Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Speaker: Key: Concession Not Recession, in reply to Russell Brown,
What the law did was reverse the part of the Employment Relations Act 2000 that says that the “real nature” of the employment relationship is ultimately to be determined by the court, rather than by the statements of the parties to the original contract or the text of the contract itself.
I don't think you have to be anti-union or a corporate tool to note who, generally speaking, has the advantage when it comes to years of "kill 'em all, and let the courts sort it out" litigation. Hint: Not the employee.
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Speaker: Key: Concession Not Recession, in reply to Alec Morgan,
Link to Helen Kelly’s long response. The upshot is the government and Warners knew the dispute was settled and ‘boycott’ lifted prior to the Warner execs meeting in NZ.
Alec: If you’re going to keep revisiting this, could you please stop using sneer quotes around “boycott”. If you still don’t grasp what the SAG statement declaring The Hobbit a “non-union” production actually meant, Kelly should.
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Speaker: Key: Concession Not Recession, in reply to Hilary Stace,
I’m still waiting for Paul Holmes to apologise to Helen Kelly.
I'm still waiting for Helen Kelly to apologise to Richard Taylor for characterizing him as the leader of a lynch mob. Guess we're both going to be holding our breath for a looong time...
But I'm going to leave this be, because (like Russell I suspect) I'm so fucking over being pissed on as some union-hating class-traitor corporate-tool for daring to suggest that nobody's wearing the white hat here.
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if our laws protected satire and parody better
Feh... I'd note Private Eye is in its sixth unspeakably vicious decade of gnawing off the hand that sues it, despite the United Kingdom being the word-leader in libel tourism.
And, for my blood, it took real balls to run this at the high tide of lunatic Diana idolatry:
The Late Princess Diana
An ApologyIN recent weeks (not to mention the last ten years) we at the Daily Gnome, in common with all other newspapers, may have inadvertently conveyed the impression that the late Princess of Wales was in some way a neurotic, irresponsible and manipulative troublemaker who had repeatedly meddled in political matters that did not concern her and personally embarrassed Her Majesty The Queen by her Mediterranean love-romps with the son of a discredited Egyptian businessman.
We now realise as of Sunday morning that the Princess of Hearts was in fact the most saintly woman who has ever lived, who, with her charitable activities, brought hope and succour to hundreds and millions of people all over the world.
We would like to express our sincere and deepest hypocrisy to all our readers on this tragic day and hope and pray that they will carry on buying our paper notwithstanding.
E. Strobes
pp Lord Gnome
The Daily Gnome
Candle-in-the-Wind
Humbug
Berks -
Hard News: Irony Deficient, in reply to Russell Brown,
If you’re doing Gerry Brownlee fat jokes on a regular basis, you should contemplate what that says about about your own talent.
Quite. And people who think it’s hilarious to make cracks about Brownlee being a “former woodwork teacher”? Really think about where that’s coming from for a second; especially if you’re the kind of person whose hackles go up at sneers about the Labour Party being run by a cabal of academics and former student politicians who couldn’t get a real job with their sociology degrees. Personally, I don't think it's a bad or intrinsically ridiculous thing that a woodwork teacher can rise in the National Party, anymore than a former school dental nurse becoming a fairly well-regarded Health Minister.
But I digress. The really depressing thing about folks who trot out Brownlee fat jokes? It's lazy when he's a minister of the Crown who provides near daily opportunities for vigorous urine extraction.
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Hard News: Irony Deficient, in reply to Kumara Republic,
And even then, it was kind of depressing how heavily even Agnew and Parry leaned on "Jenny's fat and Helen's butch" gags -- which is not only intrinsically offensive and unfunny on multiple levels, but it's kind of sad coming from two really smart performers whose own work shows women don't have to buy into sexist (or homophobic) tropes to be screamingly funny.
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Hard News: Irony Deficient, in reply to Pete Sime,
I suppose the NZ comedy scene is in good health when Cal Wilson is turning up on QI
I’m afraid to watch. One of Fry’s *cough* less endearing traits is the way he patronizes women panelists. OTOH, it was grimly amusing watching one episode where Jo Brand visibly choked back the urge to tell Fry to go fuck his condescending self on more than one occasion.
I love some of Ricky Gervais’s other material but his portrayal of life in an office managed by a certifiably insane bully was too much for me.
Nah, I have a more basic problem with Gervais. Just the relentless, remarkably nasty contempt he shows for his audience. Karl Pilkington is perfectly happy to be perpetually shat on by Gervais & Stephen Merchant. But schoolyard bullies on steroids is one-note shtick, and it doesn't reflect on the audience any better than the performers. IMO & YMMV, of course.
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Although TV3 in particular has been able to build a successful development strategy around comedy in recent years, the hard stuff – satire, and particularly political satire – is basically absent from our screens these days.
And I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing – because the “hard stuff” is really tricky to pull off. I’m a terribly bad hipster, but I’ve seen a couple of episodes of the latest series of The Thick of It and… meh. Peter Capaldi is still auditioning for the Lee Emery part in the Full Metal Jacket re-boot. It just seems to be making the same banal points with ever-decreasing effect: Politicians are fucking stupid. Spin doctors are barely functional, grossly over-paid sociopaths. A change of government hasn’t changed any of that one whit. Tories suck.
To paraphrase a line from Gore Vidal’s The Best Man: I don’t mind political satirists being bastards. It’s being stupid (as well as dull, glib and predictable) bastards I object to. 7 Days, love ya heaps. But you really need a douchebag jar (h/t New Girl) on set for the Gerry Brownlee fat jokes. Seriously. Just stop it.
Compare and contrast Yes, [Prime} Minister, which (IMHO & YMMV, of course) stands up remarkably well not just as pure comedy, but as political satire long after the more topical allusions have become nigh on incomprehensible to anyone but hardcore British politics nerds. I think it had a lot to do with creators Antony Jay & Jonathan Lynn having a gimlet-eyed view of British politics, but it never tipping over into outright contempt for their subjects or the audience. They also made the central trio of Jim Hacker, Humphrey Appleby and Bernard Wooley (by nature as well as name) amusingly complicated – and beautifully written – comic characters, not one note types.
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Hard News: Irony Deficient, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Come to that, a lot of people don’t find funny funny. They see a programme like ‘The Office’ with those nasty, nasty characters and assume it’s advocacy for that worldview.
I think you’re right, up to a point. OTOH, I don’t find Anger Management at all funny because another Charlie Sheen joint where every woman in the room is a disposable slut, a barking psycho or a castrating shrew just isn’t.
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Hard News: Media3: Standards Showdown, in reply to Russell Brown,
and the importance of public entities complying with the OIA.
It’s not just important, it’s the law. Something that shouldn’t really need to be repeated, but as long as the penalties for flouting it makes the proverbial slap on the wrist with a wet bus ticket look like an all day session with Madame Lash, it will remain so. (For that matter, why should politicians give the OIA some teeth when, to be perfectly cynical, they're among the biggest beneficiaries of the piss-weak status quo?)
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