Category Archives: Film

Poetry for Hopefulness | Bright Poems for Dark Days

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bright poems for dark days, poems, hope, poets, hopefulA fitting release for this years National Poetry Day theme of choice, Dr Sutherland’s curated collection features poetry from across globes and generations to find the perfect words of affirmation, positivity or hopefulness to aid you in moments of need or stress.

🌸 Choose from 8 themes to fit your needs, from hope to nature & escape or joy to gratitude & comfort and more

🌸 Choose words and poems from literary greats, such as William Blake and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to modern greats like Maya Angelou and Carol Ann Duffy to name just a few

🌸 With stunning full-colour, original illustrations from artist Carolyn Gavin (@carolynj)

bright poems for dark days

An anthology for hopefulness from William Blake to Warsan Shire

Dr Julie Sutherland
Illustrated by Carolyn Gavin

Bright Poems For Dark Days Published by Frances Lincoln | £12.99 | 19thth October 2021

We all have days when we find ourselves in need of some positivity and a few hopeful words of affirmation. This collection of poetry was carefully curated and compiled by bibliotherapist Dr Julie Sutherland, an expert in the healing power of words, along with original illustrations from Carolyn Gavin, make this beautifully-bound book a worthy aid to your mental wellbeing:

  • The collection is split into 8 themes: hope, resilience & courage, joy, nature & escape, love, tranquility, gratitude & comfort
  • A diverse range of writers and words are featured; from Oscar Wilde to Emily Dickinson, Robert Louis Stevenson to Maya Angelou, William Blake to Warsan Shire
  • The selections are accompanied by explanations and illuminating context that reinforces the positive mental health message
  • Combining uplifting lines of verse with joyful illustrations means this unique book can provide a much-needed dose of hopefulness and happiness in turbulent moments
  • Perfect as a thoughtful gift for someone in need or a resource of solace that can turned to whenever needed
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In difficult times, the words of others can lift us up.

 

 

 

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Bright, joyful art to inspire hopefulness is combined with a curated collection of poems, chosen to lift the spirits through the healing power of words.

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Dr Julie Sutherland is a writer and editor based in Ontario, Canada. She is a bibliotherapist for the ReLit Foundation, facilitating and presenting a wide variety of reading for well-being events in Canada, the US, the UK and online. She is passionate about the capacity of literature to effect change in the human spirit.

Carolyn Gavin is a painter, illustrator and designer based in Toronto, Canada. Vibrant, playful and happy are perfect words to describe her style. She is principal designer for Ecojot, a family-run eco-friendly paper business and also licenses her work for fabric, homewares and packaging. Find her on IG @carolynj (460k followers).

LUNA CINEMA PARTNERS WITH NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM

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If you’ve not yet attended a Luna Cinema event in London, now’s the time to try! Hosting an array of springtime screenings in the iconic main hall, cinemagoers can catch their favourite film, grab a free bag of popcorn and settle under the, erm, skeletons to watch a flick.

Hitting the big screen in London are:

A Quiet Place – 9th March

The Jungle Book – 10th March

The Greatest Showman  – 10th March

Bohemian Rhapsody – 11th March

A Star Is Born – 11th March

Night At The Museum – 12th March

Jurassic Park – 12th March

Tickets are also available for Leeds Castle in Maidstone Kent

All tickets cost £27.75 per person and a bag of popcorn is included in the price. A pop up bar will serve drinks at an additional charge

For more information, visit the Luna Cinema website

WHY I TRADED IN A HIGH-FLYING CAREER IN THE HOTEL INDUSTRY TO PURSUE MY ACTING DREAMS, AND HOW I DID IT

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By Peter Meyer, author of The Boy from the Wild

Most of us dream about quitting the 9-5 (or is that the 8-7) rat race, but few ever do.  The author Peter Meyer is proof that following a dream can be more than just a daydream. He hung up his suit and left a highly-paid job in the hospitality industry to embark on a career as an actor – and was soon rubbing shoulders with Brad Pitt.

I grew up in the hospitality industry, quite literally. I was born and raised on a game reserve in South Africa that my father created. It had a safari park, a five-star hotel and a conference centre. It was once known as Safari World and its pioneering fusion of Disney-style theme park and nature reserve  made it akin to a real-world Jurassic Park

When I was older, I graduated from Les Roches Hospitality University in Switzerland and went on to work all around the world in places including the UK, Jamaica, Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Kuala Lumpur.  I worked in different director roles in sales, marketing and business development for groups like Hilton, Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, JA Resorts & Hotels and then YTL Hotels.  At one point I was even one of Hilton’s youngest directors at 26 years old.  I had it all going for me – the experience, the qualifications, the connections, the lifestyle and so much more…. but then it all changed.

