Category: Things I’ve Seen

Heath Ledger’s Joker is like New York City.
When I went to New York, I arrived on the back of literally years of glowing references. Everyone I knew who’d been there told me it was the most incredible city in the world, that I would fall in love with the place, that I would have an amazing time. When I got off the train I thought to myself, go on then, New York. You’ve been talked up a hell of a lot. Prove it.
A week later I emerged from NYC breathless and amazed and in love with the place, and I remembered that thought a week earlier. It lived up to the hype – and it did it so well I even forgot that I’d been primed to marvel at it.
Same thing with Ledger’s Joker. You’ve heard already the Oscar whispers, the reverence from his fellow cast, and the rave reviews on line. All the hype. But when you see the film, you’ll forget about the hype and disappear into the experience of watching this performance and afterwards you’ll think back and realise, It is all true.
There is much to love about The Dark Knight. It balances its action adventure with its character exploration and its themes with its drama better than anything out of Hollywood in many years. It isn’t perfect – the plotting requires incredible contrivance for villainous plans to work, and that doesn’t sit right with the gritty tone – but when you’re watching you just don’t care. If LotR established that the hugest blockbuster could still have a heart, then this establishes that the hugest blockbuster can still have a brain.
Esteemed patron of the additiverich collective expressed dissatisfaction with the meanspirited cynicism on display, and I find it hard to argue with this point, except to say that it didn’t bother me.
So. Highly recommended. Go see.

Trouble Is My Business is a movie profile of one man and his work. The splendid Mr Peach, an Otara boy born and bred, is the Assistant Principal in high-deprivation South Auckland, his home neighbourhood. His school draws on a mostly-Pasifika population, the sons and daughters of parents who migrated in the 60s and 70s to take up low-skilled jobs. As a student manager, he spends his days chasing down student after student, seeking them out when they ditch school, collaring them if they’re acting up or fighting, and then steering them as best he can towards a good outcome.
The camera followed him for six months, and showed that he was good at his job. He showed a deep respect for the students in his care, mixed with a fierce enforcement of high standards. It was a potent mix and the students seemed to respond.
This was an observational documentary and while it won’t blow your socks off it does have enormous charm and is very engaging. I am reminded of some of the great docos I’ve watched that were much like this but stumbled on to a great unfolding story that gave the film structure (like The Heart Of The Game from a few years back). TIMB didn’t have the fortune to stumble into a ready-made narrative, but it fashions some great content from what was caught on camera.
The director, Juliette Veber, took a bunch of questions afterwards, mostly from teachers who’d come along to see the film. One of them was a teacher who felt strongly that the film created a false image of Pasifika youth as being universally troubled without exploring – on the spot, Veber handled this question fairly well, saying that she avoided going into details to protect student privacy, and she had to work with what Mr Peach encountered. The answer she really needed was this: I hope there’s another film that comes along and delivers those aspects of the story, because this one can only tell one small part. And Veber is entirely justified, I think – her film is very evenhanded and, in fact, incredibly sympathetic to kids who are exactly the sort of young people harsher regimes would see as lost causes.
I’m never going to forget the look in one kid’s eyes as he was brought face to face with the boy he’d been fighting with – his eyes were huge and brimming with fear and deep, deep messed-up emotion. It wasn’t anger, it was something else. That look by itself speaks volumes about how far from the truth are the simple stories so beloved in talkbackland of mongrel kids just growing up rotten.
Also, I would have liked to have seen Mrs Peach. I imagine she’s hardout.

Aspergic teenager is only comfortable in the virtual world of the MMORPG Archlord, while he is bullied ferociously at school and everyone seems helpless to stop him. Narrated throughout by Ben’s internal monologue, newcomer Greg Timmermans gives a great silent performance, managing to play some difficult passages (like when two bullies force Ben out of his reverie) with skill and empathy.
Structurally, the first half of the film is a mess, jumping around between in-game reality, Ben’s real world, and interview-style to-camera pieces from the adults in Ben’s life. It really doesn’t settle down and felt off-pace to me. However, this all does come together in the end, and it all works much better in retrospect than it does while you’re watching – so I’m not sure if that’s a point for or against. A lot of the material gently strains credibility, but Ben himself is so compelling its easy to let it ride.
It’s rough going for a lot of the film. Ben doesn’t have an easy time, to say the least, and his inability to respond to what is happening to him makes for a traumatic experience for the viewer. It would be wrong to say that it comes to a happy ending, but certainly the film does its best to allow you to walk out with a sense of peace, rather than despair. I recommend it.

