Posts by philipmatthews
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
funnily enough, the da vinci code was also plagiarised from more scholarly texts with 'the holy blood and the holy grail' also seen fit to be banned and denounced thus equating the vatican with ngai tahu and its denouncement of song of waitaha with both books being essentially about lineage and myth as truth but in essence, the core truth remains
I'm just really, really looking forward to reading Islander's response to that ...
-
Abyss was 90% good with the other 10% cheese. I'd put it well above Titanic.
In my view, True Lies is his one real dud. The cheese is well over 50% and the attempts at comedy are laborious. Not Arnie at his best either.
-
I know you're on a hiding to nothing looking for much depth in a popcorn flick, but should we just grant that there's something rather obnoxious about the Coca-Colonialism in play here.
I'm expecting Pocahontas with action scenes. As they'll be James Cameron action scenes, I'm not complaining. But I was never very excited by the generic fantasy art -- did someone say a Yes album cover come to life? -- in the trailers.
-
James Cameron's inability to tell a story not smothered in corn-flecked cheese
Terminator was smothered in corn-flecked cheese?
But I will give you The Abyss, True Lies and Titanic.
-
Shakespeare for High Schools: Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Richard III, Othello, Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare Never for High Schools Under Any Circumstances: King Lear, Hamlet. Also, please note, they are PLAYS. They should be watched, not read.
We had Macbeth in the sixth form, Lear in the seventh. The cool thing about Macbeth was we got to see the Polanski movie which is as gory as all hell and includes a nude scene -- how to make Shakespeare fun for 16-yr-old boys. As opposed to some droning eight-hour BBC version of Lear.
Anyway, this was back in the 80s, before the internet, NCEA and Baz Luhrmann. Hopefully the teaching of Shakespeare has progressed beyond memorise a handful of key quotes and themes and regurgitate them in the exam.
-
Hmm, perhaps that's true of any novel you're forced to read at school? Then again, maybe not: I bonded fiercely with all my obligatory school reading, and those novels and plays and poems still have a palpable aura for me.
The only thing I can remember reading and liking at high school was Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. I wish I still had my essay on the question, "How is Slaughterhouse Five a Tralfamodorian novel?" Other than that, my experience is that high school English can easily ruin literature -- esp. Shakespeare. The idea that spotty 16 and 17 year olds can have any real understanding of King Lear is ludicrous.
-
(JUST THINKING):"...in OZ I've never come across the routine racism I see often in Christchurch."
Yeah, you often hear that about Chch. But I wonder if the city simply has a more active and visible - rather than larger - Far Right ? Some research I've been doing recently suggests that the people of Chch - at least in the late 1970s/early 1980s - tended, in fact, to be more progressive on racial issues (attitudes to Maori, 1981 Springbok Tour) than people in other New Zealand cities and towns.Indeed. I think it's in Tom Newnham's book Of Batons and Barbed Wire, which appeared soon after the 81 tour, that you see that two-thirds of Chch residents opposed the tour. There were huge mobilisations here. On May 1, you had marches coming from Merivale in the north, Riccarton in the west, Sydenham in the south and Lancaster Park in the east meeting in the Square -- thousands and thousands of people involved. And then the street battles around the first test here (brilliantly described by Geoff Chapple in 1981: The Tour, which deserves to be back in print). Given all that opposition, you might wonder how one John Key of Bryndwyr, a Canterbury University student that year, didn't manage to form an opinion he could remember 25 years later.
-
That's funny, 'cos I though the thing wrong with recent New Zild literature was that it was all written by 20-something-year-old BA chicks about 20-something-year-old BA chicks. Often musing about Big Themes while abroad. Which is why we all latched onto the one about the Gay Angel in France.
I believe Bill Manhire now casts an eye over each fresh intake of young gels and tells them "Write about what you don't know".You forgot to include the bit about how contemporary NZ fiction is really just a conspiracy between Bill Manhire and Victoria University Press.
Anyway, I don't think Elizabeth Knox was a "20-something-year-old BA chick" when she wrote The Vintner's Luck. I would have thought that a Wellington writer coming up with a story about a peasant winemaker and a fallen angel in 19th century Burgundy would be as good an example of writing about what you don't know as you could get. Unless she has a time machine.
-
“The media are showing their bias and are not listening to what Mayor Williams is saying. They are mindlessly repeating the lines given to them by John Key on timing of text messages and that Mayor Williams has been ‘aggressive’ in his communications to North Shore MPs, including John Key, MP for Helensville. For example, they are ignoring William’s criticisms of the National-ACT legislation for Auckland’s new Super City,” Jim Anderton said.
Gordon Campbell at Scoop had very good observations along those lines. He concludes:
This beatup is merely the Act Party dealing to one of its most persistent critics. I mean, when you have Cameron Slater publicly lamenting the mayor’s lack of ‘decorum’ you know you’re dealing with the theatre of the absurd.
His post is here:
http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/2009/12/14/campbell-tolleys-last-stand-those-mayoral-text/ -
Those links illustrate my beef with NZ fiction, of which Witi Ihimaera is part - everything is nostalgia, mysticism or nostalgic mysticism.
Yes, including such nostalgic mysticists as Maurice Gee, Charlotte Grimshaw, Owen Marshall, Emily Perkins, Carl Nixon and Damien Wilkins. All writing on "contemporary themes with characters who live in a world I recognise".