Cracker: Wallywood
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The team fights it's way to the final, but Kong is accused of steroid abuse, and refuses to give a urine sample, and the Rabitohs are humped. Enraged, he climbs Centrepoint Tower to enjoy a revolving buffet of the winning team, the Warriors.
Warriors to beat Rabbitohs in Grand Final! I'm just off to the TAB, because the odds on that should be worth a punt, fa'sure!
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I can still do it - it works easily with any horizontally repeating pattern - or of course with a proper stereoscopic image. You just have to find the locking point.
I find something similar when I'm looking directly at a fairly close range repeating pattern - I first noticed it in the lifts at VUW, which have a repeating dimple pattern on the inside. If I'm close enough, my eyes can't lock onto points of difference and I suddenly lose all depth perception. It's very unnerving - I usually have to wave my hand in front of my face to "reset" my brain.
I'm staying out of most of the discussion here, but one thing I will say is that someone upthread mentioned the problems of filming 3D using forced perspective (as was done for LotR). This also occurred to me at one point; I asked around about it, and have been reliably assured that Nuke has a compositing node enabling forced perspective footage to be composited into a 3D scene without looking odd.
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It is a little bit symbolic of the NZ film industry, after all. A beast hidden on a remote island, worshipped only by the locals, is captured by an American film magnate, and displayed in chains for the pleasure of the crowds. But then it busts free, and heads straight for the nearest symbol of American Awesome Hugeness.
Gold
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someone upthread mentioned the problems of filming 3D using forced perspective (as was done for LotR).
I thought about it some more and realized that was the least of the worries for a 3D conversion. LotR is in exactly the same boat as anything that was never originally captured in 3D. In order to 3D it, a 3D model of every scene and every character needs to be built, so that the other eye can be rendered with the appropriate textures following the appropriate transformations.
So the whole forced perspective problem is irrelevant, I agree. What it was 'meant' to look like the shape/size was is what matters.
I love 3D illusions...there's a whole library here that don't need glasses, just the eye crossing technique...some of the Auckland ones look cool.
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I've never quite understood why we can or should claim LOTR as an ANZ film - yeah, filmed here but shit o dear, the whole corpus of the series, the complete soul-story of the thing belongs TOTALLY in Tolkein's view of Europe. Jackson *used* our landscapes for a completely foreign film, about peoples completely foreign to our isles.That's all.
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As in, none of the last several films from Jackson/Taylor's workshops really have anything to do with *here* (they use the landscape, they use the skills & abilities, but they mean buggerall to us and how we view the world.)
I despise 'em.
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Yeah, there's a lot that could be said about landscape in the LOTR films as epitomizing the colonial project. New Zealand in the 19th and 20th centuries was consciously reshaped according to a vision of pastoral Britain -- a "better Britain," if you will. The movement was utopian, nostalgic, and conservative, and it involved obliterating the existing landscape, or reforming it into a manufactured sublime, like exotics planted in a ring-fenced garden.
The LOTR films use the transformed New Zealand landscape in the same way -- substituting it for the ideal, wished-for past Britain of Tolkien's intensely nostalgic and conservative artistic vision. It's not a benign process -- it involves forgetting, obliterating, and covering over what was already here.
I find Jackson deeply suspect as a filmmaker. It's not just that he's a sentimentalist and a schlockmeister; there's something else going on as well, and you can see it operating in his handling of race. Who are the Orcs in the Fellowship of the Ring if they're not a nightmare, gothicized vision of indigeneity? And isn't it interesting that Jackson and his team chose to cast Maori and Pasifika actors in those roles, almost the only place in the films where a non-Anglo-Saxon face could be found? Let's not even get into his more-Rider-Haggard-than-Rider-Haggard take on the Skull Islanders in King Kong -- a racialized slur on indigeneity seemingly lifted straight out of the 1890s. For Jackson, brown -- indigenous -- is a synecdoche for evil.
That people now want to subject Wellington -- my home town -- to Jackson's malign, intensely alienated and Northern-Hemisphere imaginary with the Wellywood moniker is hard to stomach.
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I love 3D illusions...there's a whole library here that don't need glasses, just the eye crossing technique...some of the Auckland ones look cool.
Wow. Hours of entertainment.
See we're back to over analysing again. Meh.
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The Sylvan Surfer & our stunted land...
(they use the landscape, they use the skills & abilities, but they mean buggerall to us and how we view the world.)
I get that, we are a stunt-nation, stand-ins, bio-body-doubles for the lost (or more expensive) European forests and vistas. Weta animates an a proxy-mation and now with the ultimate manifestation Avatar we no longer even need the real forests...
- Mr Brownlee you can send in the diggers,
we'll reanimate the corpse...
Welcome to Jacksonville (the Capital formerly known as Wellington) please put on your 3D glasses for the duration of your trip... ;- ) -
I find Jackson deeply suspect as a filmmaker.
It's not like I can exactly convincingly rebut any of the points you've made about the LOTR trilogy and King Kong, Caleb, but the source material was so problematic to begin with (the original KK is just One Giant Miscegenation Horror Fantasy, for example). I mean, obviously he could have done something else and radically revamped those themes, but to be honest I don't think he's *that* reflective or innovative a filmmaker. Also, to give him credit: Heavenly Creatures! Forgotten Silver! (And I have no problem with the earlier blood-spattered/shagging puppets work either.)
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obviously he could have done something else and radically revamped those themes
Like the end of RoTK, where the hobbits return home and find that the biggest threat is internal, not external? Something Peter Jackson entirely left out?
