Archives for the 'Entertainment' Category
Murder on the dancefloor
I stopped in at Madrid on the way to Jerez for a few days of flying, , sunshine and rest. Alex kindly took me to Space, "one of Europe’s best mixed/gay clubs" for his bottle of birthday Cava. Thanks, Alex – it was a blast!
Planet Earth
Off to the RGS for the last lecture of the Autumn. And what an uplifting evening: Alastair Fothergill, the Executive Producer of Planet Earth, described how this engrossing series was made. One comes away not only with admiration for the commitment and technology involved – who would envy the two cameramen who over-wintered with an Emperor Penguin colony, or be able to emulate the skill that captured shots of Snow Leopards in close-up from a mile away – but also with a deeply satisfying appreciation of the complexity and splendour of life on Earth.
Special mention of two aspects of Fothergill’s presentation. It’s endearing to see a big chap with tears in his eyes when describing the pleasure of capturing a polar bear swimming through the ice flows; and admirable that, when challenged on the lack of a heavy climate change theme in the series, he responds that there’s still a place for documentaries with a subtle message. Don’t underestimate your audience.
It should be on telly again over Christmas, and seeing the images on the big lecture theatre screen is almost enough justification to invest in HDTV. Almost. But I promise that watching the clips left the biggest smile on my face for quite some time.
Things that should be banned at gigs
» Booking fees
» Cloakroom charges
» Support acts whose names you never catch because they’ve already started once you’ve cleared security and had a drink. Thus, even though their stuff is really good (including the use of an egg whisk and cheese grater as percussion), you’ll never hear it again
» Headline performers going through the motions
» Tall people. Specificially, anyone over 5′11″3/4. (Alternatively, move all tall people to a special Lanky Zone’ to the side of the auditorium; or make everyone sit on the floor as if at an early ’80s Radio 1 roadshow, or an early ’90s James concert)
» Jigging, especially by tall people. Jigging means bopping around like someone’s granddad, often out of time with the music, creating a viewing hazard interrupting others’ line of sight
» Bottled beer in plastic cups
» Second encores. It gets confusing
Have I missed anything?
Back, to the dinner table
It’s been a while since I was last in these parts – a month-long CELTA course plus lack of telephone and broadband back in London (should it really take six weeks to get a telephone line reconnected?) explains my absence. So a few things to catch up on.
How did I miss this Guardian list of the best curry in South London? I don’t completely agree with the entries: Kastoori has been over-rated on each of my veggie visits (although the little flower bombs are quite impressive). On the other hand, the Masaledar is always reliable and offers great value take-aways.
But, thanks to N&B, I’m grateful to have been introduced to the Apollo Banana Leaf. Interesting to see it’s slipped into the Time Out guide this year. Their dhosas are delightful, service bemused, and prices low, low, low – where else can a table of four eat their fill and still leave with a bill of less than twenty quid, total.
Stick that in yer magazine, Guardian editors.
Kong is King
I’m writing this in a cafe just opposite Auckland’s Civic Theatre which stood in for New York in Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong, a year ago today. I know this because I’ve been dipping into the DVD of his video diaries shot regularly throughout the making of the movie, and the December 17th 2004 entry covered shooting in Auckland.
If you’re just a bit of a movie geek then you’ll find these fascinating: snappy, insightful and funny. They cover everything from building the sets to Jack Black and Jackson trying to hide from Gandalf the White taking spy pics.
The diaries were originally released during production through the Kong is King website, itself an unofficial operation separate from the studio, as discussed in a more prosaic manner in this Wired article. What’s remarkable, of course, is that Jackson has in effect released the DVD extras before the movie itself. He comes across as a pretty normal, nice guy, rather than the megalomaniac one might expect from such a successful director.
Really looking forward to seeing the film itself, which I hope to catch on the big screen in Wellington. Mark Kermode speaks highly of it and reckons that Andy Serkis as Kong is the star of the movie. And, on almost all things, he’s right on. Will report back.
Happy birthday, Neighbours
For anyone who’s ever been a student, or under 15, happy news: Neighbours is twenty years old this week. From the brighter side of soap opera land, the importance of Neighbours to the modern world must not be underestimated.
Before it hit British screens in 1986 our knowledge of contemporary Australian life was limited. Sure, we could watch The Sullivans, yet that was about Melbourne life in the second world war. (I can still remember the opening titles.) If you were a little older you might have watched Prisoner, however life in an Australian womens’ prison presented a limited world view unless you were a butch lesbian failed criminal or a wannabe prison guard.
Neighbours was the first programme to show Australia as an English-speaking eden, a land of sun, beer, big houses and big hair. Later programmes, especially Sylvania waters, presented a different view of Australian life – although The Castle or Kath and Kim are probably as realistic – but coinciding with falling longhaul airfares and a greater willingness to travel it’s likely that the soap played an important part in stepping up British interest in Down Under Land, driving a new generation of migrants and washed-up celebrities (except, of course, Joe who has just got his pilot’s licence).
