Muse by Craig Ranapia

The Almighty Johnsons (Three, Mondays, 9.30; repeated Sundays, 10.30pm) 

If you thought Cheryl West's splendidly dysfunctional brood were screwed up, say hello to the Johnson Boys -- the kind of immigrants you hope would give Winston Peters an aneurysm and put him out of our misery.

I don't actually remember much of my twenty-first birthday, but it has nothing on poor Axl (played by a sweetly clueless Emmett Skilton). He just wants to mark his majority by getting pissed and at least trying to get his end away.  Instead, he ends up naked in the woods, as his brothers throw swords at him and the stressed out bald hairdresser with the Nigella fetish from the MySky ads chunters away. What the frig is going on?  Why are various hot chicks trying to kill him? Is the Waitamata Harbour turning to blood, a culturally insensitive viral marketing stunt and an awkward encounter with his sister-in-law in an en suite portents of things to come? And how stupid do you have to be not to notice when a delectable Keisha Castle-Hughes is totally hot for you?

All these questions and more will be answered, I hope, in the latest creation from James Griffin and Rachel Lang. The log-line from the website of production company is pushing all the right buttons with me:

The Almighty Johnsons are superheroes, but they aren’t like those flashy cartoon superheroes. They are typical Kiwi blokes who don’t much like to stand out from the crowd.  And everyday gods have everyday struggles - striving to love stroppy women, overcoming sibling rivalry and fulfilling your God-like destiny, all while still finding the time to enjoy a few beers with your mates.

Or put another way, you can take the (sorta) demi-Gods out of Asgard - to West Auckland via Norsewood -, but you can't take Asgard out of the demi-Gods.  Griffin and Lang have obviously been reading their Neil Gaiman - and I hope you have too - but The Almighty Johnsons is no more "Heroes with bogans" than the equally fun Misfits (which got buried on C4 last year, and is worth catching on DVD) deserved the awful marketing tag "Heroes with ASBOs".

First, anyone who's expecting slick visual FX and crotch-throtting spandex will be disappointed.  Instead, 'It's Kind of A Birthday Present' (writer Griffin, producer Simon Bennett and director Mark Beesley headline behind the scenes) set up the premise and characters with admirable economy.  Yes, there's a certain amount of point and recite exposition, but since we're discovering it all with Axl - and Griffin hasn't lost his touch for snappy, quotable dialogue - even that is relatively painless. Avoiding spoilers as much as possible, there's also a lot of pipe laying for the nine episodes to come.

Of course, a cute high concept is only one tenth of a watchable show - and there are moments where The Almighty Johnsons cheerfully flirts with absurdity, but - like Outrageous Fortune before it - it's anchored by a cast who get the best way to play farce is drop dead straight. Skilton, Tim Balme (who's also part of the writing team and is the Johnsons' Cheryl), Dean O'Gorman (having way too much fun as PR scum with the gift of the gab and the bitchiest straight man on television), Jared Turner (cold fish, literally) and Ben Barrington (whose oracular abilities and great skin for a ninety year-old aren't all down to the 'shrooms) play nicely off each other.  They may well be Norse Gods -- even though their powers are kind of shit since that Jesus bastard started getting all the attention back in the homelands -- but family isn't a word, it's a life sentence.

James Griffin has said that the idea was to make a show about "being a bloke", but I hope the women in the cast - Castle-Hughes' bemused flattie/potential love interest, and Roz Turnbull as Balme's mortal wife get more screen time.  After all, anyone familiar with Norse myths will know the ladies could be pretty formidable as well.

But that's quibbling, the production design, photography and evocative music are on the money.  We end the pilot with a moment of family bonding over a quest. For a woman. ("Who the frig is Frigg?" "Odin's beloved, 'til they kinda split up back in Asgard. Rooting around, fault on both sides.") I can see that working out without tears and blood stains before bedtime.

My big concern -- and one that producer Simon Bennett reasonably voices here -- is that people are going to say "fantasy, meh..." Genre snobbery is real, otherwise the producers of Lost wouldn't have contorted themselves to avoid saying the S- or F-words (that's "science fiction" or "fantasy" to you) anywhere other than San Diego Comic Con.

