Tag: Movies

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How to watch US Netflix from anywhere in the world

us netflix from uk
You can switch region on the Unblock US homepage

us netflix from uk
You can switch region on the Unblock US homepage
We subscribe to Netflix in the UK from our Apple TV but let’s face it, the selection available is pretty lousy – just flicking through the InstantWatcher database (a library of everything available on the US library) is enough to really make you consider cancelling your UK Netflix sub.

Enter Unblock Us to save the day!

Being a bit of a geek I was pretty sure there’d be a way around the Netflix ‘geo-fence’ and sure enough Unblock Us did the job. It’s a $5 monthly service that lets you pretend to be pretty much anywhere in the world and receive that country’s Netflix library. So if you’re in the UK and want the US library, no problem. And, of course, vice versa 🙂

Make the most of your Netflix sub!


I’d seen a lot of references on some forums I frequent (mainly Eurogamer and AV Forums) to two services in particular: Unblock Us and Blockless. Both cost the same, about $5 a month, work on any device you use Netflix on, and setup really boils down to plugging some numbers into the DNS field on your device and restarting. If you want to switch library to another country you just change the country you want to appear to be in on the Unblock Us or Blockless homepage. It’s very easy and we found that in practice we loaded up the US library and rarely changed that setting.

But hey – you’ve got the power to watch any Netflix library at all, so make sure to check out what’s available elsewhere as you might be surprised! For example, at the time of writing neither the US nor UK have The Dark Knight Rises, but the Swedish and Norwegian subscribers have had it all month. (If you’re reading this in 2015 you might not think that’s so amazing, but in August 2013 it’s pretty cool).

So which one to go for? Well it’s up to you. Both have a 7-day free trial so give them a go and see what floats your boat. The two services were essentially identical for our needs, so I’m afraid in the end I made my mind up based on which homepage I preferred the look of, and Unblock Us won.

How to search the world’s Netflix libraries

So once you’ve got access to those libraries how do you find out what’s available and where it is? I use a really cool website called MoreFlicks. You tell it what movie or TV show you’re looking for and it searches the global libraries of Netflix, Vudu, iTunes, Hulu, BBC iPlayer, Fox and Crackle and tells you where, if anywhere, it’s available. You can restrict searches to particular services or search by genre or other keyword if you don’t have a particular title in mind.

Once you’ve found the movie or show you want, check which Netflix library it’s in, switch to that region using the unblocker service, restart Netflix and you’re done.

How does it work?

us netflix uk blockless
You can switch region on Blockless too, but only when logged in
You don’t really need to know this stuff to use one of these sites, but anyway: websites like Netflix determine where you are using the DNS address each device is given when it connects. It’s a series of numbers in the form xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx that work as a kind of location ID. If you’re in the UK, your connection passes through a UK-based DNS server and you get the UK Netflix library.

Unblock US and Blockless provide you with a new DNS address you can enter in your router or connecting device that will make your device appear to be anywhere in the world that you want to be by setting that location on their site whenever you want. And it’s useful for much more than just Netflix – most media-related websites that restrict access based on your apparent location should be available, including BBC iPlayer, Vudu, Hulu and MLB.

It is, as they say, pretty cool!

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Does it really matter if Jim Carrey changed his mind about Kick Ass 2?

Today a lot of people are talking about Jim Carrey’s tweets that he no longer feels comfortable with the level of violence in Kick Ass 2 in light of the Sandy Hook shootings, and as you’d expect he’s being pilloried by some and praised by others. The producer of the film, Mark Millar, replied that he’s “baffled” about the decision.

I don’t see the problem, really. I find it perfectly feasible that the experience of performing violent acts during filming felt quite crass a few months later when the tragic massacre occurred in that school. Not that massacres are a new phenomenon, particularly in America, but maybe that was the one that broke him, happening so soon after working on Kick Ass 2.

I was going to write more, examining the range of reactions to the news from around the web, but then I stumbled across this piece by Devin Faraci at Badass Digest and his thoughts chime with mine.

On Carrey changing his mind at all:

To me that’s admirable. It’s possible that the extreme violence on set during the Kick-Ass 2 shoot contrasted with the real life violence of Sandy Hook weeks later is what caused something to switch over in Carrey’s thinking. That’s indicative of someone who is allowing experience in, who is examining his beliefs all the time, someone who isn’t didactic or chained to one belief system in the face of all reason. Yet to many others this is weakness, and an occasion to belittle and attack the guy. He’s bitching, they say. Didn’t he read the script?, they ask. He’s happy to cash the paychecks, they mock.