In 2014, I dropped everything to spend time with my father after hearing he had a very rare form of terminal cancer.  My father was my life and an incredibly special person, so I was going to be by his side.  After I lost him I lost a part of myself and realised that you are vulnerable – and that life is governed by time that we take for granted.  I tried to get back into hotels and got a huge position in Kuala Lumpur but was ultimately in a very bad mental state and lost my zest and desire for the industry.  I was missing my dad plain and simple.

By chance a short while later a family friend suggested that I try acting and modelling for fun, and at least until I’d planned my next move.  So, a short while later, I signed onto a website that was a portal for jobs in that industry.  Within the space of a few days I was contacted by a production company, which asked me to do a TV commercial for Ford.

I did the shoot and was told I was a “natural” and was advised to do more! Two weeks later I got a call from a director making an independent British film and I got a tiny part as a news anchor with some lines.  It was then that I realised how much I loved acting and it woke me up out of semi-depressed state for my father.  I decided to see where it went.

Suddenly I was getting acting and modelling roles and even got my first lead in a short film within three months of starting.  My biggest came when I got a call to audition for Allied with Brad Pitt and got the smallest part to sing.  Sadly, the role was cut but I was still an extra and got picked to be near Brad Pitt and enjoyed getting to know him. I then got chosen to work as an extra next to Liam Neeson this time on The Commuter.  He partly inspired my book “The Boy from the Wild”.  In less than 18 months all this had happened.  I was also doing a lot of plus size modelling and was Tesco’s first plus size male model wearing Jacamo.  But I have also modelled internationally with groups such as El Corte Ingles wearing Hugo Boss, GANT, Ralph Lauren and more.  Who knows what’s next?

I’ve gone from surviving animal attacks and snake bites on a safari park to surviving the concrete jungles of Hollywood.  How, people ask?  Well, get headshots, get a showreel, get an agent, brand yourself to get your followers and have passion.  If you are determined and do what you love then you will achieve.  Sometimes you have to risk it to get the biscuit. A dream is yours and yours to fail, so don’t let it.

The Boy from the Wild by Peter Meyer is out now, priced £9.99 in paperback and £3.99 as an eBook. It is available for sale on Amazon UK. Visit  www.petermeyer.com

Superhero Movies at a Crossroads?

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The latest Marvel movie and the third in its Norse chapter, Thor: Ragnarok, may herald a marked change in that franchise’s approach to superhero films.  The production of these films is as predictable as a car assembly line and their content as varied as the colours of a Model T but with Thor Three a new ingredient has emerged, that of humour.  In contrast I was recently at a cinema to see Blade Runner 2049 when the trailer for DC’s Justice League came on.  There was a palpable sense of ennui from the audience.  Perhaps they had already signalled their indifference to superhero fare by choosing to see Blade Runner but I sensed a shift that just might dent one of these studio giants.

Taking its cue from the Guardians of the Galaxy films, Thor Three’s accent is firmly on the comedy.  Thor himself is self-deprecating and droll while supporting characters present plenty of less than super attributes.  Tessa Thompson plays a Valkyrie who, when not booting monsters all over the place, advocates heavy drinking.  The really surprising thing is that she does not experience an epiphany and hold forth against the demon drink when her character arc demands it.  And, considering that Marvel Studios is a subsidiary of Walt Disney, this is a turn-up.

Superheroes are a sexless bunch but, finally, in Thor Three we detect some lewd thoughts flickering between our beefy god of thunder and his fetching Valkyrie.  There is the faintest tickle of potential hanky-panky between these traditionally po-faced heroic archetypes.  At one point the goodies have to fly their spaceship into a black hole called the Devil’s Anus. Change is indeed afoot.

Meanwhile over at DC studios, the same old formula that brought you the excruciating Superman: Man of Steel and the tired Batman v Superman: Yawn of Justice, (sorry Dawn), is busy promoting its latest commodity.  Justice League brings together Batman, Wonder Woman and some other assorted gimps you’ve never heard of to fight someone called Steppenwolf.  It’s tiring even writing this stuff.  Judging from the trailer it’s all square jaws and CGI fisty-cuffs with little evidence of the refreshing wit found in Thor.

Will audiences tire of these cinematic facsimiles?  I sincerely hope they do.  This may sound mean-spirited but my objections to this cycle of inanity are not based merely upon personal taste.  The money poured into these productions is immense; Justice League had a budget of $250 million.  For all that, we will get some feeble musings on the nature of good and evil wrapped up in a 120 minute montage of FX enhanced martial arts.  It is truly depressing how much stock, young people especially, put into what are ultimately conservative, status quo perpetuating sagas that are brainless and backward.  Wonder Woman broke the mould with a female lead after decades of male protagonists.  Racial tokenism is rife while the presence of gay characters, despite appearing in the comics, have yet to materialise on screen.

