Wednesday, September 30, 2009

It's A Global Conspiracy!

It was a momentous moment in my life this week.

After three years without any sort of VCR, I finally purchased an HDD DVD recorder. It’s awesome.

I use a cable service offered by TelstraClear, which broadcasts all the channels offered by digital satellite service, SkyTV. The signal’s pretty good, and the set-top box breaks down about as often as the old Sky box did.

I couldn’t get Sky at my new location, primarily because I don’t own the house and would have no right to install a satellite dish there (the landlords live in the same building, so I couldn’t even do it sneakily).

Sky introduced a Tivo-like service called MySky. It was much hyped; a box-top set that let you watch one channel while taping up to three (or four?) others – and all in high definition. Not to be outdone, TelstraClear announced it would be introducing a similar service. In July. 2008.

I was excited and keenly watched the months tick down. And as we went into September 2008 I was starting to get puzzled. But I held out. I think I saw a story about two months ago that said TelstraClear had finally decided what sort of set-top box it would introduce.

Eventually I gave up and took matters into my own hands. I was in the electronics store anyway, so thought: “Why not put a DVD recorder on hock while I’m here?”

Now I’ve got a year of “interest free easy payments” to look forward to. But at least I can suffer through it easier now with a cool new Panasonic HDD DVD recorder. Murphy’s Law now dictates that TelstraClear will introduce its new Tivo-like service sometime next week.

Anyway; my point, and I do have one, even though I’ve wandered like several hundred miles from it; was that the new HDD DVD recorder taught me something interesting about the whole electronics industry.

I’ve got a 32-inch Acer LCD TV that’s about two years old. The new DVD recorder remote has a function on it which allows you to turn the TV on and off, and change channel and fiddle with the volume. The manual came with a list of brands catered for, and a two-digit number to get the remote to work on said brand.

Acer was not listed.

Which left me puzzling; who do I call about this: The Acer people to find out what their TV code was, or the Panasonic people to find out why Acer TVs weren’t listed?

I chose the latter, and called the “customer care” line in Auckland. It was a toll call, but was answered (get this) by AN ACTUAL PERSON! A friendly guy named Graham.

I explained the situation, and Graham gave me this amazing revelation: Apparently, various technology companies around the world make and sell TVs for OTHER technology companies around the world.

Like, your new Panasonic could have been made by Goldstar for SONY in a deal with the electronics branch of McDonald’s and Rodney’s Chicken Shack in Waimate.

Graham suggested I find out through process of elimination. It was only a two-digit number, after all. So I went home and typed in codes up to 36 where it finally worked.

With this information in hand, I then went back to the DVD manual figuring that, logically, the code number would tell me which company manufactured my TV. This revealed unto me that my Acer LCD was made either by NEC or AIWA.

I now have absolutely no idea what to do with this information, other than to blog about it and let people who previously read this blog expecting entertainment to go: “Huh, he’s really losing it.”

Yes, this is true, but I’m losing it with a Panasonic HDD DVD recorder. So: Ha!

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Quick: While Nobody's Listening

TV people do some strange things.

I realise that’s a sweeping comment. People who aren’t on TV do strange things too; but TV people are exceptionally good at it. Although I actually only have one example to call upon to prove my point.

I’m a big fan of rugby league; specifically Australian rugby league. League was a break-away from rugby union when rugby players in England’s coal mining areas noticed the clubs were making crap loads of money, but the players were expected to pay for their own shoelaces.

There were many arguments; and as is often the case where money is involved, neither side was willing to budge – ie, those who had the money refused to give it away and those who wanted the money weren’t able to get.

This was early 1900s. The break-away reached New Zealand around 2007 or so, and in 2008 a tour of Australia and Europe was organised. This featured some All Blacks and others, and was generally a success.

Oh, there was one Australian they picked up on the way to Europe. His name was Clive Churchill, and in Australia he is now considered the all-consuming godfather of rugby league, although nobody really says why, because that would mean acknowledging that he was there with a bunch of Kiwis.

