The Films I've Watched This Year #7

Film Evening. If social media and my own experience are any measure, the Amazon's migration of Lovefilm into the main website and infrastructure has been a bit of disaster and much of it has to do with information. Unless current users followed the news they wouldn't have any idea of the changeover until they tried to log on to the Lovefilm website on Wednesday only to be met with a page pointing them in the direction of Amazon, either to migrate their account or if they'd done so already into deal with a whole new structure for their data which in some cases was either all over the place, didn't reflect recent changes with some titles having dropped off.  In seemingly taking the infracture of the US website and simply dumping the Lovefilm user database into it, there's been little care in explaining exactly how the new website works and the implications it has for users, at least unless they bother to click and look at the help pages, which judging by the confusion in a quick Twitter search and glancing at the Facebook page most people haven't.

The main problem seems to be that some users are now assuming that everything needs to be paid for (on top of their subs) or that items that have suddenly turned up in searches, mainly newer titles should be included in the package even though they're now being asked pay for them too - Amazon simply haven't made the difference between the new paid for downloads service ala iTunes and items in the monthly package clear enough other than a tiny "Prime" logo on cover graphics which is easy to miss because it's in the same place as "HD" logos on others.  This confusion has only been increased by the decision to suddenly start charging for some television series which were previously part of the package at the time of switchover while some people were in the middle of a season (with Grey's Anatomy a particular bone of contention) and what looked like a glitch which lasted two days in which items which were included in the package showed up on tablet apps as requiring payment.

All of which has led to plenty of people saying they're cancelling their packages both streaming and postal.  Not me, of course, because much of this really is just teething problems and managerial mistakes (and the like) and I'm also pretty stuck since I don't go to the cinema and these services are an entertainment lifeline.  Though it's also fair to say my experience has also been pretty bad, the disappointment epicentre of which was spending an hour on the phone yesterday with two advisors trying to sort out where my reserve lists (which are carefully curated events developed over months) had disappeared to after what should have been a simple update to the disc format of a title, conversations which (and I'm not at all proud to admit this) were pretty fractious.  Previously, whenever something like this cropped up, I'd phone Lovefilm and they'd tell me it was a system glitch or that I'd done something wrong and that was fine which is why I even bothered because let's face I should have more to do in life than worry about the disappearance of my "reserved list" on my old Lovefilm dvd by post rental account.  By the way this is a note I've written to myself.  Now I've typed it here too.

The first call was akin to speaking to The Happiness Patrol as I attempted to find out if the data had gone completely which he kept ignoring or not addressing, simply parroting the phrases he'd been given about waiting twenty-four to forty-eight for my account to transfer (which it already had) and that there were plenty of titles ready to be sent out anyway (which I knew).  I eventually coached him into admitting that he didn't have access to the information I'd been asking for during the previous twenty minutes anyway and gave me a telephone number to "someone who had more access" who turned out to be the Kindle helpline and all he could do was transfer me back to the call centre I'd already been talking to.  I'd asked the first advisor why he hadn't given the other telephone number to begin with.  Now I knew.  He'd given me this other number to get rid of me, bless him.  The upshot of all this is I'm waiting the twenty-four to forty-eight for my account to transfer, hoping that the system and website will have stabilized by then so I can trust any changes I'm making.  Oh and that the rental lists will be in alphabetical order again.

Meanwhile, Amazon Instant Video UK's online presence is an island with unanswered emails, social media boffins furiously deleting negative comments on the Facebook page rather than addressing them and Twitter searches which are a PR disaster area.  I don't know anything about how these big data transfers are carried out, but it seems to me that a more gradual process would have paid dividends, with only Lovefilm Instant customers sent over first to a website just offering in-package content, then the rest of us and after all of that had bedded in the introduction of the ability to download and stream and purchase additional items rather than the apocalyptic mess this is (not to mention the horrors of forcing Amazon Prime customers to suddenly stump up an extra thirty pounds for a streaming service they might not actually want) (and many of those, if Twitter's a guide, don't know that this extra charge isn't being added until next year).  The really galling thing is that no one in the mainstream media, who were quite happy to rewrite Amazon's press releases a week ago, has come back in to see how everything is going...

