Random Play by Graham Reid

Here's my idea for a movie I'd like to see made:

Working title: Arms Race
Synopsis: A cross between Sleeping Dogs, Crash, Death Wish, La Haine, A Better Tomorrow, and Reservoir Dogs, set mostly in present-day South Auckland.

Having seen a lot of films, I can remember the one you describe Graham. Cheerless, bleak, and frigging awful. But you forgot the 13-15 year old daughter who was coming to grips with the breakdown of her parents' marriage, which the adults try and hide from themselves through excessive drinking, and her emerging consciousness of her own sexuality.

And the symbolism, the endless sledgehammer like battering from the symbolism.

Still, no matter how bad the movie was, it was good to know Ian Mune and Marton Csokas were still working.

the symbolism.......the symbolism..........

Otherwise, thanks for that Graham. I do like to see truly bad films get the treatment they deserve.

Yes, but how do we get a yellow mini into it too?

Thanks for the tip, Graham. I was considering going to TDtheESS tomorrow but I am relieved now that I have avoided ruining my weekend.

I worked on the safety crew for a De Beer’s diamonds commercial once. They had chosen the endless rocky moraines of the lower Tasman Glacier. There is just hills of black rock with the occasional piece of dirty ice sticking out, stretching for kilometres in every direction. Perfect place to depict a primeval diamond forming landscape.

It was a bugger of a place to work. A lot of the rock is quite thin in places and you can slip on the underlying ice. The director wanted a moody cloudscape and sure enough on the main day of filming a southerly front arrived and the cloud lowered to just a couple of hundred feet above the moraines. All access was by helicopter and we were watching closely the safety margins. The director was loving it. Then it started to drizzle.

That was enough for us and we called the shoot off and bundled the relieved actors and the disgruntled director into the helicopters and started relaying them out of there.

By the time we climbed into the last machine, underfoot conditions were treacherous from the wet rocks over the slippery ice and the tops of the dark moraine hills were blending into the grey forbidding sky. Just as we lifted off one of the riggers turned to me and said rather admiringly “Vincent would just be coming in about now”.

I was considering going to TDtheESS tomorrow but I am relieved now that I have avoided ruining my weekend.

A rating of 15% on 'rotten tomatoes'....That translates roughly as 'appallingly bad. Avoid at all costs'.

The poster was enough to put me off; and the title. It was that kind of film. How could it be anything else?

Ah but there's the big problem, a real dilemma: a yellow mini showing up in the 1800 would just wrong - but equally it would be really really symbolic - you can see how a director would be torn - I think you take the wheels off and have it carried by a bunch of orcs instead

“Vincent would just be coming in about now”

Too true. Imagine his frustrated directorial ambition if he had been born in sunny California instead of gloomy old enzed.

Ah but there's the big problem, a real dilemma: a yellow mini showing up in the 1800 would just wrong - but equally it would be really really symbolic - you can see how a director would be torn - I think you take the wheels off and have it carried by a bunch of orcs instead

Now you're talking Paul. Mount big spikes all around it, skulls of past victims stuck in place of the headrests in the front seats (umm, imagine it's a mini with headrests).

And maybe the good guys could have a matching Kombi van.

"big spikes all around" - I'm getting flashes of the urban warrior aesthetic now, Kyle...

A mini tooling across a distant hillside in symbolic 1800s NZ would be great - it'd serve as a nod to the "was it there or not - well definitely not on the DVD" car in Fellowship as well.

Y'know if you pitched that New Zealand concept to the Film Commission you would probably get a swag of funding.

a yellow mini showing up in the 1800 would just wrong

Magic realism. Problem solved.

"Beans to God!"

The town is washed out, beaching an enormous whale in the process. When ravenous survivors carve up the whale, a yellow mini is disgorged from it's guts. Zombie sheep feast on entrails and devour the remaining survivors...

... and then drive off looking for Bruno Lawrence under a sullen nuclear sky.

Far be it from me to be a spoiler -- and please go see it, if you must -- but we thought it the most trite, sentimental, predictable, cornball, overblown epic ever. And I’ve seen some clunkers from the Fifties -- which stand up better for their sheer camp value.

And Mr. Read has stumbed over a rather delicious irony of the critical trade -- rather funny watching critics who cream their panties over the absurd, over-heated melodramas of Douglas Sirk, Max Ophuls, Powell and Pressburger and Fassbinder (Sirk on truckloads of cocaine with lots of kinky sex) have a problem with Baz Luhrmann?

Mr. Read should read Mr. Reid!

Poo to your orthographic imperialism! But seriously - I prefer an overwrought melodrama to glossy sadism or "Beckett on downers does family therapy" aka the American indie film.

If it helps, film festival director calls the "gumboot movies". If the characters aren't wearing them, they probably should be.

That should read film festival director Bill Gosden...

In my movies there would always be a stray dog barking in the street.....

Bollocks! Bollocks! Crikey dick.

I miss Bruno Lawrence. And his shotgun.