Home By Christmas (2010, NZ)

Gaylene Preston’s performed documentary Home By Christmas is a most unusual film. Heavily domestic, thoroughly engaging, and yet almost epic at the same time.

The film is about Preston’s father Ed’s experiences during World War II, and how his promise to be home by Christmas didn’t exactly come true. In his final years, Ed opened up about the war years, and Gaylene interviewed him and recorded the conversations. The film re-enacts these conversations, with Gaylene playing herself and Tony Barry playing Ed. This is intermixed with archival footage, as well as performed scenes of the events as they happened, with Martin Henderson playing young Ed opposite Chelsie Preston-Crayford as Ed’s wife Tui.

The stories Ed tells are great. Full of incident, fascinating, horrifying, and often very funny. Better still – and Gaylene obviously knew this given the approach she took to the material – is the voice in which it is told. Ed (as brought to life by Tony Barry) is a good storyteller with an easy manner, prone to smart understatement and a wry comment that sets off the narrative just so. It’s a very Kiwi mode, mixing the reserve you’d expect from a British voice with the verve you’d expect from an Aussie voice, hinting at deep emotion and intense experiences with gentle, simple gestures.

Watching it with Cal added an extra layer of interest, as some of Ed’s experiences crossed over with her own family history. For a while Cal was anticipating every twist and turn on screen because she’s been told the same events from a different soldier’s perspective. Hopefully she’ll blog about that herself!

Lovely film. Well worth a watch. Bound to turn up on NZ TV before too long, and currently doing the rounds in various festivals around the world.

Dirty Hobbit Linky

Dirty hobbitses!

60s Dalek comic strips adapted into lovely video.

Keith Ng linked to this: teach yourself maths. No, like, REAL maths.

Free public domain golden age comics at the Digital Comics Museum

You guys know I love these “lets all cooperate to make a crazy big single roving camera massive lip synch”, right? Well, the folk behind this one told Paul Feig it was inspired by Freaks & Geeks. It’s super cheesy cool!

From stick: a virtual ZX Spectrum

Fantasy title trends

Star Wars Japan. Always more Star Wars riffage.

The 8 most obvious signs in the world.

Webcomic about getting a wee bit drunken. Warning: makes me feel ill. But amazingly cool.

Computer game about Yakuza reviewed by some Yakuza.

Mark Evanier dug up the original pitch video for the Muppet Show.

How to identify clutter.

And finally, ducks are actually wearing dog masks (and aaaaaaaaargh)

Hobbit Trouble


@publicaddress: TrendsMap over Wellington tonight

So the word from those in the biz is that filming on The Hobbit has already been lost to NZ. The decision has been made to take it elsewhere – 3News said Ireland. This afternoon and evening the local film industry types, summonsed to a meeting by Richard Taylor himself, decided to get their voice heard about the risk to the NZ film industry.

The source of the trouble is an NZ actor’s union dispute. It is, to be frank, too complex for me to understand, let alone summarize. (Theatreview has a big set of links tracking the whole thing, and Steve Hickey tries to make sense of it all.) In fact, my impression is that the actor/union side of the dispute is incoherent. I haven’t seen a concise statement of the problem anywhere. There are claims that it’s an Aussie union, perhaps backed by a US union, trying to get NZ on to the same playing field.

But it’s safe to say that losing The Hobbit wasn’t the goal of the actors who came in on the union side. Especially because if that goes, then it’s hard to see any other major shooting jobs coming here in future. NZs film industry would wither, fast, reduced to digital effects and post-production work.

So what the heck has gone wrong? This has got much bigger, with much more at stake, than anyone expected. My take, for whatever it’s worth, is that the entire NZ scene has become pawns in a bigger game. The actors (who I’m sure have real concerns) have been pulled into a unionisation debate by overseas agencies which have clear incentives to bring NZ into line with their approach, regardless of the outcome for NZ. This dispute has then fed opposition within the studio to filming in NZ as opposed to other, cheaper locations – it is a pretext for running the numbers again and forcing a move elsewhere. The big players are international. The NZ scene is almost a sideshow in its own story.

This is a bit of a harsh critique in that it denies real agency to the local actors. Am I really justified in seeing the actors’ demands as problematic because they haven’t issued a clear public statement of their goals? If so, it doesn’t speak well of the capacity of actors to manage their own affairs.

