"Must be somebody famous..."

Coba Fynn played the Liquid Ship on Thursday. We soundchecked and retired upstairs for an hour or so, then filtered back downstairs with Charlie's massive entourage of medic mates as the hour drew near. Martin and I were hanging around near the door, waiting for the rest of the band to arrive, when I inadvertently overheard a Mum-and-Dad couple talking to their son.

"Wow - why are there so many people coming down here?"
"Must be somebody famous playing," remarked the son.

I pretty much cracked up right then.

We aimed for (and mostly hit) a relaxed, acoustic vibe and although we each managed a few technical howlers, it seemed to go across pretty well. I drove back to Edinburgh around midnight under a yellow moon, ominously silhouetting a jagged mass of cloud and giving the impression of a fell peak in the sky. All this visual drama was wasted on me, and I mostly spent the drive trying to remember what the word "gibbous" meant*.

Ash and I spent a superbly pedestrian Saturday afternoon loafing around Princes Street and the gardens, eating ice cream and generally indulging in a bit of unbridled consumerism. After a bit of filmic horse-trading ("Hmm. Spiderman 3 - well clearly we're going to see it whether we like it not, so...") we decided to go to see Sunshine later that day. Ash was more enthusiastic than I was, which is odd when the subject of the discussion was a science fiction epic with more than a passing resemblance to 2001, but then Danny Boyle squandered my Trainspotting goodwill with 28 Days Later and I'd been a bit sceptical since I'd heard about this new film. We had a coffee, bought our tickets and took our seats.

I was blown away from the word go: my jaw was either gaping in wonder or clenched in fear the whole way through. It wasn't without its flaws - the South Park-inspired spacesuits look like they were designed more with iconic appeal than practicality in mind, the "bomb"'s ambiguous, improbably picturesque physics were a little cheesy and there were a few other common-or-garden holes in the plot - but taken as a whole it was incredible. The imagery is mostly convincing and occasionally amazing: the apocalyptic, claustrophobic observation room scenes are excellent and the burnished, Grecian shields of the two ships rolling together as they dock is pure Kubrick but spectacular nonetheless. The action is perfectly judged, exquisitely tense and brilliantly shot. In short, I loved it. I have a feeling it's going to rather eclipse poor old Spiderman.

* Man, I need to wean myself off florid 19^th century fiction.