So I’ve reviewed a handful of acts from the Wellington leg of this year’s New Zealand International Comedy Festival, and managed to type up the following in between massaging my jaw (it still hurts from laughing). Read More
New Zealand International Comedy Festival 2012
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Minutes from The Clock
Notes on Christian Marclay’s staggering 24-hour video installation. Read More
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Fading Magic: The Illusionist
New to DVD: The gentle comedy of Jacques Tati and the flights of fancy of Sylvain Chomet combine in this devastating, gorgeously animated elegy to the lost arts. Read More
River-Road: Journeys Though Ecology
Photographer David Cook’s follow-up to this magnum opus, ‘Lake of Coal’.
There are a good number of photographers in New Zealand who aren’t really in the public eye, and consequently aren’t considered in the top echelon, but who work quietly away at producing decent material. David Cook is one of those photographers. A few years ago he published his magnum opus, Lake of Coal: The Disappearance of a Mining Town (2006), in my view one of the best photography books produced here. Lake of Coal was the culmination of a 20-year project. Since then he has set his sights on smaller projects, even if they still have big ideas. Read More
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Auckland Theatre Company
Maidment Theatre, Auckland | May 3-26
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is so many things to so many people. It’s a play they studied in high school or university. Or maybe their favourite Shakespeare play. Or to some, the only bearable Shakespeare. Or it’s the quintessential tale about lover’s folly. At any rate, it’s a play that has been produced more times than can be counted, by companies amateur and professional, and with as many alternate interpretations as there are productions. What the Auckland Theatre Company and co-directors Ben Crowder and Colin McColl achieve with their version is a production that is not only different, but significant. Read More
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Wellington Raw Comedy Quest: Finals
The grand finals of the Wellington heats of the Raw Comedy Quest saw eight budding stand-up comedians compete for two places in the national finals in Auckland. This is no longer the sympathetic and supportive audience of The Fringe Bar; this is the San Francisco Bathhouse, and the audience, while all there for a good time, are far less forgiving. Nevertheless, through charm, storytelling, clever liners, bad puns, or sheer force of personality, the eight competitors all made an impressive impact.
Ben Stokes won over every Mum in the room within seconds, and won over everyone else as soon as he acknowledged his “British punch-ibility.” The plight of the posh teen at a R&V was genuinely entertaining, and felt uncontrived. It made me proud to be in his generation. Read More
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WCS 2012: Miss Bala
At the World Cinema Showcase, the good, the bad, and the not so ugly.
A gritty, slow burn crime thriller, Miss Bala surprises with its heady mix of dirt stained realism, frontier violence, and the kind of formal precision you’d expect to see in a European art house film. This story of a Mexican beauty pageant contestant who inadvertently finds herself on the unglamorous frontline of the ‘war on drugs’ is equally surprising in that its bizarre genre plot finds its basis ‘loosely’ in the true story of a Mexican beauty queen involved in a gang related ammunition haul arrest in 2008. Read More
That’s So Gay
Devised and written by the That’s So Gay Crew
Directed by Toni Regan
BATS Theatre | April 26-28
The use of the word ‘gay’ is a hotbed for debate. We live in a world where changing the lyrics of a song about a happy kookaburra can make headlines across the world, and where kissing your girlfriend in [public] can send righteous Facebookers into rants of indignant proportions. In this context, Toni Regan and School’s Out bring us That’s So Gay, a community theatre piece that is a part of Regan’s MA in Directing at Toi Whakaari. Using techniques of verbatim theatre as a launch pad, the ‘That’s So Gay Crew’ has distilled the experiences and opinions of the queer community into a genuine and honest, if slightly unsatisfying forty minute piece of theatre. Read More
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Lucrece
Adapted from Shakespeare’s poem ‘The Rape of Lucrece’
Binge Culture Collective
Toi Poneke Arts Centre | April 19-May 12
Shakespeare’s name is so synonymous with his plays that his poetry is often overlooked by dramatists. This is a misstep; his narrative poetry plots are just as rich, his characters are just as complex, and his language is just as lyrical as even his greatest plays. The Rape of Lucrece is one such example, a narrative poem that has been reimagined and adapted into an audio-visual context. The poem’s dramatic potential is perfectly explored in Lucrece, a sensitive and affecting work presented by Binge Culture Collective and directed by Fiona McNamara. Read More
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Live at Six
Presented by Cuba Creative; Directed by Conrad Newport
Written by Leon Wadham and Dean Herison
Downstage Theatre | April 13-28
How do you fix breaking news? Live at Six, currently at Downstage Theatre, attacks the growing artificiality of our media in this bitingly satirical play. These days the news media is increasingly met with questions of authenticity and legality of sources, and has a tendency towards exaggeration and tabloidization. It’s the “hey man, don’t worry about it, it’s only news, it’s not real” mentality that spurred Downstage to bring Live at Six, originally a STAB production, back. Read More
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Other People’s Wars
Presented by The Bacchanals; Directed by David Lawrence
Adapted by Dean Parker, from the book by Nicky Hager
BATS Theatre | April 18-28
Over the last 12 years New Zealand’s role in the War on Terror has been spun, molded, distorted, and filtered by the Army, the SAS, the air force, and the media. Nicky Hager’s tell-all book shone a new, albeit controversial light on these events, and Dean Parker’s dramatization promises to finally reveal the truth about just what has really happened. In Other People’s Wars, The Bacchanals present a condensed history of the previous 11 years, clearly and effectively recounting the War on Terror from its origins to the present day. Read More
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A Shortcut to Happiness
By Roger Hall; Directed by Ross Jolly
Circa Theatre | April 14-May 26
Like Chekhov and Shakespeare, Roger Hall has become a form of theatre. No longer do you go see a comedy; you go to see “a Roger Hall.” The program reads: “Roger Hall is New Zealand’s best known and most successful playwright,” and indeed audience members know (or know of) his work and is at ‘a Roger Hall’ ready to laugh. A Shortcut to Happiness is a prime example of why Hall deserves this title. The opening night audience is onside from the get-go; it is all too rare to see an entire auditorium collectively gasp in shock (at the price of a cleaning lady: $40 an hour?!) or vigorously nod their heads in agreement (at the crime focused content of our 6pm news). Read More
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WCS 2012: Presumed Guilty
At the World Cinema Showcase, crime and punishment in Vincent Garenq’s harrowing reconstruction of the ‘Outreau Affair’.