They, frankly, are the small minds.

The latest trend is for folk to angrily and snarkily demand Carrey donate his entire fee for Kick Ass 2 to charity. They’re doing this all wrong. For one thing his fee is for at the very least his performance (we have no idea what he’s contractually obliged to do beyond that so stop speculating) and he’s not removing his performance. So no, he shouldn’t donate his fee.

But I do think it would be okay for me to say,

“Hi, Jim. I respect your opinion and your having the balls to stand up and say it, and I’m looking forward to the film all the same. Have you considered also making a donation to a relevant charity? It might help make you feel better, and also maybe it would shut up those people on the internet, don’t know if that bothers you but anyway. I’m sure you’ve probably considered it, I’ll leave you be. Loved you in Eternal Sunshine by the way.”

You know, friendly, like?

Ultimately, people are always going to knee-jerk and get angry on the internet, they’ll get over it. But I remain rather baffled myself as to why Mark Millar would publicly express confusion at Carrey’s ability to change his mind. It shows a lack of compassion and understanding – he doesn’t have to agree with Carrey, but to me it’s not baffling.

It’s also hardly likely to do any damage to the film, not that for one second I think that was Carrey’s intention either. It’s going to get plenty of word-of-mouth off the back of this alone.

“So violent Jim Carrey doesn’t want anything to do with it!” certain sections of the media will scream, guaranteeing further bums on seats. An oversimplified misinterpretation it may well be but what section of the demographic Kick Ass 2 is aimed at is going to be put off by such a claim?

My opinion? As far as I’m concerned it isn’t movies like Kick Ass that enable or cause horrific shootings – I’m not sure that any element of pop culture should be held ‘responsible’ – so while I think Carrey’s reasoning sounds misplaced in that respect, I can’t argue with him having the courage of his convictions to be true to them.

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Editorial Photographic Pictorial

Cockneys Versus Zombies is coming!

Alan Ford and Honor Blackman make a stand against the zombie invasion.

Last summer I did stills on Cockneys Versus Zombies (IMDb page), a comedy horror written by James Moran and Lukas Roche, directed by Matthias Hoene and starring Michelle Ryan, Harry Treadaway, Honor Blackman, Alan Ford, Rasmus Hardiker and plenty more equally great actors. It’s been a long time coming, but there’s finally a release date (August 31st) and a poster (over there on the left).

There’s also a load of new stills out there which is pleasing for me as there’s always such a long wait between taking the shots and then being able to share them; over a year in this case. Looking through Google Images it seems there’s around a dozen of mine out there now so I figure I can post them here too. There’s a handful of my favourites below and the rest are on my unit stills photography site.

I know I could be biased, but I reckon it’s going to be great; hordes of flesh-rotting zombies, buckets of gore, good laughs and lots of guns – well worth a trip to the flicks!

One of the undead gnaws on some poor unfortunate soul’s leg. Well, he wasn’t needing it anyway.
Alan Ford and Honor Blackman make a stand against the zombie invasion.
Rasmus Hardiker and Harry Treadaway mean business.
Harry Treadway and Michelle Ryan hope for a getaway aboard a London bus.
Ashley Bashy Thomas wielding a kick-ass shotgun in the face of the zombie hordes (just out of frame on the right…)
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Editorial Other Photographic

on David Cameron’s advice to the British film industry

Today the papers report the latest BS to spill forth from our Prime Minister, David Cameron, this time about the film industry (Guardian; Telegraph). Now, David clearly doesn’t know the first thing about the film industry. That’s not to say that I know everything, I absolutely don’t, but there’s some things I do know that make the crap Cameron spewed forth sounds utterly ridiculous.

Here’s how the afore-linked Guardian reports it:

During a visit to Pinewood studios in west London, the prime minister will meet small and medium businesses in the £4.2bn UK film industry, and suggest he supports the expected findings of a review that aims to rebalance the industry’s national lottery funding in favour of supporting independent pictures that have mainstream potential. Successful film companies would receive greater support, rather than government funding going to unproven film-makers.

What he’s basically saying is that only films that are going to do well at the box office should be getting funding, because that will solve everything.

