Sunday, November 2, 2008
Auckland International Film Festival: Persepolis
Director: Marjane Satrapi A French animated film based on a graphic autobiographical novel about growing up in Iran during the revolution and the war with Iraq. The visual style closely apes the graphic novel. The theme of the story is about feeling out of synch with the society in which one finds...
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Reply To AardigeAfrikaner: Part 14- Labour & National
Don’t be fooled - Labour and National are just different sides of the same face. One looks introspectively and the other xternally. National will NOT reverse the abuses of Labour but extend these new powers. We can expect Labour to do the same if it retains its hold on the nation’s finances. All...
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Auckland International Film Festival: Diary Of The Dead
Director: George Romero With the exception of “Night Of The Living Dead” each of Romero’s zombie films has had elements of satire and social criticism. In this film, taking a stylistic cue from such films as “The Blair Witch Project” and “Cloverfield”, he is taking shots (physical and metaphysical)...
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Reply To AardigeAfrikaner: Part 13 - Be Afraid
The NZ Constitution is made up of a large number of Acts of Parliament and an even larger number of unwritten conventions.. One convention involved the idea of the small constitutional change - this applied to any changes in conventions oertaining to the financing and management of government...
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Saturday, October 25, 2008
Auckland International Film Festival: The Orphanage
Director: Juan Antonio Bayona The one film of the festival I was really looking forward to seeing and so (unsurprisingly) the only one that disappointed. It is a triumph of style over substance - and it could have been so much better. Instead it wears its referants on its sleeve - “Turn Of The...
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Reply To AardigeAfrikaner: Part 12 - Party Like It’s 1999
By 1999 Labour had again refashioned itself as a mainstream Centrist Party and rode to power on a wave of boredom with National Party policies. Once again it had a secret agenda. Almost immediately it set about dismantling our Constitution. In my next blog I will list its more sinister changes and...
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Auckland International Film Festival: Not Quite Hollywood
Director:Mark Hartley A documentary on the Australian film industry of the seventies and early eighties. This was a time when Australia wasn’t making the mistakes of New Zealand (basically a government monopoly on film investments. Politicians wanted to be associated with “worthy” projects rather...
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Reply To AardigeAfrikaner: Part 11 - The Maori Wards
From the 19 th Century and into the early 20 th Maori society began to fragment along a rural/”urban” devide. The drift to the cities became a flood from 1950 onwards. Maori, in the early stage of this drift, tended to be progressives - either they felt Maori, in order to survive, needed to adapt to...
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Gallipoli:”thousands come to see this place after the war”
October, 1915 27 Tuesday: "The Dardanelles expedition wasted a great chance". (T.E. Lawrence - but note T.E. uses the word "great" always in a specialised sense. "Little" was the word he used to show the utmost contempt and "great" was always a word of high praise). 28 Wednesday: Munro arrives at...
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Reply To AardigeAfrikaner: Part 10 - Jim Bolger: Political Genius
New Zealand had suffered the thuggery of Sir Robert Muldoon and the class treachery of the Labour Party. The country was sick and tired of a political system where a party with the minority of votes could still form a government. They were tired of political bickering; of the sound of fiddling...
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