But are Kiwi audiences really not ready for prime-time fantasy for grown-ups, with a local accent?  I'm optimistic that we are - The Vintner's Luck is still one of the biggest-selling contemporary New Zealand novels despite the presence of an angel.  And a certain film-maker I promised never to mention here also pulled off the delicate balancing between fantasy and reality long before he reached Middle Earth.  Your mileage may vary, but Heavenly Creatures  is still high on my list of great New Zealand films.

And anyone who thinks fantasy is just dwarves in tights, running around with letter-openers and sprouting gibberish really need some quality time with our own Elizabeth Knox, Margaret Mahy and Maurice Gee -- for a start.

Perhaps I'm biased having Doctor Who and original recipie Star Trek imprinted on my tele-DNA at an early age, but Outrageous Fortune and Go Girls (which returns to Two tonight, at 8.30) aren't exactly kitchen sink neo-realism either.  What they both do is tell well-crafted stories about people worth the time and attention.

And by that standard - the only one that really matters - even if you're bored with the Rings, send the kids to bed and get some old time religion.

This weekend, Wellywood readers can support a good cause, and see a great movie while they're doing it.  Hobbit-gate sucked up all the film-related outrage last year, but here's why you should know who Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi is -- and care that he's been imprisoned and banned from making films for twenty years.

There will be a screening of Panahi's film Offside at Wellington's Paramount Theatre THIS SUNDAY AT 6.15pm. Speakers will include Amnesty NZ, film-maker Faramarz Beheshti, whose Salaam Rugby premiered at the 2010 Festival, and, for the Festival, Bill Gosden. Admission is free but koha is requested to cover theatre rental costs.

I usually find it easy -- too easy -- to write bad reviews.  After all, I'm a big believer in Sturgeon's Law that "ninety percent of everything is crap."

So why is this two days late, and a damn sight less vicious than the first five drafts or so?  Because, Gentle Readers, instead of an inner child your humble culture vulture has an inner patriot.  I want all New Zealand television and film to be awesome.  Call it political correctness gone mad, but I want to see GLBT characters who are fucked up and flawed without being psycho dykes/killer queens,  every hag fag's favourite accessory or (my personal favourite) the gay parachuted in so we call all learn a very important lesson from their corpses.  And don't even get me started on the shit-storm of condescending pseudo-"tolerance" that is Glee.  Seriously, I'm this close to confiscating Ryan Murphy's toaster-oven.

I really wanted Nights in the Gardens of Spain to be good, even if only on the dizzy level of po-faced camp attained by Witi Ihimaera's rather dated 1995 novel (which went into its fourth edition last year), which is neatly summed up by the blurb on my copy:

David Munro has everything a man could wish for -- a beautiful wife, two adoring daughters, a top academic position and a circle of devoted friends. But he also has another life - lived mainly at night and frequently in what he comes to know as 'The Gardens of Spain', the places where gay and bisexual men meet. Now he must choose which of his two lives to follow...

On the way from page to screen, David becomes Kawa -- a "corporate high-flyer" who sits at the Business Brown Table, is heir apparent to the leadership of his tribe, loses one of the irritatingly cute daughters and picks up an even more irritatingly sullen teenage son (who's screwing an evil white devil bimbo who escaped from a bad parody of Go Girls).

Other reviews -- like Gay NZ's David Herkt -- greeted the liberal application of brownwash with a hearty WTF. But I'm kind of surprised David is surprised when this feature ran on GayNZ a week before transmission.

The film is the result of a creative collaboration between two production companies owned by Māori women - Nicole Hoey's Cinco Cine Films and Christina Milligan's Conbrio Media.

Hoey says they initially met with Ihimaera to talk about how they might do it for television. "One of the things we talked about was taking it away from the gay coming out story set in the context of AIDS and set it in 2010. We also wanted to make it more about the husband and wife and to give it a Māori base, because the book is not set in the Māori world," she says."

"And once you do that, you change his whole environment. He might be working in a corporate environment in the city, but when you change everything about his nature, you change everything about who the other characters in the drama are going to be. His whānau and his place within that become very important."

