Category: Things I’ve Seen

The Walworth Farce (NZ International Fest)

Written by Enda Walsh, produced by Ireland’s Druid Theatre company, this intense, dense play held the Opera House audience in its thrall. It’s set in a tiny apartment in London where an Irish emigre and his two sons re-enact daily a traumatic experience from their past, using the form and structure of farce, complete with corny jokes, over-complicated plans, and mad dashing from room to room. There’s so much going on, in the play-within-a-play and its morass of characters, in the interplay between the family members, in their interactions with their apartment which tells its own tales about who and what they are, that it was genuinely hard to keep up. (Reviews had mentioned a lot of people wondering what the heck was going on; at our performance I didn’t hear any such murmurs during the intermission.) I’m sure there was a lot of Ireland-England subtext going on that went over my head too.

The farce is very funny all the way through, but as the reality under the farce unfolds it becomes impossible to keep laughing. This is a very bleak play indeed. It’s technically fascinating and hugely engaging and suspenseful, and I enjoyed it very much almost through to the conclusion. Unfortunately, I thought the end didn’t work at all; it felt like a retreat from the rest of the play, rather than a resolution of it, not to mention that it relied on melodramatic contrivance at the very moment when it cried out for something genuine. The conclusion didn’t spoil the experience, though, and most of the audience seemed very happy with it so perhaps it was just me.

I walked out of the theatre with much to think about, and very happy with what we’d seen. Worth watching, should the opportunity arise.

(Thanks to my parents for the tickets!)

Lost – up to s3

As previously blogged, I’ve been watching Lost. I mostly watch it in a little window in the corner of my computer screen while I do other stuff. I’ve just finished season 3, which was the half-way point for the series.

I’m enjoying it, most definitely. It ain’t as slow as it used to be, and it’s helped having people tell me when the dumb bits of the series are gonna hit.

It meant I finally got to read and appreciate John Rogers’ You Uncurious Motherflickers piece about season 1 Lost. Yeah man.

It meant also that I feel the pain of missing what was surely one of the greatest bouts of hilarious show-mocking evar on the internets, the “Waaaaaalt!” meme. Like this.

Here’s an example of everything that is both amazing and terrible about Lost. There’s a character who says “brother” a lot. In season 3 they reveal that he used to be a monk. That’s such a refined and pure kind of dumb that you’ve got to love it.

And yes, none of it really makes any sense, and all the characters are either incapable of investigative strategy (ref. “uncurious”, above) or incapable of telling the truth, and show likes to just throw in big moments of WTF now and then just because (foot statue I’m looking at you). But the thing that frustrates me is that none of the antagonist characters act like human beings. They are completely impossible to believe in. And after devoting s3 to revealing much about the antagonist community and way of life, they continue to be utterly implausible.

But, but, but. I’ll let that slide, because there’s lots to like. Show’s energetic devotion to mystery is engaging and it really does seem to be going somewhere. So Imma let you finish, show. But Twin Peaks was the greatest inexplicable weird-ass drama of all time.

(Thanks to Jon B for loaning me Lost DVDs, too!)

Captain America #602

What with Spider-Man and Wolverine and Iron Man being some of the biggest movies of the last ten years, everyone’s a comic-book superhero fan now. Or so I thought, until the huge controversy over an issue of Captain America erupted a month or so back.

SHAKOOOOOOM!

Story goes like this: in this comic, this dude Captain America and his long-time buddy the Falcon go investigating an anti-government group of villains called the Watchdogs. (None of these characters are new. Cap came along at the start of the 40s, Falcon in the 70s and the Watchdogs in the 80s.) Cap and Falcon carry out surveillance on an anti-tax rally in a middle-American town.

Big group of people holding signs like “America 4 Sale” and “Stop the socialists!” and “Tea bag the libs before they tea bag YOU!” Says Falcon, who is black, about the prospect of infiltration: “I don’t exactly see a black man from Harlem fitting in with a bunch of angry white folks.” So they come up with a plan: Falcon pretends to be an IRS man turning up in a bar threatening an audit, while Cap pretends to be a roving trucker who punches out the IRS man and wins over the locals.

KRAKOW!

Then the blogs got involved! It started here:

So, there you have it, America. Tea Party protesters just “hate the government,” they are racists, they are all white folks, they are angry, and they associate with secretive white supremacist groups that want to over throw the U.S. government.
Bet you didn’t know that when you were indulging your right as a citizen to protest your government that you were a dangerous white supremacist that wants to destroy the country, did you? Bet you didn’t realize that your reverence for the U.S. Constitution was a subversive thing to do, did you? And I’ll also bet that you never imagined that you’d scare the little blue panties off of Captain America!

