Skip to main content
search
Tag

wellingtonista

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

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.

Read More

Jul 15 2010
Love0

Preview: 2010 Wellington Film Festival

By Cinema and Wellington

New Zealand Film Festival poster 2010It’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.

AB7288B0-44D3-4906-A3B7-6966FC3D2C18.jpegIn 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.

Read More

Jul 09 2010
Love0

World Cup Interlude

By Football and meta

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.

Jul 15 2009
Love0

Preview: 2009 Wellington Film Festival

By Cinema

200907152020.jpgThe 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.

Read More

Jan 08 2008
Love0

2008: A Star Trek Odyssey

By Cinema and TV

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?

Wish me luck. Live long and prosper.

Or should I say: Resistance is futile.

Close Menu