In association with The Lumière Reader, The Zone, a bright new local show hosted by The Silkworm Girl, curating the best in art, music, film and theatre reviews, as well as interviews, special guests and the a cache of giveaways, presents a fortnightly film reviewed by the talking heads at Lumière. The Zone broadcasts every Monday from 5.30-6pm. Tune in to Access Radio on 783AM, stream live, or congregate at The Zone’s MySpace page.

THIS MONDAY (26/2): TIM WONG reviews the The Science of Sleep, the latest cardboard and cellophane mash-up from music video mastermind Michel Gondry.

“There is a sort of gritty, cartoonish polish to the way that Suburban Mayhem’s overriding aesthetic quality is a stylised version of middle class white trashdom. Katrina (Emily Barclay) – all bad girl, disproportionately endowed with sexual power, literally leading the local male populace around by their collective suburban phallus – possesses a kind of mythic quality you’d usually equate with a (sub)urban legend,” writes JACOB POWELL....[Read More]

Also reviewed: We Feed The World, a severe document of the globalised food industry that CALEB STARRENBURG describes as “visually striking” and “perversely fascinating”. Interviewed last August, IMOGEN NEALE talked to Suburban Mayhem’s Emily Barclay, also worth revisiting.

With a new season of Film Society upon us, converting newcomers to this weekly ritual is often greeted with the same question: why, when I can rent most of these movies at the video store? In a pervading digital age, where more films, past and present, are available and within reach than ever before, the need to preserve ‘live cinema’ gathers an urgency all of its own. If radioactive multiplexes, popcorn encrusted seating, grossly inflated ticket prices and insolent teens are just some of the reasons behind punters opting for the comfort of their own living rooms, let a Film Society membership restore their faith in theatres once more. Respectable, well attended, affordable, and certain to enrich any jaded moviegoer’s palette, we can’t recommend it enough.

Those hanging on the prospect of a ‘third act’ to Roseanne Liang’s deeply personal, yet universally defiant account of cross-cultural love ought to relish the documentary’s recent release to DVD, graced rather aptly with a 30-minute epilogue to Roseanne and Stephen’s constant forge. The idea, however, that the couple will forever struggle to gain the approval of traditional Chinese parents seems almost void in the wake of this genuine happy ending: not only a great wedding video, but something of an antidote to the cultural cringe of the film's ‘banana’ trademark. Defining assimilated Chinese as yellow on the outside and white on the inside, the epilogue's euphoric endpoint all but evaporates this notion of cultural confusion or duplicity, conquering it (as cheesy as it sounds) with the power of two people in love. Last we heard, Roseanne is turning her story into a feature film.

Courtesy of the director herself, The Lumière Reader has six copies of Banana in a Nutshell on DVD to giveaway. UPDATED 7/3/07: Congratulations to B. Lea, H. Wells, K. Corner, N. Loh, O. Yalcintas and T. Ng Chie. Your DVDs are in the mail.

Visit banana-film.com for more information on the film and DVD, or read Tze Ming Mok’s original review of Banana in a Nutshell...[here]

“[Journey From the Fall] may be financed by producers Stateside, but the American influence is otherwise non-existent: there are no marines or platoons; no embittered war veterans in wheelchairs; nor is there the overbearing presence of an Oliver Stone. He may not admit to it, but Journey From the Fall is also Tran’s backlash against imperialism: just as Americans are compelled to impose themselves on every conflict overseas, so to are they insistent on making them into movies from their own perspective. A film about Vietnamese, by Vietnamese, this is an imprint of war that’s thirty years overdue, yet fresh off the boat,” writes TIM WONG....[Read More]

Also new on The Festival Reader: impressions on Christophe Honoré’s sweet and sour Dans Paris, a New Wavy soufflé with Roman Duris in the throws of a post-relationship depression, and Louis Garrel as his skirt-chasing younger brother, and Dominik Moll’s Lemming, another typecast for Charlotte Rampling, nevertheless in shrill form as the unwelcome guest in Laurent Lucus and Charlotte Rampling’s blissful South-of-France abode. The WCS website, worldcinemashowcase.co.nz, is also now updated and live, with one change to the programme: replacing Black Gold is Li Tao’s excellent documentary about Chinese exchange students in New Zealand, Waves, returning from last year’s New Zealand International Film Festivals.