Dumb Ways to Die ad becomes surprise hit
"'Set fire to your hair, poke a stick at a grizzly bear ... Dumb ways to die ... dumb ways to die-ie-ie.' If the chorus isn't stuck in your head, it will be soon. Melbourne Metro Trains' darkly cute - and irksomely catchy - new ad for transport safety has gone viral, notching up a whopping 4.2 million YouTube views in less than a week. And nobody is more stunned by its success than the man behind the music, Sydneysider Ollie McGill. The Cat Empire keyboards player was commissioned to write the score to accompany lyrics to the McCann Group's new ad and has watched Facebook likes, Twitter shares and YouTube hits skyrocket as word of the animated video has spread like wildfire. ... In the ad, cartoon characters meet their ends in a number of colourful, sardonic ways, including a couple of nasty mishaps on train tracks, while the sweet chorus, 'dumb ways to die ... ' is instant earworm material."
(Daisy Dumas, 19 November 2012, Fairfax New Zealand Ltd.)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Pink Flamingos: a provocative celebration of otherness
"'Pink Flamingos was an antihippie movie made for hippies who would be punks in two years. It's a pothead movie. I wrote it on pot.' - John Waters"
(Jeff Jackson, DreamlandNews)
Fig.1 John Waters (1972). trailer for "Pink Flamingos".
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Buster Keaton: one of the greatest comic actors of all time
"Buster Keaton is considered one of the greatest comic actors of all time. His influence on physical comedy is rivaled only by Charlie Chaplin. Like many of the great actors of the silent era, Keaton's work was cast into near obscurity for many years. Only toward the end of his life was there a renewed interest in his films. An acrobatically skillful and psychologically insightful actor, Keaton made dozens of short films and fourteen major silent features, attesting to one of the most talented and innovative artists of his time. ...
Often at odds with the physical world, his ability to naively adapt brought a melancholy sweetness to the films. The subtlety of the work, however, left Keaton behind the more popular Chaplin and Lloyd. By the 1930s, the studio felt it was in their best interest to take control of his films. No longer writing or directing, Keaton continued to work at a grueling pace. Not understanding the complexity of his genius, they wrote for him simple characters that only took advantage of the most basic of his skills. For Keaton, as for many of the silent movie stars, the final straw was the advent of the talkies."
(American Masters and The Public Broadcasting Corporation)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
That Mitchell and Webb: we want your ad-hoc reckon
"What do you think about this issue? Do you have any thoughts? What are those thoughts? Will you tell us them? Any thoughts at all will do. If you have em -we want to hear them. Are you personally affected by this issue then email us or if you're not affected by this issue can you imagine what it would be like if you were? ..."
(BBC Two, UK)
That Mitchell and Webb Site "We want your Ad-hoc 'reckon'" Series Two, Episode Five
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Charlie Chaplin: truth and naturalism through improvisation
"While Harold Lloyd played the daredevil, hanging from clocks, and Buster Keaton maneuvered through surreal and complex situations, [Charlie] Chaplin concerned himself with improvisation. For Chaplin, the best way to locate the humor or pathos of a situation was to create an environment and walk around it until something natural happened. The concern of early theater and film was to simply keep the audience's attention through overdramatic acting that exaggerated emotions, but Chaplin saw in film an opportunity to control the environment enough to allow subtlety to come through."
(Public Broadcasting Service, 28th August 2006)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
