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Powys County Times
4 days ago
- Health
- Powys County Times
Powys author publishes mental health self-help book
A Powys author has released a mental health self-help book. Taliesin Larmour-Jones, a mental health first aider in the NHS, published his debut book, "The Exchange Rate of Happiness," on June 1. The book offers practical advice on improving mental health and wellbeing, with a focus on resilience, reflection, new routines, and finding life's purpose. The author draws from his own experiences with mental health challenges, sharing methods he has personally found useful. Mr Larmour-Jones, who is studying for a master's degree in psychology, said: "Mental health is even more important now than ever, post-pandemic the rates of depression, anxiety and other conditions have increased and with waiting times for support ever increasing it has never been more important than now to take the power into your own hands and do what you can for yourself. "Working within the NHS throughout the pandemic has shown me just how much patients and staff alike have struggled and continue to do so now. "A book isn't going to change you or 'fix' poor mental health, the truth is a lot of conditions can be managed but remission is not guaranteed. "What we can do is learn to have better coping mechanisms and to change things that are not working for us, repeating the same destructive behaviour doesn't change anything. "Action is the driver to change." Fiona Lintern, a senior lecturer in psychology at the Open University, reviewed the book, describing it as "thought-provoking." She also provided feedback and guidance on the book's content. The book's release comes at a time when mental health issues are on the rise, with increased rates of depression and anxiety reported post-pandemic. Mr Larmour-Jones hopes his book will offer readers a starting point to begin improving their lives. Ten per cent of the book's profits will be donated to four mental health charities: Shout!, YoungMinds, Mind, and Shropshire MHS. These donations will be rotated every three months to allow for larger lump sum donations. "The Exchange Rate of Happiness" is available on Amazon in e-book, paperback, and audiobook formats.
UPI
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- UPI
'Point Break,' 'Timecop,' John Woo movies coming to digital 4K
1 of 3 | Keanu Reeves, seen at the "Ballerina" premiere in Los Angeles, stars "Point Break," coming to 4K digital. Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI | License Photo June 18 (UPI) -- Shout! Studios announced the digital 4K releases of Point Break, Timecop and several Hong Kong films on Wednesday. The two Hollywood films are available Friday for rent or purchase in 4K for the first time. The A Better Tomorrow trilogy premieres digitally on July 8. John Woo directed the first two and Tsui Hark the third, all starring Chow Yun-fat. Woo and Chow's The Killer and Tsui's Peking Opera Blues become available July 22. Shout! released physical 4K UHDs of Point Break and Timecop. Point Break stars Patrick Swayze as an FBI agent who goes undercover with surfers led by Patrick Swayze to catch a gang of bank robbers. Timecop stars Jean-Claude Van Damme as a time-traveling policeman. Shout! made a deal to distribute the Golden Princess library under its Hong Kong Classics banner. A collection of Jet Li films and City on Fire, also starring Chow, are planned for 4K UHD. A Better Tomorrow launched Woo's signature action style with slow motion moves and gangsters shooting two guns at once. Those, along with The Killer, made Chow a leading Hong Kong action star. They would also reteam for Hard Boiled and Once a Thief. Woo directed a remake of The Killer starring Nathalie Emmanuelle and Omar Sy last year. Tsui also directed and produced the Once Upon a Time in China films and produced Chinese Ghost Story and Iron Monkey films. Peking Opera Blues is an action comedy starring Brigitte Lin, Sally Yeh and Cherie Chung. Shout! plans to release the Chinese Ghost Story trilogy August 5 and Woo's A Bullet in the Head in 4K on Aug 19.
