Posts by philipmatthews
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Judy, Re: The Governor and the angry politicians, Trisha Dunleavy from Victoria in her book Ourselves in Primetime makes the case that Muldoon used the cost over-runs on The Governor as a cynical way of whacking TV One journalists, who he saw as too "aggressive" towards him. In the same book, Dunleavey argues that our mid-70s of two state channels running independently, one Wellington-centric, one Auckland-centric, might well have been the golden age of NZ television.
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We have a telepathic kid and a ghostly barman -- I wouldn't say Kubrick removed the supernatural element entirely.
You're right about Kubrick's mechanical pushing of audience buttons or directing of their responses, but Hitchcock did the same thing: Psycho being the best example.
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Never heard of Children of the Stones, had to google it. Reminds me of another: while going through some Sapphire and Steel posts last night, came across references to a much earlier occult-fantasy freak-out for kids called Ace of Wands. Anyone heard of this?
Fan site here:
An episode called "Seven Serpents, Sulphur and Salt"? A "magic adviser" on staff named Ali Bongo? Only in the (early) 70s.
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That Stephen King tantrum at Stanley Kubrick is just another example of an author getting far too precious about adaptation -- he would have been better off doing an Alan Moore and removing himself from the equation. It's been years since I read The Shining (that and Carrie are the only Kings I've read) and while it was definitely creepy there were things in it that worked on the page but would have been ludicrous on screen: topiary animals that seem to move?
About ten years ago, there was apparently an obsessively faithful mini-series of The Shining, with King closely involved. The fact that we all remember specific moments of the Kubrick and none of us seem to have seen the other speaks volumes.
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Or as one of my favourite bloggers, K-punk, puts it:
Watching now, Sapphire and Steel looks like Tarkovsky's Stalker mixed with Dr Who and Magritte. Science fiction with none of the traditional trappings of the genre, no space-ships, no rayguns: no anthropomorphic foes, only the unravelling fabric of the corridor of Time, along which strange, malevolent entities would crawl, exploiting and expanding gaps and fissures in temporal continuity.
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For me, my favourite horror films aren't necessarily the scariest. My favourites run to some of the obvious: Exorcist, Texas Chainsaw, Dawn of the Dead (Romero not Snyder), Nosferatu (Murnau and Herzog), The Birds, Wicker Man, Rosemary's Baby, Don't Look Now. But the ones that are actively scary are the ghost stories: The Others, The Haunting, even The Sixth Sense. As a kid, it was Poltergeist not Friday the 13th. There's some deep, nagging sense in which the ghost stuff is plausible. But hordes of the undead or masked psychos with knives? Not even in Christchurch.
Glad someone mentioned Sapphire and Steel. That one went beyond scary into weirdly, unidentifiably troubling.
With ghost stories again, there is a classic anecdote about Stanley Kubrick and The Shining. According to the doco that came out a few years ago, he told Jack Nicholson that The Shining is essentially optimistic as it suggests the existence of life after death ...
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The artists don't have to be out of their minds. There's a ton of great art made from a place of religious or spiritual sincerity that we can appreciate without necessarily having an iota of it ourselves: the art of Rothko or Durer or McCahon or Malevich, the music of Bach or Arvo Part or Led Zeppelin, the films of Carl Dreyer or Tarkovksy or Kenneth Anger ... Shouldn't be too quick to reject the irrational.
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I had a look at that survey as well. Despite the way it was mostly reported -- "More NZers believe in faith healers than God" etc -- I was surprised at how much belief there is for a country that is often said to lead the world in secularism.
Only 27% have no doubts about God's existence, but once you add up that 27%, the 18% who believe in God and also have doubts, the 8% who believe in God sometimes and not other times and the 19% who believe in "a higher power", you get up to 72% of NZers who can't be called agnostics or atheists. Who believe, most of the time, in something external/supernatural/bigger. I'm surprised at how high that is.
And only 8% think the Bible is the literal word of God, but another 33% think it is "the inspired word of God" but shouldn't all be taken literally. So 41% think that God dictated the Bible in some way? That seems high too.
And the thing about faith healers is that 39% think they can heal and the same number think that psychics, Tarot Card readers etc really do the business. And a staggering 44% believe in religious miracles. Not quite the Godless society yet.
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I dunno. My entirely unscientific observation is that there is more affection for Bob Harvey around greater Auckland than for Banks, if His Bobness decides to run (didn't look that keen on Close Up the other night). Banks has a lock on eastern suburbs/Remmers, but I'd expect Bob to have more appeal across the west, the shore, Ponsonby/Grey Lynn/Pt Chev and probably south too.
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Which returns us neatly to Foucault, via this great fun fact (taken from Wikipedia, sorry):
"In 1975 he took LSD at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Park, later calling it the best experience of his life."
Hats off. If you're going to take acid anywhere ...