Stuck In Love
Nobody's Daughter Hae-won
Bachelor Knight
Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa
Dark Skies
Better Luck Tomorrow
Trap for Cinderella

Well, that was therapeutic.  The shortness of the list this week can be explained by Doctor Who's The Web of Fear being watched on Tuesday and Game of Thrones's third series being posted to me Amazfilm (because despite everything they're still hard at work in Peterborough sending the envelopes out).  I haven't reached the Red Wedding episode yet, so no spoilers.  Not a spectacularly inspiring week outside of the Cary/Bowie excitement.  Alan Partridge is fine and actually quite poignant thematically about how local commercial radio and the DJ's direct connection with a certain generation of audience members is being eroded over time due to the intervention of large companies, but I didn't laugh half as much as I wanted to, though that's tended to be the case with much of this saga over time anyway.  Dark Skies is a pretty solid domestic alien invasion horror which isn't doing anything particular new but still manages to be spectacularly creepy, especially when the visitors themselves appear and menace the children.

Stuck In Love was the surprise.  A glance at the advertising which apes the Love Actually posters, as so many of these things do now, suggests its going to be one of those hyperlink romantic comedies like that and Valentine's Day but is in fact a family ensemble piece about three blokes and their manic pixie dream girls.  Which is an unfair description since all of the characters are intelligent, funny and literate and to an extent it's Woody Allen's Interiors with jokes.  The problem is if you're someone who notices these things, you can see that none of the women are in charge of their own stories.  Greg Kinear's failing author is fighting to get his wife, Jennifer Connolly back whilst enjoying Kirsten Bell's company as a fuck buddy (yes, really).  His son, Nat Wolff, is trying to clean-up the noxious substances act of prime MPDG Liana Liberato.  Lily Collins is the daughter, but that story is about Logan Lerman trying to become her boyfriend.  Nevertheless, despite all of this, I had a really good time with it in way I didn't with the highly similar Smart People.

2003's teen crime drama, Better Luck Tomorrow is The Outsiders meets The Inbetweeners set within the Asian-American diaspora and about bored grade-A students attempting the gangster lifestyle in high school.  At roughly the same time as he was playing MILF GUY #2 in American Pie, John Cho has a major part as the upper class love rival of the main character.  The reason I discovered and watched it is because as a connoisseur of the Fast & Furious franchise I knew this also featured the first outing for Sung Kang's character Han who would go on to feature in director Justin Lin's first of the F&F sequels, Tokyo Drift for which this now acts as an unofficial back story, though lord knows where it fits in the F&F timeline given that episode four, five and six are all effectively prequels to that third installment.  The Wikipedia page doesn't go there.  Its indie vibe makes it well worth seeing either way, not least because it was championed by Roger Ebert at the time.

Now, see if you can guess which of the listed films features Jane Birken as herself in a dream sequence.  It's not immediately obvious...

"A by-election in the likes of Richmond or Epping Forest will never be quite like a by-election in Govan."

TV The always brilliant TV Cream mail-out points me towards this YouTube channel filled with old election coverage including very rare material from ITV which has presumably never been repeated since transmission. Too much to watch right now, but here's the Glasgow Govan by-election 1988 featuring Kirsty Wark versus Gordon Brown when they were both still in their thirties and Thatcher was still in power.



Gallow Publishing's website reports Haig Gordon's "subsequent broadcasting career went from bad to worse and he now prefers to write books on Galloway".

me, head, jumper, jeans, pressview, nose etc.

About Here I am (far left) (ironically) on a photo originally posted on Tate Liverpool's Facebook page of the Keywords press view on Thursday. It's not really the back of my head, more on the side.  Gosh, I have a large forehead.  Judging by this photo, I have a Tefal forehead.

"Staaarmaaakeeeerrrr."

TV A small nugget for old fans of The Kids from Fame, about the novelisation, from writer Stephen Gallagher (Doctor Who's Warrior's Gate and Terminus, Bugs and The Eleventh Hour):

"My slickest gig, I reckon, was the two Kids from Fame books, based on the '80s TV series. Twenty-six scripts arrived from MGM; the publisher's idea was that they'd make two books of 13 chapters each, one chapter per episode. Which clearly couldn't work because it would just be a compilation of synopses. So I split the scripts into two piles and combed through each, gathering elements for two new meta-stories. In 21 days I turned in two 50,000 word novels and picked up £4,000. They were published under the name of Lisa Todd; she got fanmail from kids in dance class, and I had to respond in character."

Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain at Tate Liverpool

Art When I was studying information science in the mid-90s as part of my Information Studies degree, which was the sexier name for librarianship, there was always the sense of sacred, secret knowledge being imparted from one generation of information scientists (librarians) to the next (or next but one). From the now arcane looking search strategies of online databases like DIALOG which had all the complexity of a programming language, through to such classification sequences as DDC or Library of Congress to the taxonomy of keywords and subjects, a trinity of interlocking processes designed to help the information scientist (librarian) to bring order to chaos and then make that order digestible to the end user.

