🌲Review - "The Seekers" (1954) dir. Ken Annakin🌎

'The Seekers' is a British, Colonial epic set, and partially filmed in, New Zealand. It is one of the few foreign films (or films in general) to be made in or about NZ during that period. 

The verson I watched had suffered from colour deterioration, making some scenes hard to see. 

Story wise, it was watchable, but dated. 

As expected from a colonial piece, the New Zealand landscape and the Maori culture are on exhibition - almost fetishised. The introduction notes that the NZ government arranged for the co-operation of Maori tribes to make the film. A claim which seems paternalistic, also weird,  considering the main Maori actor, Inia Te Wiata, was based in London.  

An awareness of History seemed not to be important. The Maori fight the settlers using spears, not Muskets. The look of the Pakeha settlment resembles the American frontier more than the Antipodes. The landscape as shot at Pinewood studios looked different from the scenes in NZ. 

Overall, the Seekers is an all right film, but it's interest is more important as a document of how "the south seas" were perceived in the mid 20th century and as a rear example of a (partially) New Zealand film, rather than a timeless movie.

🌎Review - "The Torchbearer (2016)" dir. Stephen K. Bannon🔥

Torchbearer is better than some other Bannon/Citizen United films. undefeated was physically and mentally painful to watch. Torchbearer restricts itself to mental torture. 

It looks much better than the undefeated, limiting its use of stock footage to when it is more appropriate and uses archive footage and location shots, which at least match the topic of conversation. 

Torchbearer opens with sound bites from comedians and the media attacking host Phil Robertson for holding extreme beliefs. I didn't know who he was, but it isn't important because none of the criticisms are addressed in the film. Whatever he is, he is a typical choice for a Bannon film; a university educated (Masters in Education according to Wikipedia) person who tirades against Universities. St Paul preaching to the pagans, we are told, is like preaching in the middle of Harvard.  

That gets us to the biggest problem of this movie; It is factually garbage. According to Bannon/citizens united/Robertson (if any of them actually believe their message), Isis's biggest problem is that have rejected God. Isis aren't religious fundamentalists but a hippie death cult in the vein of The Manson family or Jonestown. In fact, all of humanities problems occur when people abandon God. The American Revolution was more peaceful than the French Revolution because American values come from God unlike the French, which was secular. Nazis were bad because they read Nietzsche instead of followed God. 

This film's points are as obvious as an Egotist with his name on the side of buildings. Images of the Nazis are flashed up against pictures of Planned Parenthood (get it?) while we are reminded that Scopes was supported by the ACLU and Oppenheimer read Hindu texts.  

There is nothing to be gained from watching this film.

On the plus side, this film isn't very long. 

💻Review - "Jpod" by Douglas Coupland🗣

This is a annoying Canadian novel from a decade ago about early-2000 youth culture, the rise of China and video games. It hasn't aged well, probably due to the fact that it is not good. 

The protagonist is Ethan, who works in a computer game company with Wacky coworkers and he has a wacky family. Characters do wacky things that nobody in the novel finds particularity strange. Events just happen but that isn't interesting, so the characters just discuss pointless stuff, possibly to simulate boredom (yet the novel describes the characters a super focused and working nights). It is a novel which includes a list of all three letter scrabble words and the author appears as a character. 

Everything that this novel tackles has been done better somewhere else and reading it just annoyed me.  

💸Review - "Generation Zero (2010)" - dir. Stephen k. Bannon🇺🇸

When Bannon was occupy

This film is better than "the Undefeated". I didn't hate it. It still isn't good. Bannon's style of of putting vaguely related stock footage under audio of interviews is used here. This time it is about the 2008 financial crisis. 

Adopting Generation Theory, the idea that the culture of generations travels in cycles  from complacent to crisis, the film offers a conservative explanation of why the market crashed. A gaggle of baby boomer politicians/academics/pundits etc. explain that young people in the 60s (their own youth in that period is left undiscussed) radical changed the moral centre to focus on the individual. This allowed for the great capitalist era of the 80s followed by the financial crisis. 

I don't think I have much more to say about this film.

⛪️Review - "Sunday Teasing" by John Updike🎇

Great Updike story about a pseudo-intellectual who spends Sunday winding up his wife and ultimately reflecting on the hollowness of life.  

It has one of my favourite opening lines; "Sunday morning: waking, he felt long as a galaxy, and just lacked the will to get up, to unfurl the great sleepy length beneath the covers and go be disillusioned in the ministry by some servile, peace-of-mind peddling preacher."

I'm not sure why I like this line so much. Parts of it are simple, the use of 'he' for an unintroduced character both sticks us right in the middle of the story, and helps us to see from, Arthur's, the protagonist, point of view.  