Except it won’t solve anything at all. In fact, it’s literally impossible to achieve in the first place. What David Cameron clearly has no idea about (amongst many, many things) is that in the movie industry…

“Nobody Knows Anything”

William Goldman, movie screenwriter extraordinaire, famously stated this in the opening chapters of his book, Adventures in the Screen Trade. It refers simply to the fact that you can write a movie, cast a movie, make a movie and promote a movie, but until it gets released to the public, nobody knows anything whatsoever about how successful it will be.

Now there are executives around the world who think that actually they do know. Of course they think that, or else nobody would be funding any movies at all. Executives with the purse strings make assessments on the likely success of a movie and weigh that against how much money they’re going to put in and make a judgement on the risk involved.

The problem is that no matter how experienced they are, and how many successes they’ve had in the past, they still don’t actually know. Movies that were expected to soar actually bomb all the time. And movies that came from nowhere can go on to capture the zeitgeist and the public’s attention in ways nobody ever predicted.

So what Cameron has done is weigh in on a problem he knows absolutely nothing about, by making out like he actually has the solution. And the solution is:

(and I’m paraphrasing)

“Only fund movies that are going to make money.”

Brilliant, Dave. Just one question: how are we going to know what those movies are, exactly?

Actually, two questions. Second question: doesn’t this clever idea lead us gayly into the gaping maw of Blockbusterland, where only the loudest, flashiest, most anodyne films ever get made because they most closely match the depressing monotony of Hollywood’s annual summer release schedule?

And once we’re there, how is that going to make it ultimately easier for Britain to support the creation of the sorts of thoughtful, intelligent movies that the medium, and Britain in particular, can do so well? This decision of Cameron’s (I keep saying it’s his decision but in fact he’s actually just supporting some other investigation that has come to this conclusion, and will no doubt have been advised to do so because it might make him look more like he’s down in the trenches sticking up for the Brits he’s supposed to be governing) just bolsters the notion that only blockbusters can be counted on, which in turn drives more creative films even further into the styx (that’s if they can even get funding any more), which means they make even less money, and so on.

I have no easy answers. But the one thing I do know is that nobody knows anything, and that Cameron’s idea that we should only fund films that will make money is in fact an empty series of words designed to make him look like he’s got a plan; this isn’t it.

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Editorial Photographic Pictorial

OMNI – a new feature from Tristan Versluis

I’ve known and worked with Tristan Versluis for a few years now since I did stills for his FX-heavy short, Pixel, in around 2007. He’s mostly known for his prosthetics work (recent credits include World War Z and Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows Part I) and has been moving into directing first via self-written shorts and now features.

His first big feature came a couple of years ago, called Not Alone and starring Lucy Benjamin amongst others. Frustratingly, that project seems to have left his control in the edit, taking a somewhat different direction to that originally envisaged. Since then there have been more shorts and now a brand new self-written feature that he’s in full control of, called OMNI.

An alien abduction story, OMNI started shooting in Germany a couple of months ago with Tristan’s core group of previous collaborators, led by Stuart White on cinematography duties, and this month returned to the UK with two night shoots on a rooftop in Hackney Wick. They’re shooting on a couple of different cameras but for this particular shoot the team got access to a Red EPIC and a mini jib arm which injected some real dynamism into the scene, one of the key moments in the film. Speaking of which, I actually know virtually zero about the plot of the film other than that some of the characters witness an extra-terrestrial visitation and one of them gets spirited away. Is Tristan keeping a wickedly tight grip on the secrets in the script, or did he just forget to send me a copy of it? I have a feeling it’s both, which is cool because I like a bit of mystery…

The scenes we were shooting featured Charlotte Hunter and Ray Bullock Jnr, and despite the freezing temperatures (but thankfully little wind or rain!) both put in very moving performances. At some points in the scene Charlotte was lying on the baltic concrete wearing really not very much (no more than the average lady wears to a nightclub, put it that way) and before the camera rolled was visibly shaking with cold; these actors willingly suffered for Tristan’s art – the effect of the staunch loyalty Doctor Versluis instills in those that work with him (he has such a calming, zen-like bedside manner when applying time-consuming prosthetics to actors that the name ‘Doctor Versluis’ was coined and stuck).

So here’s a bunch of my stills from the evening, mostly behind-the-scenes because I think that stuff is always a lot more interesting, and all approved by Tristan for their lack of spoilery content; if you’d like to comment on anything I’m @myglasseye on Twitter. Enjoy, and thanks for visiting.

(just click on images to see them larger without leaving this page)