Neighbours has given a first break to some of the world’s finest performers. Guy Pearce, Kylie Minogue, Alan Dale, Mark Little, Jason Donovan, Stefan Dennis, Craig McLachlan. Er, well, at least five of the actors have had jobs since they left.
Yet the most important contribution for all most many Britons has been the part Neighbours played in our daily lives. It was the cheery soap with young people that was a warm contrast to Coronation Street or East Enders. It was on at tea time so students could fit it in with lectures and teenagers could sulk in front of it whilst eating their fish fingers. It never clashed with the inferior Home and Away.
I dropped out of watching/kicked the addiction of Neighbours after my first year in university but it will always have warm memories for me. You see, I watched Neighbours before it was famous. In one of the first week it was broadcast (back at 0905 and 1330 in those days, a real daytime soap) I was off school, sick – the same week I watched all of the Police Academy movies, twice – and my mum and I got hooked. We’d set the video every other day (since the previous day’s lunchtime episode was repeated in the morning) and when we got back from School, Laura, Mum and I would watch it. An addiction was born, and the consequences weren’t much less severe than a sugar craving developed from the ten penny assortments I ate whilst watching. After all, how else would I end up spending so long in New Zealand?
Hold on, different country.
Happy Birthday, Neighbours.
Edited to add: How can I forget to mention that the only celebrity I served on Coronet Peak this year was Julie Martin! Yes! You know, the second one, who went nuts when her kids pretended she was forgetting things. Wow. A genuine Neighbours actor in the Brasserie.
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At the movies
Speaking of Dorothy Browns, treated myself to a Sunday double bill of two contrasting documentaries, a genre which isn’t shown enough on the big screen.
First up, Kaikohe Demolition, a low budget movie that will probably never leave these shores. Your loss. It follows residents of the township of Kaikohe as they contest their annual series of demolition derbies, with almost every holiday (including Mother’s Day) an excuse to go out and crash old cars. The film’s charm is its depiction of these relaxed, easy going Northlanders doing something fun. They’re not simple people, nor do they have simple lives, but this is about just having a good time with your mates. Plus the beauty of mud.
After some cheese, on to Riding Giants, a movie from Stacey Peralta documenting the history of surfing that complements Dogtown and the Z Boys. It lacks some of the charm of his earlier skateboarding memoir – to me, it seems more commercial, perhaps appropriate given the history of surfing itself – but the film sticks in my mind for a couple of reasons.
» Professional surfers are either very brave or very stupid, perhaps both. They have my respect either way. What makes someone look at a big wave and think, ‘yes, I can ride that’?
» Fascinated to learn that for years surfing was the domain of perhaps two dozen young men who shared a hut on a beach in Hawaii. There really was no-one else doing it, until a 1959 movie Gidget (starring none other than Sandra Dee) showed surfers as dudes with chilled lives and hot girls. Within eighteen months, literally millions were doing it. If you’re a believer in the tipping point, it’s a perfect example
Question: why was it so important for two of the interviewees to have the prefix ‘Dr’ on their titles? Just being a doctor does not automatically give you more credibility in a documentary(in my world, at least – in fact probably less!).
Get out there and see some real histories in the cinema, not just on the Discovery Channel.
The Blues Brothers
One Christmas Eve when I was about 15 years old, Greg Barnes and I rented a copy of The Blues Brothers from the Rainham video shop. It was the first movie with which I fell in love. The music, the car crashes, the the suits, it all worked for me. I taped the audio track before we headed up to Scotland for New Year and can still quote the script pretty much word for word. Indeed there’s a cinema in Melbourne that shows the film every Friday night with the audience shouting along, even acting out the parts, which I must visit one day.
Of course it was filmed in and around Chicago. Walking through the Richard M Daley Plaza downtown bought a big smile to my face to think that the finale of the movie was filmed right here!
One of the greatest scenes is a car chase through a shopping mall. Some digging around turned up the site where it all took place.
American retailing is defined by The Mall so it’s surprising to read that BB was filmed in a mall that had closed in 1979, and even more surprising that is stands unaltered today. The producers bought the mall, restocked the stores then created chaos.
It’s now partly used as a police helicopter landing pad and seems to be in one of the poorer parts of south Chicago, which stalled my plans for a trip to go and take a look (yes, the movie did mean that much to me). Others have bigger balls than me, however, and have documented the mall. Indeed, some have even gone for a drive (15MB download! – link from here).
Sigh, such memories. I might have to go and buy the DVD.
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Max
I’ve not often found myself rooting for Adolf Hitler, but for one moment in Max I wished success for him and his career as an artist. It’s a peculiar movie, one I chose for the presence of the great John Cusack rather than the storyline. Odder still is Flirting’s Mr Felafel, Noah Taylor*, as Hitler; even more surprising, that Sidney Blumenthal, yes, that bloke from the White House, was one of the executive producers.
The film imagines that Hitler became leader of the National Socialists because his work as an artist was rejected, and his speechifying was an attempt to create the art of the future. ‘I’m Avant Garde’, he crys, ‘My brain is the palette and these people are my canvas’. Worth a peep if it’s in your local video shop. It’s better than Pushing Tin.
[*Who I thought was Australian but nope, he's English]
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