After a few days off the radar I find it amusing that I get the news of the All Blacks announcement via Grant Robertson’s blog .
So, here I am sitting in the deserted café of the Antarctic Centre at Christchurch Airport, waiting to pick up Marty R for the start of his birthday trip.
We’ve hired a sporty silver Mercedes so we can drive him back to his gaff in Dunedin and then hoon around Otago pretending to be rock stars. I have my sunglasses at the ready and, fingers crossed, the rain will hold off long enough to have some photos taken with the top down.
So far, I haven’t had a chance to exercise the key properties of the SLK Kompressor as all the driving so far has been in gentle Christchurch traffic but we’ll soon be on the road.
I’ll be tweeting throughout the trip, and posting longer thoughts here.
If you are told something is “policy” or “standard business practice” it means the real reason is something no moral person could live with.
(via @GaryRocketman on Twitter)
I just got back from reviewing a couple of films for RNZ National’s Nine to Noon show: (500) Days of Summer and An Education. You can listen to the item here, but I also recommend subscribing to the podcast so you can cherry-pick the best of each day’s broadcast.
[audio:http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/ntn/ntn-20091014–1151-Film_review-048.mp3]
The romantic comedy is moribund. The first traces of its demise can be dated to the turn of the millenium, when Hugh Grant decided that he didn’t really want to be the floppy-haired object of middle-class women’s affections. Since then, the genre has been a reliable producer of tired and cynical “battles of the sexes” or grown-up fables in which a self-centred man-child discovers unlikely love via a woman who is palpably too good for him. Earlier this year The Ugly Truth scraped the bottom of that barrel by trying to merge both forms and has yet to be surpassed as worst film of the year.
So, if ever there was a genre ripe for reboot (like Star Trek earlier this year) it is the romantic comedy and, because nature abhors a vacuum, we now get one. It’s called (500) Days of Summer and it may well be one of the best films of the year.
The time is present day Los Angeles (a street-level Los Angeles not a million miles away from the charming In Search of a Midnight Kiss earlier this year) and our hero (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a young visionary who no longer believes in himself: an architect stuck in a dead-end job writing greeting cards. He meets his boss’s beautiful new assistant Summer (Zooey Deschanel) and they bond over The Smiths. He is besotted. She, not so much, but they start an affair.
It’s October which means that the best radio programme in the world my favourite radio programme is back – Start the Week with Andrew Marr. The walk to work is made that much more intellectual when STW is on the iPod.
This week there was a lovely moment when Peter Maxwell-Davies (Master of the Queen’s Music), in conversation with thriller novelists P.D. James (Phyllis, I now learn) and Stella Rimington, compared the construction of a good plot to the composition of music – the organisation of it, the mathematics of it. I so enjoy hearing people from different disciplines find common ground – and uncommon ground. Great radio.