Posts by Geoff Lealand
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You wouldn't ever think of taking to the trots*, I suppose?
* I used to think they had something to do with Trotsky.
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The two girls who stole his hat at the airport are students of my beloved. As Josephine said, she didn't know whether to laugh or cry--especially as they were bunking off school to engineer the hat theft.
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A question for a Friday: my colleague Ben Goldsmith at AFTRS in Sydney is currently writing an article about Australian characters in non-Australian films & TV. He has asked if I know of any Aussies (characters rather than actors) in New Zealand films. For the life of me, I can't really think of any, except for Flight of the Conchords. All suggestions or guidance gratefully accepted!
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A Friday offer (not quite where else to put it):
For filmies: if you go to the Directory of World Cinema site www.worldcinemadirectory.org, you can download a free copy of the just-published American Independent Cinema directory (337pp of it), edited by John Berra. A magnificent deal--I hope Intellect do the same with the Australia & New Zealand directory (edited by Ben Goldsmith and myself), later this year, -
Don't dish NZs Hottest Home Baker
Oh. the tension! Oh, the drama! Oh, the cupcakes!
re Popstars
It certainly influenced the development of Pop Idol (as well as the nasty rash of boy/girl bands through the 1990s). By all accounts, the format was sold (to Freemantle?) for diddley-squat, partly because the NZ producers didn't really realise the financial potential.
Where is Fiona doing her panel (so to speak)? I am doing something similar (as the 'academic/political' contributor) for a Screen Directors Guild forum in Ponsonby on Monday afternoon.
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the past decade has been particularly bad.
You are forgetting about Black Sheep and Second Hand Wedding, which were a giggle or two. The problem is to do with distribution, publicity budgets + the fact that all our major film distributors/exhibitors are overseas owned, with no particular loyalty to local film. I'm Not Harry Jensen (2010) is a New Zealand-made, well-formed and effective little thriller but it has already disappeared without a trace. In 2008, for example, NZ films earned a miserly 1.6% of the total NZ box office.
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incidentally what previous comedy did Boy just surpass to be more successful than
Sione's Wedding
I saw Boy at a preview and the audience laughed up a gale. Another example, I guess, of what Sam Neill now refers to as a New Zealand cinema at ease-- (revising his former judgement of __cinema of unease?) I must say that Taika is a very generous fellow--I sent him a whole bunch of questions, for a profile I am doing for the Australia media magazine Metro and fullsome replies came back within a week.
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And set in the Waikato to boot.
Then, Miserable Chief(s) might be more appropriate. The only teepee I have seen around any parts is the one perched on a hillside in Upper Takaka, Golden Bay.
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Kyle: Hmmm. Is bewilderment also a characteristic of social scientists? I do remember the time I thought I would buck conventions in a large survey (of journalists, incidentally) and put the gender question as Female/Male, rather than the usual Male/Female. Only to to realise half-way through the data entry stage that I had coded all this information incorrectlly.
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The more knowledge there is, the less of a proportion anyone can know of it. If you seek to broaden your knowledge, you also tend to make it shallower as well, and when the depth of the knowledge is increasing all the time, this means people are more and more out of their depth about anything outside of specializations.
Very well put, Ben. This is the reason I admire PAS and remain in awe of the knowledge displayed here. I try to keep up with debates and wonder, as many do, whether aberrant weather and natural disasters are indicators of a larger pattern of irreversible climate change. Nevertheless (and to be perfectly honest), much of my unwillingness to listen to counter-arguments from climate change deniers (Wishart et al) is more to do with a strong distaste for their general politics, rather any arguments (spurious or otherwise) which they might offer.