That said, I think it’s undeniable that the actors have demonstrated no strategic leadership throughout this affair. The lack of public communication is one aspect, but even simply making a clear case has been a challenge.

And I should also emphasize that I’m sympathetic to the aims of a union. Unions are important tools for social equity – that’s clearcut.

My concern is that this union dispute, at this time, on this issue, is surely having consequences that those caught up in it did not intend. Sitting back and saying the decision to go to Ireland was driven by WB wanting to save money and not by the actors’ demands – well, it might make you feel better, but it doesn’t change the fact that the industry’s gone. The truth is, obviously, that the film industry globally is a haven for exploitative practices. There are good reasons why contracting is the default here in Wgtn and wider NZ, and yes that contracting will sometimes lead to exploitation, but the situation is complex enough that simplistic “workers need a union” claims won’t necessarily turn out to be appropriate. These complex reasons need to be addressed. This would be suggested by pragmatism, and also by awareness of the large interrelated nature of the film industry – if part of it goes, it all goes.

There are many other aspects of this sad tale that could be addressed – the dearth of leadership from the Beehive, for example. But I’m going to go to sleep instead, for I am tired and my eyes are droopy. Here’s hoping that the film can get tied down in this country after all.

EDITED TO ADD: a big post from industry worker Dan on this stuff.

ALSO: Radio NZ interviews with Fran Walsh, Pip Boyens, Helen Kelly, Dave Brown

Robyn Malcolm interview audio in the sidebar on the Stuff story

Russell Brown pulls the threads together: Anatomy of a Shambles

EDITED 5.50pm: Helen Kelly comments on Russell’s post, and Russell replies with exactly the right question.

Dan, of that link just above, was interviewed on bFM midday or so. I thought he did very well indeed. His post has been generating lots of discussion and comment.

(I wrote this post just after midnight last night. I think it stands up pretty well after a long day of charged conversation and reportage. Still no idea what’s going to happen to “Wellywood”…)

EDITED 9pm: via Jack of TallPoppy, some people who were there claim the “Robyn Malcolm abused/police escort needed” story is a fabrication

Pakistan Relief RPG bundle


US$700+ worth of RPG stuff, for $25

In a successor to February’s bundle for Haiti, this is a fundraiser for Pakistan flood relief.

Includes ICONS which has my name on it, friend-of-FTM Malc’s Hot War, and heaps of other goodies (Starblazer Adventures! Fear Itself! Wild Talents 2E! Contenders! Dragon Warriors! Exalted 2E! Covenant! Don’t Rest Your Head!)

Simply incredible amount of game creativity for a tiny price – and all for a worthy cause. What’s not to love?

Check it out here

Death of Comic Book Guy


From memory, this was the first issue I bought at the local comic shop, coverdated July 1987

A few weeks ago, my brother closed off our file at the local comic shop. This is a significant development. We’ve shared that file between us since 1987. I remember many happy train journeys in those early years, sitting by the window looking at fresh issues of Avengers, Aliens, Dark Horse Presents… Then over a decade later, a regular Thursday visit to pick up a few issues then settle into Eva Dixon’s to read the latest creative madness from Marvel (which, under Jemas and Quesada, was pushing the boundaries in every direction). Good times.

But those days are now done, and not just for me and bro. Comic shops are dying out. This has been going on a long time – industry-watch blogs have tracked the steady closure of comic shops and the shrinking of the market. And despite the occasional surge into this or that channel, comics retail is still mostly locked up in the comic shops. A whole creative industry seems to be dying on the vine.

Predictably, a lot of folks point at content to explain this downspiral. Inward-looking massive crossovers in the big superhero lines are eating the consumer base! But I think it’s obvious on its face that this is insufficient as an explanation. The biggest retail years ever were the continuity-ridden low-quality 90s, and the non-supers scene remains as vital and challenging and innovative as ever.

In fact, while the stores close, comics have finally gone mainstream. Bookstores carry graphic novels and trade paperbacks, from the dumbest supers collections to the navel-gazingest indie tome. Comics movies are big news (and the supers ones cross-market to toy stores and restaurant promotions and more). The Walking Dead tv show is about to launch with top-tier creative talent and major buzz. Decades of talk about how comics deserve greater appreciation have finally been fulfilled. Heck, the best sign of all is that newspapers no longer need to launch every comics-related article with “Biff! Pow! Comics aren’t just for kids any more!”

