WE DID IT!
We sent the BW/DR app/magazine off to Apple this morning (via TypeEngine, our wonderful publishers)!
Filled to the brim with essays, reviews, humor, and even a poem (on Sex & The City 2, obviously)—all accompanied by illustrations from our very own insanely talented Brianna Ashby—I’m so excited to show this thing to you I could almost burst. When I’m not cross-eyed or falling asleep at my computer in the middle of the night, that is. Turns out preparing a magazine is a whole lot of work. But it’s going to be worth it, and then some.
So here is how it will work, once it becomes available to you next week: We’ll be offering you a “mini-issue” (consisting of a Foreword/Introduction to the magazine, as well as essays on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Place Beyond the Pines, and Mad Men) entirely for free, which you’ll receive when you download the magazine app. Don’t worry, we’ll provide links to it all over the place once it’s officialy released. That will always be free to you, no matter what. We want you to see what we’re doing with the magazine before you decide to sign up or pay us a single cent for any of it.
The first official “full” issue will also be available at that same time next week, and will be yours as well, once you choose to subscribe to the magazine. And that subscription is only going to cost you $1.99. For less than you paid for your coffee this morning, you’ll get a whole month’s worth of brand new BWDR content (not previously featured on the site), served up fresh and piping hot to your phones and/or tablets, each and every month!
Once the magazine is launched, the only way to get the very best BW/DR content going forward will be to subscribe to the magazine. We plan to post one full new essay from each month’s issue here on the site, as well as teaser paragraphs from all the other articles, but if you want to get all the goods (7-8 additional essays/reviews/features per month + illustrations and artwork), you’ll have to subscribe.
And we’ll continue to do everything in our power to make that absolutely worth it for you.
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We will still maintain a regularly updated site here at BWDR, featuring quality essays that we just couldn’t find a place for in the magazine, as well as incorporating other kinds of interesting posts—links, pictures, videos, quotes, blurbs, etc—that previously had been getting shuttled off to our sister site, Film Projections, but will now start to make their home on the main BWDR site instead. (We’ve been slowly starting to integrate more non-essay content over the past two weeks, and will continue to do so from here on out).
In other words: keep coming back here too, because we aren’t going anywhere!
It’s happening. It’s finally happening. I hope to have something in an upcoming issue, but you shouldn’t subscribe for me, you should subscribe for the other, better writers and the beautiful illustrations.
We are all proud and excited for this thing to be with you. Chad, Brianna, Elizabeth and the gang have done so much work.
Never been more proud as a writer than being involved in this venture.
My Thoughts On…The Hunt
My blood is boiling now. This film made me so angry. Righteously angry, about the world, angry like when I watch Paths of Glory.
This is a brilliant, brilliant drama about a complex issue. Sensitive, but handled with great thought and craft. The script is sensational. It sets up a world, and then rips it apart, then rebuilds, and reshapes, and reveals, and ends with the world looking the same but underneath irrevocably changed forever.
Mads Mikkelsen gives an incredible performance (as he does), as a nice man, caught in an unbearable situation whose life completely unravels on a lie. The way that the script and the direction balance character and issues within the characters - friends, children, co-workers, the community, family is exceptional.
The one thing I didn’t like was how protocol wasn’t followed at the outset, with such a sensitive issue (I don’t want to say anything more, because I want you to see it). But then on reflection everything feels too deliberate, so maybe that was too. Again, filmmakers deftly moving you in a certain direction.
There is a scene that absolutely broke my heart and it’s a brilliant moment where the audience takes sides in an instance, without even realising they’ve done it. It’s manipulative, but brilliantly so, and the film is careful after this, to peel back more layers, and throw in more confusion. It’s not clear cut morally speaking. The issue means it can’t be. There’s the plot, and there’s a very problematic theme, and both are sublimely intertwined.
