Tag: film

Te Hobbit

Hobbit stays in NZ. Situation complex. (Previously.)

NZ as a nation: keeps The Hobbit. Turns out this is of massive symbolic importance to us. Our national identity is bound up in these Middle Earth films now (or, perhaps, in the fact we showed we can make ’em). That’s cool.

Film bosses: got more tax breaks, plus happy Peter Jackson. They win.

NZ film industry workers: have a film to work on. Is good.

Dealmaker PM John Key emerges with great triumph. Never mind embarrassing spectacle of our political leader holding crisis meetings with film bosses; voters already forgotten that.

Legislative due process: sacrificed by John Key. Pushing through today legislation developed in meeting with US film bosses. Terrible behaviour, although if it is just limited to a review/clarification of the differences between an employee and a contractor I’ll be cool with it. Won’t know until it’s already been pushed through of course. Sickening.

Actors? Lord knows how they come out of this. Their position remains inscrutable. What did they want? What did they get? Who knows?

Unionism in NZ: wounded. The Actor’s Union acted with great strategic idiocy. CTU’s Helen Kelly came in and did not help, instead stirred things up further. Misinformation exposed, either lies or stupidity. Anti-union forces including hero of the hour John Key leap on opportunity to attack unions. Disastrous result. (I support strong unions, but only if they don’t act like idiots.)

Blogs vs mainstream media: got most of my news on this from the Public Address thread of doom, which (uniquely as far as I can tell) put a real emphasis on sourcing documents and establishing facts. On the other hand, the big announcement was on live TV so old media still has the power.

Conspiracy theorists: in their element. This outcome was foreseen.

Opposition leader Phil Goff: this is bad for Phil Goff. Everything that happens is always bad for Phil Goff.

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.

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.)

Piranha 3D (USA 2010)

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.

Perfect Blue (Japan, 1998)


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.

Inception (USA, 2010)

Inception is a big budget sci-fi film by Christopher Nolan who did The Dark Knight recently. It’s getting quite some acclaim. I saw it on Saturday with the other moose, the knifeman, and the enigmatic B. We spanned the whole range of opinions: one liked it, one didn’t like it, one thought it was okay, and one was unable to decide.

Here are some bullet points.

  • I was the one who liked it. I did. About halfway through I realized I was having a good time.
  • I’ve had several conversations about Neuromancer in the last week. Inception felt like that – dense, global, informed by Noir, a heist story that turns on the specific nature and limitations of a distinctive technology.
  • But not really that dense. It felt very straightforward to me – if you keep up with the technology explanations, then the whole thing runs with no real deviations or surprises.
  • (If you keep up with the technology – and here let’s pause and acknowledge the most extreme case of infodumping I’ve seen in any medium for quite a long time. Characters keep stopping and explaining at length this or that aspect of the tech. Not even remotely elegant.)
  • Some viewers have constructed elaborate theories about what was really going on, analysing looks between characters and specific cuts halfway through the film to argue this or that theory. That’s cool if you like that stuff, but I don’t think there was anything in the film that demands it. The straightforward explanation is never undermined or challenged. There’s no reason to think that it’s anything but exactly what it seems to be.
  • It’s a heist movie with nearly the entire focus on the procedural aspects of the job. It was a bit like CSI crossed with the A-Team. I enjoyed it for that reason, I think.
  • The zero-g stuff was wonderful.
  • The psychology stuff – not so wonderful. Inception, the process of putting an idea into someone’s head so they think it’s their own? Far from being an ultimate, feared challenge requiring future!tech and extreme risk-taking by our band of outlaws, inception is performed on all of us every day by advertisers. Dude.

I liked it. Don’t think I’ll watch it ever again, though. I’ll give it about a 3.5 out of 5, which is pretty good really, but not at all a classic.

Enthusiasts might want to read the preview comic, written by Chris Nolan.

Farewell (France, 2009)

I was one of the many many people who saw this film at its Monday festival screening. Lots of familiar faces in the audience. Embassy Theatre was heaving. It’s a nice cinema always, but especially when it’s heaving.

So: this is a “based on a true story” of prominent 80s KGB informant Vladimir Vetrov, who passed secrets to the West that enabled the discovery and complete dismantling of substantial USSR infiltration of Western technology programmes. (Flicking through webpages on the subject, somewhere I read “the West was basically in a technological arms race with itself” because as soon as a breakthrough happened, the Russians caught up thanks to their network.)

It was enjoyable, if somewhat undisciplined, and (as is apparent from just a cursory search of Wikipedia) substantially divergent from what really happened. The filmmakers make no apologies for this – they renamed their informant for a reason. But it does make some of the familial relationships that drive the film feel a bit empty, knowing they were contrived for the film rather than summarised for it.