GANOOSH!

Soon the entire rightosphere was raging with animus and fury, overcome by a frightful and all-consuming hunger for vengeance! Rich Johnston has the overview. Even Glenn Beck, crying, screaming superstar of the political rightiest, devoted some airtime to the comic. Fox News grabbed the story and made much hay out of story writer Brubaker’s left-leaning Twitter-expressed politics. Faced with this uproar, Marvel hastily damage controlled to say “it’s part one of the story, give us a chance to show you the whole picture” and “we didn’t mean for it to specifically be a tea party rally”.

SMACKASH!

Meanwhile, comics people cashed in their copies of the suddenly-in-demand Cap 602 for easy cash money.

KACHING!

And now the whole storm is gone and forgotten, except not by me because I found a copy of Cap 602 and of course I bought it. Because I had to see for myself what the fuss was all about. And here’s the thing: there isn’t much to get fussed about, here. To the extent there is, it’s in the plan to get in with the anti-government extremists by punching out a black civil servant. Even in the shorthand and broad-strokes storytelling of comics, that’s kinda weak.

What I like about this whole saga is how perfectly it encapsulates the way popular politics works in the U.S. right now. (Similar patterns are apparent elsewhere, but in the U.S. this process is very well-established.) The network of conservative blogs, always voracious for content, grab on to anything that emerges in their network and start howling enthusiastically. When enough of them do this, it works its way through to the radio hosts, and if it gets play there it finally surfaces into the Fox News circuit. If it still has legs, it will go on to all those mouthpiece shows Fox has clogging its broadcast schedule. The fundamental narrative is always one of conservative victimization.

It’s an amazing system with a slick and efficient beauty. To use the jargon, the Republicans have figured out how to crowdsource their propaganda machine. I have to admire it. But it is horrible, too, because it’s all sound and fury with no real thought or analysis. Everyone grabbed on and started whacking without much care to check the validity of the initial complaint. Indeed, the bit of the original post that had some merit (the supposed subtext of racism to the IRS agent scene) fell by the wayside immediately. The story just became about that one picture of the tea party rally, evaluated solely in the context of frothing blog posts. Such is the nature of this machine – it generates noise and anger and emails and phone calls, but it doesn’t generate anything remotely like understanding.

Which has been to the amusement of those who’ve followed the Captain America character, whose writers have an unsurprising history of making none-too-subtle political points with their work. In his first ever appearance, he was punching out Hitler on the cover of his new comic – which was remarkable because the U.S.A. wasn’t even in the war at that stage.

And then (as the Slog notes) there was the time Cap found out Richard Nixon was involved in a criminal conspiracy, and watched as Nixon shot himself in the Oval Office.

Or the time Ronald Reagan turned into an evil snake-man.

Shutter Island (USA, 2010)

Saw this a week ago, still haven’t talked about it. It was very enjoyable. It’s a grand operatic noir, an unnerving psychological thriller that doesn’t make much sense (do any psychological thrillers make much sense?). Great intensely-imagined visuals, gripping and moody atmosphere, pitch-perfect performances (heavily stylised and just OTT enough). The film offers very few surprises but is a great ride nonetheless.

It’s a big screen film, but probably not worth the big screen ticket prices unless you’re a particular fan of Leo DiCaprio or Marty Scorsese or Michelle Williams or Mark Ruffalo*. So watch it on your home cinema with surround sound, or go to the fillums on cheap night.

To its enormous credit, the film absolutely nails its very final scene.

* Hah! No-one in the world is “a particular fan of Mark Ruffalo”!**
** I stand corrected

Review: Jitterati collection (2009)



