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Creative Indigestion | Dec 21, 2005 11:31

In last Sunday's Star Times, Kim Knight wrote a feature on the apparent persistence of sexist advertising. It reads a bit like the editors decided it'd be a good topic before they went out and tested the hypothesis, because most of the examples are frankly tenuous. The Nutrigrain ad where the teenage son eats his cereal and helps his mother with various improbable feats of Nutrigrain-assisted strength? Really?

To be sure, there's more skin than ever on show in certain sorts of advertisement - but it's almost wholly in the service of products targeted at women. Go figure.

Ironically, if you were in pursuit of unflattering and insulting depictions of one gender you'd have a lot more luck if you looked at the way men are depicted in middle-market TV commercials. We're blithering idiots, apparently, although capable of rescue and redemption through the use of certain products. Honestly, if you cast wives and mothers the way husbands and fathers are cast (often with the intention of flattering female consumers) there'd be an uproar.

The feature, perhaps for want of material, does venture into the men-are-stupid genre, but it picks some odd examples. I'm not even remotely offended by the Tui billboard about men looking good in speedos (yeah, right), let alone of the belief that it's about "objectifying men or making them feel awkward about their bodies," as Camilla Belich, co-president of the New Zealand University Students Association, suggests. I'm sure she's a good person, but I think we left this sort of stuff in the 80s.

Regarding the niceties of the BBC's Creative Archive licence and the extent to which it allows sharing outside the UK, I was lucky enough to be able to put a couple of questions to Paula Le Dieu, the head of Creative Commons International and the first leader of the BBC Creative Archive. Specifically, whether sharing the clips on a UK=based website (or from a filesharing service) breaches the licence, and on the implications of a possible move to make CA material available to non-Britons for a fee (which could imply, bizarrely, DRM on commons files). She said:

The terms of the licence do not include any requirement for DRM or TPM measures to be put in place when re-distributing the Creative Archive files. Therefore, if I as a Brit resident downloaded material from the archive and then decided that I wanted to put it on my website for download that is fine. The license requires that the consumer of the material is in the UK.

With respect to a pay system - it is far from clear as to whether this is the way that the Beeb will go in terms of international access. As you are probably aware they are experimenting with a number of different models of content access including a fully DRM'd, view only model called the Interactive Media Player (iMP). The reality is that DRM and the Creative Archive model are not compatible.

The best analogy that I have come up with is that DRM is like an envelope, a very secure envelope (at least that is the intention!) with one of those windows on the front. The idea is that the experience of the content is via that window. The envelope ensures you can't get to the content on any other terms other than intended. When you come to try and reconcile that with the Creative Archive model you come to understand that Creative Archive explicit encourages you to open the envelope, take out the contents, throw the envelope in the bin, mess around with contents and never put it back in an envelope again!

We're hoping to bring you more of Paula in 2006 … And might I also say thanks and Merry Christmas to the British reader who just happened to put up a selection of the BBC "iconic moments" clips on a website I just happened to find.

Anyway, interesting range of readers' views on the merits of the Kong film. Francis Wevers thought "it was great - even got a tear at the end when Kong died," and Toby Manhire called Kong "a magnificent, joyful motion picture - loved every minute of it, despite the bladder-challenging length. Shame the same can't be said for Narnia."

On the other hand, Edmund King said:

I'm not sure Jackson should be let off too easily on the racism issue - especially in the portrayal of the Skull Islanders. Obviously, they're not supposed to be 'real' in any documentary sense (although, geographically, they would be Andaman Islanders, who have had a hell of a lot of racism flung their way since their 'discovery' in the nineteenth century), but they do crystallize and express (in a really powerful sense) any number of racist stereotypes about cannibal islanders/savages. I can kind of see what Jackson might be doing here - taking elements already present in the '33 version and, by turning the amp up to 11, problematizing them.

The problem is though, by importing elements from a less reflective time in cimematic history and combining them with the imagery of '70s Amazon cannibal and Italian zombie movies, Jackson's created something new in the Skull Islanders, and I'm not sure that it's any less racist than the earlier version. It certainly felt as 'off' to me as the portrayal of the orcs in LOTR -- where Jackson performs a similar elision of dark skin and pure, unthinking evil.

As my wife commented to me as we left the theatre, 'I know Don Brash is in the ascendancy at the moment, but Jesus...'

Gotta disagree. I took the whole point of going OTT with the Skull Islanders to be that they were meant to be something out of a movie, rather than anything from life.

Geoff Lealand agreed with Edmund:

Most of the time I agree with you, Russell--but not in respect of King Kong. I started looking at my watch 60 minutes in, and groaned inwardly (there being sufficient audible groaning on the screen!) when I realised there were another two hours to go. It is all too big and too excessive and all I want to do now is go to small film with a strong narrative and well-rounded characters (Little Fish, maybe?). As reputedly the sixth-most expensive film ever made, maybe we need to ask, 'was it money well spent?"

In respect of your comments about racial portrayals--the exaggerated 'natives' might have been acceptable in 1933 (the original Kong was a contemporary film in that it was made in 1933 AND set in 1933) but I felt that Jackson, Walsh and Boyens could have displayed a little more post-colonial sensitivity!

Speaking of monkeys and stuff, a judge appointed by Bush has quite thunderously come down against the teaching of "intelligent design" in school science classes, and criticised the "breathtaking inanity" of the decision by the Dover Area School District to order that ID be taught as science. Wow.

