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Random selection…
I stumbled across some of my old writing still online on Netribution from over two decades years ago that was so bad I wanted to cancel myself before anyone else had a chance to. I was scrolling down my old year 2001 design for old raw HTML Netribution pages untouched in 20 years, and still looking much like it did then (other than screens are much bigger so there's a lot of left/right padding)…
Method acting is a technique used by many leading Hollywood actors. Everybody from De Niro to Hoffman uses it. One of the leading teachers of method acting working today is Arnold Bloomberg of the Bloomberg Academy of Drama in New York. Dr Andrew Cousins, went to learn more.
AC: What is your fundamental approach to acting?
AB: For me acting isn't just about pretending to be somebody else. It's…
Music videos
The End of the World
REM's The End of the World As We Know It sung by George W Bush
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Familjen - Det snurrar i min skalle
Swedish Grammy nominated mashup of archive evangelists to Familjen's music.
{youtube}QfU-4Y4_akY{/youtube}
Mashups
The Vadar Sessions
Before Star Wars, James Earl Jones starred…
Thursday, March 19, 2009 To Whom it May Concern: Please in what city and country was the Church bombed in the movie The Reader, where 300 Jewish Woman died. Are the only survivors Ilana and Rose Mather? Does anyone know if the name of her book is Memoir? Is this book still in print? Best Regards, Sharon Corr
'Stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you'
Ray Bradbury
Dear Tom,
It has been a while. I forget whose turn it is, but for sake of ease I shall both ask and answer my own question - a simple one.
Where am I?
It is a device, more than a question, to uncork my tongue as I sit here, in Paris's Gare De Lyon. Life shakes its stuff around me, and I shudder inside with the wearines…
Just before lunch yesterday I read of a report by the WWF that the number of species on the planet has reduced by 31% in the last 35 years. If the planet continues at its current pace of using natural resource, by 2050 two earths would be needed to meet current demand, with an almost inevitable consequential environmental collapse.
Then while munching away on my fried eggs on toast, I read…
The first time. I can never forget that. Shunted to the outskirts of
town to watch Robert LePage juggle love and war in his heartstopping
multimedia devised play the Seven Streams of the River Ota,
which would eventually run at 7 hours by the time I last saw it at the
National, years later. Stuart Lee and Richard Herring in pre Jerry
Springer the Opera days chumming with Jenny Eclair…
So that's it then, four years to the day almost, since issue 99 went out, so it's been a while.With this new architecture it has not been too bad. Not a lot of midniht oil burning, although Nic looks to be a little jet-lagged when it gets to tea-time.There's no chance of Netribution losing its non-London centricity either, since our cotributors are well spread from the Smoke to the Shetland Islan…
A record number of films are getting release in British cinemas without any cuts being needed to get approval. Figures released by the British Board of Film Classification show that during the past decade less than three percent of the 4,951 films released into cinemas had to have cuts in order to achieve the classification they wanted.
This is a substantial fall from the…
the horror film franchise is still surprisingly resilient and not really showing signs of slowing (some would say that the current incarnation has outstayed it's welcome). The question i ask is if there is space for a real rough and ready old school horror film that does what it says on the tin? The last good horror for me was Outpost. It didn't make you think too much and had a great genre story…
So I
decided to give myself the Christmas break - from just after boxing day
until the 9th of January when I returned to work to tryand get
Netribution 2.0 up online. I ordered one of the most boring christmas
presents in memory - Larry Ulman's 'PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Websites'
and proceeded to teach myself some basic PHP, beynd what I'd hacked for
the www.ukfilmfinance…
The day Greg Dyke was pushed out of the BBC was a grave one for both the corporation and broadcasting in general, yet Mark 'the scissors' Thompson was reportedly seen that day skipping around the Channel 4 office where he had been Chief Executive for barely a probation period, gleeful in the news that the top job of broadcasting could finally be his.