Jitterati is Grant Buist’s strip comic of life in a cultured, coffee-drenched festival-heavy Wellington. It runs every week in the free local paper the Capital Times, and in Grant’s own words it tends to go like this.
I have a lot of love for Jitterati, no doubt because I am a coffee-drenched festival-going Wellingtonian with pretensions to culture. It speaks my language and talks about what is going on around me, and that’s cool. More than that, it’s important; we need media content that reflects our local environment or something in the feedback loop between person and community starts to break and you end up with the weirdness of everyone using packaged American culture as their reference point (as everyone who remembers the 80s and 90s will no doubt attest).
(Since this is a review, it’s also worth pointing out that I have known Grant for years, although for most of those years our relationship has been stable at the “say hello to each other on the street” level. And I’ll send him a link to this review. Hi Grant!)
I picked up a copy of the collected edition at Zinefest last year (along with a few other treats that I really should blog about too). It covers the complete run of Jitterati from its launch in 2001 through to 2009, reprinting about 75% of the strips (complete with marginal notes to explain the many, many topical references), as well as several short text pieces talking about stories from behind-the-scenes.
It’s a handsome A4 collection with four strips to a page, black-and-white interiors (with lovely print quality that makes full use of grayscale), and a card cover with colour spot illo. The title of the book was apparently stained on with coffee, which is a nice touch. Nicer still is the CD in the back, which contains the full run of the strips in colour, and two short films.
The Zinefest edition also came with some free Havana Coffeeworks coffee, which I finished off the other day. Lovely.
Grant’s art is extremely polished, as you’d expect after a decade-and-half of solid cartooning. He’s become extremely comfortable with the four-panel format, making good use of the limited space in every panel and getting lots of physicality and geography out of a strip that is basically three characters sitting around a table. Around the middle of the decade the strip acquires the photographed backgrounds that are now its trademark, and the mix of photographed background and illustrated foreground works beautifully to give the strip a nice sense of place. (It reminds me a bit of Herge’s Tintin, which used stylized clear-line character drawings set against highly detailed and realistic backgrounds and made them work smoothly together.)
The collection shows an increasing comfort with the four-panel gag strip format, too, with a good mix of gentle fun and outright cynicism. Lots of jokes about local politics and the theatre and arts scene, and now and then some variations from the standard patterns to mix things up.
I really enjoyed reading through this collection – as a tour of Wellington’s noughties culture, it carries a surprising amount of heft and is very enjoyable read as a bundle. The best part of this for me was reading over the years when I was in Edinburgh, and getting a nice cafe-level view of what was exercising Wellington at the time. (The controversy over the braying portaloo had somehow passed me by!)
So – I recommend it, unreservedly, to Wellingtonians. Inner-city latte-sipping theatregoers should get hold of copies and sit them on their coffee tables. Every cafe in town should purchase a copy to keep with their reading material. This strip is a mix of pop-art and journalism and it’s funny and it’s ours, and I give it a hearty thumbs up.
If you want to get one – well, they’re out of print at the moment but Grant informs me he’s doing another run in time for Armageddon Pop Culture Expo at the start of April. You can reach him through his blog and ask him to write your name on a list or something.
(Aside for any non-Wgtners who’ve come this far – does your town/city have a comic strip about what’s going on there? I’m curious…)

Sherlock Holmes (USA/Germany, 2009)

Yes, I don’t know either why this is a USA/Germany production, but that’s what it says on IMDB.

Cal and I watched this the other day, on account of hearing consistently good reports about it, including from Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s movie reviews (which I discovered thanks to my recommend-me-a-podcast post). My expectations still weren’t high, on account of (a) big blockbuster action fillum (b) jude law (c) guy ritchie, but I figured that at the very least it’s always fun to watch Robert Downey jr.
It was fun! I just loved the dialogue, which raced along without drawing attention to how clever and effective it was. The cast clearly loved it, treating every line like a favourite toy. Beautiful work, really engaging, put a smile on my face.
Negative: the action scenes were as exciting as watching someone else play a video game, i.e. not at all. Thankfully there weren’t that many of them, and the rest of the time I got to revel in the fun of characters being sarcastic to each other.
I’m not even remotely a Sherlock aficionado, but I understand this portrayal of the character is relatively faithful, if rather more of an action hero and rather more of a charmer than the literary version. Importantly, this was a Holmes who was decidedly unsafe, which is an aspect of Holmes that struck me in the stories I did read and which was decidedly absent in other big-screen versions. Watson not being a buffoon = also brilliant; see this fantastic strip by Kate Beaton who you really should be reading by now anyway.
I was pleased, also, that the chemistry between Holmes and Irene came off with a decided imbalance. Holmes seemed fascinated by and powerfully drawn to her, but I didn’t get the slightest sense of romantic interest from him, whereas Irene clearly just wanted to rip his trousers off every time she was in reach. How much did Downey Jr. play out the suggestion he mentioned to such controversy, I wonder? Gay subtext or not, Holmes was never a figure of love and romance, so this was all quite acceptable.
Worth a watch, but the big-screen explodo is unengaging – wait for DVD, I reckon.