Intense and angering, Presumed Guilty—television documentarian Vincent Garenq’s biopic of one of France’s most infamous “judicial disaster(s),” to quote then French President Jacques Chirac)—makes for uncomfortable but necessary viewing. Stories of grave injustice born of public hysteria and the need of governing bodies to assuage the inflamed populace must be aired so that we cease to offer up scapegoats to bear the responsibility for our collective sense of guilt and complicity. Read More
WCS 2012: Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, Woody Allen—A Documentary, The Color Wheel
At the World Cinema Showcase, BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM on the West Memphis Three and Woody Allen; TIM WONG on Alex Ross Perry’s double act.
Most activist films struggle to make the kind of difference that Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s trilogy on the West Memphis Three has made. Essentially responsible for drawing attention to a gross miscarriage of justice, the documentaries examine the aftermath of terrible murders in the small Arkansas town of West Memphis. Three teenagers were charged and convicted of the killing of three young boys back in 1994—a ‘closed case’ driven in part by dubious police tactics (including interrogating a borderline intellectually-disabled teenager for 12 hours without a lawyer), prejudice and moral panics (Satanism, goths etc.), and media and community pressure to find the killers behind such an horrific crime. Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory reveals new evidence: support drummed up from the first two movies paid for expert determination of some of the ‘evidence’ used to convict the Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, Jr., and Jason Baldwin. And it’s clear from how the film progresses that the trio’s innocence isn’t in any doubt. It remains to be seen whether those familiar with the documentaries will find this third chapter in the story old hat—but as someone who’s yet to see the first two films, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory certainly works as both a standalone piece and an introduction to the case. Berlinger and Sinofsky’s arm’s length documentary style is insightful without being manipulative, and the film carries a real emotional charge in highlighting a justice system that, as far as the three defendants were concerned, kept on getting it wrong. Compelling and powerful stuff, it’s hard not to rank this film alongside Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line as an example of what activist cinema ought to do. Read More
Out of the Past: Damsels in Distress
At the World Cinema Showcase, Whit Stillman makes a comeback—but after 14 years, has his cinema of propriety and verbal wit aged well? Read More
WCS 2012: This is Not a Film
At the World Cinema Showcase, the creative resilience of Jafar Panahi’s captivating new film.
Since mid-2009 celebrated Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi (The Circle, Offside) has been in and out of Iranian police custody (and prison) for a variety of stated and unstated official reasons. Finally, in late December 2010, the auteur was (according to Farideh Gheirat as quoted in a BBC News article) found guilty of “(participating) in a gathering and carrying out propaganda against the system”; a charge incurring a sentence of six years imprisonment alongside a 20 year ban from making films and writing screenplays. Over the course of one day, with prospects looking grim, Panahi set about creating a kind of personal video diary which in turn developed into the hard-to-categorise feature This is Not a Film—famously smuggled out of Iran and into the 2011 Cannes Film Festival on a USB stick hidden inside a cake. Read More
Wake in Fright (1971)
Previously at the Wellington Film Society: one of the great, unheralded Australian films of all-time.
In the early 1970s, Australia’s nascent film industry was kick-started by a bunch of upstart foreign directors: Michael Powell, still feeling the after effects of his black-listing for Peeping Tom; Nicholas Roeg, fresh from the success of Performance; and Ted Kotcheff, the Canadian director whose career has seriously diminished since (First Blood being the highpoint). Against the Film Society’s upcoming screening of Roeg’s fascinating Walkabout, Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright remains a largely forgotten film in Australian cinema’s annals. Critically popular upon its release, it soon disappeared from view despite influencing the new wave of Australian filmmakers; directors such as Peter Weir and Bruce Beresford, who would go on to achieve considerable success only a few years later. Read More
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Floral Notes
By Geraldine Brophy; Directed by Emma Kinane
Circa Theatre | April 4-28
Floral Notes is a charming love letter to friendship, and a useful reminder to slow down and smell the flowers. Two pen pals haven’t communicated in 40 years when one resumes contact. In a series of spoken (and sung) letters and emails the two correspond, catching up on old times, filling in the past 40 years, and planning their futures. This simple premise provides the framework for Geraldine Brophy to examine the value and importance of old, close friendship. Brophy’s dialogue is a real treat; it’s delicious, vibrant, witty, and fun. Read More
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At the
Rigoletto
Directed by Lindy Hume; Conducted by Wyn Davies
St James Theatre, Wellington | May 19-26
The New Zealand Opera pulls no punches in this sublime version of Verdi’s Rigoletto. As a young person, it is easy to feel alienated or self-conscious at opera; I feel like I’m pulling the average age down by about 20 years. Nevertheless, my flatmate had ironed my only buttoned shirt with a hair-straighter and we braved the cold stares of people who can wear a bowtie comfortably. We needn’t have worried; Rigoletto is beautiful, thrilling and breathtaking. Read More »