And now, the Big Picture thinki…
I'll never forget watching Truly Madly Deeply as a kid, a film I hold responsible for a crush on cellists (Altman's Shortcuts also playing a part). Anthony Minghella did much more besides making deeply heartfelt and tender films - from chairing the BFI to Grange Hill, Inspector Morse and promoting the family ice cream business on the Isle of Wight. All thoughts to Hannah, Max, Carolyn and the res…
How
many notices have we seen from directors who have a great idea for a
film, have written a script themselves and now ‘just’ need a producer
to raise a hundred thousand to make it? What could be simpler? And
let’s not forget that all-important incentive… no fee, but you’ll get a
VHS copy of the film if, and when, it’s finished! Wow, as a prod…
"Memes
don't exist, tell your friends" spouted the t-shirt of Hugh Hancock
when I first met him at a Dundee hotel loby for a Scottish Screen new
talent event. Hugh, for those who haven't read James' Wideshot interview
with him, is one of the pioneers of the Machinima movement and through
his Strange Company (whose t-shirt he was sporting) has made 16
Machinima films…
A few months ago I downloaded an open source add-on for Joomla, the (free) software that powers Netribution. It's a powerful tool which should make a nice addition here at some point - and it was free. So impressed was I after half an hour of using it that I checked out some of the add - available for it. I could buy alternative templates for $19 a time, an iPhone version, integration with other…
With
more people in Britain now watching TV on digital sets rather than
analogue, this seems a fitting time to revisit what the BBC's digital
chief had to say about the future for the industry that he foresaw.
This is the text of the speech by Ashley Highfield, Director of BBC New
Media & Technology, at the Royal Television Society on Oct 6 2003
I was reading an article…
There's not been a new post here in over four years, so maybe Netribution's 21st birthday today is a good time to update on a little expirment with "Web Monetization" (their zee, not ours).
Web Monetization is a way to donate to the sites you visit without needing to have a separate subscription for them or even having to hit a donate button. After signing up with a provider (at the moment there…
On a day where celebrities seemed to dropping like flies, it's a shame that the obits for British scriptwriter Troy Kennedy Martin probably won't be as extensive as they should be. Needless to say the man was a man who had a hand in helping to create and write some of the best UK TV shows ever made including 'Z-Cars' and 'The Sweeney'. His TV shows helped pave the way for intelligent genre fare…
Following
the success of Brokeback Mountain and Capote, 2006 has been called by
some, the gayest year in recorded history. But one man has gone further
still. Josh Tenttrow is Professor of Gender Studies at the University
of San Francisco. Often called the most flamboyant academic in the US,
Tenttrow has written a string of books examining gender and sexuality
issues in mainstream cinema…
“The reality is a single stream only amounts to 0.003p, which means I would need millions of streams to earn at least the minimum wage” Ayanna Witter-Johnson, singer-songwriter
Last weekend The Guardian published some great insights from 25 figures across the music world around the state of subscription-streaming, as Spotify passes 155 million Premium subscribers and ahead of a uk.gov report…
Actor and documentary-maker Kenneth Griffith has died at the age of 84.
He was born in Tenby, Pembrokeshire and had been a familiar face on TV and cinema screens since the 1940s, including the 1960's cult TV hit, The Prisoner.
Griffith, who died at his London home, also made often controversial films on such subjects as the Boer War - on which he was an expert - an…
Sheffield Doc/Fest wound up on Sunday night after 5 full-on days. Capturing a flavour of the event overall did mean sacrificing time spent in screenings, but I caught two films up for a Special Jury Award; Clio Barnard’s The Arbor (premiered at London Film Festival in October) and Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol (premiering in the UK at Sheffield).
Neither won, although Barnard’s film did get the…
In the rush and work pressures surrounding filmmaking, it's all too easy to overlook some essentials, but these are often the factors that can lift a film from the mundane level to the exceptional. James MacGregor's notes reveal some of the secrets of real film craft.....
Storytelling on Screen
Your focus is on telling the story, not just o…