Things that were 3D in this movie:
* Fish
* Cave
* Gore
* Vomit
* “Naked underwater skank ballet” – Nathan Rabin, AVClub
* Eli Roth
I had a great time. Directorially? The suspense wasn’t ratcheted up nearly as high as it could have gone. But on the other hand, the violence was perfectly judged – you saw things that caught you by surprise and made you shout, but were still silly enough that you laughed. The nudity was also perfectly judged – you saw things that caught you by surprise and made you shout, but were still silly enough that you laughed.
Several dimensions better than Avatar. Best seen with a crowd.
Perhaps you heard: there was a great big earthquake in Christchurch. A reminder that NZ is basically a big faultline with Lord of the Rings scenery on it. And, as Jack has noted, it’s a reminder that in NZ the disaster survival kit is an everyday common-sensical thing, rather than a sign of extreme right-wing anti-government paranoia.
I’ll expect that disaster survival kits were hauled out and checked across the country this past weekend. We certainly checked out ours, and yes there are a few bits and pieces we could add to it.
But human nature being what it is, as the earthquake recedes from memory, our impetus to add those things will fade away. I’m going to use this blog and its small but attentive readership as a motivation tool, by declaring: in three weeks, our disaster survival kit will be fully stocked up.
Have you checked yours, and found it wanting if so? I invite you to add your name in the comments making a similar pledge. I’ll check up on you and on myself in advance of the three-week deadline. Don’t run the risk of waking up to a local disaster next year and kicking yourself for letting it slide now.
Watchin’ the Tall Blacks vs France at FIBA World Champs in the other window. NZ playing its best game of the tournament so far. I love (LOVE) watching random guys from the NZ basketball league taking NBA players to the hole. But I will not spoil the game for ppl who record it to watch later. So only cryptic comments from now on.
Here’s a treat: the death trap page from Treasure Hunters University, which appears to be a site by a guy who’s all about going into Mexico and looking for ancient treasures in deathtrapped tombs, for realsies.
With a couple hours to fill before the Tall Blacks vs Lebanon game began, I decided to watch this film. And blog about it too. It was in a stack of DVDs the Knifeman loaned me a few months back that I am ever-so-slowly working through. The director Satashi Kon died a few days ago, aged on 46, which was good impetus to finally see this animated film.
It’s been on my list for a long time. I’m fairly sure it came through the NZ Film Festival back in ’98, and it was one of the films I circled in the guide but didn’t go to see. It’s a psychological thriller that’s one part Alfred Hitchcock, one part Dario Argento, and one part Wes Craven – or their Eastern equivalents. It starts out as a fairly by-numbers suspense film, but then goes very weird indeed in the second half, finishing up with an intense final sequence that is carried off by its visual verve and commitment to its distinctive vision.
There’s some stuff in it that doesn’t entirely sit well with me – the film was too keen to show us the lead character naked and exploited, so much that the in-story protests about how this was gratuitous and demeaning seemed both too much and too little. One line of plot in the film is about an actress working her way to greater prominence by using her body and performing in scenes involving sexual violence, but as the story fractures around questions of reality and fantasy it becomes impossible to find any resolution for this thematic question. Not as well-handled as I’d like, and raises questions it can’t quite resolve.
It’s a great ride though, with some amazing flourishes. There’s a funny scene that precisely dates the film where the main character struggles to understand the internet and the web; this scene played out in a lot of TV and film in ’97-’98 as I recall. How far we have come…
Overall: it’s a good watch, if not quite as cerebral and intense as I’d been building up in my head for the last decade. Contains nudity and violence, so not for family viewing or casual night, but if the suspense/psychological stuff like in Shutter Island works for you, this will be a good time. Thumb goes up.
My dad just dropped around to drop off some lemonade and food treats, on account of hearing that I’m home with a cold.
He is a good man, my dad.
It’s just a little cold. I hope. Fascinating sleeplessness night-before-last though, as the sickness rolled in on me like a stormfront, and I found myself lying awake nearly face-down on the pillow and with the clear awareness that my head was a seamless component of an enormous crystalline array of cubes constructed of thought. Ideas represented as small visual icons flipped through the cubes to line up in long significant sequences, but it was impossible to complete a thought because the meaning always extended out of reach into the distant extent of the array. I was awake and asleep at once, like a lucid dream that perfectly overlapped with reality. Heh. Consciousness is fun.
One of the strands of being really busy is finally resolved and open to public view: the Diversity Issues page on the Issues.co.nz site. This has been a long-term idea for my work at the Centre for Applied Cross-cultural Research, dating back to some attempts way back in ’04 to develop a better way to communicate about cultural diversity outside of the academic sphere.
The specific impetus was the well-received report by CACR and the Human Rights Commission, launched at the Diversity Forum last Monday, about the experience of discrimination by Asians in NZ. It’s a great report, easy to read, and worth at least a glance by every New Zealander. Here it is on Slideshare:
Of particular interest to the From the Morgue audience, I think, are parts 3.2 and 3.3, about employment access – the comments of recruitment companies (in 3.2, page 12) are shocking and the study where the same C.V. was sent out with either a Chinese name or a European name (page 14) matches it.
Overall it produces a pretty rough picture, but also the message is clear that Asians in NZ aren’t being destroyed by this consistent unfairness. They’re happy here, and happy to be here. That’s good to know, as they’re a huge demographic group in this country and growing all the time.
So I hope you’ll check out the report, and pop over to the Diversity Issues site to look around there and maybe to add a comment. Discussions online are always hard to foster so any contributions would be welcome!
While the voting continues apace in previous-post (midnight tonight NZ time is when I count ‘em up and apply the result to my Twitter account), here be some linky.
David Tennant, post Doctor Who, went the House route and got a U.S. pilot. It wasn’t picked up but a clip from the pilot has emerged. Enjoy David’s accent here (because there isn’t much else to enjoy – this is so by-the-numbers it hurts).
Stand-up Dan Telfer explains dinosaurs (via George L)
Here is some well-expressed love for the KLF’s Doctorin’ the Tardis. I was holding my cassingle of this just the other day. Linky includes .pdf of KLF’s “The Manual” about how to get a #1 single, whose rules were famously not followed by the KLF themselves.
As part of some other work I’ve needed to finally look for a new profile image. The ones I use currently are a photo from 2006 and a cartoon image that’s even older than that.
Here are three more recent profile pic options. Which should be my go-to option when I need to present a face to the world?
I’ll close voting Friday midnight, NZ time. Winning choice becomes my Twitter pic.