Let's cut the crap and get to the real problem with Night in the Garden of Pain.  I've no problems with film adaptations that radically deviate from the source material -- I doubt any cinephile would mark Hitchcock down for his liberties with the sources of classics like Vertigo, The Birds and Psycho. And the new angle on the adaptation was done with Ihimaera's knowledge and assent, which isn't surp[rising given his own changing views on his role and nature as a Maori writer.  (Whether his revisions of his own work have been successful is another question for another time.)

But it was simply embarrasing watching fine actors like George Henare and Vicky Haughton trying to do something, anything with the thankless parts of the homophobic parents who eventually come around.  Nor are Nathalie Boltt (as Kawa's wife Annabelle) and Dean O'Gorman (the other man) well-served.  She snivels a lot, when she's not throwing up.  It's hard to see why either of them care so much, because Calvin Tuteao's performance seems to involve recovering sense memories of being constipated.  In the background, the little girls oozes sacharine from every pore -- even when she's almost getting herself killed so everyone else can come to their senses -- while the boy sulks. A lot. Even getting stoned with a cuzzie bro doesn't relieve the dour pout.

As for the actual gayness, the sauna resembles an runway show where Karen Walker is unveiling a new line in designer bathtowels and the one implied blow-job looks painful. (Yes, nobody's cum-face is attractive. But this is acting, and looking like your  knob is being chewed off has unfortunate implications.)

For all the talk about giving the project a "Maori base", but endless subtitled dialogue of tooth-grinding banality and adorable moppets at kapa haka doesn't change the tedious reality that the characters are barely human.  It would be tempting to put the blame on credited writer Kate McDermott, but a lot of what doesn't work comes staraight from the novel. And director Katie Wolfe had no feel for dialogue or performance.

As I said up top, I want to support local drama (especially when it's made by women and Maori creatives) and gay representation. It does matter. But the cultural cringe inverted (with healthy lashings of straight white guilt), is a pass I'm not willing to write anymore. It's a brutal reality that New Zealand can't match the sheer volume of production in the United States and Britian where people have the freedom to fall on their arses, and learn their craft while doing do.

All that granted, Outrageous Fortune proved that Kiwi drama doesn't need any special pleading -- and I'd still say the first series took a long time to get right  the show's delicate tonal balance between farce and tragedy.  If I'm hard on things like Nights in the Gardens of Spain, it's because we have the talent to do better. To tell our own stories about complex characters with passion, committment and  trust in the audience's intelligence. GLBT and Maori communities deserve nothing less. We all do.

 

Starting as I don't mean to go on, my review of Nights in the Gardens of Spain is going to run very long, and a little late, so here's some culture-related linky love to tide you over.

• Friend of Muse, BookieMonster reminds us all that Book stores need love too - and call for your recommendations.

• Auckland Libraries Super Tour 2011 -- just what it says on the tin. Whatever you think of the Super City, nice to see the public libraries getting some love.

• Kiwi comic-blogger Adrian Kinnaird notes a doco screening Wellywood comix geeks shouldn't miss. 
  

• Skins creator Bryan Elsley defends the US version of his show against charges of "child pornography."  Elsewhere, one of my favourite American tele-bloggers, Maureen Ryan, asks a more interesting question: Is the real problem not that the show is too raunchy, but a shortage of sinners being punished hard and fast enough for American tastes?

•  Neil Gaiman is in Sydney -- and being a damn sight less annoying about it than Oprah.

• I haven't seen Los Bros Coen's re-make of True Grit (The Dude may abide, but Jeff Bridges should be de-rezzed for Tron: Legacy), but I can't imagine it equalling Charles Portis' wonderful novel. I can't put a better case for it than this.

• Still having problems getting your head around the WikiLeaks cables?  Try reading them as a Patricia Highsmith novel, with jokes.

 

GRATUITOUS YOU TUBE VIDEO OF THE DAY:

If anyone can explain why the indecently fabulous hip-hop geek goddess Janelle Monae isn't bigger than Justin Beiber, answers on a tear-stained postcard. Please.

 

I'll tell you a little secret about Russell Brown, our gracious host.  He's remarkably persuasive, and more than a little mad.  In his position, I can't say a bad tempered Tory who hates the sound of his own voice (you in the back, stop sniggering) would have been my first call for Public Address Radio.