Well, long story short, Australians embraced the game. Especially around Sydney where it now dominates rugby union and Australian rules (essentially Gaelic football).

Anyway, the 2009 rugby league season is coming to a close. The grand final between Melbourne’s Storm and Paramatta’s Eels will be this weekend. It should be a good match: the heart goes with Paramatta, the mind with the Storm.

In Australia, Channel 9 broadcasts the league. Being a commercial channel, naturally they slip ad breaks in as often as possible. But they also sell the rights to pay-per-view channels around the world which don't break for ads.

The team of Channel 9 commentators is led by an old chap named Ray Warren. He’s brilliant. Consummate professional is he. It's hard not to get caught up in the game when he's verging on a stroke everytime a player passes the ball. But he has this weird quirk that I just don’t understand.

When Channel 9 goes to a commercial he says: “And I’d just like to welcome all the viewers watching in New Zealand, in the UK on ESPN and in the United States…”

He slips this welcome in when the domestic audience isn’t there; like it’s our little secret. “Don’t, for God’s sake, let the Australians know anyone else is watching!”

Like it would be some massive blow to the Aussie TV ratings for the locals to discover that Brits, Yanks and Kiwis were watching the league, too. I find it very bizarre.

Now, for any North Americans reading this, I urge you to watch the grand final this weekend. The game’s excellent. It’s a lot like American football in principle, only the game doesn’t stop between downs (so it’s much faster), there’re six downs to a set and only lateral passes are allowed. Check it out.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted? They Freakin' Blog About It

It is spring here in the southern hemisphere … as in: Spring!

There are blossoms appearing (but still being blown off the branches by icy winds); lambs apparently born and frolicking completely ignorant of their big upcoming trip to Europe in time for the Christmas roast; and cute girls are wearing short skirts over-top of their winter tights.

Spring – one of the three seasons we can all agree on a name for. Spring, summer and winter have that commonality. We Kiwis call that other season autumn. North Americans call it fall. I’ve got to say, I think we have the upper hand in this, because “fall” indicates something is going to land on you.

“Come the fall…” makes me think either you’re going to fall down, or something is going to collapse on you. Autumn seems to make more sense. It’s so neutral. It even has that weird “umn” thing going at the end, like it’s not entirely sure of itself. It’s a true season of change.

But autumn is not what I wanted to discuss. Spring is a time of waking from winter’s dormancy, and as a long-term single guy I’ve actually found that the only time of the year when I really find my romance nerves twitching is spring.

It was this emergence of romantic feeling from its annual hibernation which probably caused me to spend an inordinate amount of this past weekend mourning lost love. While watching sport, of course.

It’s a love I treasure, but don’t often talk about. She was beautiful and exciting and full of life. It was like she’d been kissed by the God of Fun. She was a florist who would light up a room brighter than any bouquet.

We used to meet up occasionally and talk; have coffee or lunch, and it was all very chaste.

The major sticking point was that she was engaged. But that was OK, because she told him everything from day one and I, in turn, never tried to break them up. It was totally dysfunctional, but all above board as well.

No, we never kissed. Yes, I did see her naked. Yes, we did go on one (fiancĂ©-sanctioned) date and it was a lot of fun. We both understood the situation: she wasn’t going to break up with him to be with me; and I wasn’t going to ask her to.

Unfortunately, he was Canadian and wanted to take her home to meet the family. They packed up and, oddly, moved to Australia – which is like 1600 miles in the wrong direction. Apparently it was a money thing.

I haven’t heard from her since. But I learned through acquaintances that they parted ways in Australia; then she met somebody else, moved back to New Zealand and is living up north somewhere.

I’m happy to be a fond memory for her. To me, she’s so much more. Why else, I wonder, would my memories return to her when spring so heartlessly jabbed at my slumbering desire for love?