But at the exact same moment that comics content is has gone utterly mainstream, the retail channel for the artifacts themselves is going down the gurgler.

One big culprit is obvious: price. Comics are resource-intensive and modern quality demands are high. Comics hit the $3.99 US price point a while back and that was breaking point for a lot of people. With an already shrinking audience, economies of scale and increased production costs had devastating results. Industry death spiral. The value proposition just doesn’t work at that $3.99; it was barely holding at $2.99.

Yet all is not lost. Comics are going digital, in a big way. The big companies have been putting footprints down for a while; Marvel’s iPad app was a clear sign that comics are shifting focus to the screen not the printed page. This, again, is not a new development – Scott McCloud foresaw some of this a decade ago in his Reinventing Comics, and many creators have already gone to online publication. (Shout out to Dylan Horrocks, whose serial Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen is on fire as a free online publication, after starting out in print.) Sales numbers for digital are promising, where even bookstore sales are showing a remarkable drop.

But – and here’s the thing – my brother and I aren’t shifting to digital for the content we used to get on paper. A general digi distribution model isn’t in place yet. Reading paper-format comics on laptop screens is still a frustrating experience. Tablets like the iPad are great, but they don’t have much market penetration yet. And what, to keep my conscience clear on the piracy front my brother and I now have to buy duplicate issues in digital form?

So it’s strange times for an industry. Just as it hits the big time in terms of cultural capital, the bottom collapses out of its infrastructure, while the lifeline of digital isn’t ready to take the weight. There’s some irony for ya.

Me? I’m gonna sit tight, wait things out, and see where we are in a few years. Comics stores won’t die, but they will need to change (and the good ones are already well on-track for doing this). I’ll still pick up the odd single issue, as long as they keep makin’ em -what can I say, I like my slabs of culture. But the old model is history for me personally, and soon enough will be for everyone.

And thinking about it again, it does blow my mind a little bit. “Old model” = the entire infrastructure for a creative industry. A whole medium’s falling over. That doesn’t happen too often. (And, just quietly? Broadcast television should be watching verrry closely.)

(N.B. Statements about comics industry here don’t apply to manga or to European b-d, which are both in a much healthier state by all accounts – not least for their use of formats very different to the 24-page “floppy” that has been standard in US-derived comics for 75+ years).

Silver Ferns Linky


Last night I watched the gold medal match between NZ and Australia in netball. It was the most exciting sporting match I’ve ever watched. Double overtime then into golden goal, which in netball means securing a two-point lead. Netball is a game of absolute focus, where small errors cost a lot, and in a big match like this the pressure is intense to never make the tiniest mistake. Maria Tutaia, who I’ve long thought just didn’t have the nerves to finish the big matches, never wavered and delivered the win in a way that has shut me up forever. Amazing. Already being called the best netball match of all time! Watch closing minutes here (stupidly, can’t embed).

So here are some celebratory Friday linky!

Bleeding Cool provides the necessary backstory to understand a Doctor Who spoof styled after On The Buses. Read’n’watch here.

Some alumni from Joss Whedon’s weird, troubling Dollhouse show make a music video on the same theme:

OKCupid’s dataminers continue to offer insightful analysis of their many, many dating profiles with this takedown of myths around gay sex vs. straight sex.

Latest mindblowing infographic doing the rounds: the true size of Africa. Africa is really, really big. Which makes it even more shameful that I know next to nothing about it.

Only Kiwis will get this gleeful Onion-style NZ political satire from the Dim-Post: National to stand Spider-God in Epsom.

This ought to be bigger news, shouldn’t it? Scientists think they’ve figured out what’s behind the massive decline in honeybee numbers. (Remember, if the bees go, our entire ecology is screwed.)

A gallery of book cover art being reused for multiple titles.

Hilarious/cringey The Internet Never Forgets: Tumblr-log of famous actors when they were clothes models. Exhibit A: heartthrob du jour Robert Pattinson [WARNING this will make you feel dirty and wrong, he is far too young for your lust in this pic] B: Sarah Michelle Gellar [this one is just weird]

Lord of the Rings travel posters

And finally, there was that one time Jason went on Arsenio:

Our Former Mayor is a dunce

[edited to add “former” to the title. She’s gone, baby, gone! And for the record I vote for the Hutt mayor, but still feel Wgtn mayor’s power…]

Kerry really doesn’t like our single transferable vote system.
“At this stage, Celia [Wade-Brown] can’t beat me, but STV can. I don’t think members of the public have really understood the system. Some do, but the majority don’t understand.”

