Tag: reviews

NZFF: Candyman (NZ/USA, 2010)

Next flim fevistal offering: Candyman. NZ filmmaker Costa Botes went to California to make this documentary about David Klein, the inventor of the Jelly Belly jellybean. This was a candy product that, not to overstate the case, revolutionised candy production in the U.S. (and, some speculate, helped humanise Ronald Reagan). Klein sold out of Jelly Belly in the 80s, for a pittance relative to the worth of his invention. More importantly, he has been written out of history by the Jelly Belly company, who simply do not acknowledge his existence.

So the film is a character study of an interesting character who had a great idea, followed it through with his heart and soul, then lost everything.

Klein is fascinating. He’s entrepreneurial and good at business operations, with an instinctive eye for marketing and branding – the Mad Men advertisers could learn something from him. But at the same time he’s compeletely not cut out for business-as-she-is-played. That fateful act of selling out was a ridiculous decision from any sensible business perspective. More importantly, Klein’s heart is not in profit at all – he marries his business sensibility to a deep love of helping people, regardless of the cost to himself. Unfailingly, stupidly, generous, he was never going to thrive in the world of real business.

So this is a fascinating doco looking at Klein, at who he is and what makes him tick, as well as the ins and outs of the Jelly Belly story. It will particularly resonate in the U.S. where this candy brand is a genuine cultural icon.

However, I can’t recommend this unreservedly. It felt, to me, like a 45 minute documentary packed into a 75 minute package. There wasn’t enough in it to sustain my enthusiasm.

So: very good, but not great.

(And, special mention to the music by Lower Hutt’s finest, Tom McLeod. Music in a doco is often hard to get right, but this was a delight – it’s no surprise Costa made special mention of it when introducing the film.)

NZFF: The Illusionist (UK/France, 2010)

First Flim Fevistal experience of the year was this animated piece by the fine minds behind Triplets of Belleville. It’s an adaptation of an unproduced (and apparently deeply personal) script by French comic filmmaker Jacques Tati. In the fading years of Vaudeville, a stage illusionist travels where the work takes him, and in the Scottish Highlands he acquires a young girl who is enchanted by him and believes his magic is real. The remainder of the film plays out in Edinburgh, as the illusionist tries to make ends meet, and the girl – a true naif – starts learning a thing or two about life.

We bought the tickets to this one based on Katie’s recommendation on my grumpy-about-film post. It was indeed a stunningly beautiful rendering of Edinburgh, enough to load me with a heavy shot of missing the place. That mood sat well with the film itself, which was gentle and wry and shot through with sadness, right to its final frame. Not a happy movie at all. It didn’t fully transport me, principally because the story never quite resolved its fable-aspects with its realistic-aspects, but it kept me engaged and fascinated throughout, and the ending was marvellously right. (And endings are so very, very difficult to do well.)

So, a successful outing. Good flim. Has chipped away some of the film-grumpiness of recent times.

Next NZFF: Candyman. (Not the guy wth the hook – the guy with the jellybeans.)

“Conscience of a Liberal”

Train reading over the last little while (when not listening to the Mayo/Kermode podcast) has been Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming America From The Right (2007, this edition paperback with new foreword from 2009).

The book is essentially a history of “how we (the U.S.) got into this mess”, combined with an emphatic reminder “yes, this is a mess”. It tracks through the last century-plus, where the Long Gilded Age of massive inequality was succeeded by the New Deal which introduced a welfare state and (with the help of some wartime measures) brought about what Krugman calls “the great compression”, where the extremes of inequality shrunk massively and the U.S. became a middle-class nation.

Then it tracks the rise of movement conservatism through its capture of the Republican party, and shows how the political shifts from Reagan onwards pushed inequality back towards Gilded Age levels. And it does all of this from an explicitly liberal, progressive viewpoint (Krugman discusses the use of both terms) that gives a prescription for pulling back from inequality and, crucially, completing the New Deal by developing health care for all.