While Thor Three did provide some cheer for the super-weary, the end of spandex-clad shenanigans is not nigh.  The Asian market continues to bolster these movies even when they perform poorly in the west.  William Goldwyn famously stated that in Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything.”  He was talking about the unknowable formula for making a hit film.  Today I fear that Hollywood executives know exactly what to do.  Until one of these films tanks at the box office the procession will persist and the cinematic landscape will be the bleaker for it.

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Mother!

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If you are the kind of person that gets twitchy when a hot cup of tea is plonked beside, instead of on top of, a perfectly good coaster then Mother! is not the film for you.  It is the tale of a frustrated poet (credited as Him) and his house-proud wife (credited as mother) living in an idyllic country house.  He spends his time not writing while she noodles about sploshing muted Farrow and Ball tones on various walls of their chic wooden dwelling.  Her domestic goddessing routine is upset when strangers start arriving and, crucially, not leaving however many times she screams “Get out.”

An unknown couple stay over at the behest of the poet followed by their bickering sons.  What follows is rather like watching an episode of Grand Designs in reverse.  Strangers begin to arrive at the house in greater numbers as the film initially plays out as a home invasion horror.  The mother’s show home is steadily ruined as hordes of the poet’s acolytes descend on them, literally tearing the house down.  The film unfolds like the kind of nightmare where you are entirely impotent to events going on around you.  mother dashes from room to room straightening rugs and emptying ashtrays only to find a new group of hell raisers have arrived.

Critical chatter around this film has been mixed, with a good deal of words devoted to the allegory that the film purports to represent.  The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed that the poet’s credit is Him with an upper case h while mother and everyone else including ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are all lower case.  Yes, we are in God territory here.  Javier Bardem is God, Jennifer Lawrence is Mother Nature., the house the Garden of Eden.  The first two strangers to arrive, Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer are Adam and Eve, the sons Cain and Abel etc.  The destruction of the house is the pollution of the world and so goes the allegory.

If Mother! feels burdened by a need for interpretation it succeeds in being a nasty and very difficult film to watch – which is a good thing.  Director Daren Aronofsky is tapping into his previous work with the bristly paranoia of Black Swan and the way the camera is often stationed just behind Lawrence’s shoulder as it did behind Mickey Rourke’s in The Wrestler.  The choreography and escalation of the violence and horror make for a deeply uncomfortable second hour as Aronofsky tightens the umbilical cord he has wrapped around your neck.  That Mother! chases its own tail will come as no surprise for some.  However, you may well share the sentiments of four unlikely geysers sat to my left.  As the credits rolled one of them queried, “What was the f****** point of all that?”  What indeed?

 

 

The Soft(er) Side of Stephen King By Richard Warburton

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Via YouTube.

Many of you will have noticed the posters for the latest adaptation of Stephen King’s It.  Some feature a sinister red balloon being proffered to a small boy while others show the eponymous killer clown’s grotesque face – a malevolent grinning monster.  This sort of thing sends me bolting to the nearest Cineworld while others avert their eyes and try to think nice thoughts.  However, for all you cinephiles who don’t ‘do’ horror, then Stephen King’s cinematic canon does offer pleasures that are not so reliant on scares and gore.

It was probably the success of The Exorcist that gave King his break.  William Friedkin’s occult shocker was the second most popular film of 1974 eventually becoming the ninth highest grossing movie of all time.  Publishing houses took note and signed the likes of Anne Rice and James Herbert.  Over sixty cinematic adaptations of his work have been filmed which have varied wildly in terms of quality and revenues.  Nevertheless, amongst the horror classics like Carrie or The Shining there are several sensitive and thoughtful films that may interest viewers put off by the King brand.

Discussions of this subject usually begin and sometimes end with prison drama The Shawshank Redemption.  No supernatural monsters here, just the human variety in a film that accents perseverance and hope in the face of institutionalised brutality.  Instead, I would consider Stand By Me, a tale of four young boys who set out into the woods to search for the body of a missing child.  The film captures something that Stephen King renders so well in his prose, that is the exhilaration, vulnerability and confusion of what it is to be a kid.  Ironically King masters these themes in It and the latest film does a solid job of conveying childish camaraderie in the face of undiluted evil.

Of course It is not for the squeamish so next I would turn to Hearts in Atlantis which stars Anthony Hopkins as an elderly psychic who becomes the confidante of his landlady’s son.  It’s a curiously old fashioned film that played poorly in cinemas and divided critics.  However, its whimsical charms should win over the less cynical while its supernatural elements never dominate what is really a simple coming-of-age story.