Los Angeles Times
08-04-2025
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
Shout! Studios Acquires Gravitas Ventures
Los Angeles-based Shout! Studios, a multi-platform media company backed by Oaktree Capital Management, has acquired Gravitas Ventures from Anthem Sports & Entertainment, Inc. In a press release announcing the acquisition, Shout! reported that it remains highly committed to expanding its growing content portfolio by acquiring entertainment companies and major content libraries, while continuing to partner with independent rights owners to monetize content and launch new streaming channels. This addition to the Shout! Studios' family of properties is consistent with the company's strategic vision to build a large-scale, world-class distributor of movies and TV series for multi-platform partners around the globe. Gravitas Ventures provides Shout! access to over 3,300 scripted, non-scripted and sports-related feature film, documentary and television titles, adding genre diversification and title depth to Shout!'s already extensive catalog. Shout! Studios and Gravitas Ventures will operate as two distinct brands, continuing each business' long-standing tradition of serving and supporting independent filmmakers and studios. Each brand will continue to actively distribute content from its respective catalog, leveraging a scaled combined distribution organization to better monetize content across traditional and digital channels. 'Gravitas represents the next step in our continued expansion of the catalog at Shout!,' said Garson Foos, CEO of Shout! Studios. 'We are excited to join forces with the Gravitas team and see several opportunities to expand distribution of the combined library.' 'We're thrilled to welcome Gravitas to the Shout! family and believe it represents another successful example of Shout!'s ability to identify and execute upon attractive library acquisitions in the space. We are excited to continue to support the entire Shout! team as we pursue other organic growth and M&A opportunities going forward' said Jared Frandle, managing director for Oaktree's Special Situations Strategy. Salem Partners acted as the exclusive financial and investment banking advisor to Anthem Sports & Entertainment and Gravitas Ventures, led by Ivar Combrinck. Sheppard Mullin acted as exclusive legal advisor to Anthem Sports & Entertainment, led by Shaun Clark and Aerin Snow. Greenberg Traurig acted as the exclusive legal advisor to Shout! Studios, led by Ben Einbinder and Daniel Black. Recent successful films from Gravitas include Mack & Rita starring Diane Keaton; The Kings Daughter, starring Pierce Brosnan and Kaya Scodelario; Queen Bees, starring Ellen Burstyn and James Caan; Our Friend, starring Casey Affleck, Dakota Johnson and Jason Segel; Vanguard, starring Jackie Chan; The Secret: Dare to Dream, starring Katie Holmes and Josh Lucas, among others. Shout! Studios' creative acquisition mandate has established it as a leading independent distributor, with partners and properties including Aardman Animations, The Carol Burnett Show, GKIDS and Studio Ghibli, LAIKA Studios, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Golden Princess movie library, alongside many others. Shout! also operates two successful imprints - Scream Factory for genre horror films and TV, and Shout! Kids for family animation and live-action entertainment. Information was sourced from Shout! Studios. To learn more, contact tchen@
The Guardian
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie review
'It's a drag, isn't it,' Paul McCartney told reporters quizzing him the day after John Lennon's murder, a soundbite as dispiritingly muted, even callous, as his reaction to his mother's death when he was 14: 'How are we going to get by without her money?' Behind the scenes, Paul was lost and tearful, as well as guilt‑stricken that he and John hadn't properly reconciled since the Beatles split: 'I'm never going to fall out with anybody again.' Still, the enshrinement of John and vilification of Paul had begun. 'John Lennon was three-quarters of the Beatles,' Philip Norman told television viewers while promoting his biography, Shout!, a few months later. The antagonism has abated in recent years, but the John-Paul duality persists. Heavy rocker versus cute populist. Working-class rebel v smug bourgeois clone. Tormented genius v girly sentimentalist. Strawberry Fields Forever v Penny Lane. Ian Leslie takes on these tired polarities by reframing the story as a volatile bromance: 'passionate, tender and tempestuous, full of longing, riven by jealousy'. However much at odds temperamentally, John and Paul were an indivisible twosome, the driving force of the Beatles, with George and Ringo (not much featured here) as add-ons. The emotional ties they shared, not least the early loss of their mothers, weren't ones they could talk about, so they sang them instead. As Paul put it: 'You can tell your guitar things that you can't tell people.' To Beatles aficionados, the cast and chronology will be familiar: the Quarrymen, Hamburg, the Cavern, Beatlemania, Abbey Road, the Apple rooftop concert; Brian Epstein, George Martin; Cynthia Lennon, Yoko Ono, Jane Asher, Linda Eastman. But Leslie's approach is fresh because focused on the double-consciousness ('a duet not a duel', 'a group within the group') and their 'shared ownership of each other's talent'. He follows them from the teen years when they bunked off classes to strum at each other's houses ('Paul's reversed guitar meant that the two of them could act as mirrors for each other') through jamming sessions in hotel rooms to late-night studio recordings. Their work rate was phenomenal (at the Kaiserkeller they played seven nights a week till two or four in the morning). But so was the intimacy and sense of fun. 