Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Feel free to note anyone else who needs congratulating.
OK, time to come out of the closet and own up to my total gay boy crush on Robyn Malcolm. No disrespect to the rest of the cast (especially after last night's kick in the guts Outrageous Fortune), but she just owns every scene she's in with that mix of satin and steel that wins Helen Mirren (or Goddess, as she's known in my house) every award she's nominated for.
And yes, kudos to Rachael King. I didn't really like Davey Darling - but Paul Shannon is definitely a very talented man, and if you're trying to write something that's all thing to all people, you just end up being nothing to nobody.
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Jeebus...it's really turning out to be a sucky week to be a arthouse cinema god.
Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian director whose chilly depictions of alienation were cornerstones of international filmmaking in the 1960s, inspiring intense measures of admiration, denunciation and confusion, died on Monday at his home in Rome, Italian news media reported today. He was 94. He died on the same day as Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish filmmaker who died at his home in Sweden earlier Monday..
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Dang... Those Shortland Street roots are showing - when in doubt start slaughtering the cast. :) But kudos to Rachael Lang, because I had the horrible sense (even without the promos) that there weren't any happy endings in store for Van and Aurora. Meanwhile, who wants to bet that we're far from finished see shit hit the fan at high speed?
Oh, and can someone please give Robyn Malcolm a special award for Best Fierce Bitch in a Television Drama? I can't pay her any higher compliment than saying she's doing the kind of work that wins Helen Mirren... well, every statuette, plate, gong and lump of perspex she's nominated for. :) No disrespect to anyone else in the cast, but Robyn just owns every scene she's in.
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Is anyone else a little uneasy that only women are victims of domestic violence under the hospital questions?
Don't know if I really want to turn this into a gender issue, Michael, but I've certainly seen way too much evidence that culturally and legally we're still struggling with the notion that women are perpetrators - as well as victims and enablers - of abuse in relationships and within families. If we're really serious about being a 'zero tolerance' society towards child abuse and violence in relationships, then it strikes me as a no-brainer that we're got to look critically at the biases we bring to the table.
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Still think Simon Dallow was great - they sometimes squirmed in front of him.
Indeed - one of the more pleasant surprises to come out of TVNZ was seeing someone I'd pretty much dismissed as a pretty but vacant autocue reader coming out as a pretty sharp interviewer. Can't envy the man getting the big desk - but I do hope he gets moved to 7 o'clock if they decide to de-fluff Close Up.
And having pretty ferociously dissed Lisa Owen, I've got to say she was improving - and that kind of interview is much harder than it looks, because you've got to make an endless string of instant judgment calls: how the subject is going to play it out, when to push (and how hard without it going to custard), when to just hang back and let the subject hang themselves, when a line of questioning is going nowhere and what to shift track to... You can learn a lot of it, but there's a certain degree of instinct there too.
And, I/O, I can tell you from experience that the ''obvious questions' quite often don't seem so obvious at the time.
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And how exactly can you tell a couple of good Southern men - or even better Southern ladies - are residents on the slopes of Brokeback Mountain?
Well, I guess this is the criteria:
Census results have revealed that there are just three gay couples living together in the South Island town, all lesbians.
Then again, there might well be hundreds of Sodomites and Sapphists in Gore who - like myself - don't actually think who they fuck is anyone else's business. God... I know the Sunday Star Times has to fill the pages somehow, but couldn't they at least try to come up with something that could be mistaken for actual news - and avoids the perception of up-themselves Jaffas sneering at the provincial hicks?
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This morning I also heard it was because of teh drugs and violent video games. OH COME ON PEOPLE! Whatever happened to violence begets violence?
Well said, Heather - I know one teacher who told me she came home from a parent-teacher conference concerning one of her 'problem kids', and seriously considered never going back. And we're not talking about a convent-reared hysteric who goes to pieces at a bit of adolescent male attitude either. She was genuinely terrified after being subjected to an obscenity-laded tirade from the prick's mother about how she must have done something to provoke being told by a 14 year-old boy that she was a c**t and deserved a 'good fucking'.
Somehow, I suspect that little charmer already gets smacked around quite enough.
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BTW, apropos of nothing Ingmar Bergman is now depressing the Almighty
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i assumed prime had torchwood and would play that first, but i hear tvnz has it. so maybe tvnz and prime are playing a game of chicken with their programming?
Well, if that's the grand plan - good luck to TVNZ counter-programming all that swearing, bloodshed and 'omnisexuality' (i.e. John Barrowman getting off with everyone and everything) against family-friendly Doctor Who at 7.30. Three certainly bottled out at putting Galactica back in the Saturday primetime slot they ran season one in. :)
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I concur about 30 Rock, Craig, and disagree about Studio 60.
To hideously misquote M. Loaf, one out of two ain't bad. :) Sorkin's work always depends on how much solemn pomposity you can stomach at any given moment - The West Wing? Nummy. Malice and The American President, not so much... and when you come to A Few Good Men it's almost beside the point, because Tom Cruise and Jack Nicolson are gnawing away at the scenery like termites on P.
Don't really know if a thinly disguised SNL can really bear the weight of all that significance, nor am I really interested in Sorkin's substance abuse or sociopolitical angst.
And let's face it, I couldn't imagine Matthew Perry ever nailing (let alone Sorkin writing) a line as elegantly set-up as "those shoes are definitely bi-curious".
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