It’s a great and readable book, putting a framework around a lot of things I only knew in bits and pieces. It’s a refreshingly candid argument, too, with an appeal to the fundamental morality of political liberalism and a reminder that it is liberals who are always on the side of democracy:

When liberals and conservatives clash over voter rights in America today, liberals are always trying to enfranchise citizens, while conservatives are always trying to block some citizens from voting. When they clash over government prerogatives, liberals are always the defenders of due process, while conservatives insist that those in power have the right to do as they please. After 9/11 the Bush administration tried to foster a deeply un-American political climate in which any criticism of the president was considered unpatriotic – and with few exceptions, American conversatives cheered. (p267)

Implicit in Krugman’s argument, but mostly unexplored in favour of other lines of discussion, is the power of social identity in shaping politics. Krugman gives convincing evidence that America is in fact a liberal country – that when you poll Americans on policy initiatives they would support, liberal policies are highly favoured. However, many of these same people identify as Conservatives. This is partly thanks to movement conservative’s skill at putting values issues to the forefront, a trick learned from Nixon; partly it’s a legacy of endemic racism in the US. In fact, if there’s anything in Krugman’s book that shocked me, it was his matter-of-fact conclusion that racism in the U.S. – specifically, the race relations problems that are the legacy of the slave trade – is the point of differentiation that explains why the US is so different to its neighbours and contemporaries. Since Reagan’s “welfare queens” comment, the hidden element of economic discussions in the US is that supporting poor people means supporting black people, and that is not a vote-winner.

Krugman gives a good account of the rise of movement conservatism. This was a small set of intellectuals in favour of minimal government and unregulated economic activity, and who saw the welfare state as anathema. They developed over time into a complex system of media channels, think tanks, and political operations that co-operate and, crucially, protect their own by circling them around through the system while ejecting those who stand against them (e.g. by shifting towards a more Eisenhower-Republican stance). However, he doesn’t have much to say about why people become movement conservatives – about the appeal of the ideology, in its purist form as well as its popularized (tea party) form. (The tea party movement hadn’t happened at the time Krugman wrote, of course, but the elements of it could be seen in the Joe-the-Plumber/Sarah Palin crowds.) To be fair, that’s well out of Krugman’s area, but I would have appreciated some comment from him on this. Movement conservatism, it seems clear from Krugman’s account, is not fundamentally concerned with social dividers like race and homosexuality. Movement conversatism is about the relationship between wealth and government, which are not identity issues in the normal sense; and yet the ideology seems to resonate as powerfully as any identity politics might.

This post hasn’t been a very good review or description of the book, more some random musings that it has prompted in me, but there you go. As usual, reading about the U.S. political scene is an exercise in wonder and frustration for me as a non-U.S.ian, but the influence of the U.S.A., and of movement conservatism, is clearly felt over here in countless ways so this kind of understanding is very handy. Book now available for borrowing, Wgtn/Hutt folks!

Predators (USA, 2010)

Yeah, so, remember how I was all down on cinema and not interested in movies? Well we had a sporting break on another cheap night, and when the invitation came down to go see Predators, I couldn’t resist. After all, I have much love for the original film and its under-rated sequel, and it’s been a long time since we’ve seen the dreadlocked hunters in action. Because there have been no films featuring them since the 90s. None.

And it was mostly a great popcorn flick. I enjoyed it, on average. Some of it I really enjoyed. Some of it I was bored. The whole final battle made no sense at all, as did the introduction of a second variety of Predators who act exactly the same as the first variety, except they maybe squat-and-roar-in-triumph a bit more often. Having the classic monster humbled by the new monster is a fine way to garner cheap heat, but nothing at all was done with it.

But! Exactly as advertised, there were a bunch of morally-dubious anti-heroes being stalked and killed one-by-one by alien hunters, and that was fine by me.

The highlight: when all the cast gather ’round as one of their number spends a full minute describing, in some detail, the complete plot of the original film.

The other highlight: realizing that the key moment in the trailer wasn’t actually in the movie, but was a quite different movie scene digitally altered specifically to create that key moment in the trailer.

The recommendation: watch as a cheap video with friends, or as a cheap movie with friends, or don’t, because whatever. Actually, watch Predator 2 again, because Danny Glover and Gary Busey, that’s why.

—

So I guess I’m cured, right?

The Knifeman, following that earlier movie-blah post, sent me a challenge to only watch unpopular movies for six months. “At the end, your view of movies will almost certainly be altered forever.” It’s tempting, but I’m going to decline, if only because I don’t want to spend the last six months I have before baby arrives banned from watching movies that might be good…

I invite him to share the details of this challenge, or speak more of the value of such an exercise, if he is so moved.

Saramago, Portugal

Been thinking about Portugal in the last couple of days, because of the death of Jose Saramago, and the impending departure from work of visiting Portuguese academic Rosa. I travelled through Portugal in October 2002 and it made a huge impression on me. I stayed in the country much longer than I intended, and was impressed by the massive diversity (both geographical and cultural) within such a small area.

