January 2012
3 posts
7 tags
“We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our...”
– Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. | Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence | April 4th, 1967| Riverside Church, New York City.
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December 2011
4 posts
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“My future…is in the past. That’s okay with me because only what we...”
– Brother Theodore Gottlieb | The David Letterman Show
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Lost Christmas (BBC One)
It is ironic that Anthony mentions Walt Disney in BBC One’s urban fairytale Lost Christmas. Disney and his animation studio redefined contemporary understandings of the fairytale genre, from its literary origins of writers like Hans Christen Anderson to the screen in the mid-twentieth century. What it conveyed, in contrast to its antecedents, was that love triumphs all and thus endings must be...
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“We struggle in, from, and against precarity. Thus, it is not from pervasive love...”
– Prof. Judith Butler | Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation Lecture for the Nobel Museum, May 2011 | pp. 24-25
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My C.V by Benedict le Gauche →
Featuring as part of the usual ‘Odd-One-Out’ round on the BBC’s satirical quiz show Have I Got News For You, this particular guy’s CV has been hailed as the worst ever as it had been deemed ‘too honest’. After watching this highly entertaining part of the programme I thought I would look it up and the CV in its entirety is pure comedy, mainly due to the presumed...
November 2011
6 posts
9 tags
Damages | Season Four Review (Audience Network)
FX Network’s Damages owes its critical success to two significant elements within its run: the terrific dynamic between its central performers, Glenn Close and Rose Byrne and the non-linear format of the show’s narrative arc. The development of these two characters, cold, narcissistic high-stakes litigator Patty Hewes and naive but determined young attorney Ellen Parsons was...
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“Other peoples’ pictures. There are those who find other people’s...”
– Oswald Bates (Timothy Spall) | Shooting the Past (1999)
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Harry Potter and the Commodity Fetish by Waetjen... →
An extremely interesting article analysing the commercial opportunities and success of the Harry Potter phenomenon that took hold in the early 2000s when theAOL Time Warner Co purchased the rights to the series and transformed the popular book series (having only published four books in 2000) into an overwhelming commercial enterprise worth millions.
Where I think Jarrod Waetjer and Timothy A....
October 2011
9 posts
“Some people say we’ve got to find a British identity. Where? Which one is...”
– Benjamin Zephaniah | Al Jazeera English
Shirley (BBC Two)
Though on a fair few weeks ago now, I thought I would write a review on Shirley, the BBC2 biopic on Dame Shirley Bassey’s rise from obscurity to singing sensation whose recognisable, formidable tones gave her enormous success in the early 1960s through to the present day.
Biographical films are always interesting in what they decide to dramatise and the contexts in which they...
“No-one, and I repeat no one, has ever died for a flag. A flag is a piece of...”
– Bill Hicks | Love All The People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines | p. 28
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
When Doug Liman’s 2002 adaptation of Robert Ludlum The Bourne Identity was released, there seemed a wide-spread response that the world of espionage on film had found a grittier, more realistic edge than that of its contemporaries. However, while the Bourne series certainly proved to be grittier than perhaps the later Brosnan Bond films, the ruthless lifestyle of its central protagonist...
September 2011
8 posts
“I have come to the conclusion that executions solve nothing, and are only an...”
– Albert Pierrepoint | Executioner: Pierrepoint (1974)
Don't Execute Troy Davis: Too Much Doubt →
Like many around the world, I’ve been following the appalling sentencing of Troy Davis, a man who is about to be executed despite the significant doubt of his being guilty of the murder of a police officer in the United States. Seven out of the nine witness testimonies have been recanted, no DNA evidence has linked Troy to the crime scene and another man has been suspected. I am no advocate...
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This month's reading & 'Playing Shakespeare' by...
After finally finishing John Barton’s Playing Shakespeare, which was a collection of transcripts from the RSC television series of the same name (with the now-famous Shakespearean actors Ian McKellan, Patrick Steward, Sheila Hancock, Judi Dench et al), I am moving on to reading the following three books this month (though I must warn that I am an incredibly slow reader and it will probably...
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“Knowing others is intelligent.
Knowing yourself is enlightened
Tzu chih che...”
– Lao-Tzu | Tao Te Ching | p. 33 