It’s a bleak moral fable, stunningly performed and a mesmerising blend of the theatrical and the cinematic. Filmmakers at the top of their game. Fascinating, and timely, for we live in an increasingly reactionary world, where manipulation and soundbite rules. For this bleak age The Hunt is a brilliant cautionary cinematic tale.
My Thoughts On…Sightseers
I love how Wheatley is gradually going outdoors and things are spiralling further and further out of control, yet simultaneously he is honing ideas and getting to the essence of what he wants to do as a filmmaker.
I love the way the film channels Badlands but completely understands how ludicrous such an enterprise would be in the UK. It’s an anti road movie. There’s just too much temptation to sink into evil, because the island is so small and crowded.
And at the heart of it all is this relationship. Two lonely, damaged people come together and try to live, co-exist, love. The relationship evolves and mutates. Alice Lowe’s character grows as she is empowered and then jealous, for the first time in her life. She comes alive with this man, and learns things about herself she never realised.
It’s funny, and like all good antihero journeys constantly blur the lines between righteous fury at the state of the world and downright sociopathy.
Loved it.
Three Years With Bailey
I love my dog. Remembering it was the 3rd anniversary of Bailey coming into our lives I watched him snoozing in the sun and went to sort out stuff for work this afternoon, thinking, I must blog about the anniversary, as I have the last 2 years.
When I hear a rustling. And I go back into the garden and he has bitten through a bin bag and pulled out the salmon wrapper and is licking it transparent. He looks at me and I at him and he knows he is in trouble. I say ‘naughty boy’ and he immediately takes himself off to his bed.
3 years and 2 days ago, if you would have said to me I would write about a dog licking fish wrappers I would have laughed. Heartily. But as I have mentioned countless times, this pup changed my life.
Me and the boy are currently 300 miles away from Roma. He is with me for a fortnight while I am working. You may or may not know that I have a new job, in Cornwall, by the sea. It’s part time now, but I hope soon it’s full time. So we can all be together again. Living our dream.
It’s been a bittersweet couple of weeks. I’ve loved having him with me, even if it’s been super stressful because we are both guests in someone’s house. Not helped by returning the first day I left him on his own to find he had eaten an entire box of unopened Jordan’s country crunch cereal. The cardboard remnants of the box he had taken off the counter were strewn across the kitchen and he sat doe-eyed on his bed.
The bitter part is because I want us all together, as a family. But he has alleviated some of the loneliness I’ve felt acclimatising to a new life with no wife and no money, and going back and forth.
Since Cerealgate, as for the past three years, he has been a joy. Such a good boy. A wonderful companion. I still cannot believe the impact he has had on me as a person, as an artist.
And I can’t believe how happy he makes me. He is not quite the water puppy Roma dreamed of yet, but with every passing visit to the beach he gets more and more adventurous, and when we find more secluded beaches and I am swimming for hours, it will no doubt become second nature.
It’s been weird living here on my own for the past couple of months, realising how integral to my happiness Bailey, and the way of life he has introduced to me, has become. This past fortnight has been a glimpse of my future, our family future, and I love it, and am excited. He’s my boy. He’s changed everything, and I am so grateful to him.
My Thoughts On…A History Of Violence
I intend to write more about this film over coming months and years. I feel there is so much to say about it. I think it’s a masterpiece. It’s such a powerful, profound and brilliantly entertaining work. There’s so much going on. I’m teaching it for adaptation. I love it.
It’s a coruscating dissection of the American Dream. It’s Cronenberg’s Blue Velvet. And as good as that movie. So watch this space. I really want to go into this film for Bright Wall/Dark Room and I feel drawn to it academically, so just looking at outlets for talking about it - journals and conferences looking at violence, adaptation, cronenberg, the american dream.
For now. Just watching it again because I haven’t seen it in a while, but it hangs over me, haunts me, inspires me, challenges me and gets me excited about writing, movies and teaching writing and movies.
So good.
Professional Doctorate (11)
Right back in the swing of it. Finished the big chapter. Just a couple of references to check then get it proof read.
