Posts by Craig Ranapia
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I think you're all missing the point. The issue there was the wording of the withdrawal of the actor's ban. Nothing illegal there. Indeed, rather polite of the actors to give him the opportunity I would have thought.
@Jan: As I said, Simon Whipp or Jennifer Ward- Lealand wouldn't put their names to anything they believed implied Equity NZ had ever acted in bad faith. And, while you obviously disagree, I don't really blame Jackson or Warners for having trust issues with the MEAA after they'd framed the ban as involving a "non-union production". That just wasn't true.
If you really expect me to believe Whipp wasn't fully aware of the weight those words carry, I'd like to introduce you to an Aussie idiom: Get your hand off it before you go blind.
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I own every Weller album
Weller's a bit like Miles Davis -- if you say you like all of it, you either have astoundingly catholic tastes (and a genius for repressing painful memories), or you're lying. But, in the end, I'm more interested in someone who is willing to over-reach and fall on his arse then be dully competent year after year.
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Hard to believe that if Sir Peter knew, Fran Walsh did not. Hard, then, in my opinion, to justify her calling Helen Kelly a liar.
Or Kelly accusing Richard Taylor of deceptively whipping up a "lynch mob mood" -- since there seems to be no evidence Taylor was ever party to these negotiations conducted with cast-iron gags on the participants?
And interesting that he's not prepared to approach negotiations in the spirit of good faith - which is the backbone of our current industrial law.
FFS, Jan, not being willing to enter into negotiations he didn't believe he had legal standing or moral authority to engage in isn't my idea of bad faith. And I rather doubt Jennifer Ward-Lealand or Simon Whipp would have been no more keen to sign off on a press statement that could have been spun as a tacit admission they hadn't acted "in the spirit of good faith".
Then again, I suspect Jackson has given up waiting for a formal retraction and apology for the factually inaccurate (and widely reported) claims that The Hobbit was ever a non-union production.
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@Gio: Sadly, you're right. Don't want to get too misty-eyed about the old studio system -- it turned out enormous amounts of fly-blown tripe. But it also produced something as sublime as Some Like It Hot, which closed out the Auckland Film Society season on Tuesday. Compare and contrast with the latest offence against the muses that is Katherine Heigel's film career.
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Just for the record, the first Kubrick film in which Warner Brothers had a hand was A Clockwork Orange. 2001 was an MGM joint.
Quite right, Gio. I bow to my sensei's superior nerd-fu. :) All the same, you've got to wonder if MGM or Warners would touch a weirdo like Stanley Kubirck with the proverbial barge pole if he was starting out today. I rather doubt even Peter Jackson would be allowed to follow up a commercial and critical flop like Barry Lyndon with a complex shoot on massive sets went months over schedule.
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With the announcement of the Avatar sequels going to Weta it's all but guaranteed that four of the worst films of the coming decade will be made right here, in our fair country. One's heart fills with pride.
Over the long weekend, I brought irresistibly cheap BluRays of 2001, The Shining and A Clockwork Orange. (Yes, I'm a consumerist drone. Bite me.) New Zealand's film industry would have been a scarier but more interesting place if Stanley Kubrick had decamped to New Zealand instead of England. We'd certainly have gotten used to the sight of whey-faced Warners executives passing through customs, muttering "what the fuck have we done..."
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For that matter, Tony, PAS had a rather lively and useful discussion on the merits (and otherwise) of Avatar -- didn't recall a lot of patriotic Kool-Aid being quaffed to lubricate the Wellywood celebrity anilingus. Then again, its a good rule of thumb that on any given topic a random page of PAS will contain more wit, insight, analysis, fact and useful provocation than your average Herald column.
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Craig: I don't have much truck with what Roughan says but he has a point here. Not everyone drinks from the PJ/LOR cool aid.
@Tony: PAS regulars will know I think "the trilogy" is over-produced, over-long and I spent the last half hour of Return of the King chanting "get on the fucking boat and go already..." I also find the book utterly meh-some -- having read it when I caught chicken pox at boarding school, and was in isolation for a week with nothing else to read. Would rather re-read Gene Wolfe's magisterial Book of the New Sun, but it would be intellectually honest to note that plenty of people beg to differ and they're not all Kool-Aid drinking idiots who deserve to be sneered at.
But I can express my disdain without 1) being a condescending twatcock, and, 2) being typically careless about basic matters of fact. Roughan might not "recall much discussion of his books for the next 30 years" but that says more about Roughan's cultural illiteracy and general ignorance of the publishing industry and matters literary than anything else.
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Meanwhile, we have Hobbit related #Heraldfail bingo, with a fatuous John Roughan column:
Cult books have a short shelf life. Tolkien had done his dash by 1972 and I can't recall much discussion of his books for the next 30 years. Then Peter Jackson remembered it. He would have been a child when the book was being read and he made a child's movie of it.
Since the film was shot in New Zealand it was almost obligatory to see it. Again I tried. I couldn't recognise anything of this country in the digitally doctored scenery, let alone the story, if there was one.
Strange little computerised hordes in halloween costumes kept rushing across the screen to cut each other up and chase a sappy boy hero who had a couple of older gents in tow. Very odd.
I know I wasn't alone in this response but not many have admitted it out loud. People who don't share the national infatuation hesitate to say so.
I can't put my response better than this Tweet from @LachlanForsyth:
It's part of the Heralds ongoing 'two facts max' campaign
Buuuurn...
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Warner Brothers- "What the fuck are we going to do when we run out of hobbit books."
Well, J.K. Rowling is pretty "not planning to, but never say never" about a return to Hogwarts. There is whole new generation of Potters after all...
But it's OK because a National government would never abuse their powers like Auntie Helen did! Or something.
Oh, Andre -- cosy self-interest is now, always has been, and alway will be entirely non-partisan. Hey, at least we have a Speaker will who force Ministers to answer questions -- one radical innovation at a time.
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