“Portugal is cursed by God” – graffiti in Lisboa
“[pi]=3.14” – graffiti at the Ancora-Praia train station

Saramago was the source of my initial interest – the other moose loaned me The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis and it blew my head off. It also made me realize that I knew virtually nothing about Portugal, couldn’t even point to it on a map. And this one of the great powers of the age of exploration with colonies all over the world – a faded light, Ricardo Reis suggested, lost in an unarticulated sorrow.

“We are a sad people” – Tanya, a Portuguese girl I met in Lisboa, October 20th, 2002.

Saramago is probably my favourite author, inasmuch as I have a favourite author; I’ve enjoyed every book of his I’ve read. Their clever, magical concepts are expressed with a distinctive, embracing style, the kind of style I need to fight to kick out of my own writing for weeks afterward. More than this, however, what I think of when I think of Saramago is compassion. This is of a piece with his high concepts and his style – his authorial voice is embedded in the text, allowing the reader to sense his great compassion for his characters, and by extension, for the human condition.

That first Saramago book, Ricardo Reis, introduced me to writer/poet Fernando Pessoa, whose Book of Disquiet I read while travelling through Portugal. The straight-faced melancholy of the book served as counterpoint to everything I saw and did.

“Life is whatever we make it. The traveller is the journey. What we see is not what we see but who we are.” – Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I say grab life with both hands” – text received from my friend Alastair while in Portugal.

Reservoir Hill (NZ, 2009)

Locally-made digital Emmy-winning web series Reservoir Hill had an old media screening in omnibus form over the weekend, and I ended up watching much of the broadcast.

It’s about a girl named Beth who arrives in a new subdivision and finds everyone reacts to her in an unusual way. Very soon she finds out why, and that stakes out territory for the show somewhere between Twin Peaks and Shutter Island. The rest of the show follows her investigations into the mystery, shot through with moments of teen drama.

It’s a fascinating production, very well-made, making much of its anonymous suburban setting (it was shot out Porirua way). The colour palette is very Twilight, all washed-out colours and muted tones, stylistic and moody but not as over-the-top as Twilight seemed to be from the few minutes of that I watched.

Most fascinating was the interactive elements. After each episode, with Beth facing a decision, online viewers were encouraged to text her advice. These text messages were referenced by Beth in video blogs she made, and also seemed to affect the direction of the show: the character’s phone would beep, we’d see a close-up of her phone displaying a text message giving her advice, and then she’d follow the advice.

I’d love to know more about the logistics of this. Co-Director David Stubbs was interviewed by the Herald at the start of the project and said that they would actually let the text messages drive the production:

Each week scriptwriters will be responding to Beth’s texts and Bebo messages and deciding which suggestions, if any, will form the rest of the plot.

They will film episodes two days before screening. “It’s an amazing and quite frightening logistical effort,” Stubbs says.

A Good Morning interview elaborates – the episode goes live Monday evening, and they accept input until Weds evening, write script for the next instalment Thurs morning, prep Friday, shoot over the weekend, and cut it for release on Monday day.

This sounds crazy, but they’re all sticking to the story. They must have a pretty tight structure in place already, with locations and cast members lined up, so the script isn’t written from nothing and production can be developed based on that. It’s an incredible logistical mission even with the most minimal interactive elements.

And it clearly worked – the Bebo page and the message boards testify to the fact that they had viewers enthusiastically giving advice to Beth, and winning the Emmy is huge. There’s some elements I can quibble with, like the interactive audience not quite making sense within the fiction, but that’s small stuff. Overall the show is a great achievement, and it’s nice to see some pitch-black local drama for a teen audience.

It’s worth a look, I reckon. First episode is here – it’s six minutes long. Check it out.

Funny People (USA, 2009)


IMDB entry. (We watched the extended version on DVD, so I might refer to bits missing from the cinema cut.)

My affection for the works of Judd Apatow is well-known, so it pains me to say that this one is Not Great. However, I liked it a lot anyway. Your mileage may well vary.

Seth Rogen is a young comedian, starting out. Adam Sandler is an old comedian, jaded and terminally ill. There are two stories running here: young guy gets a break from old guy, and old guy tries to find a way to patch things up with his old flame.

This is mostly a dramatic film set within the world of comedy performers, and so it gets to have its cake with the funny stuff and eat it too with the serious stuff. Mostly that hangs together well, although there are one or two funny-but-real moments that don’t work at all, like Seth Rogen man-blubbing.