Now, everyone online is an information scientist (and by extension, a librarian). Almost every type of social media, every type of website in which a person uploads a thing, from blog posts, to bookmarking, to videos, to photography asks us to apply keywords, to carry out a form of classfication so that items on similar topics can be gathered together for us to find more easily and the next person. Some of us are better than others, but nevertheless the democratisation of information science has been startling, if not a bit horrifying because arguably along with Google it’s rendered a large percentage of my degree entirely obsolete apart (from the bolted on sections about sociology and management).

At which point having glanced at the headline and the photograph above, you might be wondering what relevance this has to Tate Liverpool’s new exhibition since its inspiration, Raymond Williams’s seminal 1976 book, Keywords – A Vocabulary of Culture and Society is talking about the key words utilised in our society rather than the words which describe the key aspects of an item or object (see above for the 1988 reprint but a new addition is available). Williams selected the hundred and thirty or so words he believed most regularly cropped up when discussing “the practices and institutions, which we group and culture and society” then across a couple of hundred words describes their usage, origins and meanings and how they relates to other words in the book and so other aspects of culture and society.

The format will be familiar to anyone who’s read Kingsley Amis’s similarly useful The King’s English, The Guardian style guide or The Meaning of Liff. But whereas those are very personal extrapolations of how words are and should or could be used by a single man or group of people with a particular ideology, Williams is reflecting those words back on themselves. The entry on Genius shows how a word which in its original Latin form simply meant “a guardian spirit” through its utilisation as a way of elevating further someone whose made a genuinely important contribution to society to being applied relatively frivolously to anything and anyone. Ironically Amis’s book ignores genius despite the fact that it seems perfectly applicable to him.

Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain approaches some of Williams’s words then utilises them on a subset of art from a particular period and predominantly from Tate’s own collection in a way which will be familiar to professional and amateur information scientists. But curators Gavin Delahunty, Tate Liverpool’s Head of Exhibitions and Displays and Grant Watson, the Senior Curator and Research Associate at the Institute of International Visual Arts were keen to stress in their introductory press talk that this isn’t a simple keywording exercise and that they want the visitor to ask questions about how relevant the chosen works are to the words with some of the connections not quite as immediately clear as they might, at first, appear,

This forces us to consider what Stephen McKenna’s painting An English Oak Tree has to do with “conflict”, which is written in giant blue script designed by Lucia Frei and Will Holder on the wall opposite. Except look closer and we realise that this great British symbol is standing in a city park and that it’s emphasising the struggle between the man-made and the natural world and how society still feels the need to be close to nature in a world of concrete even if we have to artificially construct the venue within which we can still experience the feeling of grass beneath our feet and the fragrance of flowers (and the fact that much of the scene is painted from McKenna’s imagination rather than a real place makes it even more man-made or constructed).

Though curatorially similar in design Tate’s previous exhibition, Art Turning Left, which grouped works within various concepts and like Keywords, visitors were asked to interact with the various relationships. But whereas the results there were pretty bewildering and an arguably more didactic, historical approach to the overall topic might have been more rewarding, in Keywords, by focusing on the politics of one period in particular and displaying far less work, the atmosphere is much more relaxed. Sometimes, when an exhibition is stuffed with work as was also the case with Art Turning Left, even with all the time in the world, there’s a feeling of needing to push forward in order to see everything. There’s none of that here.

All of which is aided by the decision to present the two dimensional objects on a single wall stretching across the centre of the Riverside Gallery and the three dimensional sculpture and installations in the Dockside Gallery as a kind of “field”. The symbolic power of walls, resonant of oppression and defence is also emphasised in the words chosen for that area which must also represent society: private, structural, folk, violence, criticism and liberation. The more metaphoric "field" (really a series of carpeted areas) offer words with more cultural aspects: formalist, native, anthropological, unconscious, myth and materialism.   Ferdinand de Saussure would have loved this.

For all of that, because this is a group or anthology exhibition based on curatorial taste we are unlikely to appreciate everything on display, but like the best of the form we’re also introduced to artists which we might not have previously considered. That’s specially true in Keywords because of the decision to choose work less often on displayed like Harry Holland’s lithographs, represented here by Lovers and TV which portray nudes in intimate if unusual settings. But there are plenty of established artists and I’m very grateful to have seen the return of monumental sculpture to Tate Liverpool with Tony Cragg’s On The Savannah, massive bronze abstract meditations on laboratory objects like Bunsen burners.

