I went to Whipsnade Zoo this week, which really does put other zoos to shame in terms of the amount of space they give their animals. Almost everything had an enclosure that could better be described as a field, with plenty of running around space, hiding space and general chilling out and watching the world go by space. Fortunately everything was ( Read more... )

BBC news described this year's Oscars as "one of the most unpredictable Academy Awards for years". I must be some kind of genius then because I got 20 out of 24, only missing Animation (which the academy got wrong), makeup & hair styling, production design and sound mixing. I even got all the short films right! I'm pretty bloody pleased about that ( Read more... )

I've had a more successful year than previous at watching Oscar nominated films, but that still doesn't mean I've managed the complete set. Of the twelve films covering the nominees for big awards (best picture, director, actor, actress) I've seen exactly half. I even made an attempt to seek out clips and trailers of the various shorts. I make ( Read more... )

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Last year I said "I doubt I'll ever top 2010's total of 130 (and given that it took a broken arm to do that, I rather hope I never do)". Well I beat it this year without any major injuries, but I suspect a few months of sabbatical from work helped me along to my total of 138 films. 126 of those films were new to me. There's a full list at the ( Read more... )

I'm now habitually late with these monthly summaries, I guess I could justify that as wanting to leave the month to marinade a bit before looking back on it, really though it's just because January got off to a pretty busy start ( Read more... )

My aim for the year was to increase my reading, by targeting 50 pages a day and I'm going to consider this a success, although not entirely a runaway one. Read more, through an arbitrary target of an average of 50 pages a day. I succeeded in this one, although it did come down to the wire when I realised that I was three pages short on my target ( Read more... )

There will be three big parts to this review, because I want to make sure that I spend enough time on the actual review of the film, without bogging down in the questions around the 3d/high frame rate stuff or lingering too much on the major problem with the film. I would consider it spoiler free, but if you're paranoid about knowing which ( Read more... )

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