In fact, Rogen is a weak link throughout. And that’s the second thing that pains me to say, as my affection for Mr Rogen is also well-known, dating from his Freaks and Geeks days. He’s out of his depth here though, and although he’s game as anything and tries really hard the engine just doesn’t run for him here. Sandler is great, once again showing off the dramatic chops that mean “Best Actor Adam Sandler” is surprisingly likely to be a real event some time in the future. Leslie Mann in the part of the Director’s Wife is actually pretty damn good too.

Those two stories mentioned above? It’s clear throughout that they don’t fit in the same movie. An attempt to unify them with a climactic race-to-the-airport scene just falls completely flat. But I enjoyed this film anyway, because it felt almost painfully truthful now and then, and was really funny a bunch of times, and coming away from it I actually thought I understood what being a comedian might be like. (Plus, Eric Bana’s small role as the husband of the ex-girlfriend is marvellous, and I could watch Eminem yelling unwarranted insults at Ray Romano all day.)

So it’s even more of a big, rambling structural mess than Apatow’s other films, but it’s always watchable and sometimes even surprising. It’s not a classic for the ages, but its certainly not a failure. Watch it sometime, if only for the glimpses into comedy behind-the-scenes.

The Writer’s Tale

I recently read the inelegantly named Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter by Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook. Davies (RTD) is the man behind the recent revival of Doctor Who, taking it from embarrassing forgotten history to pop-cultural behemoth. Cook is the young Doctor Who Magazine journo who sparks up an email correspondence about RTD’s writing process. The book collects this correspondence.

It’s a mighty tome, nearly 700 pages, and it’s fascinating reading. I raced through it. There’s a lot that’s great about it, as RTD writes expressively about his creative process, how his ideas come together, and where the final product comes from.

Although the book claims to be about the writing process, and that’s what I’ll talk about below, most of its length is about the production of the Doctor Who television show and all the challenges and problems involved. The writing focus fades away after the first hundred-fifty pages, never to return; the writing process becomes a scaffold to talk about what it’s like making Doctor Who in the UK in the late 00s. While I think the writing bits are great and useful for any writer, the rest of the book is really of interest only to people curious about TV production or about Doctor Who. It’s sold a lot of copies, so there’s clearly plenty of people in that category, but the writing sadly becomes less important as the book proceeds.

RTD’s time on the show has not been universally praised. His stories have been criticized for being over-stuffed, poorly structured and too reliant on deus ex machina endings. In this book you can see all of those flaws and limitations at work. For example, the sense that RTD doesn’t do endings well is clearly because he writes in sequence and usually doesn’t have a definite climax in mind.

You even get RTD’s defence of some of these flaws. Memorably, acknowledging criticisms that his scripts don’t develop plots effectively but just throw in incident and then race on to the next thing, he says (p679):

What I’m saying is, I can see how annoying that looks. I can see how maddening it must be, for some people. Especially if you’re imposing really classical script structures, and templates, and expectations on that episode, even unconsciously. I must look like a vandal, or a kid, or an amateur. No wonder some people hate what I write. Of course, I’m going to win this argument. (Did you guess?) Because the simple fact is: all those things were planned. All of them were my choice. They’re not lazy, clumsy or desperate. They’re chosen. I can see more traditional ways of telling those stories, but I’m not interested. I think the stuff that you gain from writing in this way – the shock, the whirlwind, the freedom, the exhilaration – is worth the world. I’ve got this sort of tumbling, freewheeling stule that somersaults along, with everything happening now – not later, not before, but now now now. I’ve made a Doctor Who that exists in the present tense.

However, most of these problems are not really dealt with and Cook isn’t interested in going on the attack about them. This is a shame in lots of ways. I would love to see Davies defend himself over the decision at the very end of his final episodes to marry off the two black characters in his ensemble, apparently for no other reason than they’re both black. But this isn’t even mentioned in the correspondence.

I think the book also does a good job showing Davies’ strengths as a writer – his sure-footed dialogue and ability to write to the constraints of TV production, his ability to edit and strengthen the work of other writers, and most of all his gift for great moments. Time and again you see how his ideas begin with one or two key scenes that he is confident will make great telly, and then he develops a script around them. And they are truly great moments. The revival episode of Doctor Who, “Rose”, finished with such a moment that had clearly been in Davies’ head for a long time. I wrote about it five years ago: “The last shot of the episode – that last one second – it just about made me cry.” This bit:

The Writer’s Tale has a website. Download RTD’s scripts!

