In the story of WordPress –the tool that powers 45% of the web, including 10s of 1000s of film sites– Mike Little is Steve Wozniak to Matt Mullenweg's Steve Jobs. Matt polished the interface, the marketing and curly quotes – while Mike added the blogroll, rebuilt the code, and added the one-click easy-upgrade that's been central to its success. But unlike Woz, Mike never had shares in Matt's $7bn…
The 'keep politics out of cinema' row that saw Arundhati Roy quit the Berlinale jury last weekend over chair Wim Wenders' comments – is an odd debate because, of course, films are all political, whether they like it or not. They almost always show one set of norms, behaviours or cultures as preferably to another: Wenders' zen-toilet-cleaner in Perfect Days – is still a statement of what he values.…
Speaking of heroes, Ben Blaine (@ben) s latest is about superhero culture, billionaires and Epstein – and is worth a read: the mass public dumping of the Epstein files comes at the end of the Hero culture, where it is no longer quite enough to stick a cape on a body suit and count the dollars flowing in. For two decades though, the decades that saw Epstein at the impossible height of his power and…
In the 25 years that I've been interviewing the great, the good and the frankly terrible of cinema, a lot has changed. If you had told me then that one day I would be able to watch an almost unlimited selection of movies, TV dramas and a thousand and one programmes based around differing variations of people baking cakes of one kind or another, all on my mobile phone, then I'm afraid I would have…
This interview follows David from paper-round to model, actor in London's West End - bullied for his working class background - then on to production as the BBC's first indie producer in the 80s. Then in the 90s, after unintentionally inventing the Special Interest video genre distributing his James Herriot's Yorkshire –which made back its investment 15 times over– he became a distributor. He's…
The first new Carnal Cinema column cartoon in 20 years… Oliver Reed, Richard Harris and Peter O Toole were a breed of actor apart. Prodigiously talented on screen and with extremely tempestuous personal lives off screen. Booze, women and plenty of bust ups featured regularly. It was for that reason they acquired the nickname “the [ ]
At the end of a row of rental bikes outside Waterloo station some pigeons were greedily attacking a discarded packet of cookies. There were two snack types; white and dark chocolate. I stood watching the scene, smoking a cigarette and wondering how this tasty product had ended up as elevenses for this feral horde. I had dozed [ ]
In 1942 a precocious young twelve-year old by the name of Stanley Kubrick was given the job of directing the Christmas nativity play at St Jerome School in New York. Stanley kept a journal, hand-written in crayon, from the age of eight. This is the first time that permission has been given to reproduce extracts [ ]
> "I'm not an anti-tech person. Shooters was built on technology. But I am mindful that we want technology that doesn't extract, technology that enables people." Long before social networks and smart phones in the mid-90s, Cath entered the world's first cyber-cafe in Soho, London to message a cyber-girlfriend in Australia. There she met Cyberia's founder Eva Pascoe, and joined the woman-owned…
It’s 19-and-a-half years since I first emailed the late James MacGregor, in a state of major excitement: Netribution wanted to republish an article I’d written on work experience about short films! That was May 2006. A month or so before, my brother and I had been checking out the mastheads of his beloved film magazines [ ]