Imagine you’re on a train, and the prescription medication you’re on is playing hell with your sleep patterns so you’re in a weird and hazy state and keep falling into these micronaps but your brain wrenches you out of it so you can’t quite sleep and on the train with you is a guy from Winnipeg and he tells you stories about himself and about Winnipeg but you think some of them got mixed up with your dreams or maybe he was talking about his dreams about Winnipeg and you’re not sure about it and maybe you’re not even awake right now.
My Winnipeg is like that.
Guy Maddin’s weird-ass “docu-fantasia” was made for the Documentary Channel and you have to hope they knew what they were getting into. Its mostly about Guy Maddin trying to escape the gravitational pull of his mother, or is it the supernatural magnetism of the bison and the hidden river forks underneath the real river forks? Anyway he’s on a train trying to escape again and telling stories about his past, telling stories about his mother, telling stories about Winnipeg. And it gets pretty bizarre.
Maddin’s Winnipeg is an absurdly fanciful creation, where grains of truth (old footage shows them off) are spun into outlandish and wild stories that still somehow manage to keep one foot in the realm of plausibility. Certainly I want them to be true, because why not? There’s a buffalo-haunted seance-ballet, a secret team of ancient ice hockey stars scuffling in the depths of a building as it is being demolished, and lots of sleepwalking. There are feverish recreations of incidents in Maddin’s childhood, with his mother playing herself surrounded by actors taking the parts of Maddin’s siblings, except it isn’t really his mother playing herself its another actress.
If there is one genuine strand to the picture its the frustration Maddin feels at the demolition of several storied old buildings in Winnipeg; here the claustrophobic black-and-white breaks out into bursts of colour only to watch as these grand old edifices are torn down and replaced by heartless committee-built modernity.
I enjoyed this film a great deal. It took me a while to warm up to it – the over-the-top pretension took a while to wind around itself enough to convince me this wasn’t a failed experiment – but when it got me, it got me good. I don’t think I can recommend this one generally, but if you think you might dig it – yeah, you probably will.

There was something of a carnival atmosphere outside the premiere screening of Alister Barry’s new doco, The Hollow Men. Labour was there in force, handing out flyers with its local candidate smiling and shaking hands. There was a real sense of occasion; everyone was pleased to be there. It’s a sign of how political this town is, perhaps, or a sign of how political this time is.
This is the second media spin-off of Hager’s book. We went to the stage play last year, dragging non-local Malcolm along for the ride. I think Malc enjoyed it, but it must have been hard going to keep up. Surprisingly, I think the film is even more incomprehensible than the play to an uninitiated audience – it relies on a lot of prior knowledge about how things work in this country.
Barry has a track record of assembling compelling documentaries on New Zealand’s recent sociopolitical history out of TVNZ archive material, and this was another worthy entry. An adaptation of the book by Nicky Hager, Barry took leaked emails and followed Hager’s timeline, showing with clips of key players and key incidents how a novice MP was manouvred into leadership of the opposition and nearly made his way to being New Zealand’s Prime Minister. There was lots of voiceover, much of it read aloud from leaked emails by actors. The vast majority of the footage was from the TVNZ vaults, showing MPs at work and at play and, most interestingly, including “cutting room floor” material from outside the edges of the scripted public appearances.
As an account of cynical political message manipulation, this is first-class, tracking the behind-the-scenes decisions to run certain issues through to how they played out in the media and the public eye. Hager pointed out during questions afterwards, as he did at Drinking Liberally the other week, that this was a portrayal of politics-as-she-is-done, and not specific to one party. However, he said that the cynical tricks on display were designed to misrepresent or distract from the party’s true policies – and the National party had a large gap between how it portrayed itself and what it really stood for. Much larger than other parties. So although the tactics are general, National does deserve particular condemnation for its behaviour.
And the signs at the end are clear – the media dance is continuing in earnest, just as cynically as before. John Key is a much better poster boy for National than Brash, and equally managed and compromised. The film all but demands that you be cautious of Key and the people behind him – if you weren’t already.
It was a good doco, sometimes painful to watch, and of particular interest to me so i could see lots of material that I had only read about (I was in Scotland while this whole affair was going down). I recommend a watch if you’re a New Zealander.