It’s a French film so it features men having affairs, a bearded protagonist, and lots of unscrupulous Americans. (One of the Americans is Willem Defoe, hurray!) There are actors in the roles of Mitterand, Reagan and Gorbachev, who verbalise the impact of the passed information. They were all fine in the roles of such well-known public figures, but I think the film would have been stronger if it found another way to show those aspects of the story. The strongest elements are the personal relationships around the spies – I was actually reminded of Donnie Brasco, a great filmic study of the familial costs of a life of deceit.

It’s a bit too broadly played to be fully satisfying, and knowing how far it was from the truth feels like a let-down to me, even though it made no claims to be anything other than a dramatic story that echoed some of the things that happened. But it was engaging and often genuinely suspenseful (although it pulled the same suspense trick twice for two of its tensest scenes, which felt like scriptwriting laziness to me). Above all, it’s very watchable. I had a good time watching it; I think most everyone would.

Plus, Freddie Mercury in white pants cameo as part of some Queen concert footage. On the giant Embassy screen… well. Those pants were tight.

La danse: The Paris Opéra Ballet (USA/France, 2009)

Those people who advised about going to see films without expectation or even choosing were right – this was not one I’d have chosen, and I think it’s my favourite of the five I’ve seen so far. We inherited tickets from my parents, who found late that they couldn’t go.

There’s not much film to sum up. US documentarian Frederick Wiseman takes his cameras inside the highly-respected Paris Opera Ballet, mostly into rehearsal rooms but also into administration offices, costume-workshops, and the rounds of the maintenance men. As the film goes on we see some of the actual performances, seven ballets in total from the traditional pleasures of the Nutcracker to a bunch of others I’d never seen before. It’s long, two-and-half hours, with extended sequences of nothing but dancers dancing and choreographers feeding back to them.

It was riveting.

I should clarify that I’m not a ballet aficionado in the slightest – I’ve seen, hmm, three ballet performances in my entire life, including last year’s Peter Pan. It’s a medium towards which I’ve never been drawn. That hasn’t stopped a strong thread of awe at what dancers do, and what they represent – the power and potential of movement alone, movement performed and experienced, and the many layers of communication that entails. Perhaps one of the reasons it isn’t my medium is because I’m so caught up with words, whereas dance is almost the opposite of words – one point in the film almost made me laugh as it addressed this so precisely, where a choreographer advised a dancer, as they talked through what the character might be thinking, “don’t put words to the movements or you’ll kill it”. And he was obviously right. Dance is a parallel track and its rules are different but no less potent for that.

This film, I felt, spoke to me very clearly about the creative process and creative expression, particularly shared and collaborative creativity. I was humbled by the sheer amount of work the dancers put into their craft, and pleased by their obvious joy in what they were doing. And as the film approached its end, and we started to see the ballets in performance, I found myself utterly caught up in the full realization of all that masterful development. Once or twice I might have forgotten to breathe.

I don’t want to oversell this film – as much as I loved it, I don’t know that I’d recommend it without caveats. It resonated with me personally, but I don’t know how another random person might take it. I don’t know that I’d watch it again, either. I think, if it sounds interesting to you, you’d probably enjoy it.

But yes, for me, this has been the highlight of my festival selection.

The Most Dangerous Man in America (USA, 2009)

Doco about Daniel Ellsberg, an ex-Marine Pentagon/Rand staffer whose eventual conclusion that Vietnam was unwinnable then turned to horror when he discovered that the U.S. had been the instigator from the beginning. Ellsberg then leaked the history of the origins of the Vietnam War, first to senators and congressmen who did nothing with the information, and then directly to the press. Cue uproar, and Nixon in full-on supervillain fury mode.

Ellsberg was disappointed that the leak didn’t have the impact he’d hoped. Predictably, the story became about him, not about the facts of the origins of Vietnam. The fury he must have felt watching the similarly contrived build-up to war in Iraq can only be guessed at; Ellsberg is depicted protesting against that war too.

I found this fascinating and educational. I only knew the broad strokes of this story, so it was great to have it unpacked and explored. And as much as Ellsberg was unhappy the story became about him, his personal story is indeed fascinating, such as his on-again off-again love affair with a woman tied to the peace movement while he was working in the Pentagon on the war.

I would have appreciated a bit more detail on the secret history Ellsberg was unveiling. The collusion of five U.S. Presidents in lying about Vietnam was sketched very briefly – a few more minutes on the subject seems worthwhile to me, as I expect many in the audience would be just as uncertain about the detail as I am.

Apart from that, a solid doco, well-made, about a subject that rewards the interest. It doesn’t strive to illuminate any higher truth, which is probably to its benefit. To be honest, it felt like reading a really well-written chunk of journalism from the New Yorker or the Atlantic Monthly, and I mostly mean that as a compliment but an also an observation about style. A lot of film docos use the medium to explore things no magazine article could touch, but I don’t think that was much the case here. This was a more traditional journalistic style, rigorous and eye-opening. Recommended.

Movie site