Insert lonely sigh here.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Questioning the Laws of Zombieism

Honestly, I don’t have an obsession with zombies. There are just some things about them that kind of fascinate me.

I was watching Resident Evil: Extinction on the movie channel this morning before work. I’ve seen it before so I wasn’t so much following the story as wondering about a few strange things in this particular zombieverse.

I understand it’s the third in the Resident Evil trilogy and I haven’t actually seen any of its predecessors. But it seems that there’s a virus floating about that turns people into zombies and an evil corporation and Ali Larter wandering around as a superhot psychic kung fu and weapons expert who kills zombies with the same efficiency that a nuclear explosion kills moths.

I don’t know how long ago the outbreak of zombieism began in this story, but in this film somebody said six months. There’s a convoy of survivors in trucks, driving around trying to stay out of the zombies’ way.

Now these are some impressive zombies. For a start, the moment they became zombies they all put on trousers and grey, green or black clothes. There wasn’t a single zombie out there wearing a bright red Jean-Paul Gaultier dress or carrying a Prada handbag. Not even a yellow t-shirt.

Nearly as amazing were the survivors. They’ve been driving around a desert for six months and all the women still have perfect hair and makeup. Nobody’s going: “Shit, we’ve been out here for months, there’re no baths or showers around and we’re all rank.”

In the film a few people get bitten by zombies and a few more get eaten by zombies – who haven’t had a decent meal in forever so they're rather enthusiastic. Yet they’re still on their feet, staggering about. They all move at two speeds: Full and shamble.

The people who get bitten all slowly turn into zombies. Yet during the metamorphosis the other zombies still try to kill them. And I started to wonder; at what point do the other zombies just go: “Oh, he’s one of us now, we should back off.”?

And what do the zombies hope to achieve when they reach the changing victim? I mean, the bitten person is already zombifying. Do the zombies want to taste the last vestiges of the person's humanity?

Picture this: You’re a zombie and you’ve attacked a person and you’re gnawing on their leg. Suddenly their zombification is complete and you notice the flesh has kind of gone stale. Yuck. Now do you apologise to your new zombie colleague for chewing on them? Do shrug and give them a light-hearted “arrrrgggh”? Is this the sort of thing that happens all the time on zombie sitcoms?

I think, if it was me, I’d just give an embarrassing smile and say: “Y’know, I think you’d look just great with a red dress and a Prada handbag.”

Thursday, September 10, 2009

My Little Splinter of Classic Mania

I love The Beatles.

I was raised in a fairly strict Baptist family and my mother’s kooky friend from a radical religious cult kept sending us comic books that were so conservative you had to pay them to open the pages.

These comic books were great masters of ideology. I seem to recall something about two Christians venturing out into the world doing God’s will. They prayed a lot and cast out demons and that sort of thing.

What I do remember is that the comics put the blame for the social revolution of the 1960s firmly at the feet of The Beatles. And I think that's just awesome. I did back then, too. It was my internal rebellion against God.

I had always liked them when growing up. I didn’t even mind that My Sweet Lord wasn’t talking about Jesus. What a rebel that George Harrison was.

The town I grew up in had one radio station and a playlist that stopped sometime in 1943. What it did have of modern music was stuff like Bobbie Gentry and certain slower numbers by Carole King. When it finally got hold of McCartney’s sentimental dirge Mull of Kintyre it went on high rotation for about three years.

But that was about as close as it dared get to The Beatles.

When I was 17 I finally bought a Beatles’ greatest hits tape. All the tracks I had heard from time-to-time and never knew who did them suddenly had a common name. I was instantly in awe.

I bought books and other best-ofs. I listened to Hey Jude every morning while getting dressed for over a year.

I determined that I liked mostly what came after Revolver, yet the first actual Beatles album I owned was Rubber Soul – bought second hand off a guy who was moving to Canada.

Then, about a year ago, a photographer friend at work gave me a DVD. I put it in the computer and discovered it contained every single Beatles album ever made. Including the three Anthologies and Let it Be… Naked.

