Nuclear Wintour – Film Festival choice

The New Zealand International Film Festival starts on July 30 giving Christchurch movie fans of all persuasions two weeks of fantastic film going. I was lucky go to the festival launch where the feature film was the documentary The September Issue.

Don’t miss this – you don’t need to be a fashionista to appreciate this behind the scenes look at the making of 2007 September issue of American Vogue. This is traditionally the fashion bible of the year with literally hundreds of pages. A whole fashion design and retail industry waits with bated breath to see what has been decreed by Anna Wintour (a.k.a Nuclear Wintour) the famously intimidating editor who was supposedly the inspiration for Meryl Streep’s performance in The Devil Wears Prada. The other leading player in the documentary is the former model Grace Coddington who is the creative editor of American Vogue. The dynamic between these two women is worth seeing.

Anna famously hides behind dark glasses and a poker face and sometimes only the most subtle flicker on her face or slight change of body language gives you a clue as to what she is thinking. Needless to say her employees are highly tuned to watch for these signs. Anna does reveal – either deliberately or unwittingly a bit about herself. The intimidating personna is definitely how she keeps herself at the top of the tree – defying the world to question her judgement – but how much it is genuinely her or how much she has changed and come to be the persona she created I don’t know. Anyway a great night out at the movies.

 

What’s your favourite children’s movie?

Being a big kid at heart I love children’s movies.  I have to say I’m definitely more of a fan of the old school style of movie making rather than the computer animated variety which seems to have taken over our movie screens.  To my way of thinking you really can’t beat Dick Van Dyke leaping around singing away cheerfully.  I grew up on classics such as Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and nothing made in recent times seems to even come close to those musical masterpieces.  My parents got some really strange children’s movies out from the library and video stores for me when I was a kid – sci-fi classics such as The Last Starfighter and Flight of the Navigator – but I loved them and still do to this day.

My all-time favourite children’s movie has to be The Princess Bride.  I’ve actually lost count of how many times I’ve seen this movie and can quote it verbatim.  I even own a t-shirt with Inigo Montoya on it quoting one of my favourite lines from the movie ‘My name is Inigo Montoya.  You killed my father. Prepare to die.’

My top 5 are:

1. The Princess Bride

2. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

3. Mary Poppins

4. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (original musical version)

5. The Goonies

I’d really like to get other people’s opinions on what their favourite children’s movies are so please post a comment and let me know.

 

Celebrity to the rescue … or maybe not

I’ve been gleefully devouring Hello magazine since the early 1990s, while simultaneously despising every celebrity sell-my-story sad-sack in there. This dual love/loathing for celebrity culture creates contradictory forces which miraculously, in my case, seem to live in happy co-existence. Yes, I read, actually inhale, New Weekly but I also have “read it, enjoy it but never, ever believe it” etched onto my cortex.

I have long suspected I am not alone in this. For example highly educated and cynical librarians have many hidden shallows; the Central library staff room is groaning under the weight of frothy celebrity mags. Who needs Dostoyevsky when there is an Australian Women’s Weekly to gobble?  But one thing I cannot stomach is celebrity do-gooders, and Celebrity: How entertainers took over the world and why we need an exit strategy explains in a much more coherent and entertaining way than I ever could just exactly why people like that Bono need to shut their yappers and give world peace a wide berth.

Marina Hyde, the author of this rollicking good read, writes a celebrity column for The Guardian called Lost in Showbiz; she also mercilessly parodies celebs in a mock diary column A peek at the diary of… Like the Dr Doolittle of Celebsville, she attempts to decipher celebrity grunts and gobbledygook to find out if their forays into the world outside the movie studio or catwalk have any real meaning or long term benefit.  The resounding answer is no. Hyde then hilariously proceeds to bash celebrity in all its self-serving attempts to “give something back” or use their fame to highlight or bring focus to issues, issues they regularly fail to understand.

Hyde is a little light on answers to the celebrity conundrum: how do we get them back in their box, back to what the famous have always done well- wear sparkly frocks, go to orgies and generally brighten up our drab little lives? Nonetheless this book will make you snicker out loud and roll your eyes at the fatuous arrogance of the celluloid chosen ones. Angelina, Sharon Stone, Richard Gere etc you have been rumbled.

 

I’m late, I’m late for a very important date

Tim Burton is doing Alice in Wonderland in 3-D!

I love 3-D, it can even make post-George-of-the-Jungle Brendan Fraser watchable. The first pics to whet your appetite are here. It’s due to be released in May 2010.

See what else we have in 3-D.

 

Terminator Salvation

The latest in the Terminator “franchise” (I hate that term, makes the movies sound like a Nandos Chicken outlet) blasted it’s way on to movie screens in New Zealand this week. As an unabashed fan of Terminator and Terminator 2, and not much fussed on the third, I didn’t have very high expectations for this film despite the presence of Hollywood heavyweight and sometime drama queen Christian Bale.