It being an election year and all, when PA Radio returns next month 180 Seconds... will be full of not suffering fools, and making fools suffer with barely safe for work snark, but Muse is going to be a slightly different beast.

One of my best pieces last year was written in response to the Pike River tragedy, and its core was a reading of Philip Larkin's majestic poem The Explosion.

Now you may ask, what use are fancy words?  As Larkin’s near contemporary W.H. Auden noted, all the fine poems he wrote in the 1930’s — some of the best ever written in the English language, in my opinion — didn’t save a single life, or shorten the Second World War by a second. And Auden’s right.

 But Larkin’s unsentimental empathy — the act of human connection from a university librarian to people and experience so foreign from his own — reminds us that we may be born alone, and die alone.  But our dreams and sorrows — the ordinary moments and small grace notes — are shared alike.

I believe every word of that, but that comes with the risk of turning culture into sociopolitical cod liver oil.  (Swallow your national identity, or I'll have to get out the enema kit of art!) I wish I could be a little more high-minded, but I had my sense of womder kicked into gear in a dark cinema at the age of five:

Star Wars is remarkably easy to snark now - and the prequel trilogy felt like increasingly bad pity-sex with that annoying ex who hasn't improved with age.  But it's hard to be cynical while remembering that moment with John Williams' bombastic score at full pomp, as the Star Destroyer slid on the screen and just kept coming.  Even the campy robots, the scary dude with asthma and Princess Bagel-Ears seduced with the brutal will to entertain.

"Culture" is one of those slippery terms better minds -- and more over-confident ones - than mine have tried to define. In the end, Russell has set me the most irritating remit of all: "Write about anything you want.  Yes, books, music, films and art remind us of human values and common experience.  But the pleasure principle is nothing to sneer at either.

I'll start off with a rather useful set of rules John Updike laid out for reviewing books, which strike me as valid for cultural criticism and commentary in general. The money quote:

 Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never [...]  try to put the author “in his place,” making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

I've a few rules of my own:

1. Everything here is my opinion, and mine alone.  This is too much work to indulge in being contrary for its own sake (which is every bit as banal as following the crowd), trolling for a fight or C.K. Stead-style feuding.  You're perfectlyt entitled to disagree with every word I say; just assume I'm saying it in good faith.

2. More often than I like to admit, I am completely full of shit and prone to drivel on about subjects that I know nothing about. So are you, come to that, so let's call it even and move on.

3. I lace my prose with not-so-subtle smut, lame puns and spicy Anglo-Saxon vernacular. Don't bother pissing and bitching about it, or I might really get grumpy. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

4. As a rule, I don't care what you think about me or my opinions. What I do care about are passionate, informed people who will bring their own views to the table. With stablemates like Jolisa, Emma and Russell -- and the Public Address System Massive including one highly opinionated Booker Prize-winning novelist, several film-makers and more arty-farties than you could shake a lily at -- I'm expecting the Algonquin Round Table on P.

5. I try hard to be all the way up front about my blind spots -- I probably won't cover a lot of live music because I find gigs literally painful, and there are others (like Russell, Graham Reid and Damien)  who do it better. 

Muse is also operating under practical constraints.  Yes, it's going to be very Dork-land centric unless I work out some serious sponsorship that allows me to travel.  I'll also be covering television, films and books a lot because that's in my wheel house, as the kids say.

6. The plan is to publish three posts a week, but that's open to negotiation dependent on how often I take a Douglas Adams-ish approach to deadlines.  If there's more to write about -- and I've got anything worth saying about it -- there will be more.  Or less.  Please feel free to e-mail tips, comments and suggestions via the dongle at the bottom of the post, but put MUSE in the subject line, otherwise the spam filter gets all clogged up .

COMING UP: Wednesday's post is a joint review of The King's Speech (on general release now) and a rather odd adaptation of Witi Ihimaera's Nights in the Gardens of Spain (which screened on One, Sunday night).  I'll be musing on how to do high-lactose melodramas well, and whether I'm just too hard on local drama.

And to end with a fine Public Address tradition, here's a charming but only marginally relevant You Tube video on how to shine in the high aesthetic line.  If you catch me acting like this, hit me with a stick. Please.