‘It needs to be loud’: Jozef Van Wissem’s one-man mission to make the lute rock again

The Dutch ex-punk and Jim Jarmusch bandmate talks about his passion to free up a hidebound repertoire and make its strings ‘a real pop instrument’ Nobody can accuse Jozef Van Wissem of doing things by halves. The musician, very likely the world’s most notorious contemporary lutenist, owns a sonic arsenal of eight of the string instruments: some bespoke, and all boasting remarkable features. With them he has created a huge body of work, nearly 50 titles to date. Another album, This Is My Blood is released this May. Each Easter, Van Wissem settles down to compose a new record. He finds the peace of Warsaw, where everyone has “gone away for the holidays”, more amenable for work than “noisy” Rotterdam, where he also has a flat. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/lIktvjD via IFTTT

Academy take action: why there should be an Oscar for best stunts

The director of John Wick: Chapter 4 has revealed that he is in discussions with the Academy to officially recognise the power of action sequences – and it couldn’t happen quickly enough

You could ask a million different people what they want from the Oscars, and you’d get a million different replies. Some would want greater diversity, others for commercial movies to be better recognised. Some would want to see the entire ceremony scrapped altogether and replaced by a list of winners sent out via email, although that last one might just be me. Anyway, the point is that nobody – nobody on Earth – would want the Oscars to be any longer.

To watch the Oscars these days is to commit to slowly losing all feeling in your lower body. On and on they go, for hours and hours. All the awards. All the speeches. All the montages. All the bits where everyone assembled focuses their willpower to shut out the creeping death of theatrical film-making as a financially viable medium. It goes on a while, and at this stage only an absolute lunatic would want to start adding categories to an already overstuffed dance card.

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