Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 18 December

Sorry, no recommendation today

Kia ora whānau

As we hurtle towards the hol­i­day break time gets short­er and I real­ise that I won’t have time later today to send through a new recommendation.

I’m deep in prep for my six-week stint host­ing At the (Summer) Movies for RNZ and that means lots of day­time pre­view screen­ings before the mad rush of Boxing Day openings.

There are also meet­ings today with a cli­ent about a (non-movie) pro­ject that will ramp up over 2025.

Normal ser­vice will be resumed tomor­row (Thursday) but Friday will be the last reg­u­lar news­let­ter before the Christmas hol­i­day. The first “Something to watch tonight” news­let­ter of 2025 will arrive on 6 January.

I’m very grate­ful for the feed­back on yesterday’s long guide to many of the great films not yet released in Aotearoa cinemas, espe­cially the cor­rec­tions. Reader DD inter­rup­ted his hol­i­day in Australia to say:

Excellent list. A few minor cor­rec­tions: NO OTHER LAND got a cinema release in Auckland a few weeks ago. RAP WORLD got one of its only cine­mat­ic out­ings in the world in Auckland (thanks to Tom Augustine) and is now on YouTube. (It was nev­er releas­able in a con­ven­tion­al sense due to music rights issues.) And THE KILLER (2024) is cur­rently on Netflix in Australia, where I am atm. Not sure if it snuck on to Netflix in NZ or not.

(And saw RUMOURS over here. Freaking loved it. But I am a Maddin fan boy.)

I double-checked and The Killer is not one Netflix in NZ.

Doug fol­lowed up with:

(Oh, and RED ROOMS played Terror-Fi 2023. James Partridge: ahead of the curve once again!)

I wasn’t sure wheth­er some of these had played earli­er fest­ivals and had no easy way to check so con­grats to James for that pres­ci­ent programming.

Reader J of Ōtepoti Dunedin commented:

Unfortunately for us here in Dunedin, because we only received 37 films from NZIFF this year I had even less oppor­tun­ity to see most of these!

And read­er TH reminded me that bor­der secur­ity can make lives miser­able any­where, wheth­er they are gov­ern­ment employ­ees or not:

I’ve been through Melbourne air­port a couple of times a year for the last sev­en or eight years and it has the second sourest & most obstruct­ive bor­der secur­ity I’ve encountered – but the out­right nas­ti­est was TSA in Honolulu where at 11.30 at night they clearly enjoyed put­ting a Māori whānau with young kids – invited per­formers at an inter­na­tion­al gath­er­ing – through a lengthy and sneer­ing inter­rog­a­tion in front of every­one, with the addi­tion­al pleas­ure of hold­ing up the rest of the exhausted pas­sen­gers whose bod­ies were still run­ning on NZ time. I don’t think I could bring myself to see Carry On des­pite all the excel­lent reviews – just the thought of going to an air­port sends my blood pres­sure through the roof nowadays.