Probably would have thrown a major spanner in the narrative arc, though. But might have been possible with less Enya, and less singing Viggo. So win-win, really.
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Rich, you think I've actually *read Tolkien*? I have a very low hey-nonny-nonny threshold, and it tops out at about, say, Richard Thompson. :)
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I was just getting my hate on, Danielle, because ... well, it was 4pm on a Sunday in Milton Keynes, and frankly there's not that much else to do here. :)
But anyway, it speaks to Jackson's powers as a filmmaker that years later I'm still angry about LOTR: FOTR and KK. So I'll give him that.
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I enjoyed Danyl's classy risposte. Wait, did I write "classy"? I meant "dickish".
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He elided my paragraph break! The most meaningful thing in the whole diatribe! I've been misquoted! Help!
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I despair sometimes, I really do.
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Caleb, it looks like you've read Belich's Reforging Paradise - I really liked his reference to NZ playing the Shire to the wider world's Middle Earth.
Who are the Orcs in the Fellowship of the Ring if they're not a nightmare, gothicized vision of indigeneity? And isn't it interesting that Jackson and his team chose to cast Maori and Pasifika actors in those roles, almost the only place in the films where a non-Anglo-Saxon face could be found?
Hang on a sec. You didn't see the real faces of any Orcs or Uruks in FOTR. There were all sorts cast to play them under the suits, including pakeha and women. You did see the face of a Pacific Island or Maori actor as a dead soldier in TTT - he was one of the human soldiers from south of Gondor tricked by Sauron into fighting for him. The text of the book, and the subtext of the movie, portray the soldier as human, sympathetic, in a sort of Christmas eve on the trenches sort of way. A better example of problematic treatment of indigeneity is also in TTT, when in a minor scene Saruman rarks up the Dunlanders against the Rohirrim - "they stole your land" etc. Orcs, in the mythology of the book, are clearly not indigenous - they were created in mockery of or from humans by an envious demigod. It's hard to integrate that with European racist mythology.
Rich:
the biggest threat is internal, not external?
I wouldn't say that. I'd say that the external threat managed to extend to the home front as well as the outside world - the Scouring of the Shire was still Sauron and Saruman's work.
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Caleb, it looks like you've read Belich's Reforging Paradise - I really liked his reference to NZ playing the Shire to the wider world's Middle Earth.
I think he's probably read Kavka and Turner's work on the New Zealand gothic.
The same treatment of the indigenous is also in Braindead, in the first ten minutes.
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Caleb, it looks like you've read Belich's Reforging Paradise - I really liked his reference to NZ playing the Shire to the wider world's Middle Earth.
Yeah. And Patrick Evans's Long Forgetting, too, who also has some good take-downs of PJ from a poco perspective. Maybe Danyl would have preferred if I'd, like, footnoted it.
Hang on a sec.
OK, that probably is an overreading. But the scene in that really disturbed me was the one showing orcs being born -- literally -- out of mud. Pseudo-autochthones, if you will. That did seem like a nasty parody of indigeneity.
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Rich: the biggest threat is internal, not external?
I wouldn't say that. I'd say that the external threat managed to extend to the home front as well as the outside world - the Scouring of the Shire was still Sauron and Saruman's work.
With the help of large numbers of local bullyboys, if my teenage recall is correct. But it was a throwaway comment for amusement rather than intended as anything deep and meaningful. I'm all for the deconstruction of culture, including pop culture, as part of The Debate on the State of the World Today. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Orcs, in the mythology of the book, are clearly not indigenous - they were created in mockery of or from humans by an envious demigod. It's hard to integrate that with European racist mythology.
so all that stuff in the book about black skins and slanty eyes should be dismissed as irrelevant? :)
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Good point, Jake. And the other thing that clip shows is that Jackson can't direct actors for shit ...
Anyway, in the light of that, it's not surprising that Jackson's LOTR films have a healthy fandom on the extreme right, which responds very positively to the racial messages they perceive in his films. [Warning: Stormfront]
It's not like people are seeing phantoms here.
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Like the end of RoTK, where the hobbits return home and find that the biggest threat is internal, not external? Something Peter Jackson entirely left out?
An plenty more killing of Maori and Pacific Islanders could have been had! I was a little disappointed, but it was, after all, a movie, not a 1000 page book. Things work differently.
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so all that stuff in the book about black skins and slanty eyes should be dismissed as irrelevant? :)
Not to mention the sallow faces of the "half goblins" in Bree, particularly Bill Ferny.
But on the flip side of that, the entire book explicitly rejects the idea that heroism or nobility comes from being tall, handsome and well bred. Sam and Gollum both are held up as examples of "real" people who shouldn't be dismissed based on where they come from or what they look like, because they're still people underneath it all. Many of the greatest tyrants in the history of Middle Earth were from the "chosen race" of Numenor, who were led to cause untold suffering by their own arrogance resulting from their pride in their racial heritage.
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Maybe Danyl would have preferred if I'd, like, footnoted it.
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It's not like people are seeing phantoms here.
Er, quite. The Arab pirates? The "people of the West" speech? In the lead up to the war in Iraq? Hello?
With this.
Yes, I remember that. Funny. For future reference however, seeing as you are after all a commenter on this forum, excerpting on your blog something that somebody wrote here by way of honest argument, without offering a response other than the tag "general idiocy", is a really, really classless move. IMHO, and all that.
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