What do you call a man with a seagull on his head?

Cliff.

Cliff Richard sang "Summer Holiday", and I've just been on one of those. There's your tenuous link for the day.

HERE IS A MAP.

We went to a place called Shelly Beach, just north of Coromandel. As we are spoiled by previous ownership of a campervan (and anyway, we have no big tent), we stayed in cabins. They are much easier to put up in the pissing-down rain, not that there was any.

Shelly Beach is aptly named, although it might also be called Very Shallow For Miles Beach, or perhaps It's A Long Way To The Water At Low Tide Beach. Neither of these are complaints, it's a great place, especially for small kids.

Much to the chagrin of my sister-in-law, I enforced the use of our old Primus camp stove to boil water for cups of tea, despite the availability of an electric jug about four metres away. Gotta at least pretend we're camping, right?

I found the Viking inflatable dinghy (wonder if it was made by these guys?) in its bag in our garage before we left, so after a quick inflation test, we took it to the beach with us. It gave sterling service, I got very sore arms from rowing it about the place, and the kids absolutely loved it.

This thing was bought for me (and presumably my brother) for christmas 1979.

1979!!!!

I biked over to Coromandel a couple of times, the second time I also went up Driving Creek Road. This is just to the north of Coromandel Town, and runs across to the other side of the peninsula. It is a metal road (i.e. gravel) in the classic NZ style - buchs-clad, lots of sharp, cambered corners, and great stepth^©. Biking up it was pretty slow, bottom gear all the way, no more than about 8 km/h.

A weird thing comes over me on roads like that, though. Even though it's bloody hard work, I'm constantly saying to myself, "I'll just go round that next corner, then I'll turn round and go back down." I didn't record it, but I must've gone at least a couple of km, and probably about 200m up before I finally turned around and went down again.

Going down a metal road on an old hardtail mountain bike isn't quite as much fun as I'd thought, especially when you're never sure if a car's coming around the next corner or not. Corrugations, annoying in a car, induce blinding blurriness on a bike.

We also visited the Driving Creek Railway, which I have gone on about at length before. Suffice to say it lived up to and even exceeded my expectations, and is highly recommended.

We twice visited the Driving Creek Cafe, just down the road. They are organic as an organ, and the only thing even vaguely close to meat was the baby goat weeding the garden. Pretty wicked nice food though, I even had a tempeh burger (in the process finding out what tempeh actually is).

The staff there all appear to be young hippies, and are all incredibly happy about everything. In this cold world, it's a little unnerving at first, but actually becomes rather infectious.

Pleasingly enough, they also had a good range of the Teatotal teas, which I vastly prefer to even an excellent coffee.

We came back home refreshed as hell, and I feel ready to attack the new year. I'll let you know if/when this uncharacteristic positivity wears off.

Short Reviews #1

Since I haven't added anything here for far too long, I will instead do a pile of short reviews of movies I've seen since Team America World Police.

Please also note that I had a DVD player which had a problem with minor scratches (the kind that most rental discs are covered in). This meant the majority of movies would have lengthy pauses somewhere during them, followed by the skipping of long and often important parts.

I have since bought a player that can handle the jandal, but I fear the old one may have coloured my opinions of some of the movies.

Un long dimanche de fiançailles (A Very Long Engagement)

I first saw this at my local boutique cinema, and, while they don't bring coffee to my seat at my house, I don't regret getting this out on DVD. Anyone who hasn't seen it should - no, must!

The commentary was very interesting too, although, as the director stated at the beginning, it reveals the huge amount of smoke, mirrors, blu-tak and string that go into making a movie. Taping a bunch of cats together springs to mind . . .

The Princess Bride

I was a little worried about this, as another 80s kids' fantasy movie wasn't anywhere near as good to watch as an adult in the 21st century. TPB never quite was a kids' movie though. It is still brilliant and hilarious. If you haven't seen it, do so. I find it quite inconceivable that you won't like it . . .

Don Juan de Marco

I remember at the time finding some parts of this movie annoying, and other parts excellent. Now (a month or so later), I can only remember the good bits - must've been quite good, then!

Cheech & Chong: Up In Smoke

Here's what I wrote about this for my fatso review:

"Only good for the dope-smoking jokes. There is very little plot to speak of, and what there is doesn't make much sense (although some of it is explained in the deleted scenes)."

