Everything Express

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With so much of our daily lives now conducted via the Internet, from paying bills to accessing medical services, on-line banking, shopping; if you can’t trust your browser to take you to the right site, what do you do?

And what do you do when it is the right site but the browser thinks otherwise?

It’s all to do with certificates and identification.
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Looking for the Twilight zone, all you get are testosterone-fueled pretty boys snarling their way through a macho version of The Craft. Some impressive special effects can’t disguise the vacuous, sub-Supernatural script. Unintentionally comedic, courtesy of ham-fisted Finnish demolition-meister Renny Harlin.

Somewhere in Massachussets; the Ipswich Colony (which immediately destroys the movie for the Brit’s – we can’t take anything from Ispwich seriously), where, since 1692, a ‘covenant of silence’ has kept witchcraft from the world.

Now, in the present day, the teenage heirs of four ancient families of warlocks battle it out with the banished evil fifth son… meh. Continue reading →

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Life is for living: a hokey, magical-realism, ghostly romance is saved from Ghost Whisperer ignominy by the star quality of Zac Efron.

A supernatural drama based on the best-selling book by author Ben Sherwood, Charlie St. Cloud (Efron: High School Musical, Me and Orson Wells) is a home-town golden boy who wins a sailing scholarship to an Ivy League college; but in the summer after high school, a car-wreck kills his younger brother Sam and Charlie is clinically dead until revived by paramedic Ray Liotta (Goodfellas).

Charlie was driving, and, weighed down by guilt, puts his life on hold to work in the cemetary where he plays catch daily with Sam’s ghost. Then Charlie’s former high-school classmate and sailing rival Tess (Amanda Crew) returns to town. Continue reading →

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Originally posted as Surviving Actors Expos by Edwin Flay, February 11, 2014.

“If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the consumer, you’re the product.” – Anonymous.

So on Saturday, I attended an event called Surviving Actors, an expo stacked full of “opportunities” for the aspiring/struggling/stalled actor…

There’s a legitimate need for all these things, and it’s handy to have them all in one place. You could argue that companies that sell courses play on actors’ insecurities to make their money – that it’s easy to blame your continuing lack of success on a lack of skills, or on just not being good enough, so you invest in their course to feel better and more confident. Doubtless, that’s how some of the marketing works, and there’s nothing wrong with that per se; in my opinion, it’s far better to address your own insecurities by attending a course in an acting method that works for you, or in a new skill, than it is to simply stew in your own fears and self-doubt – that way lies a self-destructive spiral. Continue reading →

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[Small spoilers alert]

During the chaos at the end of WW2 as the Russians and Americans are circling the wreck of Europe, a man with a plan collects a motley team of art experts together to help retrieve and return a continent’s mountain of looted art treasures to its rightful owners.

If you’re looking for action, violence and large scale spectacle you won’t get it – what this film excels in is its charming blokey friendships, with a ‘let’s get through this’ sense of humour and a different agenda at odds with the rest of the Allies. Visually stunning recreations of the destruction and devastation of city, art and life mix with astonishing real archive images of stacks of priceless treasures and their epic hiding places. Continue reading →

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Originally posted as Surviving Actors Expos by Edwin Flay, February 11, 2014.

“If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the consumer, you’re the product.” – Anonymous.

So on Saturday, I attended an event called Surviving Actors, an expo stacked full of “opportunities” for the aspiring/struggling/stalled actor. I specify this type of actor, because the place was full of people selling things that beginners may not know they need, and other things besides.

This may be no surprise to many of you. There’s half a dozen of these things every year – Surviving Actors, The Actors’ Expo, Perform!, etc – generally between January and April, and they’re all either free, or cost very little. The people who pay for it are the people selling you stuff, and what they’re buying is a room full of potential marks. Here is my quick (and probably not 100% accurate) tally of the various services available: Continue reading →

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I was recently sent a query about whether to use WordPress or Drupal.

It was from a non-technical person in the voluntary sector, so there was no point writing a technical article. I couldn’t assume anything about their level of technical knowledge. I did throw in Joomla as well, as it’s another website tool that is often mention in the same breath, often by the same kind of line manager (knowing just enough to be dangerous) who raised this question to my poor correspondent.

Which is why I told them this…

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