Four reviews

Things I’ve watched recently on DVD or big screen, in order of release date:


Adventureland (USA, 2009)
Boy becomes man at theme park job. Another comedy-drama male POV film as exemplified by the Apatow stable. Slow, meandering, generous in every sense. Not well-crafted drama, which actually works in its favour, a lot of it feels like biography in how loosely it plays out. However, this sits uncomfortably against the heavy, contrived schtick of minor characters like the comedy managers and the villainous stepmother. Martin Starr (Bill from Freaks & Geeks) is the only one who successfully straddles the divide, delivering delicious broad comedy and solid, affecting dramatic work in a seamless whole. Kristen Stewart nervously adjusts her hair a lot but there’s some depth to her that won me over anyway – girl could go far if she escapes the Twilight eternity trap. Overall: ramshackle, fun, not worth swerving for but watch it if it comes on TV.


An Education (UK, 2009)
The delightful Carey Mulligan anchors this film, which is a little bit Lolita and a little bit… er… something else? Schoolgirl is wooed by older man, finds out older man is not actually perfect, cue tears and decisions and personal growth. A small story well-told, with an absolute commitment to its 1961 setting. Although the schoolgirl-older man relationship is central, the best energy in the film was between schoolgirl and teacher (Olivia Williams from Dollhouse, Whedon fans) and schoolgirl and headmistress (Emma Thompson, who is just great). It’s an odd script from Nick Hornby that mostly plays its beats gently, but can’t resist making The Dad a caricature. Crucially, though, the big turning point in the film didn’t play for me at all. When the girl finds out for the first time that the older man isn’t perfect and starts walking away, he chases after her and gives her a big speech and slowly she relents and goes back with him. This is probably the most important scene in the film, and it didn’t convince me. In fact it failed so spectacularly that it bumped me out of the film and I annoyed poor long-suffering Cal by ranting and raving about how unconvincing it was. It just wasn’t enough – there was nothing in the scene that made me believe in her turn, which was the one on which the entire drama of the film rested. Even more frustrating: in the very next scene, the girl gets a big speech in which she figures out the hypocrisy and pointlessness of the world and asserts her right to find her own path. THAT should have been the turn! That scene I believed absolutely – it got me back into the film and I shut up again, all the way to the ending (which inexplicably uses a “now I’m older and wiser” voiceover to daft effect, but never mind). Overall: engaging and heartfelt but wounded by odd scripting, probably worth it just for the period detail and the great performances. A worthy DVD rental.


Boy (NZ, 2010)
Kid has his life change when Dad comes home. Taika Waititi’s new film is side-splittingly hilarious for the first 15 minutes if you’re a Kiwi kid born in the mid-70s like me. And if you don’t fit that category then you’ll probably still laugh a hell of a lot because it’s funny as. The rest of the film is still really funny, but also quite sad. If you’re a New Zealander you will end up seeing this film. If you’re not from Aotearoa New Zealand, well it’s still not a bad night out I reckon. See it.


Kick-Ass (UK/USA, 2010)
Teenage nobody decides to be a superhero, fails his way into a mad adventure. Good lord, this film made me laugh and wince to almost painful degrees. Breathtakingly over-the-top violent like some of those crazy Asian films that used to play late slots at the Incredibly Strange Film Festival. Completely, unrelentingly loopy throughout. It almost never makes a conventional decision. Dogged in pursuit of its strange, wet-suited vision of movie bliss. You’ll be hearing a lot about the 13-year-old sweary assassin, and I almost cried with laughter telling Cal about the scene where the hero finally gets the girl, but the best thing about this movie is Nicolas Cage. NICOLAS CAGE. The guy is an enigma wrapped up in a hunk of wood wrapped up in a feverish hallucination. His performances left behind anything that might be called “real human behaviour” about a decade ago, and seriously, does anyone understand what he’s doing now when they point a camera at him and say ‘action’? I can’t see him receiving direction. “For this take, dial it up a couple of notches, okay Nicolas?” No. Not credible. They just must point the camera and pray. In this film he is AMAZING. I never wanted him to leave the screen, except that his exits are some of his best moments. MOAR NIC CAGE. Dude, do you remember when he was a huge action movie star? Doesn’t that seem more and more like it was a weird dream you once had, rather than something that actually happened? Overall: See. This. Movie. It earns its (NZ) 18 rating, so be prepared for a few moments of hands-over-face violence, but it will be like nothing else you see all year.

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!)