arf

I'm happy to be able to announce that the Queen's Hall's sound tonight was perfectly acceptable (if not brilliant) but definitely not too loud; much better than the complete fuckup they made of a gig during the festival when I had to stuff my ears with tissue in order to be able to remain in the building. Tonight the slightly-too-loudness was the exclusive domain of those few in the crowd (surprisingly consisting almost entirely of students) who felt it necessary to whoop, whistle piercingly and bark like fucking seals at the start of songs, presumably to indicate to all around them that they knew the song. Thank fuck they didn't try and sing along. The yahbloke in front of me was particularly irksome and probably not just because he was sitting directly in front of me; his energetic, stylised applause was almost entirely for his own benefit as a performance to the horse-faced big-toothed identiJemima beside him. He probably only whooped moronically about ten times but it felt like more. Luckily his sweet whisperings of "yeah this one's really good, yeah" into her inbred ears did not detract from the amusing performings of Mr. Timothy Minchin of Australia. The gig was a compilation of his two previous years' tours and featured all the best ones and is worth catching if it comes past; it was also rather good value with a solid hundred-and-fifteen minutes of actual performance for the same price as a meagre hour at the Festival. The gig also finished at exactly the right moment to leave me just enough time to make it to the Vue without having to run to catch the next entertainment.

Also definitely worth catching is Cloverfield. Despite the miserable dissing it received in the Scotchman review from a gentleman who didn't quite get the point it jars very little, makes points subtly and was making me tilt my head to and fro with the camera which is usually a decent sign of engagement. I was also craning my head to see outside the frame, occasionally an indicator of bad framing but in this case part of the whole like-being-inside-the-film sensation of the pseudo-camcorder style employed throughout. It certainly pisses all over the likes of the Broderick-version Godzilla. I'm not sure if it quite deserves the fifth star awarded by Empire but it's worth a look and is the sort of thing worth seeing in the cinéma just for the sake of seeing in the cinema.