{"id":598,"date":"2007-08-01T00:06:42","date_gmt":"2007-08-01T00:06:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=598"},"modified":"2007-08-01T00:06:42","modified_gmt":"2007-08-01T00:06:42","slug":"flem-fistival-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=598","title":{"rendered":"Flem Fistival Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/em>, and Knocked Up<\/em>.
\nHarry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix<\/em> 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<\/em>, there is pleasure to be garnered simply from watching the actors grow up on screen across the series of films.
\nKnocked Up<\/em> 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.
\n===
\nThe 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.
\nLikewise, 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”.
\nOf 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.
\nAnd 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…”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading Flem Fistival Reviews<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mediawatch"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-9E","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}