As it turns out the film is a non-stop barrage of gunfire, explosions and death-defying stunts…and I love that kind of thing so I was happy. Unfortunately David Mamet doesn’t tend to write dialogue for blockbuster action movies so it’s no great shakes in that department but that’s not what you expect from this kind of movie is it?

When you throw a lot of money at a film this big you do get some pretty spectacular stunts, high-tech design and scary looking futuristic robots though. Which is why I’m considering checking out The art of Terminator Salvation…not in the hopes of catching a picture of Christian Bale with his shirt off…at all.

 

Kung Fu no more

At the risk of sounding callous, it’s been a bad week for Davids. Fantasy writer David Eddings passed away earlier this week and this morning brought news of the death of veteran actor David Carradine.

Carradine is probably known for three things; being a Carradine, a family that could out-Baldwin the Baldwins in terms of actors per square foot, as the titular character of Quentin Tarantino’s ambitious but genius Kill Bill films, and as Caine, the forever wandering Kung Fu student in the television series of the same name.

I have to admit that Kung Fu never grabbed me. All that dour wandering about in the Wild West didn’t really interest me as a child. I thought he brought just the right mix of menace and gentility to the role of Bill in the aforementioned Tarantino films though and this was an experience that he wrote about in his 2006 book The Kill Bill diary : the making of a Tarantino classic as seen through the eyes of a screen legend.

For more information on the life and death of David Carradine go to -

• David Carradine : The Times obituary
• Obituary from Variety film magazine
• News story including updates, video and photos from The New Zealand Herald

 

Middle-class terrorists a “story looking for an author”

How did a bunch of middle-class activists end up in a web of international terror and murder?

Stefan Aust has spent his career finding out, saying it was a once in a lifetime case of a “story looking for an author”. The Baader Meinhoff complex examines in gripping detail the lives of a group of German revolutionaries known as the Red Army Faction (RAF). They began as protesters against war and the state in the sixties and ended up committing arson, bombings, murders and kidnappings. In prison they went on hunger strikes, and won sympathy when the authorities force fed them.

Some of the of the group died in prison – there were questions over whether it was murder or suicides? Two had shot themselves, one had hung herself – but even though they were closely guarded, no-one heard the shots or found them until the following morning.

At his festival session with Mark Sainsbury, Aust decribed this chapter of German history as “the most interesting and dramatic time after the Second World War”.

 

Watchmen director to tackle Guardians of Ga’Hoole

Find "Guardians of Ga'Hoole" in the Library collection

Zach Snyder (director of The Watchmen) is directing an animated The Guardians of Ga’Hoole movie. Guardians of Ga’Hoole is a kids fantasy series by Kathryn Lasky. It’s a Watership Down type tale of anthropomorphic animals (in this case owls) engaged in a battle against evil.

The choice of Director makes me a tiny bit worried (the decision to film a Watchmen movie wasn’t one I entirely agreed with) but this series is totally different so hopefully a good film adaption will compliment the series and bring more readers to it (or Tu-Whit).

 

What’s the time Mr. Wolverine?

What time indeed? Well, it’s very nearly popcorn scoffing time for fans of one of the more hirsute X-men (Beast being rather more hairy though not as bolshi) as X-men Origins: Wolverine comes out in cinemas this week on 29 April.

Wolverine was always one of my favourite X-men characters with that winning combination of surliness and admantium skeleton. He’s like House but instead of cutting sarcasm he has cutting knuckle-knives. I am also excited to see that characters from the comics such as Gambit will be turning up in the film (what can I say, I like that Cajun accent).

If none of this makes any sense to you then all you need to know is that there was a comics series called The Uncanny X-men which spawned a successful series of blockbuster films and that the latest one is due for release, oh and Hugh Jackman is involved, and the whole thing was sort of leaked on the internet, and they filmed some of it in New Zealand. Phew.

Those of you more attuned to pop culture references about genetic mutants might be interested to know that the library has a good selection of Wolverine-related tales in our collection. Grrrrrr!

 

Untouchable Girls – The movie

The Topp twins. It’s no exaggeration to say that they’re about as Kiwi as you can get without actually being a small flightless bird. Lynda and Jools Topp have been entertaining all heck out of New Zealanders for the last 25 years with their assortment of comic characters, country music…and yodelling.

We’ve got three “two for one” vouchers for the twins’ new documentary film Untouchable Girls – The Movie which is released 9 April.  The Sydney Herald says it’s “more fun than a possum up your trousers!”…and they would know, I guess.  Anyway, check out the movie trailer below and if it looks like something you might be interested in taking a friend (or twin) to then email us at libwebteam@ccc.govt.nz including your name, phone number, library card number and address. We’ll be in touch with the winners about getting them their vouchers (competition applies to Christchurch City Libraries members only). Entries close Thursday 9 April and the vouchers are valid until Wednesday 29 April.

If you’re feeling like reminding yourself of some of the genius that is the twins Topp, then have a gander at what Christchurch City Libraries has to offer -

• The Topp Twins musical recordings
• The Topp Twins book
• Ken’s hunting and fishing show

Beauty!