In Wellington, when Hollywood comes calling we make Lord of the Rings and Avatar.
In Auckland, they make things like this:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TX2jEdwX2c[/youtube]
In Wellington, when Hollywood comes calling we make Lord of the Rings and Avatar.
In Auckland, they make things like this:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TX2jEdwX2c[/youtube]
Welcome to the 2010 “cut out and keep” guide to video renting (or downloading or however you consume your home entertainment these days). I suggest you clip this article, fold it up, stick it in your wallet or purse and refer to it whenever you are at the video shop, looking for something to while away the long winter evenings of 2010.
First up, the ones to buy – the Keepers. These are the films that (if you share my psychology and some of my pathologies) you will cherish until you are old and the technology to play them no longer exists. Best film of the year remains Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. Mashing together several archetypal stories with a vivid visual style and a percussive energy, Slumdog may not represent India as it actually is but instead successfully evoked what India feels like, which is arguably more important. After Slumdog everything I saw seemed, you know, old-fashioned and nothing has been anywhere nearly as thrilling since. There are films you respect, films you admire and films you love. Slumdog is a film you adore. “Who wants to be a … miyonaire?” indeed.
There have only been asked two questions that anybody has been asking me this week: “Have you seen Avatar?” and “Is it any good?” Thanks to the helpful people at Readings I can say “Yes” to the first one and thanks to James Cameron I can say “Whoah” to the second.
Like many Wellingtonians, I have been following Avatar’s progress since production started in 2007 and it’s almost impossible to be genuinely objective. It’s only natural for locals to try and claim some ownership of a project like this and we are all a tiny bit invested in its success. The hype has certainly been hard to avoid so I was slightly pleased when the fifteen minute extract on “Avatar Day” didn’t fill me with delighted anticipation. I couldn’t quite my head around the character design of the Na’vi (the indigenous race peacefully populating the beautiful but deadly planet of Pandora). The blue – the tails – the ears. I couldn’t for the life of me work out how these characters were going to be cool and I thought that *cool* was going to be important.
Tom at Ornery World notices something awry in the world of Avatar:
Not only are the subtitles not in a sensible, unobtrusive font so you can read them and get back to the movie, they are in The Teenage Witch’s Choice of fonts, Papyrus!
It’s going to be a massive few months for Wellywood – District 9 seems to have come out of nowhere to take the world by storm (Currently #35 in the IMDb All Time list, just below Citizen Kane. I kid you not) and The Lovely Bones trailer is whetting everyone’s appetite at just the right time. This Friday, Wellington audiences are the first in the world to see a fifteen minute sampler of the locally shot Avatar (Readings from 11.45am, free of charge) and three more Film Commission features are due for release between now and Christmas: The Strength of Water, Under the Mountain and The Vintner’s Luck, all of which have a significant Wellington component to them.
And if the Hollywood big cheeses were worried about The Lord of the Rings shifting the tectonic plates of entertainment industry power they ought to be terrified by District 9, a new world demonstration of the SANZAR spirit (minus the Australians) that achieves in spades everything that this year’s big-budget tent-pole features like Transformers and Terminator failed to do. It works thrillingly as pure entertainment and yet at the same time it’s a little bit more.
Aliens have arrived on earth but unlike in the 70s and 80s they aren’t here to tell us how to connect with the universe and expand our consciousness. And it isn’t like the 90s when they arrived to caramelize us with their death rays. These aliens have arrived for remarkably 21st century reasons – their ship is crippled and with no way home they are destined to become refugees, outcasts, misunderstood second-class citizens.
Let’s get the unpleasantness out of the way first: watching The Farrelly Brothers’ ugly remake of Neil Simon’s The Heartbreak Kid was a trial beyond all human endurance. After about 20 minutes I was begging for release (which came shortly afterwards as blissful unconsciousness overtook me). Sadly, no studio executive will ever get fired for green-lighting a racy Ben Stiller romantic comedy so no matter how bad this one is it won’t be the last one we are forced to endure.