Gallery Dots


Yesterday, I cashed in some of my time-in-lieu and left work early to spend the rest of the day wandering in the sunshine. I was in an unusual head-space, mentally and physically restless while seeing the familiar Wellington scenery with fresh eyes. I was approached by a couple of young mormon missionaries and had a pleasant chat with them, then decided to go and see the dots.
“The dots” is what Wellington has come to call the City Gallery’s exhibition, Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years. Kusama’s immersive and engaging work has proved a huge success, drawing big crowds, and the City Gallery building itself has been covered with dots in honour of Kusama’s iconography.
I thoroughly enjoyed the exhibition. There were some lovely mirrored spaces that provided a fully immersive environment, and the two “Dots Obsession” rooms containing gigantic 3D shapes were imaginative and powerful.
However, I found that it was the smaller, less dramatic works that had a bigger effect on me, if you can call these giant canvases small. Here’s one that takes up an entire wall: Stars Obsession A, B, C (This may not be the specific painting on display in Wellington, but it’s part of this series at least.) This image revealed new aspects of itself as I stood in different relation to it, and I particularly loved how my initial impression of simplicity when close by (forced by the gallery, which put another object close creating only a narrow walking channel) was completely unseated when I viewed it again from further off and saw how subtle colour gradations gave an incredible texture and depth to the image.

I’m curious about whether the curators at City Gallery did that deliberately, placing another object to force that contrast of perceptions from up close (on one side) and far away (on the other). The exhibition has not been supervised by Kusama, who has not come to New Zealand with her work. Curators have been given significant freedom in arranging and presenting the work. In the initial flurry of interest in the show, this was a frequent negative talking point in the Wellington media, but it has disappeared completely since the show’s success became obvious. For my part, there’s only one curatorial decision that seems wrong to me, and that’s the juxtaposition of the “clouds” works (here they are in Sydney) with these large black-and-white canvases full of obsessively repeated motifs. I didn’t think these works had much to do with each other, and the fact that they’re both monochrome overwhelmed any other aspects of either set. (Of course, this might have been a space issue – this is a big show, and compromises will have been needed somewhere.)
My favourite piece was one of the simplest, and also one where curatorial input mattered a great deal. Kusama’s Narcissus Garden consists of a large number of football-sized mirrored spheres. In the City Gallery, they have put this piece in the space directly across from the entrance hall, a big wooden floor with windows at the end. The spheres are arranged right up against the walls, up to six balls deep, as if they have rippled out there from the centre. The more I stayed in this space (which, given its unassuming character and proximity to the coat-check, took me a while to properly appreciate) the more it had an effect on me. The mirrored spheres crowding against the walls seemed to be retreating from me, trying to push themselves as far from me as possible, like magnets repelling each other. My reflection in every sphere thoroughly implicated me in this. There was an undeniable emotional level to the experience too, as though I was responsible for an unsettling disequilibrium. The piece resolved itself into something quite emotionally aggressive, not remotely pleasant, but something that seized me and forced me to consider how to move on from it. (That last is always a sign that an artwork has grabbed me.)
So, I really loved that piece, and it was easily the highlight of the show for me. But here’s the thing – my experience, I’m certain, is nothing like what was intended by the artist. Narcissus Garden was launched in an infamous art-prank in 1966, when Kusama turned up at the Venice Biennale with the full piece and proceeded to hawk off the spheres for a couple bucks a pop. A photo of that incident shows the spheres all sat together on a small grassed plot. When they install this piece, curators have to make their own decisions about what to do with the mass of silver balls. A google image search shows the variety of solutions that different galleries have adopted. The City Gallery decision to push them to the edges of a large space is quite unlike the choices made elsewhere.
So where does that leave my experience of the piece? I am fascinated, to be honest, by the fact that my interaction with it wouldn’t have happened at any other Kusama show in the world. What this does is highlight for me just how much engaging with artwork is a fundamentally creative act. To me, and this will surprise no-one who knows the patterns lodged in my thinking, art is about interaction. Artworks are an opportunity for us to create personal responses through our experience, and the back-and-forth between these two is where everything of value and meaning happens.
Or, put another way, art is a game we play.
The show finishes on Sunday. If you’re in Wellington, it’s worth the effort to go see the dots.

DVDs, 39 Steps

My brain is still in recovery mode from that intense January. Still busy at work but I’m being careful to use my downtime for down. This is something of a change, I realize. Example: for the first time ever, I’m watching a TV series* on DVD by myself. Just cuing up the next episode when the previous is done feels very strange to me, like that time in ’98 when I was getting paid to watch an empty room and surf the internet. How can this be allowed?
* Lost season 1, actually. I downloaded the very first episode of Lost right after broadcast but didn’t get around to watching it that week, then decided I couldn’t be bothered catching up. I’ve told anyone who’s listened that I’d only give Lost a try when the whole series was complete and they had demonstrated they knew what they were doing. Well, the buzz about the final season has convinced me to give it a try. Ten episodes in, I’m not exactly hooked, but it’s very watchable. But slow. Man, but this show takes its time. I’m confident you could edit every episode down to about 22 minutes and not lose any content. Losties, are there episodes worth skipping entirely?