Right-wing political correctness is descending on Steven Spielberg's Munich before it even opens. Spielberg seems as entitled as any other film-maker (more than most, actually) to present a nuanced perspective on the 1972 Olympic massacre and (more particularly in this case) its aftermath, but, as usual, the trusty conservative forces of freedom want to shut down the speech of others. There's a good column by Michele Goldberg on Salon about the furore.

Meanwhile, the populist loon elected president in Iran has followed up his appalling comments about Israel and the Holocaust by banning Western music from the country's TV and radio stations. Uh, wasn't the invasion of Iraq going to triggering a flowering of secular liberalism in neighbouring countries? Or did I get that wrong?

The Greens want New Zealand to stop sending spy-base data to the US because it could be misused. You know it's not gonna happen, but they have a point. A Defensetech story hints at the idea that Echelon has been part of the illegal domestic spying programme in the US. Although the useful-idiot brigade (hello Power Line!) has fallen into line, even conservative commentators are worried. Some say it's an impeachable offence.

Newsweek says Bush tried to get the New York Times to kill the story. And now a separate Times story reveals that since 2001 the FBI has monitored such dangerous domestic groups as vegans and Catholic Workers. AmericaBlog notes that under the same policy a "kiss-in" staged by a law school gay-rights group was monitored as a "credible threat" of terrorism. Yes, really.

Meanwhile, check out this female Iraq vet running for Congress as a Democrat - the video interview (conducted two days after she left hospital after months of treatment and rehabilitation - she lost both legs and the use of an arm) is quite long, but she's strikingly good. The NYT has a backgrounder.

And finally, human occupation of northern Europe goes back way further than anyone thought.

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Kong's really good | Dec 19, 2005 10:53

On Sunday afternoon, the family went and saw Kong. And we loved it. I thought it was a tremendous piece of film-making, if one - given the look of a couple of weak CGI sequences - that they didn't quite get to finish. (I should note that there are also many amazing feats of imagery - you'll never see the good old Civic Theatre quite the same way again.) The crowd cheered and applauded after Kong finished off the V Rexes. Naomi Watts (mostly luminous, occasionally earthy) was great. The script was spot-on. And it just didn't feel like a three-hour movie to me.

But not everyone feels the same way. There's something of a fanboy backlash in motion, to judge by the Talkback section at Ain't Cool News (warning: spoilers). Emboldened by a relatively weak Wednesday opening (only the 21st best ever), some movie geeks have been furiously picking nits from Kong's fur.

I suspect Jackson cops this precisely because he is, publicly, a fanboy - just a very successful one, who gets to make the movies he always wanted to make, and loads up on Oscars. It's as if he's gotten above his station or something.

Some of the sillier critiques include the claim that the "bat rescue" scene is preposterous. Dudes, it's a movie about a giant ape that lives on an island with a bunch of dinosaurs and giant insects. That's preposterous. Get over it.

Inevitably, the Kong-is-racist theme comes up in discussions. Someone takes issue with the portrayal of the Skull Islanders: "They have these amazing people in New Zealand called the Maori, who are real Pacific islanders ... why not make a small community of them?" Oh yes, that would have been clever. Not. Look, the natives of Skull Island are a bunch of tricked-out blue-black zombie people. They're not meant to resemble any real "community" of Pacific Islanders. That would have been offensive.

Another guy criticised Peter Jackson for not casting Samuel L. Jackson in the Carl Denham role (which would have been a truly shitty piece of casting) before offering: "Peter Jackson is just insensitive to race issues, probably because he is from New Zealand." Uh, what? Turns out that apparently the problem was that, not being an American, Jackson couldn't possibly understand racism in an American context, and therefore his film is, er, racist.

Actually, I think Jackson has handled and re-interpreted the non-PC elements of the original remarkably well, most notably in the shift to a less sympathetic portrayal of the Denham character. He's done it and still made a great modern matinee picture. The idea that someone could wet themselves over the last three turgid Star Wars films and not have fun at this movie just defeats me.

Sunday was otherwise quiet, because on Saturday I had all the Public Address bloggers (apart from Jolisa and Keith, who were offshore), CactusLab and their significant others over for a huge Christmas lunch - free-range turkey, barbecued butterflied leg of lamb and home-smoked salmon fillets, plus salads from 5 Loaves and 2 Fish and a large and decadent chocolate-cherry-marscapone thing from Rocket Kitchen. And plenty of wine. Fabbo.

Paul and Morgan came over later on to bring the gayness and several of us ventured out to a party at the Musket Room put on by Johnny from Il Buco, which turned out to be a fine finish to a long day. Dick Johnson and the Professor DJd, and I had a lickle dance. I also chatted to Milan from Pluto and asked him what 'Long White Cross' was about. (He said it was a personal thing.) There's a lot to be said for a party that (a) doesn't make you wait till 2am for anything to happen, and (b) does not require you to travel further west than Ponsonby Road. Yowsa.

Anyway, it's a nice day out there - and there are no neo-Nazis with petrol bombs, or Lebanese gangsters with petrol bombs, or police (justifiably, but regrettably) boarding buses and going through everyone's text messages, or the prospect of the beaches going into lockdown for the whole summer - and I've got to take all the hire stuff back. So, later …

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