Dolores Claiborne is a sombre and profound psychological mystery starring Jennifer Jason Leigh as the daughter of the eponymous Dolores played by Cathy Bates.  Dolores is the prime suspect in the suspicious death of her frosty employer and her estranged daughter is not convinced of her mother’s innocence either.  The mother / daughter relationship is delicately teased out.  King’s empathetic depictions of women, something rarely appreciated in his writing, are on show here.  And, despite the gothic gloom, Dolores Claiborne tightens its grip over two mesmerising hours.

Horror fans would no doubt be disappointed if they watched these films based on their familiarity of King’s signature output.  They might take some solace from another prison drama, The Green Mile, with its graphic execution scenes but the film spends more of its time examining humanity and dignity than revelling in shock and gore.

There is more diversity to Stephen King than his reputation suggests.  If you are willing to dip your toe into an unfamiliar genre then reading the long and terrific novel of It would be a rewarding starting point.  The film adaptation is the first of two with the second part due to go into production next year.  And, if you are curious as to why horror is such a popular genre then the upcoming book Why Horror Seduces by Mathias Clasen should provide the answers.

 

Business of Books: Jane Cable talks to author & book designer Christine Hammacott

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the-business-of-books-interviewswithjanecableJane Cable talks to author and book designer Christine Hammacott
 
How much of your working life does the business of books take up?
The business of books is extremely varied these days. Being an author doesn’t just involve writing a book. It can involve research, editing, marketing and promotion, social media, blogging, events and book festivals, to name but a few – anything that can help raise your profile.
I’m an author and also a book designer. I run my own graphic design consultancy and spend a lot of time working on logos and brand development across all media both in print and online. Three years ago, I joined forces with a couple of other writing friends to set up a indie-publishing co-operative. We’ve published seven titles so far including my own book. As a result of this I’ve been asked by other authors if I would design their covers. So two years ago I added book design to my portfolio of offerings and word seems to have spread as I’m now constantly working with other authors.  
My writing is a lot less disciplined than the design side, as I’m forced to write around family commitments, often snatching time at the laptop or with notepad and pen in car parks and corridors while my daughter is at one of her out of school activities. It isn’t ideal but it’s a one way of ensuring I have some regular time to write.
Jane Cable talks to author and book designer Christine Hammacott
What’s your business model for earning a living from books?
As far as earning a living from my writing goes I’m a long from doing that. I’m not convinced I’d actually like to solely write, although I would like to address the balance better. In an ideal world I’d like to spend the mornings writing and the afternoons designing with a walk with the dog in between.
I really enjoy designing book covers. My first job after art college was working for a publisher doing just that. I turn an author’s manuscript into a marketable ‘product’ that is visually appealing and conveys the genre and essence of the book. It can be quite difficult getting this across sometimes to an author but it’s important for a potential buyer to know immediately what they are buying and whether they want it. 
I think authors like working with me because I’m an author too and therefore understand where they are coming from and that their work is precious. A lot of them haven’t published before and part of my role is to gently hand-hold them through the process.
What do you write and what do you consider your major successes?
Years ago when I first started writing, I entered a Writing Magazine short story competition and won first prize. That success gave me the confidence to believe in my writing and undertake something larger. I now write psychological suspense. I enjoy finding out how ordinary characters cope in extraordinary situations. My debut novel is about a young woman who just want’s to get back to some sort of normality after a devastating fire that has left her homeless and a neighbour dead. Only she then finds she has a stalker and begins to fear for her safety. It’s a genre I particularly like as it’s very easy to imagine myself in the protagonist’s position and that makes it scary.
Tell me about your latest project
I’m working on another psychological suspense. This one is set in the New Forest and is all about living with consequences, morality, family relationships and how easily a situation can get out of hand. 
 
 
Amazon link  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Taste-Ash-Christine-Hammacott/dp/1499590830/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1491584065&sr=8-1&keywords=christine+hammacott
Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25820474-the-taste-of-ash?from_search=true
website   www.christinehammacott.com
www.artofcomms.co.uk
facebook   christinehammacott.author/
twitter @ChrisHammacott
 

Gaucho Premieres present Ab Fab

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Yes Sweeeeety Daaaaarlings! You heard it here. Gaucho have managed to bag the hotly anticipated Absolutely Fabulous Movie and it’s set to be premiered at Gaucho O2 on Saturday 2nd July. Forget the cinema, how else could you possible enjoy Absolutely Fabulous without a cocktail in hand. Thank you Gaucho for making this one possible, expect sexy Argentine Steak and Stoli Cosmo Cocktails… no, really!!! Each guest will receive a Stoli Cosmo on arrival followed by a two-course meal before being escorted to Gaucho’s private premiere screening.

Tickets cost £55 per person

Absolutely Fabulous Movie
Saturday 2nd July
13:00
Gaucho O2

Peninsula Square
London
SE10 0DX

For more information and to book, please visit:

http://www.gauchorestaurants.com/events/event/gaucho-premieres-absolutely-fabulous/