Last Friday Cal and I went to see The 39 Steps at Circa. Theatre for the win – so much more fun than cinema. The show is in a revival season, and it’s obvious why – a highly energetic farce that throws out gag after gag without pausing for breath. Not all of it worked for me, but there’s always another bit just around the corner, and the sheer enthusiasm on display won me (and everyone else) over. The performers were dropping lines and corpsing all over the place, because they could get away with it in this show, and their ad libs were some of the best bits. Great fun. We were sitting next to a drunken Irishman who’d seen the show in London and announced that this was “completely different” (in fact he announced it every few minutes, while the performance was underway), and finally said he thought this one was even better than the London one. So, drunken Irishman seal of approval there. It’s on until the 13th, Welly folk – go see it.
Minor achievement at basketball last night: you know that bit where the score is tied and the guy in the movie is fouled with no time left and has to go to the free throw line and win the game from there, with the whole stadium watching? I was that guy, and made the second of the two shots so we won. But that wasn’t the achievement. The achievement was that we, as a team, called a time out with 3 seconds left, decided how we would use those final 3 seconds, and then executed our plan perfectly. In all my long years of playing basketball, that has never happened before. I was proud of us. Nice one team.

Dollhouse S2 (No spoilers)

Season two of Dollhouse was great TV.
Dollhouse is still the strangest TV series I’ve ever encountered. Structurally it is *bizarre*.
The creative team never figured out what to do with the premise. They knew, right from the start, that they were sitting on a goldmine of weird and interesting and potent material. They spent all of both seasons trying to work out how to exploit it, and never quite managing.
However, they certainly created some memorable, challenging TV along the way.
The final episode, in what must be a first for any TV series, is a broadcast sequel to an episode available only on DVD. It’s a fun ride, and gets away with its cringey moments by just packing in so much stuff. It doesn’t really function as a thematic capper, it doesn’t make a final statement about the ideas in the show, and the writers still haven’t worked out what to do with their star and her character(s). But it made me think a couple times, and it did great work on the secondary characters.
Watch it sometime. It won’t be your new favourite TV show, but it carries its weight, and it’s downright provocative. I’m glad it happened.
And watch out for this guy, find-of-the-series Enver Gjokaj: dude can act like wow.

Dan O’Bannon (1946-2009)


Stan Winston (born the same year) passed away in 2008, and in 2009 it’s Dan O’Bannon‘s turn.
Dude was one of those do-it-all guys from 70s cinema, a special-effects geek, screenwriter, actor and director. He’s in my pantheon for being one of the creative powerhouses behind 1979’s Alien. He co-wrote the original script that kicked the whole project into gear, and was the guy who pushed Giger at Scott as a creature designer. Others involved have not been entirely generous about O’Bannon’s contributions (Giler and Hill called it “a terrible script with one amazing scene”), and O’Bannon certainly saw himself as frozen out of the core creative process once the movie started rolling, but he stayed involved as an effects guy as the movie came into being.
Over at Coilhouse, Mer points out that “O’Bannon and Ron Shusett initially sketched all of the roles for Alien as generic males. However, they handed over their script with a note that explicitly stated: “The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women.” They were the first to suggest that traditional gender roles could be reversed, leaving the door wide open for Brandywine’s rewrite/production team, Ridley Scott, and casting.” I’m not sure quite how much of Ellen Ripley I’d lay at his door, but he does deserve some credit for sure.
O’Bannon’s chestburster idea (that one amazing scene) is one of the most iconic moments in all of cinema, and – I’m being serious here – is up there among the greatest artistic achievements of commercial American film. A deeply Freudian nightmare that reconfigures the relationship between human and non-human life, it had an indelible effect on those who saw it, and has only lost its power thanks to being endlessly copied and parodied since.
After Alien, O’Bannon had driving-seat roles in films like Heavy Metal, Lifeforce, and cult favourite Return of the Living Dead. He can be seen on the documentaries on my Alien DVDs. He was an interesting guy who did good work. Respect, Dan O’Bannon, respect.
—
By the way, yesterday’s Avatar review has attracted some hefty disagreement in comments from my friends Conan and Jarratt. Spoiler-heavy, but worth a look if you care about that film, especially if you thought I was off-beam…