Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 3 January

Wreck-It Ralph (Moore, 2012)

Happy new year, every­one. I hope you all had a grand time and watched lots of cool stuff.

Highlights here included tick­ing anoth­er disc off in the extens­ive “Almost Definitive” John Clark and Bryan Dawe box set from the ABC, Sydney Pollack’s clas­sic Out of Africa on Blu-ray, on Christmas Eve, the sea­son­al weird­ness of Meet Me in St. Louis, the deeply dis­ap­point­ing Rebel Moon on Netflix, and on Christmas Night, a Peter Baynham double-feature of Arthur Christmas and Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa. That led to a (some­what illi­cit for New Zealand) view­ing of the ori­gin­al BBC six-part TV ver­sion of The Trip to Italy.

As you can tell we pri­or­it­ised laughter this hol­i­day and, as alert read­ers can tell, we also chose sev­er­al titles pre­vi­ously recom­men­ded in these pages. Eating one’s own dog­food, I think they call it.

To add to the F&S recom­mend­a­tions that we took up, we re-watched the Alexander Payne clas­sic Downsizing – warm­ing up for the The Holdovers which opens here in a couple of weeks – and after that were so high on Matt Damon that we finally tried the 2016 reboot of Jason Bourne which turned out to be a damp squib. You can’t win ’em all.

There were sev­er­al trips to the cinema among all that home enter­tain­ment and reviews of the hol­i­day movie releases should start appear­ing on the RNZ web­site in due course.

The kids still require enter­tain­ing, though, don’t they? And the weath­er remains vari­able, so today’s recom­mend­a­tion is one that the whole fam­ily can enjoy indoors. Wreck-It Ralph is a gag-filled anim­ated clas­sic with a first rate voice per­form­ance from the great John C. Reilly. “Call of Doody” still makes me snig­ger to this day.

I reviewed it back in the 2012/13 Summer Holiday roundup:

Kids of all ages will enjoy Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph, an anim­ated pic­ture about an arcade video game char­ac­ter who tires of always being the bad guy. John C. Reilly’s Ralph goes look­ing for anoth­er game in which he can be the hero for a change but he doesn’t real­ise that he’s throw­ing the entire arcade world out of bal­ance and threat­en­ing everyone’s future.

There’s out­stand­ing voice work from Sarah Silverman as feisty young Vanellope and kids will enjoy the exuber­ant visu­als although adults will get nos­tal­gic from the many old game ref­er­ences – not sure if kids still go to spa­cies par­lours these days, do they?

Where to find Wreck-It Ralph

Aotearoa, Australia, USA & UK: Streaming on Disney+

Editor’s note: A word about Substack’s Nazi problem

Some of you may know that there is cur­rently a bit of a back­lash from Substack users –both read­ers and cre­at­ors – about the platform’s hands-off approach towards con­tent mod­er­a­tion, spe­cific­ally their accept­ance (and in some cases pro­mo­tion) of far-right and white suprem­acist authors.

The Substack pos­i­tion on this – that the best response to hate­ful speech is more speech – is at best naïve and at worst implies some sym­pathy and sup­port for those positions.

Aotearoa author and dis­in­form­a­tion research­er Byron Clark is one of many who have writ­ten to Substack founder (and fel­low kiwi) Hamish McKenzie and his open let­ter is a good sum­mary of the con­cerns that have been raised.

Frankly, it’s not cool that Funerals & Snakes is asso­ci­ated with some of that garbage just because Substack has some ideo­lo­gic­al com­mit­ment to let­ting rat­bags talk. It’s also very not cool that some of the good and inter­est­ing writers here are hav­ing eye­balls and incomes reduced because of grow­ing res­ist­ance from read­ers to sup­port­ing the plat­form itself.

I have had a few com­ments on social media from people telling me that they love my stuff, but that they won’t sup­port Substack and there­fore won’t click a link to read it.

Like many pub­lish­ers on Substack, I am look­ing into my options but there’s no obvi­ous altern­at­ive and no fric­tion­less way to move – yet. And I don’t have such a huge audi­ence here that I can afford to lose any of you in a rushed transition.

I’m hacked off because everything else about Substack has been great. It’s cer­tainly the most pleas­ur­able digit­al writ­ing plat­form I’ve ever come across. And part of me hopes that Substack will come to their senses before it comes to that, but I sus­pect that the only way to prove to them that de-platforming Nazis works is to de-platform ourselves and join the boycott.

I’d appre­ci­ate your thoughts as I work through this.