His greying itinerant preacher’s hair flails behind him wildly
His greying, itinerant preacher’s hair flails behind him wildly. It’s about an actor (played by Stephen Baldwin) who identifies too closely with his role when he re-enacts a murder for a crime show “I’m playing the serial killer,” says Postlethwaite “He turns into one, just by chance. This girl he’s walking home with happens to get something in her eye and he says, `I’ll have it out in a minute,’ and he does.” He chuckles wholesomely at his own thumbnail sketch.He’s never played normal people, has Postlethwaite. Like a lot of middle- aged British thespians, he has ben pigeonholed by Hollywood as a lugubrious baddie. Take the RSC’s Midsummer Night’s Dream from a few years back, where our conversation leads us first.
Postlethwaite, with a knobbly head that could have been specifically designed for the addition of ass’s ears, was a marvellously bucolic Bottom. “It was with Gerard Murphy and the tall girl, the governess, what’s her name?” Janet McTeer?
“Lofty McTeer And the director… what’s Bill’s second name? Bill Alexander.”
Postlethwaite has been chauffeured up through London’s dense traffic from Twickenham Studios, where he is filming a psychological thriller called Crimetime. There are certain tell-tale signs that Pete Postlethwaite doesn’t do a lot of theatre these days. For a start, the names of several quite illustrious people he worked with have slipped his memory. UK distributor: Astrion (tel: 0181-202 0011; fax: 0181-202 3300)..
Want to turn your sitting room into a hardcore techno club? Or your potting shed into a rave all-nighter? Well, the answer could lie with Flux, developed by EXP, which combines Flux Trax, a double CD of 18 classic techno cuts, compiled by The Grid’s Richard Norris, and Flux, a cartridge for the Sega Mega CD, which turns your TV screen into a visual feast of abstract graphics that pulse and animate in sync with any audio CD you choose to play. There are five double CDs on offer to Independent readers, plus five copies of the Mega CD cartridge to give away. Name and address on a postcard to Flux Trax Comp, Devonshire House, 12 Barley Mow Passage, London W4 4PH. All told, this is the best art CD-Rom available.For Mac only, System 7.1, 6MB RAM, pounds 39.99. There are stories, textual tricks and cursor jokes in each section, and rewards for frequent visits. The sections are linked by music (an hour’s worth) and graphics, which compensates for the current slowness of the medium.
You also get 16-bit CD-quality sound and, for the wired, there’s a Web connection for adding extra video. For example, hall of time, fax, love line, ouija board, ear, shadow and plug. This information you obediently download to the editorial office.For Windows PC 486/33MHz, 8MB RAM, or Mac System 7.1, 8MB RAM, $35.99 annual subscription (tel: 001 310 260 7786).True to form, it’s taken one of the best multimedia (performance) artists alive to produce a CD-Rom that really is intellectually and aesthetically challenging. Laurie Anderson (she of O Superman fame), with designer Hsin-Chien Huang, has made the amusing Puppet Motel, which makes strong connections between many of the themes of her artwork over her 35-year career There are 33 “rooms” to explore. If you didn’t mind the idea of having your hard disc frisked by Big Brother, you’ll probably get a kick out of Launch’s new feature – built-in software that tracks where you spend your time on the CD-Rom.