'It's like you and me are lovers,' John once said, to which Paul grunted assent, and even after the band's breakup they spoke of their relationship as a marriage. John referred to Paul as 'an old estranged fiance' and described how getting together with Yoko reminded him how he'd picked Paul 'as my partner'. Maybe, John conceded, 'it was a marriage that had to end'. Still, 'I would do anything for him, and I think he would do anything for me.' As Leslie sees it, the marriage didn't end because of musical differences, but because they were spending less time together, and others had intruded. John's marriage to Cynthia, and Paul's long romance with Jane Asher (plus countless flings), didn't seriously threaten it. But Yoko Ono was a force of nature, and with John quiescent in her domineering presence she became a replacement for Paul; John told her he liked her 'because you look like a bloke in drag. You're like a mate.' Linda Eastman was even more of a threat because Paul allowed her well-to-do family to take over Apple's financial affairs, much to John's rage and resentment. After the Beatles broke up, his denunciations of Paul, both in interviews and in music, were ferocious. The Beatles years had been humiliating, he said, with Paul 'a pretty face' who made muzak, rather than a true artist; Yesterday, a Beatles song with only one Beatle on it, was the epitome of his soppiness. Paul was hurt and John backtracked, describing him as 'my closest friend, except for Yoko'. But John had been hurt too, by Paul's neglect and bullying assumption of command, and there were further outbursts. Nonetheless, his idiom ('dear one', 'brother') was still tinged with affection. For Leslie, the intensity of their relationship is imprinted in their songs. He spends many pages dissecting them musically and is thorough in identifying influences: behind Hey Jude, for example, he discerns Bach, doo-wop, Broadway, Anglican church music and gospel. But it's what John called the 'eyeball-to-eyeball' collaboration with Paul that interests him most: 'They liked to put their faces close together and stare, unblinking, until they felt themselves dissolving into each other,' he writes, a tad mystically. Laughter was crucial (the Beatles loved to lark about). So was whistling: 'The way we work,' Paul said, 'John will whistle at me and I'll whistle back to him.' Some of their songs were composed within a couple of hours. Leslie doesn't shirk the question of how much each contributed to the lyrics and melody of their classics. When John, jealous of Paul's versatility, claimed to have written half of Eleanor Rigby, it was a wild exaggeration. But the emphasis here is on Lennon-McCartney as a joint enterprise, and the miracle of the songs they wrote together, with their singing voices sometimes indistinguishable and credit to one or the other beside the point: 'They were so far inside of each other's musical minds that it doesn't matter.' Reading songs as autobiography is dangerous. Leslie's previous books have been works of psychology, and he's an armchair shrink in places here, with Freudian digging to find lines that shed light on the John-Paul relationship. His tone can become overexcited. Please Please Me 'a cruise missile carrying a payload of joy'? Twist and Shout 'a carnal joyride'? Getting Better a 'self-help narrative' in which John acts as 'a Greek chorus in the drama of his own maturation'? Well, maybe. Attributing the self-assurance John and Paul displayed on stage to 'the arrogance of the damaged' is pushing it, too. Then again, John described Strawberry Fields Forever as 'psychoanalysis set to music' and Leslie enjoys the complex identity swaps in the collaboration, such as Paul thinking up the title for John's book In His Own Write: 'There is something delicious about a third-person title being suggested by a second person who co-created the first person's sensibility.'. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion For the most part, Leslie's book is intelligent, diligently researched fandom. He has read all there is to be read, from the pioneering Hunter Davies to the recent Craig Brown, and has consumed many a film and podcast in between. He's not afraid of terms such as postmodernist and metatextual. But the tone is chatty and engaging, with the emphasis where it should be, on the songs. There'll still be fans wedded to the old binaries. And though Leslie didn't interview McCartney for his book, he's not wholly impartial; it was a 10,000-word lockdown essay about Paul that prompted him to go on and write this. Still, his portrait of John's fragility and self-destructiveness is sympathetic. And his Paul isn't a winsome poster boy but tough, cynical and prone to cold fury. ''I realise now we never got to the bottom of each other's souls,' Paul once said. The dynamic remains mysterious, but this book takes us closer to understanding it. John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie is published by Faber (£25). 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