Suddenly I was able to put everything in perspective. And there were some memorable moments. Such as when a mellow guitar slide in You Never Give Me Your Money on Abbey Road took me straight and vividly back to me as a four-year-old hanging out in the family lounge with my eldest sister’s friends.

Me and music have that sort of relationship.

But when you look at The Beatles you can see their music – although fantastic – wasn’t the entire source of their fame. The early Beatles flourished largely on the back of Brian Epstein’s marketing abilities. Their personalities and music obviously gave him a fantastic product to market; but it was because he marketed them so well that they succeeded so incredibly.

And I guess that’s why, 40 years later, their music still sounds fresh. And why they can market a Beatles Rock Band electronic game and why they anticipate it will sell millions upon millions of copies. Not to mention introducing a whole new generation to the music of the Fab Four.

So, welcome back John, Paul, George and The One With The Big Nose (who no longer answers fan mail, apparently).

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

A Flicker of Kiwi Cinema

New Zealand cinema has a long and interesting history. Well, it's got a long history. OK, it has a history.

Seriously, though, Kiwis fell in love with the big screen quite early. There were films being made here in the early 1920s and some bloke even devised an early way to make talkies (though his method never caught on).

Anyway, a guy I follow on Twitter is a big fan of foreign films. Him being overseas officially makes Kiwi films foreign. I offered to give him a list of cool NZ films he might be able to track down.

These are in no particular order, except that I quite like them.

Goodbye Pork Pie – this 1981 comedy is a Kiwi institution. A length of the country road trip with two unlikely fugitives in a yellow Mini. The yellow Mini remains an icon in this country. Not only did the film show Kiwis being Kiwis, it showed some things we either do (or want to do) that aren't exactly legal: smoke dope, car surf, steal petrol, stick a big middle finger at Mr Plod etc. Director Geoff Murphy was later lured to Hollywood to make sequels to bad movies (ie, Young Guns 2, Fortress 2 and Under Seige 2). Before he left, though, he made a string of top Kiwi films such as The Quiet Earth, Utu and the lesser Pork Pie clone Never Say Die .

Second Hand Wedding – is mentioned this early because it was directed by Geoff's son, Paul Murphy. This 2008 film is a light comedy about a goodhearted woman who loves hitting the garage sales to pick up some bargains. Almost qualifies as NZ's answer to Australia's classic The Castle but doesn't quite have the same deep-cultural-cringe-laugh thing going on.

Sleeping Dogs – NZ's first 35mm feature film appeared in 1977 and was directed by future Hollywood director dude Roger Donaldson (Species, Dante's Peak, The Recruit and The Bank Job). The story is of a man known as Smith (a young Sam Neil – Jurassic Parks 1 & 3, Hunt for Red October, Dead Calm, The Piano and Dirty Deeds to name but a few of nearly 100 appearances to his credit) who is on the run in a dystopian society. Donaldson – who is technically Australian, but we won't hold that against him – also more recently revisited his Kiwi roots with The World's Fastest Indian in 2005.

Once Were Warriors – put the dark side of NZ culture on the world stage. It was helmed by top director and bad transvestite Lee Tamahori, who later went on to make Mulholland Falls, The Edge, Along Came a Spider, the Bond flick Die Another Day and Nic Cage's 2007 flick Next. Tamahori jumped to mind because The World's Fastest Indian starred Anthony Hopkins, who also starred in The Edge.

Came a Hot Friday – a 1985 slightly askew comedy about two conmen trying to fix a horse race in 1949 NZ. Features a stand-out performance by late legendary Kiwi comedian Billy T James. James also appeared (vocally at least) on the next recommendation – Footrot Flats: The Dog's Tale. This 1987 animated flick brought to life a beloved cartoon strip about everyday events on a disfunctional NZ farm. While in every theatre people walked out saying: "That's not how I thought The Dog was meant to sound..." it was always a hiding for nothing for writer/director/cartoonist Murray Ball. Everyone had a different idea of what The Dog was meant to sound like. The farmer was obvious, who else could play a Kiwi farmer but John Clarke? But Kiwis were too close to The Dog to realise Ball had actually made a good choice in Peter Rowley. The film was well reviewed and received elsewhere in the world. It also gave NZ its new unofficial national anthem, courtesy of Dave Dobbyn.