Researching that last paragraph, I notice the Tate’s own website carries a keyword taxonomy of its own at the bottom of some pages allowing users to seek similar items. On The Savannah is delineated amongst other things as “symbols & personifications -> gender -> female sexual organs - vessel -> male – pipe” and clicking on one of those items does indeed take us to objects that are thematically connected. Perhaps “formalist”, its keyword from Keywords should be added now too, though it’s also a rare example in the exhibition were the keyword actually is a keyword since Cragg’s often thought of as a formalist artist. This exhibition’s unafraid to be playful too.

If I did ultimately learn anything at university, other than that my lovelife was doomed to be classified in DDC as more 718 than 642 (unfortunately), it’s that classification is a messy business. Most items and objects still require a value judgement by the information scientist, precisely the kinds of value judgements a visitor to Keywords might have to make themselves, bringing us right back to the idea of everyone being an information scientist (librarian) now. Despite basing the exhibition on a book published in the 70s and choosing art mainly produced in the 1980s, the curators have still managed to deliver a show which has strong contemporary resonances, and for that reason is well worth a visit.

Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain. 
 28 February – 11 May 2014.
Adult £8.80 (without donation £8). 
 Concession £6.60 (without donation £6).

MKS NME

Music "Hey enemy!" MKS reminded us that they're still a thing by playing the NME Awards last night offering backing vocals to Metronomy. Keisha's clearly thinking, "Well I mean they're fine but they're no Elvis."

Act Naturally.

Film  This has a fair few "Oh god, I hadn't noticed he/she was in that, nicely making up for the lack of "Before You Were Famous" on television at Christmas this past few years, Bradley Cooper in My Little Eye, or Fassbender in Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking.  Oh and it also includes my favourite Christian Bale moment from all his films.  See if you can guess which one.

Cary Grant's Magic Dance.

Music The only David Bowie album I ever owned, or certainly owned on vinyl though I'm pretty certain I don't own any others is his soundtrack album to Labyrinth, bought from the Liverpool Central Library when it was having a clear out (having borrowed the same copy myself earlier).

 The key track, or at least the track most people seem to remember most, is Magic Dance.  It was parodied recently in the "outtakes" at end of the second episode of the brilliant BBC Four comedy, "The Life of Rock with Brian Pern".

Here's the scene from the film in which it appears:



Mainly people seem to remember it for the opening dialogue:

Bowie: You remind me of the babe.
Goblin: What babe?
Bowie: The babe with the power.
Goblin: What power?
Bowie: The power of voodoo.
Goblin: Who do?
Bowie: You do.
Goblin: Do what?
Bowie: Remind me of the babe.

Having listened to this blessed album incessantly as a child years before I realised (a) that Bowie was quite a famous musician and that (b) he'd done a few other things on top of playing the Goblin King, it's imprinted on my brain.

Shift forward to this evening during which I was entertained by Bachelor Knight (or The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer as it was called in the US), 1947 romantic screwball comedy starring Myrna Loy, Cary Grant and Shirley Temple (RIP) which is currently available on the BBC iPlayer after its broadcast on Sunday morning. For reason too complicated to explain here, Grant has been forced to date the much younger (and underaged) Temple and this scene in an attempt to overplay his hand in order to end his purgatory he's playing Jack the lad:



At which point I jumped out my chair as the years drifted away. There it is again. Slightly different but nevertheless:

Grant: You remind me of the man.
Temple: What man?
Grant: The man with the power.
Temple: What power?
Grant: The power of hoodoo.
Temple: Who do?
Grant: You do.
Temple: Do what?
Grant: Remind me of the man.

It's repeated in various ways across the film and colour me amazed as we find David Bowie influenced by this relatively forgotten Cary Grant film (though it's worth noting the screenplay written by Sidney Sheldon won an Academy Award). Hoodoo incidentally is "folk magic".

How did this happen?

Magic Dance's Wikipedia page merely acknowledges the reference as does the one for Bachelor Knight (or The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer as it was called in the US).

Google otherwise only turns up this Yahoo Answers conversation from eight years ago in which, as ever, no one has the faintest idea what they're talking about.

