batshit-auspol
4 hours ago

In the mid-2000s there was a brief fad in Australian government messaging where they went out of their way to insult the public as much as possible.

image
image
image
image
image
image
image

This fad eventually died out after the tourism board attempted the same style of messaging in the UK, causing a minor scandal which led to the head of Tourism Australia, Scott Morrison, getting the sack.

image

The first time we drove past the โ€œdonโ€™t drive like a cockโ€ sign, my mum looked at it was immediately SO confused - after all sheโ€™s a good semi-conservative Christian woman. My brother and I knew it right away but for the next half hour she guessed literally EVERY other word for cock (donโ€™t drive like a rooster, chicken, hen, chick, bird, fowl, poultry) trying her goddamned hardest to make the sign make sense until my - at the time - eleven year old brother got fed up and yelled COCK at the top of his lungs from the back seat.

My mum was FURIOUS - we werenโ€™t even allowed to say โ€œheckโ€ - until she realised heโ€™d just been telling her what the sign was, and for the rest of the three hour trip our good semi-conservative Christian mother proceeded to amuse herself by muttering โ€œcockโ€ under her breath and giggling like a teenager every time she did.

We still bring it up every now and then. So that particular advertising campaign has been making my family laugh for over a decade.

This one was always my favourite, though:

image

Reblogging to make sure this excellent story is seen

pablolf
6 hours ago

And Keanu says something really interesting to me on the first John Wick. He comes to me and he goes, “Look, just so you know, little bit of advice, when you edit, once a week, you should see the edit on the big screen.” And I’m like, OK, we’ll try. Later, alone with him, I’m going, “Well, why?” He’s like, “I’m a big-screen actor.” And I had no fucking idea what that meant. I thought it meant a movie star. And he’s like, “No, no, no, no.”

And he started talking to me about non-verbal acting, like gestures, motions. And he’s like, “Look, when you see me on a little monitor and I give this little look, it’s one thing. But when you see it on a 40-foot screen, that look’s going to say a lot. That’s what I want to play this guy as. So just please be aware of it, so when we punch in on the closeups, it’s going to mean something.” And it kind of really clicked for me right there.

I’ve always been fascinated by non-verbal gesture, body language. Keanu would go through and strip his dialogue down. It was like, “No, no, nope. I’m just going to cuddle the puppy.” In the first John Wick, he doesn’t talk for 32 minutes. Try to sell that one to a studio: You have Keanu Reeves and you’re not going to let him talk.

Chad Stahelski on what the John Wick movies owe to Buster Keaton