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RN 1/15: Don’t go to bed angry

By Audio, Cinema, Rancho Notorious and Reviews

Guest host Liam Maguren sits in for Kailey and tells us about the goings on at flicks.co.nz and fliks.com.au plus he and Dan review David Fincher’s Gone Girl, which opens this week­end all over the world, and The Equalizer star­ring Denzel Washington as a gen­i­al old dude who you really don’t want to mess with.

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RN 1/14: The Long Road

By Audio, Cinema, Rancho Notorious and Reviews

Award-winning Scottish act­or, writer and dir­ect­or Peter Mullan (Top of the Lake, My Name is Joe, Trainspotting) calls in from Auckland where he is appear­ing at the Big Screen Symposium, Jonathan King (Under the Mountain, Realiti) reports on Fantastic Fest plus Kailey and Dan review Locke and The Lunchbox).

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RN 1/13: “You say you want a revolution...”

By Audio, Cinema, Rancho Notorious and Reviews

Kailey is in Toronto, Dan is in rainy Wellington and between them they review Kelly Reichardt’s “thrill­er” Night Moves and the dysto­pi­an night­mare of The Giver star­ring Meryl Streep, Jeff Bridges and some kids, plus Robin Wright play­ing sev­er­al ver­sions of her­self in Ari Folman’s The Congress.

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RN 1/12: Telluride Dreams

By Audio, Cinema, Rancho Notorious and Reviews

We get an update on what Kailey has been up to over­seas – the Telluride Film Festival and arriv­ing in Chicago – and we both get to review Richard Linklater’s Oscar-tipped Boyhood and the author­ised doc­u­ment­ary about Nick Cave, 20,000 Days on Earth.

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Review: Housebound & Aunty and the Star People

By Cinema and Reviews

In Gerard Johnstone’s tightly put togeth­er comedy-chiller Housebound, Morgana O’Reilly plays rebel-without-a-cause Kylie, forced by a judge to spend nine months of home deten­tion with a moth­er she detests in a house with a hid­den his­tory. It’s a star-making per­form­ance from O’Reilly in a film that’s full of them. In addi­tion to our surly heroine, we have an expertly pitched Rima Te Wiata as moth­er Miriam (why she hasn’t been seen in more fea­ture films is a long-standing mys­tery that is only deepened by her per­form­ance here), Glen-Paul Waru as Amos, the secur­ity guard attached to Kylie’s detail and dragged into invest­ig­at­ing the bumps in the night that plague the house, and the debutant writer-director himself.

Johnstone’s con­trol of his mater­i­al is first-rate, pro­du­cing com­par­is­ons in this reviewer’s mind with Edgar Wright of Shaun of the Dead fame, prob­ably the highest praise that I can come up with for a film like this one. He keeps the mys­tery mys­ter­i­ous even as more clues are unveiled, deliv­ers gags that work to pro­pel the story and illu­min­ate char­ac­ter rather than just being yucks for their own sake, and makes sure that there are enough scares that an audi­ence can nev­er really relax.

That word ‘audi­ence’ — it’s key to the suc­cess of Housebound. There’s no ques­tion that this film won’t have a long and suc­cess­ful life on vari­ous forms of home video, but it really comes to life with a full house.

Last year, one of the most sur­pris­ing suc­cesses in loc­al cinemas was Gardening With Soul, a doc­u­ment­ary about Sister Loyola Galvin, nona­gen­ari­an tender to the Sisters of Compassion garden in Island Bay. In 2014, we have anoth­er doc­u­ment­ary about an older Wellingtonian. Jean Watson isn’t quite 90, but the rev­el­a­tion that she is actu­ally in her 80s still comes as quite a sur­prise as we watch her ped­alling her bicycle around the small Indian town she loves — and whose children’s homes she has sup­por­ted for over 30 years, des­pite liv­ing in a mod­est Berhampore flat back in New Zealand.

Like the earli­er film, Aunty and the Star People is full of gen­er­os­ity and wis­dom, remind­ing us that we should be pay­ing much closer atten­tion to our eld­ers. They have much more than just their exper­i­ence to offer us.

Printed in the September issue of FishHead magazine in Wellington.