Clearly the answer is somewhere along the lines of "David Bowie was watching television one night saw the quote and thought "I'll have that." " Or was simply familiar with the dialogue from a familiarity with old Hollywood which also led to this.  Or that they're both referencing a different literary source which I've entirely missed.

I can't think of there being any particular thematic connection other than that Temple and Loy's besottedness with Grant is signalled in hallucinatory sequences in which Cary is shown dressed as a knight in full armour obscured by soft focus and that like Labyrinth its about a young girl ambiguously obsessed with an older man.

Either way, my goodness.  Any Bowie scholars out there who'd like to hazard a guess?

"'This is not going to work. This is tough."

Film As an update to my rumour history of Gravity or whatever this was, here's a link to The Playlist in which Alfonso Cuaron somewhat explains what happened with Angelina Jolie and Robert Downey Jr during the casting process:

"Cuaron, who recently sat down with THR's Stephen Galloway, provided some info on the departure. "I thought I had written a small movie ... just one character floating in space," Cuaron explained. "We started developing stuff [trying] to figure out the technology. And the luxury [was] that we could try many things. And part of that was conversations with actors. I had conversations with Angelina, but then she went to do one film, and then she was going to direct ['Unbroken']. Something happens, you part ways."

As for RDJ, Cuaron didn't want to pen the energy of the actor into a film that wouldn't utilize his talents. "It became very clear that, as we started to nail the technology, or narrow the technology, that was going to be a big obstacle for his performance. I think Robert is fantastic if you give him the freedom to completely breathe and improvise and change stuff. [But] we tried one of these technologies and it was not compatible," Cuaron said. "And, after that, we [had a] week that we pretended as if nothing was happening and then we talked and said, 'This is not going to work. This is tough.'"

Of course none of which explains what happened later about Cuaron apparently wanting Natalie Portman but the studio all but forcing, thankfully because she's fabulous, Sandra Bullock on him.

Feng.

TV The US version of House of Cards is a fantasy and has about as much to do with politics and international diplomacy as Gravity has to physics. But if I'm also happy to accept Shakespeare's approach to history, then why not the slightly bizarre China storyline which already looks about as dated as Doctor Who's The Talons of Weng-Chiang. It's drama so it's fine. Not that this has stopped The Atlantic from testing the plausibility of the thing with two China experts, Steven Jiang, a journalist for CNN in Beijing and Donald Clarke, professor of Chinese law at George Washington University. Spoilers ahead obviously:

Corruption: House of Cards' fictional Chinese billionaire Xander Feng, though twice tried for corruption at home, says he can sway the senior leadership of the Communist Party. Question: Possible?

Steven Jiang: Not really. It’s like saying [disgraced Chinese politician] Bo Xilai came out of prison but was tried for corruption again—and he got released again and became best pals with [Chinese President] Xi Jinping.

Kaiser Kuo: If he’s supposed to be a princeling whose grandfather fought alongside Mao and was one of the Eight Immortals, then it’s plausible that he would have access and even influence within the very senior echelons of the Party leadership. The impossible part of course is the notion that he’d been brought up twice on corruption charges and acquitted. This to me was the most egregious bit in Feng’s backstory, and one that was wholly unnecessary to establish that he was walking a fine line.

All of which is odd because if they tapped a technology expect, they must certainly have had someone with an interest in Chinese politics on staff.  But let's not allow the facts get in the way of a good story.

"What horse?"

Film Suffragettes and Meryl Streep's participation is the subject of Pass Notes in today's The Guardian:

Will she give the famous "Freedom or Death" speech Pankhurst delivered in Connecticut in 1913? Will we see her force fed during her hunger strikes, or the way her work transformed the lives of workhouse women and orphan children? Probably not. It's described as a cameo role.

@liverpoollogs

About Well this is something I didn't think I'd end up doing again.

Back in 2007, when blogging was still a thing, I decided that if writer Kate Feld was collect Manchester blogs on her blog The Manchizzle, someone in Liverpool should do the same thing and so I began a blog called Liverpool Blogs designed to promote blogs in Liverpool.

It was always a bit of a irony full zone because as a blog it didn't really work because mainly it was about the sidebar being a list of the Liverpool blogs and so eventually I replaced the blog completely and just ran the list of blogs as the main content on the page.

Eventually when Twitter became I think, I loaded up a folder on Google Reader and began autoposting links to the blogs to Twitter which became the main format that people seemed to read it and people seemed to like it. It's the format I eventually copied for the @shakespearelogs Twitter feed which has in and of itself been a great success within its own limits.

