. Amazingly, the visionary takes on planning authorities, lawyers, senate, extreme climates, the architects association, funding crisises, and emergency housing tasks after earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis. Impressing with his hard physical and clever intellectual work, his passion, enthusiasm and humanity, he founded not only several earthship communes in the desert and mountains of New Mexico, but also builds prototypes all over the world, such as in Honduras, Bolivia, France and even Brighton, where he met the film maker Oliver Hodge on a UK test site.
And whilst the documentary is beautifully filmed, it seems to focus at the start too much on one man; whereas his whole collective is digging, stamping and building away with and in the recycled rubbish material. The film is inspiring the audience to not just go and see an earthship, but to practically do; to build one and live in it as well. So it’s quite a powerful piece then.

rating 4/5

More info: http://www.earthship.net/

The other side of the country (De l’autre côté du pays)

Catherine Hébert / Canada / 2007 / 83 min

The film is about the northern part of Uganda, which is split by the Nile. Whilst the subject is about the Lord’s Resistance Army and should therefore be interesting and enlightening, the director managed to make this film incredibly boring. Everything just takes too long – the titling, the interviews, … . There is no focus on a particular character, there does not seem to be any structure and the director just tries to be too objective for the viewer to get involved.

rating 2/5

Beaufort (Bufor)
Bavaria Film International

Joseph Cedar / Israel / 2007 / 125 min
Oshri Cohen, Itay Tiran, Eli Eltonyo, Ohad Knoller, Itay Turgeman, Arthur Faradjev, Itai Szor

This film is based on a novel by Ron Leshem; but you wouldn’t notice that it is a fiction film as it seems so incredibly real. Set in 2000 in southern Lebanon, this is the story of the retreat by the last Israeli outpost on the historical Beaufort mountain and a character study of its commander Liraz. The narrative is very quiet and very slow, but tense and tight at the same time, mainly because of the unexpected interrupting explosions. One after the other of the protagonists die in the conflict between IDF and Hezbollah, and the soldiers seem to have long forgotten why they are on this historically bloody mountain.

“There is an abrupt, definitive moment in every war, when the mission, or purpose,for which soldiers gave their lives until that moment, ceases to exist.” (Joseph Cedar, director.)

rating 4/5

Children of Glory (Szabadság, Szerelem)

Krisztina Goda / Hungary / 2006 / 123 min
Kata Dobó, Iván Fenyo, Sándor Csányi, Károly Gesztesi

What an amazing film! Absolutely brilliant, heartbreaking, historically informative and accurately enlightening! For me it is the best film of this year. The open end also works well, because somehow there is no end to history.

Set during the Olympics in 1956, it narrates the history of the Hungarian uprising like no one has ever done before; with sound, colour, movement and acting like Hollywood, a masterpiece with wonderful continental and emotional depth and clever story-writing. It portrays the situation in the Soviet block, in Budapest and the rather accidental student uprising spreading out and about not only for more personal freedom, but also for the independence of the country from Russia. The demands were not for Capitalism nor free-market economy but to support the strike in Poland, for the Russians to go home,…and so on. And, like it is in these crazy situations, some friends turn out to be secret service informers, some opportunists, and the supposedly most conservative communist becomes one of the most enthusiastic rebels. Death and injury seems purely random as seems help and friendship, lies and truth are swirled through expectations, hope, fear, doubt and uncertainty as Western and Real Existing Hungarian Media also spin with wishful interpretations.

The film has been made and premièred for the 50^th anniversary of the Hungarian uprising, commemorating the participants. So far it has been a big hit in Hungary and at international festivals, especially as some emigrants to the US film industry were involved in the making of the film. Its an unmissable film! Go and see it!

rating 5/5

British Piano Music
Ian Farrington

There is something beautiful about watching masters at work, what enjoyment they show when they tackle challenges and with what ease they perform the most difficult of tasks. What pride they have got in their work whilst thriving on the admiration of the ordinary laymen. Pianist, Organist and Composer Iain Farrington enjoys playing these modern, unmelodic, disharmonic, dramatic and nearly arbitrarily sounding notes. The artists painted the scenes with sounds and Ian Farrington explains the context of the music before each performance. Benjamin Britten’s Early Morning Bath was a
revitalising, refreshing short piece; however, as impressive as the concert was, that type of classical music makes the majority of mankind try to escape from as quickly as possible.

St Andrew’s and St. George’s, 18 Aug, 2.30 pm (3.15 pm), 8.00 (6.00), ffp 133.
rating 4/5

Acting and Creating a Character
Sweet Entertainments

The workshop started of with a one hour theory and finished with half an hour improvisation acting on stage for some selected few. The workshop was disappointingly lecture like; there actually was not much interactivity, improvisations, no group work and hardly any practical acting. Everybody noted down on paper the definitions of active and passive imagination, character, purpose, acting, environment and similar. Actor Julian Moore from Sweet Entertainments engaged the brains of the twenty participants and discussed the character of the nurse in Romeo and Juliet more in depth. But his approach to acting training was far from “refreshingly new” as promised in the Fringe programme, and creating a character just another term for in-depth background research.

Sweet ECA, Aug 10- 11, 17 – 18, 24 – 25, 11 am (12.30 pm 0, £ 7.00 (£6.00), eff 118.
rating 3/5