Get Shorty

I really can't remember too much about this, but I know I liked it overall.

On a related note, please read something by Elmore Leonard (there's plenty to choose from!)

Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain

I'm not sure whether I like this or AVLE better. I think the latter is a better all-round film, but Amelie has a greater sense of fun, and some of the detail is brilliant. Another one you must watch.

Shark Tale

Hard to know which wins the donkey prize between this and Robots. Both are pretty awful, but I think this is the overall loser, from loss of points due to:

• trying to cash in on the whole Finding Nemo CGI/seafloor phenomenon;
• trying to cash in through the use of "fine actors" (Rob, Renee, Jack, Ange and Marty)
• using Will "AW HELL NAW!" Smith at all;
• general badness and boringity.

Enough about that one.

Labyrinth

Another 80s puppetry movie, and just nowhere near as good nowadays. I think maybe I was hypnotised by Jennifer Connelly and her superbrows, or perhaps I've just lost all my childhood innocence now.

Worth seeing for David Bowie's mind-bogglingly dodgy performances though. On a related note, see if you can find a copy of the video for Dancing in the street, Bowie's 1985 duet with Mick Jagger. It was for a good cause, but as someone else said, "man, they must've been really getting through the cocaine to even contemplate that."

Ray

Wow! This actually blew me away. I wasn't really that interested when it came out, just didn't seem like a subject I'd be that fascinated by. The Oscars it got seemed a bit like nails in the coffin really.

A colleague, whose movie taste doesn't coincide much with mine told me I had to see it, so to shut him up I put it on the fatso list. I was well wrong.

This is a brilliant biography - it doesn't seem to have anywhere near as much of the usual Hollywoodisation, which could have been there in spades, with several "overcoming adversity" angles. Jamie Foxxxxxxxxxxx absolutely deserves any accolades he gets for this role - I quite forgot that I was watching an actor for the majority of the running time. He really became Ray Charles.

Super Troopers

This is mentioned on The Internest in the same breath as Office Space, only it is about some State Troopers somewhere in middle America. It's a pretty fair comparison, although the old DVD player really had a hard time with this one.

What I did see was pretty good, but I'll have to watch it again without the smouldering rage brought on by constant pausing and skipping.

__

Alright, this has gone on long enough already.

Bye.

Anthropology today #2

[NOTE: I wrote most of this some time ago, it's a bit of a mess - if you get bored/annoyed/incomprehensed part of the way through, don't worry about continuing, I don't think it gets any better].

As I wandered past my local Chrysler dealership on the way home yesterday, a thought occured to me as I took in the beefy good looks of the new (to NZ) Chrysler 300C. It's a notion I've had before in one form or another, but it seemed to come in particularly coherently yesterday. Let's hope it's somewhere near as coherent when I write it down:

The 300C is a pretty new car, and it's flavour of the month, at least as far as styling goes. All the schoolboys (including the 40-year-old ones) want one and all that stuff. Even I like it.

As I walked past it yesterday though, I thought, "When does it stop being cool and new and interesting and stylish?" Inevitably it will - all new cars do.

I further thought, "Why is it that people don't seem to be able to recognise that this is going to happen?"

I further further thought, "Don't be so arrogant, pretty much everyone knows that these things happen - how is it then that they either pretend they won't happen, or forget that they will happen?"

I can see that this is already far less coherent than it is in my brain. Let me try a different example - fashion. Everything from Haute Couture to Hallensteins is cool in the present (stretching it a bit with Hally's, I know), but at some point it turns to shit.

Yet, rather than try and get something that will never date, or has already dated, people flock to buy these things that they know will be outmoded in a few months.

I don't have any answers for this, and I'm sure it's been analysed a billion times before as part of the whole "What makes something cool?" question, but I still find it interesting.

Perhaps it only happens in our Western Capitalist cultures - cool and fashion are just cogs in the great corporate conspiracy to make us buy more stuff.

The bit that I find most fascinating is the way everyone - from the dude in the street to the respected commentators - seems to ignore the way new items fall from popularity. Will Jeremy Clarkson still be raving about the Monaro in five years time? Or will he be laughing at it and ridiculing it, like he does with every other five-year-old car?