So far it's been largely entertainment over art, so let's head down Jane Campion lane with An Angel At My Table. The 1990 film stars Kerry Fox and is a sensitive and powerful story about the life of esteemed Kiwi novelist Janet Frame. Frame, a brilliant recluse who only died a couple of years ago, was so misunderstood as a child that she ended up in a mental institution and was scheduled for a lobotomy before her writing suddenly started winning awards.

Illustrious Energy – is a largely forgotten NZ film, but one I've always held in high esteem. It's a drama that follows the fortunes of two Chinese goldminers during the Otago gold rush. It is almost like a nugget of Kiwi cinema that you'll need to dig hard to find.

Snakeskin – when newbie director Gillian Ashurst decided she had to get a road movie out of her system she wrote Snakeskin. It's an east to west tale that goes from sunshine to darkness, comedy to dramatic tragedy, clean fun to dark perversion. This is done subtly, deliberately and paying homage to the genre all the way. Kiwi audiences expecting another Goodbye Pork Pie just weren't up for that. So when Snakeskin won a slew of awards at the NZ Film and TV Awards in 2001 people began mourning the decline of NZ cinema. In fact it remains a solid, entertaining film starring Melanie Lynskey (whom Americans will recognise as psycho girl from Two And A Half Men) and American Boyd Kestner (GI Jane, Black Hawk Down, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood). Sadly, Ashurst hasn't directed features since, though I understand she's still behind the camera, making documentaries.

The Devil Dared Me To – falls distinctly in the "watch it only once and pick a rainy day when you're already half drunk" category. I mention it here because, well, it had potential. And I try to stick with talent from Timaru (haha). After their off-the-wall series Back of the Y Masterpiece Television (see earlier blog) Matt Heath and Chris Stapp were somehow funded to make a big screen film. Sadly, they ran out of money at some point well before they expected to, which is why the film seems to ramble about and finish suddenly.

A couple of late additions: If you're looking for Kiwi comedy you pretty much can't go past Sione's Wedding. It's known elsewhere as Samoan Wedding and was largely the production of comedy troupe The Naked Samoans. It was a big hit here, but was unkindly reviewed internationally by screen nazis who simply didn't "get it". Maybe the jokes were too "in" for their liking. The general gist of it is a group of lads who never out-grew their teenage antics have been banned from the upcoming Sione's Wedding. Sione used to be part of the group. However, some fast-talking allows the boys the chance to attend; provided they can each find a date. A proper date. The plot unwinds in fairly obvious fashion, but the jokes – visual and verbal – truly make the film memorable.

No. 2 – was the first feature film by writer/director Toa Fraser. It starred esteemed American actor Ruby Dee as the matriarch of an extended Fijian family living in Auckland. In a superb mix of comedy and drama we watch her seek out the life of her family over the course of a day as she beligerantly browbeats her family into preparing a feast. Dee does very well, but I simply could not buy her as Fijian. That was my only criticism of the film, which throws its story out on many threads and then draws them together at the end. Also features a fantastic Kiwi jazz-blues song written by Don McGlashan and sung by Hollie Smith.

Well, I think I've wasted enough time on this. You might be wondering why I haven't even touched on the works of Peter Jackson. It's because his light shines so bright I don't want to dazzle you all. Seriously, PJ's stuff is second-to-none right the way through. Just watch everything for fun, laughs and lots of blood on the early stuff. From brain-eating aliens to lovesick hippos with machine guns to real-life murder to dwarfs with big feet to giant apes; he's done it all.