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The Sunrise over the Minster

A pleasant little video of the sun rising over York railway station. Towards the rear left you can see the permanently-lit York Minster towering over the rest of the city. The large yellow crane in the centre of the image is part of the building site on the former Hudson House plot and sits just in side the city walls. And, of course, prior to that this plot of land had been the original York station.

Ad Astra – The ‘Is this a review?’ Post

Is this a review? Probably, but sometimes it’s quite hard to tell. Anyway, earlier today I braved the train-tram combination to see Ad Astra at the local IMAX.

And it’s a funny little thing – part 2001: A Space Odyssey, part Apocalypse Now, odd little bits that felt almost like b-reel from Beyond the Black Rainbow (especially certain parts of the Mars sequence) and what appeared to be some very visible sellotape.

The plot is relatively straight forward; bad things start happening to Earth, the military dispatch a man to the outer reaches of the solar system where they think his estranged father might be responsible for these bad things occurring, the hero stops them and then comes home to tell everyone that the universe is otherwise empty of life and so we should be happier and nicer to each other.

And yet we take a number of odd diversions along the way. Lunar rover driving moon pirates attack the hero as he transits between two American controlled installations and then, shortly afterwards, a brief stop-off at a Norwegian space station sees a barely introduced secondary character die via free-floating space baboon. Major actors (Sutherland, Negga]) turn up for a few minutes, move the plot along a little and then disappear, never to be seen again. Liv Tyler – who, miraculously, actually manages to appear in all three acts! – seems to live in a parallel universe where every camera has a thin sheen of vaseline covering every lens. FX are what you would expect from a film of this budget and time-period but with only limited moments where it goes beyond the norm. There were no real moments where the IMAX format was used to it’s full effect.

I came away confused at what this film wanted to be – Apocalypse Now? 2001? A mediation on the need for family and community? A condemnation of the idea of sending people far outside of their natural habitat? – and, because of that, I walked away with a strong feeling that Ad Astra was far less than the sum of it’s influences and that this flaw ran all the way back to the beginnings of the production.

The Unicorn and the Penguin – Images from a trip to Edinburgh Zoo

More pictures uploaded, this time a gallery from a February 2019 trip to Edinburgh Zoo.

The Zoo itself feels very much like an organisation in flux. Some of the enclosures – the pandas, the tigers and the chimpanzee – felt very new and very modern while some of the others – I’m thinking of the lion enclosure in particular – felt very ‘old-school’ and old fashioned. Indeed, the lion enclosure – effectively a large metal cage that you walk up to and is very reminiscent of the what you might have expected 40 or 50 years ago – is worth contrasting with both Edinburgh’s own tiger enclosure – bright and open, with landscaping and an interesting walk-though section for the public – and Yorkshire Wildlife Park’s lion enclosure – large, interestingly designed with subtle and complimentary landscaping.

On the other hand, the large amount of building work we observed suggests that they know parts of the zoo need improvements and so we can hope that they get around to the lions sooner rather than later.

The day itself was cold, grey and dark but ultimately dry. At times fingers were cold and my camera struggled with the light and I think both of those are reflected in these images. Eventually I would like to make a summer trip back – as I think the summer sun zoo would show it’s best side – but even the crowds we encountered in February make the thought of summer holiday traffic seem daunting.