Well, the wonderful Wellington Film Festival is in full swing here, with enormous numbers of incredible films drawn from all around the world. So here are my reviews of the two I’ve seen, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and Knocked Up.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was a British film (with American funding) about a troubled young wizard and his struggles against a repressive regime at his wizard school. For about ten minutes. Then it was about something else. Then it was about something else. The film never settled down into one narrative, constantly rushing off to the next plot-sequence in a way that never quite added up. There were wonderful bits aplenty, but the comings and goings of so many minor characters made it difficult to settle into the film. Adapting a lengthy and incident-driven novel into a film is a challenge, and this effort didn’t quite manage it. Still, like that other Festival mainstay Michael Apted’s Up series, there is pleasure to be garnered simply from watching the actors grow up on screen across the series of films.
Knocked Up was a shaggy comedy from the USA, about an overgrown layabout and a bright young thing with a career who find themselves facing adulthood when she falls pregnant to him after a one-night-stand. It’s a sincere and engaging film, although it loses many points for a startling lack of chemistry between the two leads (both of whom are very good, but there is no spark between them at all). Lighter on the laughs than I was expecting but not a bad way to spend a couple of hours.
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The Nia Glassie abuse coverage took a turn for the unexpected today. The Dom Post made it eight paragraphs past its “SHAME” headline before it mentioned the word Maori, showing a restraint that surprised me.
Likewise, the Dom Post editorial took a useful tone saying that even though recent high-profile child abuse incidents have involved Maori, “child abuse is not a Maori-only problem”.
Of course, it squandered my goodwill a couple lines later by saying “For all the talk of the caring nature and superiority of the whanau approach over the supposed sterility of the Pakeha nuclear family, abuse is higher among Maori”, which implied an unlikely causality between family structure and abuse, and did so by inventing a cultural competition of which Pakeha are the winners.
And of course, down in the list of solutions to end the editorial was that old reliable: “What is needed is… the Government to accept that, for some, welfare payments are not the whole answer…”
6 thoughts on “Flem Fistival Reviews”
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Whanau Vs Nuclear. Intresting. Know which one i would pick every time.
Abuse is unacceptable and effects all aspect of society. To use this as a wedge between the people of Nz is just so……..
dude no words. Shocked.
I hate that living here I have to own up to the fact that Nz is more than a little racist. That it is not all sparkling lights and nice scenery. It pisses me off because Nz is like some bastion of cultural light and we undo it all with something like this.
Keep on keeping them real.
I got the impression from what I’ve heard about the case that Nia Glassie’s whanau wasn’t working for her – the abuse happened, but that it did manage to save her life – her aunt got her to a hospital in time.
I dunno, I know a lot of Pakeha households that include more than mother, father and kids. In my family alone when I was a child we had boarders and foster kids and my parents’ friends all cycling through the house. It makes a lot of sense to me to have more than two caregivers – you get backup.
James Cameron, when mutilating Abyss, said that you can’t cut bits out of stories and subplots. Either cut the whole story/subplot or leave it all alone. They cut a good deal out of HP, but they tried to leave a bit of everything. I think that given the amount of Kreacher/Sirius story they left, the rest might safely have been lost, for example.
But I think that what it lost in tight structure, it made up for in excellence of montage. 🙂 There were three, and they all felt pretty natural. The other thing it did was finally have an awesome looking fight between high level magic users. I remember even at the time being embarrassed by the climactic Fight in Willow between Bav Morda & Fin Razel, for example.
For the non-NZers among us, could you very quickly run through what (a?) “whanau” is?
Good point – whenever there are Maori issues being talked about the whole discussion is full of specialised vocab all Kiwis understand with lots of nuance and depth, but that are completely opaque to you furriners.
“Whanau” is family; but in Maori culture family is a broader concept and has different connotations of the role of relatives.
In colloquial NZ english, whanau is used interchangeably with the word family, but in a context like this the cultural differences start turning up.
The explicit contrast being made is between the mum/dad/kids of white European-descended culture, vs. a wider collective “whanau” extended family unit, with cousins and aunts/uncles having close contact and perhaps living together.
(The “Wh” is pronounced as an F sound, by the way…)
Hope that makes sense…
Next, Morgue, you should have a crack at explaining “tamaiti whangai”…