Welcome to the Sticks was our first film of the festival. A sold-out audience joined me + Cal in laughing all the way through this.
A post office manager gets transferred to the far north of France, where he surprisingly finds himself enjoying life; but due to extreme storytelling contrivance he keeps telling his wife far to the south that he’s having a miserable time.
It was a broad, silly, undemanding comedy/farce The subtitles managed to keep up with the endless play with language as dialect differences led to misunderstandings and the transplanted manager struggled to navigate local pronunciation. Good fun. Catch it on DVD for a goofy night in. Added value: seeing someone play a carrillon – I’ve never actually seen what that looks like before.

Over the last few weeks Cal and I worked our way through classic Kiwi kidult series, Under the Mountain. Consisting of eight 25-min episodes, on its ’81 broadcast this became one of the defining TV experiences for NZ kids. It is available now as the first release in a new line of TVNZ Classics DVDs.
Under The Mountain was a kids book written by NZ literary legend Maurice Gee. It concerns two twins, eleven years old, whose psychic potential is unlocked by a friendly alien and who join in a war against a family of degenerate, destructive monsters.
And these monsters are truly monstrous. Their appearance in episode one is chilling – a slow reveal as something barely seen out at sea, then a strange shape in the dark, and finally a terrifying full-body shot as they menace the twins. The costumes aren’t anything special but they’re lit and shot well enough to work – strange lumpy, slimy menaces straight out of Lovecraft. (In fact, it is easy to imagine Gee was paying homage to Lovecraft, with the shoggoth-like monsters and the sick, Innsmouth depravity of the strange Wilberforce family; not to mention the weird cosmic amorality of it all.)
Warning: It gets heavy. Not all the sympathetic characters survive. The eleven-year old twins have to grapple with failure and hopelessness as well as more prosaic threats; they argue about the morality of trying to kill the monsters. The whole thing is very deeply felt, and all the more impressive for it.
In fact, I’m surprised to see it marketed here in NZ as “children’s classic”. It is definitely for adults as well as kids, and apart from not talking down to anyone, its actually quite scary. There are some great jump moments, some bits of real suspense, and some unnerving body horror mixed in with the sheer b-movie joy of the monsters themselves. Add in the deeply creepy set design (clearly inspired by H.R.Giger’s work on Alien) and it’s no wonder this gave rise to so many nightmares in this country.
UtM was the first of NZ’s celebrated run of “kidult” dramas, followed by Children of the Dog Star, The Fireraiser, and others. (The genre reappears now and then, e.g. Mirror Mirror in the 90s and Maddigan’s Quest in the 00s.) For a while, there was a lot of pride in our kidult productions – they crossed over the young/old audience barrier and were internationally successful, perhaps our most successful televisual exports ever?
The supremacy of the “kidult” drama disappeared in the 90s with the coming of commercial television, and its a shame – all the more so considering how well UtM stands up today. The acting, sets, effects, and staging are all far better than I had any right to expect. Sure, it bears the marks of its era – the acting is often a bit stagey, the effects are dramatic but not exactly convincing, etc. – but overall it is a great piece of craftsmanship.
Its also obvious that a lot of money went into it – not just from the effects and giant, fascinating sets, but also the direction and camerawork. It was all shot on film, not on tape, with heaps of location shooting. There are little touches that surprised me – a shot that started looking at the kids on the beach, that then turned right around to follow them as they left the beach and finally craned high above their heads to track them as they went into a nearby house. For a shot that doesn’t have any particular significance, that’s a lot of trouble to go to – and its indicative of the care that went into the whole production.
The DVD has no extras, which is a real shame. Still, I’m just pleased its available. The picture quality is okay, nothing special but not poor – for some reason the clips on the TV ad are much fuzzier than the actual release. The episodes even have the cuts to and from commercial breaks left in, apparently there aren’t any clean copies of the episodes left in the archives! Its also a Region 0 release, which as all right-thinking people know, is the best region to be – it plays anywhere in the world.
Cal and I invested in Under the Mountain for the nostalgia value, but it deserves far more respect than that. It’s a genuine classic, in fact I’d go so far as to call it a triumph. I’m as surprised as anyone to be saying this, but here goes: my highest recommendation.