First chapter nearly done. The majority will be edited this week, just waiting on one response and the graphs need a lot of work, but I have a date with my graph girl scheduled in.
Then it’s knuckle down and sort the other two chapters. One is decent shape, one (a graph heavy one) is in disarray but getting the head space ready to smash it, feels close.
Back in and powering through. The end is in sight.
Was funny, part of today’s soundtrack was the first Clash album. I needed to hear Joe and Mick today.
The lyric that stood out the most was ‘I’m so bored with the USA, but what can I do?’ which in a strange way, is the alternative title for this whole thing.
Tired of US dominance that leads to homogenised everything? What am I gonna do? Try and change it I spose. Hear me now.
I’m Reaching Out To You Friends
@MaryKixCancer
That’s Mary Anne on the left. She’s a good friend of mine. She is an artist, an educator and a carer for her Mother. And she has cancer of the thyroid.
Despite the financial burden she has medical insurance but the world being what it is, the insurance company is refusing to pay for her cancer treatment because she has a history of thyroid problems, even though one doesn’t beget the other. As a result, and despite paying thousands over the years for medical insurance, she needed to find $16,400 as a deposit to have the vital surgery.
Her consultant raged at this, and the insurance company’s attitude and is performing the surgery himself next week. There are good people in the system.
However, the real problem isn’t really the surgery, crazy as it sounds. It’s the oncology after care, to ensure it doesn’t come back. It’s also the time. If she doesn’t get the surgery and attendant care there is real risk the cancer will spread and what is treatable right now, may become less and less so.
So, yep, this is a hand out plea. Mary Anne is not someone who asks for help, and she has lived on the bread line to afford health care and look after her equally poorly Mom for years. So we, her friends are asking, because we don’t see why she should suffer needlessly, especially when fate has dealt her such a cruel hand.
So. If you could give something, and I mean anything. The cost of a morning coffee maybe, you would be doing a beautiful person a great service, and making what is mostly a shitty world a better place.
If you can, please visit - https://www.giveforward.com/fundraiser/36d2/helpmaryannekickcancerpart2
If you want something for your money, and I don’t blame you, it’s a cutthroat world as I’ve just explained, hold your dough but follow the campaign because next month there will be a special auction to raise money and you can get your hands on limited edition prints, artworks and all types of other wonderful things. It’s being organised by among others Amelia, her friend on the right of the picture at the top.
Like the page on FB - https://www.facebook.com/HelpMaryAnneKickCancer
Follow on Twitter - https://twitter.com/marykixcancer
It’s a great cause, and friends such as illustrator David Litchfield and photographer Mark Wooldridge have supplied items you can buy at the auction.
I am readying something unique that will be sold with proceeds going to Mary Anne but sadly it won’t be ready in time for the auction.
You, we, shouldn’t have to pay. The insurance company should. But they aren’t. And the consequences of that bullshit are too hard to think about and not act upon.
Thanks for reading.
Where #chaosdog and I spent our afternoon
My Thoughts On…Silver Linings Playbook
Close to wonderful. In its quiet moments it’s a beautiful, searching document of cracked humanity, packed with great performances and some wonderful dialogue.
But too often it takes the obvious route of manic loudness and then it falls apart somewhat, which is a real shame, that it can’t marry the two.
Loved a lot of it, but just got really annoyed by how it drifted into the standard portrayal of mental illness, somewhat undoing a lot of its good work.
The performances are really good though. All down the cast.
A thing I wrote about one of the best weekends of my life. Yep. No biggie.
Sleevenotes // Luton to Falmouth [13/5/13]
My Thoughts On…Damsels In Distress
Wonderfully barbed, funny and beautifully scripted satire from Whit Stillman. Sharp as a nail, whimsical, surreal, musical and complicated. Great performances and utterly refreshing in its complex unravelling of privilege, education and competitive friendship. Left me with a smile and in awe of Stillman’s craft as writer, director of divergent styles in a cohesive whole, and director of actors.