There is something else I like about this line. Possibly because it has the entire conflict of the story in this first sentence. The use of Galaxy to describe Arthur's early morning state, also links to the cosmological perspective which Arthur takes in his life. Through the story Arthur is focused on theology, but seems unrestrained when it comes it winding up his wife. This last bit is preconsideredIn this opening lines; he is avoiding is church, the practical, and intra-human application of his beliefs.

🇺🇸Review - The coming war on China: dir. John Pilger🏝

It is disappointing that this movie doesn't work. It was almost a good movie about how American imperialism has, and is continuing to, damage small-island communities in Asian and the Pacific. But instead the film tries limply to make the argument about US aggression against China by spending it's time focusing on the wrong evidence. 

The film is Made after the victory of Donald Trump and touches on the increased likelihood that his victory has meant for war. But here the proportion is all wrong; while spending Forty minutes about nuclear testing during the Cold War, the film only briefly mentions the Donald. No mention is made of, for example, the Lunatic Michael Flynn who had seemed to believe China has worked with Al Qaeda and Isis. (Unless Pilger somehow had predicted Flynn's rapid fall and knows that he would be gone for good.)  

While parts of this film elsewhere could have been good, a bizarrely sycophantic section in the centre of the film focuses on modern China. This brief section of the film parrots the mainstream Chinese media line. While a film about US aggression does not need to explore every abuse and atrocity that China has been involved in, The Coming War on China engages in full-blown red-washing. That is unforgivable.  

📆Review - Billy Liar (1963), dir. John Schlesinger💷

Thoughts tending to ambitions 

*Spoliers*

Billy Liar is a kitchen-sinky type movie starring Tom Courtenay as the title character. During the film, Billy imagines himself as a general of the fictional country of Ambrosia which is fighting a war. These fantasies are getting in the way of his life. At the start of the film, we are introduced to Billy awake in bed, already late for work. Instead of rushing to the job, Billy is saluting and  we are shown the adoring crowd and military parade. 

These disruptive behaviour is similar to what Eli Somer calls "Maladaptive daydreaming". The folks who suffer from MD suffer from complex, detailed, daydreams  often with themselves as great figure. 

Maladaptive daydreaming limits Billy's life by the end of the film, when instead of running away to London with the only girl who seems to get him, he returns home to dwell in fantasy. The film shows Ambrosia's army marching back with Billy as he returns home. 

These kind of lifestyle problems destroy people's lives, and society is only just beginning to look into it now. But this marvellous, little film had it all figured out over 50 years ago.

⚰Review - "Death Register" by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa😕

The depressing sort of morbid.

Yeah, it is good.

Although it is not so much a story, but more of the recollection of the death of Akutagawa's mother, infant sister and father. A short forth section covers Akutagawa's visit to a graveyard and the discomfort associated with that otherwise uninteresting place. 

Each section is fascinating; his mothers mental decay is described with blunt, honest brushstrokes. The opening line "My mother was a madwoman" hides nothing. It places Akutagawa at a distance from his mother, similar to the distance he would have with each of his departed family members. 

The story is filled with brilliant little details to fill the ugly reality it describes. Any author can write that somebody died, but Akutagawa gave details to the world he presented, grounding each death with heavy flakes of reality. 

"...gold teeth mixed in with the tiny white shards of bone at the crematorium."

"...I used to get remnants of her clothes to put on my rubber doll."

"I dozed off now and then... I would wake to find the long funeral procession still winding its way through the streets of Tokyo in the autumn sunlight."

(This last detail from his mothers funeral provides a contrasted with with father's funeral where "a great big Spring moon was shining down on the hearse.")

🇺🇸Review - "The Undefeated" (2016) - Dir. Stephen K. Bannon🌨

When Bannon was a feminist

This is a bad documentary. 

It is the life story of Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin until 2011. Everything else is wrong about this film too. Especially the title 'The Undefeated' isn't spin; it is a lie. Even The narrative argues that she was defeated. No attempt is made to justify why this film is called the undefeated.

Actually it seems no attempted was made to justify anything creative done in the film which is made with interviews played over stock footage. Compared to some other right-wing populist films (Brexit - The Movie) which are trying to convince people of their policy positions, this film's merchandise is cliche. The movie has a structure like my old secondary school assignments, rushed together to so something can be handed in, content and quality ignored.

But this is kinda why it is interesting. Some of the cliches ("They didn't see us coming") used are the same when Bannon was part of a team manufacturing populism during 2016 Presidential race. But some of the cliches used back in 2011 are the opposite of the ones used in 2016. 

