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capital times

Apr 22 2013
Love0

Delayed gratification

By Asides

Well, it has taken a while to sort out but I can finally make a few announcements.

Exactly a month ago, I had a big whine about the clos­ure of the Capital Times and what it meant for print review­ing and for me spe­cific­ally. It was a shock, of course, but the impact turned out to be pretty grat­i­fy­ing. The feed­back from read­ers was ter­rific­ally reward­ing (“You like me, you really like me”). Even the one neg­at­ive com­menter out of the 25 who wrote to me here demon­strated that he cared enough to con­trib­ute, even if he did think that review­ers “were going to way of the dodo”.

And there were some pretty good offers too. Some from print pub­lic­a­tions, some online, some even involved get­ting paid which was a bit of a nov­elty. Read More

Apr 08 2013
Love0

Review: Trance, Eternity, The Whale and The Perks of Being a Wallflower

By Cinema, Reviews

Danny Boyle is one of my favour­ite dir­ect­ors. From Shallow Grave in 1994 to 127 Hours in 2010, his work has stim­u­lated and inspired me. I re-watched Trainspotting the oth­er day and it still made everything else I saw that week seem old-fashioned. Everything, that is, except Trance which just hap­pens to be Boyle’s new film, a return to cinemas after dir­ect­ing the biggest theatre show of all time – the Olympic Games open­ing cere­mony which was seen by an audi­ence of – ooh – about 900 mil­lion people.

Trance returns Boyle to his $20m budget com­fort zone and his new light­weight digit­al film­mak­ing style. It also reunites him with screen­writer John Hodge (Trainspotting) so it should be all sys­tems go, yes?

Not quite. In Trance, James McAvoy plays an art expert with a prob­lem. Instead of help­ing a gang of thugs steal a very expens­ive paint­ing from his auc­tion house he actu­ally tries to steal it him­self, get­ting a whack on the head for his trouble. Now he can’t remem­ber where he left the paint­ing and the gang are try­ing everything from fingernail-pulling to hyp­no­ther­apy to help him remem­ber where it is.

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Apr 04 2013
Love0

Review: No, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, The Host and Hyde Park on Hudson

By Cinema, Reviews

No sounds like the kind of thing a tod­dler in the middle of a tan­trum might say, while stomp­ing around your lounge room at bed­time. At the cinema, though, the tan­trum belongs to the cor­rupt dic­tat­or­ship of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, forced through inter­na­tion­al pres­sure to let oth­ers play in his sand­pit. In 1988 he announced a ref­er­en­dum that would demon­strate – by fair means or foul – that the people loved him, weren’t inter­ested in demo­cracy and that those who thought dif­fer­ent were noth­ing but com­mun­ists and terrorists.

15 years after he and his mil­it­ary junta over­threw the legit­im­ate left-leaning gov­ern­ment of Salvador Allende, the ques­tion in the ref­er­en­dum would be a simple one: “Yes” to keep the dic­tat­or­ship and “No” for a return to free elec­tions. No, Pablo Larraín’s bril­liant movie, looks at the cam­paign from the per­spect­ive of an ad guy – a Mad Man – played by Gael García Bernal, who har­nessed the latest cor­por­ate sales tech­niques and the power of tele­vi­sion to change the dir­ec­tion of a nation.

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Mar 27 2013
Love0

Review: Rust and Bone, A Lady in Paris and Jack the Giant Slayer

By Cinema, Reviews

It’s no dis­grace to come second at Cannes to Michael Haneke’s Amour, espe­cially so when your film is Rust and Bone. Writer-director Jacques Audiard has a track record of unset­tling and con­front­ing dra­mas, start­ing (for New Zealand audi­ences) with Read My Lips in 2001 and – most recently – pris­on drama A Prophet in 2009. Rust and Bone is equally rugged but with some beauty to bal­ance the viol­ence and despair.

Academy Award-winner Marion Cotillard is the big name on the mar­quee but the film really belongs to Matthias Schoenaerts who lays down a por­trait of wounded mas­culin­ity as riv­et­ing as any of De Niro’s clas­sic per­form­ances. He’s Alain, a drift­er and waster who lands in pic­tur­esque Antibes with his young son. He’s use­ful in a scrap but use­less as a par­ent and some of the most dif­fi­cult scenes in the film are of him fail­ing to look after the boy.

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Mar 22 2013
Love0

Unwelcome changes

By Asides

Update: I have some con­firmed cir­cu­la­tion fig­ures from the paper itself. Even more depressing.

We inter­rupt nor­mal – slightly stut­tery – pro­gram­ming to bring you news of some changes in the Wellington media scene that might have an impact on the con­tent that you see here.

Pg1-iss3821-bigThe Capital Times news­pa­per will be ceas­ing pub­lic­a­tion on – I think – 10 April. The reviews that I re-publish here were all writ­ten for them and it is their Monday morn­ing dead­lines that I meet every week. Broader dis­cus­sion of the impact on Wellington’s loc­al media – it leaves only Fishhead as an inde­pend­ent print pub­lic­a­tion serving the city – and trends in tra­di­tion­al versus digit­al media in the struggle for advert­ising yadda yadda, will be bet­ter off else­where, but the impact on me per­son­ally? That belongs here.

The first ques­tion is simply “to be or not to be”. The Capital Times is a recog­nised Wellington media insti­tu­tion with a decent cir­cu­la­tion and a large audi­ence. I was told that they print over 15,000 20,000 cop­ies each week and the read­er­ship is estim­ated at between 40,000 and as much as 60,000. That’s sig­ni­fic­ant, and made it worth­while for me to write for and for exhib­it­ors and dis­trib­ut­ors to sup­port me by giv­ing me tick­ets, pre­views and screeners.

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Mar 20 2013
Love0

Review: The Red House, 21 & Over, Liberal Arts and Broken City

By Cinema, Reviews

The Red House posterAlyx Duncan’s The Red House is a lovely example of how ideas that evolve, adjust, trans­form over time can pro­duce work that is just as coher­ent and com­plete as if it arrived fully formed. Originally con­ceived sev­er­al years ago as a doc­u­ment­ary about her age­ing par­ents who were think­ing about leav­ing the house she grew up in and start­ing again over­seas, her film is now a poet­ic and impres­sion­ist­ic – as well as fic­tion­al – med­it­a­tion on place and belonging.

In the fin­ished film – unlike real life – Lee (Lee Stuart) fol­lows Jia (Meng Jia Stuart), his wife of 20 years, to Beijing where she has trav­elled to care for her own frail par­ents. He packs up the few belong­ings he is able to take with him from the years of assembled memen­tos, books and treas­ures, burn­ing much of what is left over. Voiceover from both char­ac­ters lets the audi­ence know how dif­fi­cult this trans­ition is, as well as telling the back­story of an unlikely – and lovely – relationship.

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