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
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.
The 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.
It’s never been a tougher time to be running a film festival. In addition to the usual commercial considerations of just selling enough tickets to stay afloat, each year brings with it fresh wrinkles to be accommodated. The window of availability of titles shrinks every year because distributors don’t want to sit on their investment. There’s increasing pressure to get films into cinemas before downloading destroys the market and less time for films to build a deserving international buzz.
In previous years films like the Argentinian Best Foreign Language Oscar winner The Secrets in their Eyes might have been tent-pole features for a Wellington Film Festival but have already been and gone from local cinemas so it’s incumbent on director and chief programmer Bill Gosden (and his cohorts) to dig deeper to find more gems for our annual mid-winter fix.
People keep asking me, Dan, they say, what sort of Festival is it, this year, and I have to answer that I really don’t know. I’ve only seen 19 out of the 160+ movies in the book. That’s not enough to know anything, really, about the Festival as a whole. It’s less than 15% of an enormously rich and diverse smörgåsbord of potential goodies.
As usual, I asked the Festival people to feed me the unheralded and unknown, the films that might miss out on attention from the big media, and they did. As might be expected, not all of them worked for me but I have some suggestions for films that I am assured will not be coming back on general release later this year.
In the drama section I was very affected by Honey, a beautiful Turkish film about a young boy with some kind of learning disorder, desperate for the approval of his teachers, classmates and his taciturn beekeeper father. A fine example of slow cinema, I feel certain that you will be absorbed by its beauty and the miraculous central performance.
Once again, things have gone a bit quiet around here but I have been producing some writing for the Internet at Russell Brown’s Public Address blog for the last week or two. Hadyn, Peter D and I have been World Cup guest-blogging and you can read my contributions here, here, here and here. My final piece, trying to reach some conclusions about the tournament, will appear after the Final is concluded some time next Monday.
On the subject of the World Cup, I came across this article at The Guardian today, again trying to sum the tournament up with two games to go:
As we saw in this year’s European Cup, and are now seeing in the World Cup, football is going through a phase in which the science of coaching has the upper hand over the technical skill of individual players. That emphasis gives an advantage to the rich European clubs, and by extension to their national teams, who benefit most immediately from the rising levels of tactical sophistication.
Which seems a reasonable conclusion to come to, I guess, but quite different to what was being said a fortnight ago. I would add that the argument about the primacy of the coach is confirmed by the success of New Zealand (the best coached and led side at the tournament?) and the failure of England, whose coach failed to overcome the negative influences of player-power and media bullying.
Anyway, the World Cup has taken a lot of my time recently, and the Film Festival kicks off in Wellington next Thursday so that’s another fortnight spoken for. Indeed, I have been beavering away at screener DVDs from the Festival for my Capital Times preview which goes to print next week – and I’ll post it here (and at Wellingtonista) as soon as I can.
The Wellington Film Festival (sorry, New Zealand International Film Festival, Wellington Branch) is a huge undertaking for the committed cinema-goer. Every year we devour the programme for weeks in advance, scheduling annual leave and long “lunch breaks”, trying to work out what is essential and what isn’t. After 20 years of this, I’ve only just begun to realise that in the search for the essential many other pleasures have been passing me by. This year, before I even looked at the programme, I asked the Festival to choose a stack of DVDs for me, with the emphasis on the unheralded and the unexpected. Thus, of the 13 films I’ve been watching over the last three or so weeks, all but one of them were from the back half of the book (and probably would not have been on my personal shortlist) but all of them had something special to offer. So, is my advice for the Festival to not book in advance but instead choose films at random depending on your own availability and proximity to a venue? Maybe it is.
In anticipation of the release at Christmas this year of J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek XI (back to before the beginning with a new cast including Karl Urban and Simon Pegg) and because I really don’t have enough to do (ahem, that would include Downstage, Capital Times, Latin American Film Festival, Wellingtonista, 48HRS, Newtown Athletic and the commencement of a Post Graduate Diploma in Business and Administration at Massey) I hereby embark on my longstanding plan to watch all the Star Trek episodes and movies in chronological order.
And when I say chronological order I mean in story order which, according to this Wikipedia entry, starts with “Enterprise” set in 2151 and ends with Nemesis in 2379. Ever the iconoclast, however, I intend to start tonight with First Contact which, despite featuring the TNG crew of Picard, Data, etc. contains Zefram Cochrane’s first warp flight, thus leading to all the other stories. Then to Season One of “Enterprise” and onward, hopefully arriving at the end before I have to review Star Trek XI this time next year.
I won’t be reviewing every entry because, frankly, who cares?
In the drama section I was very affected by 
The Wellington Film Festival (sorry, 
In anticipation of the release at Christmas this year of J.J. Abrams’