Posts by Craig Ranapia
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But let us parse Haden's statements. They amount to:
1. Convicting the complainants in the Brooke case of concocting a rape complaint after the fact.
Which is actually a pretty serious offence -- and if you extend that a little further, as has happened in other cases, so is extortion and perjury. If Haden (and Michael Laws et. al.) doesn't know, or care, about defamation one might think the broadcasters who give his a platform would.
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Right, that's it. Handbags at dawn!
Oooh, Miss Thing is throwing down! Hold my gold, bitches, I'm going in. :)
Seriously, Friday Night Lights is not my favourite show but I'll happily grant that the cast is excellent (Chandler and Britton's great sin is they deliver under-stated performances rather than showy Emmy bait).
Treme? Meh, there's a lot to admire but David Simon has a didactic streak a mile wide that too often overwhelms the storytelling in a rather unattractive way. The Wire was much more successful in showing rather than telling, and I just hope that next season Treme is going to hit the same sweet spot.
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And the Emmy noms are in. I'm with The Guardian's writer: what's with the ongoing love affair with Two and a Half Men And why do they hate David Simon?
Two and a Half Men may be a misogynistic pile of shit, but it's (a) enormously popular, and (b) a fairly traditional sitcom. What I don't get is why 30 Rock is still racking up the noms when the last season has been, frankly, dreadful. And Glee, IMO, is seriously over-rewarded for a show that suffers from Ryan Murphy's creative ADHD.
As my favourite tele-blogger Maureen Ryan says, the Emmys have such a solid track record of rewarding mediocrity and snubbing talent that you've just got to say FTW when they occasionally get it right. (And sorry, Wire-heads, I'm go out on a limb and say what I've seen of Treme is not doing it for me.). Not the biggest fan of Friday Night Lights, but Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton have been doing solid award-worthy work all along.
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And if you can work out what's actually going on on the basis of this morning's Herald news story, you're doing better than I am.
No even going to try -- can we please decide who's going to be massively incompetent and stick it? Not seeing the need for a central-regional-local government partnership here.
Do you think John Key has ever actually partied? Like, real hard-as?
No, otherwise he'd be telling us all to harden the fuck up and find a nice quiet parking lot.
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Yes.
Well, good luck with that then. I just think it's an impossible ask for the government to keep financing the kind of production framework that exists in the United States (where HBO ultimately only has to convince the shareholders that it's maintaining a profitable subscriber base), or even the UK -- where we may hold up the BBC as a gold standard, but tend to squint past the enormous amounts of tosh it's produced over the years.
Look, I don't much rate Radiradirah either, but I'll keep saying this: Sketch comedy is extremely hard to do at all well. If you want to talk about absolute shit, ask yourself how James Corden could co-create (and star in) something as good as Gwen & Stacey then put his name on something as horrendous as Horne & Corden. (Least said about Lesbian Vampire Killers soonest mended...)
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but I'd rather have an NZ series in the league of Cracker, Red Riding Trilogy, The Wire, Deadwood, Sopranos - hell, going back even further an Edge of Darkness (directed by a Kiwi) - than setting up a funding body to try and to capture lightening in a bottle like Boy or The Piano.
So, what you want is the kind of shows written, directed and produced by people who cut their teeth (and learned their craft) on industrial strength shit churned out by massive, product-hungry industries we seldom see here? If you want to put that production model to Cabinet, the best of luck to you...
Or put another way: Roger Corman gave a pretty impressive roll call of talent (from Martin Scorsese to James Cameron) their first credits. Don't know if that's much of an argument for the NZFC funding a string of Z-grade exploitation flicks.
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Congratulations on being the only voice questioning whether we should spend less on our own culture.
Who "we", kemosabe? Oh, be in no doubt that I'm all for arts patronage. Don't know if anyone else has been watching Kevin McCloud's Grand Tour, but it's hard to look at this and this without concluding that the Medici may have been downright reptilian but their contribution to Italian culutre -- and the legacy of Renaissance art and architecture -- is hard to over-state.
Still, I'd like to think that state patronage in a 21st century democracy is a little more open than that practised by the lords temporal and ecclesiastical of Renaissance Europe.
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But you can always argue that. People are dying! Maybe we should close all libraries and galleries, concrete our parks over and spend the money on healthcare.
Perhaps we should -- but my point is that the argument for state funding of the arts is no more self-evident than that for pot loads of public money (and anti-competitive "clean venue" legislation being passed with indecent haste) being poured into the Rugby World Cup.
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But it's not necessarily a good model for creative funding. Jackson basically wants a handful of people empowered to spend public money on their hunches. He's living proof of how magnificently that can work out -- but it's a bloody tough sell to Treasury. And, if anything goes wrong, to a news media only too happy to make an issue of it.
Well, it should be a bloody tough sell to everyone. I'm sorry if this makes me the in-house philistine, but no matter how you cut it, film and television production is enormously speculative and I'm not inclined to sneer at anyone who finds that a much harder sell that putting money into a new surgical suite at their local hospital.
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I don't necessarily trust Peter Jackson's judgement - he is a commercial filmmaker.
Excuse me? I'd be very much surprised if Vincent Ward, Jane Campion or anyone else consider themselves anything less than "commercial" film-makers, in the sense that no serious artist is going to dedicate years of their lives to a film (or book or music) nobody is ever going to see. The nobility of garret-bound obscurity and dying in poverty is grotesquely over-rated.
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