The really really interesting thing (maybe only to me) is that these same things that are cool/fashionable/whatever now turn into the opposite. In this way, they define what is cool next (by being not cool), and the cycle begins.

Maybe this goes some way to explain the regurgitation of fashions/style from twenty (or more) years ago?

Enough of this!

Fuck yeah!

Team America: World Police is, bizarrely, a film I hadn't really been looking forward to. Bizarrely, because I love South Park (also the fictional version), and I loved Bigger, Longer and Uncut as well.

No, I thought the world had seen enough of Trey and Matt's genius, and as for bringing back SuperMarionation, well it was OK in a camp kinda way in the '60s, but now?

Still, now that DVDs are pretty much on tap, I though I might as well add it to the list. I'm glad I did.

Turns out I'm Just Gay Enough to actually quite enjoy musicals, and this is a modern musical - in PUPPET form! In the process of finding links for this entry, I've read quite a few reviews, either overwhelmingly negative, or overwhelmingly positive. Not a one seems to say anything about the obvious morals of the Parker and the Stone.

Every South Park episode I've seen (and I haven't seen them all) has a very good (and plainly evident) moral lesson built into it. I don't know if people can't see past the offensiveness/hilarity (depending on their point of view), but these moral plots are there every time.

TA:WP is no different. Most of the movie is about ripping as much piss out of as many things as possible, whether it be action movies, Kim Jong-Il, or entire nations. Perhaps this breadth of pisstaking has confused a lot of viewers and reviewers, who expect a much more binary view to be taken.

However, you don't have to look too hard to see what they're trying to get across (I'm not gonna put it into words here either, figure it out yourself).

Personally, I really like their "fuck everything" attitude - why should a lack of support for the War On Terror mean you must therefore support the opposite?

Its getting near the end of the day here and I seem to have lost the thread somewhat. What I mean to say is that this is a great movie, with a great message, contrary to what you may have heard.

However, if you're easily offended, well, you can just ga'an and get fucked.

Some of the most interesting DVD extras I've seen too.

Metrolopis

Sorry about the mis-spelling. We have a cafe (actually, they call it a caffe) called Metropolis in my town, which a friend of mine insists on calling Metrolopis. It's stuck now.

I first watched this movie a long time ago. I can't remember exactly when it was, but I would definitely have been less than 11, possibly more like eight or so. I remember absolutely loving it at the time. I was also watching a lot of Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy about that time. I'm not sure why there was such a focus on these things - this was well before the video era, it must've just been what they had on after school (or on a Saturday morning) in England. Come to think of it, they should put those things on after school now, instead of PokeDigiMegagodIsoundlikeaparent.

Meandering back to the original point, I remember loving Metrolopis then. This time it wasn't so good. This may well be due to it being a "restored-exactly-as-Fritz-Lang-intended-even-down-to-referring-to-missing-footage" edit. I don't remember it being anywhere near this long - surely my attention-span at that age wouldn't have withstood it?

My 31-year-old attention span certainly didn't - I had to watch it in two goes! The second half seemed a lot better, more like what I remember.

The score is apparently also the original (presumably played live at each screening?) by Gottfried Huppertz. It is overblown and horrible, an absolute cliche of silent film. While this does make it seem more authentic, I had to turn it down so it didn't detract from the film so much.

This place talks about the Giorgio Moroder soundtrack from 1984, often misreported as a Queen soundtrack. It may well be this version of the film I've seen. I certainly remember the video for Radio Ga-ga, and recognising the bits they'd nicked from the movie.

Back once again to what I was talking about - while the film didn't grab me as such a brilliant, depressing vision of the future this time, I still love it.

It has such a wide-ranging influence, noticeable in everything from Blade Runner's bleak vision of the future, to the weird machinery of Brazil, to the architecture of the third reich.

The main plot (the heart is the mediator between the hand and the brain) is one of those old classics that are eternal and timeless.

The sheer scale of some of the scenes is astounding, too. There appear to be thousands of extras quite a lot of the time, and although some sets are obviously miniatures, others appear not to be. No wonder it cost so much to make!

Overall then, a great film. The flaws are overridden by its technical magnificence and historical significance.

On a slightly different note, this is the first silent film I've seen in a long time - boy, people really knew how to act back then, particularly with their hands. I've never seen so much actual clutching of breast (outside of "art" films anyway)!