What an imbecilic comment. Of course people understand what they need to: you order the candidates into a list showing your preference. It just takes a while to work out which name appears highest on the most lists. I mean Kerry, you’ve been at the front end of local government for a long time, surely you understand –

“As they drop off, if you support one of the losing candidates, you get a second vote, whereas my supporters only got one vote.”

– or maybe not. As the kids say these days: FAIL.

Gremlins 2 (USA, 1990)


In this movie, virtually nothing coherent happens, and thousands of tiny green violent anarchists go wild in a high-tech tower. Still astonishing. Haven’t seen it for well over a decade, and I got more of the movie references – the referential density of this film might outweigh even Spaced.

I laughed and laughed, and then I laughed some more. Cal sat with furrowed brow; this movie is not for everyone, it seems. She at least had the good grace to be alarmed when the film apparently broke, in the film’s most famous sequence; the DVD film uses the theatrical version, in which gremlins in the projection booth have snapped the film and the usher fetches Hulk Hogan to scare the gremlins into carrying on. There’s also a video version which went out on the VHS release, in which the film greys out as VHS tapes used to do and the gremlins turn up interspliced with a John Wayne movie. Also of note is this bravura fan effort, updating the film break sequence to the DVD era:

(More info on this at BoingBoing)

Anyway, I love this movie. It’s an easy 100 out of 10.

(Scott Tobias at the AV Club puts it in his new cult canon.)

What I’m doing this week

Part of my life is being manager of the Centre for Applied Cross-cultural Research. Every week the researchers get together and there’s a presentation of some sort or another.
This week, I’m doing one. I’m not a cross-cultural researcher, but I am a giant geek. So:

Playing culture: Dungeons & Dragons, fantastic ethnicity, and the undisciplined mimetic imagination

For several decades, intercultural education has made productive use of interactive exercises, role-plays and simulations. These “infinite games” offer a way to explore and practise cultural interaction in a way that is immersive, memorable and supportive of exploration. Such engagements are carefully managed with inductions and post-experience briefings to contextualise what has taken place.

However, there exists a vibrant strain of parallel activity that is purely informal. For forty years, small groups of people have gathered together and imagined intercultural experiences without any inductions, briefings, or contextual guides. Tabletop role-playing games use an infinite game structure for the shared creation of character-based narrative fiction, and intercultural engagements often feature. In this presentation, I’ll describe how these games have presented and explored culture, and how innovative techniques are opening new possibilities for playing culture. To explore some of these ideas, a prototype for a new game based directly on cross-cultural research will be presented for discussion and feedback.

Happening Thursday. Should be fun.

Inky Linky

Via Draw: GET OUT OF THERE!

(list of featured movies)

The Global Entrepreneurship Week launch event had a focus on Social Entrepreneurship, with speakers including Sam Morgan, Marc Ellis, Rod Oram, and others. It sounds like a pretty cool thing. I didn’t make it along due to the Waitomo deadlines, but the whole thing is available via Massey’s mediasite. I look forward to checking that out. GEW is in mid-November, so keep your eyes open.

The Hobbit has been in the news for all the wrong reasons – and I don’t think NZ has had so much interest in such a fuzzy dispute for a long time. I’m still not remotely clear what the union is actually concerned about. My sympathies lie with actors, but I don’t know that the unions are discharging their responsibilities to well at the moment. Anyway, Theatreview has been tracking the entire story and dragged all the links to one place.

Sadhbh asks, are there any chick-lit novels where the girl ends up with the good guy, not the bastard? There are tumbleweeds. Well worth a read, and do comment if you have any suggestions!

FFFilm: screenshots from films. Very engaging.

The ten computer games Roger Ebert, who said games can’t be art, should play.

Very detailed interactive map of Middle Earth.

Cinema advertising tricks from the 1920s.

The pointless, creative delights of CAPTCHArt: taking one of those little CAPTCHA phrases and interpreting it through art. Often hilarious.

And finally… the Dick Tracy comic strip scrambler. Every time you reload it randomly assembles three Dick Tracy panels. I dunno either.