In mid June 2012 the main blog list page apparently gave out a virus warning and concerned something horrid may also have migrated to the Twitter feed I put both on hiatus and then realised that the process of finding out exactly which blog was the problem was causing the problem would be such a massive undertaking, the hiatus became permanent.

Which was a relief because the whole thing had become less entertaining than it had initially been due to a series of fundamental and manifold problems.

(1) Maintaining the main list page was a messy, time consuming horror because of dead links, adding new blogs and having to deal with spammers complaining that their blog hadn't been listed because ....

(2) They kept pretending to be in the area because I'd borrowed Kate Feld's rule of only listing blogs in the area and of being comprehensive. Eventually this also led to being harassed a bit via email by people who thought it was their right to be there even though I wasn't sure about the legality of what they were writing. Fun times.

(3) The geography rule also meant that the list and feed became a bit unfocused because it included blogs like mine which cover everything so people would look at a Twitter feed called @liverpoolblogs and find precious little content actually about Liverpool which I didn't ever think wasn't valid.  Plus there were whole questions about whether Tumblrs and the like should be in there of which there were hundreds.

(4) By calling it Liverpool Blogs expectations were created and sometimes it was difficult to tell what actually counted as a blog.

All of which meant that the hiatus was a relief.  But I did miss that stupid feed, it was a pretty handy thing to have and an ace way of keeping up, sometimes, with things which were happening in this stupid city.

Which is why I've decided to have another go.  Sad face.

But there are philosophical changes.  It's different.

For a start, learning a lesson from @shakespearelogs, I'm changing the name of the Twitter feed to @liverpoollogs, that single loss of a letter changing expectations in what it will cover in two ways:

(1)  It won't just be blogs

Basically this will be a news and commentary twitter feed now, but still including personal blogs if they're regularly updated and "loved".

(2)  In general it will only be about Liverpool

Utilising Web 2.0 doodat IFTTT as the new back end, means I can filter each of the feeds on the fly so each one will only ever post a link to the feed if that post is about Liverpool especially if it's a general feed like a newspaper or the BBC.

(3)  No geographical rule.

If it's about Liverpool and the surrounding areas and I think it'll be useful it's in.  I've already added in some Beatles sites for colour.

(4)  No list page.

That's biggest change.  Essentially now, I'll simply create a recipe at IFTTT and add a label to each Tweet listing the source and that's how the reader will know the source.  That means I won't  have to spend half my time pissing about with links and lists and like @shakespearelogs leave IFTTT to get on with things.  Oh and

(5)  It's going to be heavily edited

Or more specifically like my Twitter feed and @shakespearelogs it's going to be mostly things I might like to read, so there still won't be hundred of links to things on Football sites.  It's not going to be comprehensive (which is arguably what killed things last time).  I'm mainly doing this for me to use.  So there's that.

We'll see how this goes.  The feed has about five hundred followers and none of them have commented yet on it suddenly spitting out tweets again so I don't know if anyone's noticed that it's back, assuming anyone noticed it went.  Or cares.

https://twitter.com/liverpoollogs

Lovefilm FAQ.

Film Lovefilm have added an FAQ page about the switch to Amazon Prime Instant Video which makes a few things clearer, not least what happens if you have a Lovefilm by post and Amazon Prime account already. The former will be cheaper:

"I have a LOVEFiLM subscription including both LOVEFiLM Instant and LOVEFiLM By Post and I have an Amazon Prime membership

"After 26 February 2014, LOVEFiLM Instant will be called Prime Instant Video, and will be separate to your LOVEFiLM By Post subscription.

"As an existing Prime customer, your Prime Instant Video subscription will be included in your annual Prime subscription so you won’t see a monthly charge for this service. So as soon as you switch, and we can see which accounts are being combined, we’ll stop charging separately for your Prime Instant Video subscription Your LOVEFiLM By Post will continue as a separate part of your service and can be accessed at Amazon.co.uk.

"This means you will only see a reduced, monthly charge for the LOVEFiLM By Post part of your subscription. The great news is, this will mean you actually pay less, as the cost of your annual prime subscription will be less than the previous combined cost of your Prime membership and a year’s LOVEFiLM Instant."

The FAQ also seems to suggest that everything Lovefilm is being migrated to Amazon.co.uk including rental lists and the like, retiring the Lovefilm.com URL perhaps or turning it into nothing more than a redirect. As these things go, Wednesday's going to be an interesting day and it's all fine so long as they get the next Game of Thrones season 3 disc out to me in good time.