'The Undefeated' is superficially feminist. The narrative the film puts forward is that male establishment (the boys in the playground) disliked the strong, female politician which the film argues Palin was. Apart from her 'conservatism', the major reason her establishment critics dislike her is because she is a woman, the film argues. A Montage  of comedians making jokes (not including Tina Faye) about Palin opens the film and places that argument a the head of the 2 hour onslaught. 

Avoid this film. 

🇳🇿Review - Chronesthesia (2016)⌚️

It is what it is, but it isn't Wellington

I just saw Chronesthesia, a New Zealand low budget drama. It is a sunnier verson of the Butterfly Effect. The film held my interest. The story is decent and although slick in many respects, the major twists are guessable 10 minutes before they film seems to want to reveal them.

Besides the story, the films strengths are its acting and the editing. But even here the strengths arn't quite synced. The lead, played by Hayden j Weal, is described inside the film as a jerk and not getting along well with people. But the role is acted likeable, and always seems pleasant and sociable. 

A similar contradiction exists in the location of the film. It attempts to be the definitive depiction of Wellington and goes about doing this by showing lots of locations around the city. On a low budget, they  use the cities natural light and every day in this film's Wellington is bright and sunny. (The exception is the picture's climax; but even the computer manufactured mother of a storm passes, allowing a montage of sunny again Wellington.)

Anybody can produce good looking footage of Mount Vic. The point of a movie is to dipict what life is like to live there.

🏙Review - "New York to Detroit" by Dorothy Parker📞

Not a lot to say about this one.

It is a transcript of a phone conversation. A woman called Jean from NY is calling Jack in Detroit. They have had a romantic relationship in the past, Jean is still madly in love with Jack. Jack is uninterested, he spends the conversation complaining about the connection and how he can't hear Jean. When is friends arrive, he seems more interested in talking to them than with Jean.

That is about it. 

✉️Review - "Collectors" by Raymond Carver🏡

This was a short, uneventful story which I had to read twice to make sure that I wasn't missing anything. It reminds me of the type that are set as close reading exercises, and I normally like this sort of modernist story where people are just going through life. I didn't click with this one.

The plot is basic: An unemployed man is waiting for letter. A vacuum cleaner salesman arrives at the house, saying that Mrs Slater has won a free cleaning. The narrator claims that Mrs Slater doesn't live there and that he is to poor to purchase a vacuum cleaner. The narrator seems more motivated to make it clear that he can't afford it, rather than out of concern for the cleaner. The salesman proceeds to clean the house anyway, and picks-up the letter when it arrives. Claiming that the letter is for Mr Slater and that he would "see to it." Then the salesman leaves.

Was there any meaning to it? It was just a slither of the daily routine of two people. I guess what is remarkable about it is that another author may have made the story farcical, the story of a man going through the motions of cleaning a house for the wrong person, who had no intention of buying a vacuum cleaner either. But this story here is just mundane. 

🖼Review - Ways of seeing (1972) - John Berger

It is a case of you don't know what you've got until it's gone. I was vaguely aware of John Berger, mostly hearing him referred to as the guy who gave his Booker prize to the Black Panthers. So as a result of the coverage of his death, I was introduced to his 4-episode, 1972 documentary Ways of Seeing. 

This documentary is up there in quality and passion with such great documentaries of the era such as Carl Sagan's Cosmos. It does have a slower pace than something made now, but it never feels dull. 

Aimming to demystify 'high culture' from the chains of heavy terms, Berger covers European painting from 1400 - 1900 and the echoes in mid-20th century culture. 

My favourite episode (or the one for which I took down the most notes) was the third, which discusses art as a commodity, but then looks back at why this is. The European oil paintings of this era, according to Berger, are the 'Images of the things which are desirable." Rich people had painters paint them along side their property, livestock, mistresses, slaves and junk to preserve and show off there spender. It was "a medium which celebrated private possessions."

👽Review - "A princess of Mars" by Edgar Rice Burroughs👾

Review - "A Princess of Mars" by Edgar Rrice Burroughs

(With musings about why I should write a space opera, but probably won't) 

I finally got around to reading A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The novel is famous for being mad into a forgettable film by The Asylm and then into an even more forgettable film by Disney. The book is fun, even if times it does get to anthropological. The strange titles which most characters have get a bit confusing at times.

The book is almost a western, but on Mars. It establishes the Si-fi plot where the 'civilised' humans align with the primitive natives to defeat the evil (thing Dune or Return of the Jedi).

So, where does it leave me. I'm thinking of writing a space opera, but probably won't. I have scribbled down a brain storm which resembles Henry IV in space. This could pretty amusing be. A celestial nation ruled by a leader who seized power through force, recently fallen out with his heir. This youthful dauphin has been lead astray by the comic relief, secret hero of this epic. But the prince must redeem himself by defeating a braver verson of himself, leading the revolution against his father. Most likely it will go into the pile and never be developed farther.