Bob Dylan
Claudelands Arena, Hamilton
Review: Bob Dylan’s a great with grasping growl
Munster mash of All Blacks all-time low point
One of the most inglorious days in All Blacks history is set to be relived on the big screen.
Guinness – brewer of the official beer of the Irish Rugby Football Union – has commissioned a short clip immortalising the plucky club side’s historic 12-0 win over the All Blacks during the side’s 1978 tour of the UK, the only time any Irish team – including the national side – has beaten the All Blacks in 109 years of competition between the two nations.
As with the movie Invictus, the All Blacks will be portrayed not as the brave heroes Kiwis love to see, but as machine-like automatons trampling all before them – at least, until the brave boys of Munster stepped up.
All Blacks wing Bryan Williams, who played in the game, said he’d be keen to watch the clip, saying he loved the way the Irish continued to celebrate the upset.
“Two years ago I was contacted by [Welsh great] Derek Quinnell and asked if I would like to go over and take part in a dinner celebrating the anniversary of the day [Munster] beat the All Blacks,” Williams told the Sunday Star-Times. “On the day [of the loss] we were mortified, but years later I am up there celebrating with them. It is one of the beauties of rugby.”
The Guinness clip, which has a working title of Munster – Immortality, will be built around centre Seamus Dennison’s early-match tackle on Stu Wilson; a shuddering hit credited for inspiring the Munster team.
The voice-over says: “They were just bus drivers and butchers and builders, 15 unlikely lads. All up against a certain truth: You don’t beat the All Blacks. Everyone knows this. Every team, every expert, every crowd.
“Everyone except for little Seamus Dennison. With a single tackle he stopped the rampant All Blacks. Dead. And every Irishman grew 12 feet taller.”
The one-minute clip will be uploaded to Guinness’ official YouTube channel in time for the start of the 2014-15 European rugby season and will also be broadcast as a promotional clip at movie theatres in the UK.
Williams said the result was “a great day for Irish rugby” but admitted the All Blacks had under-estimated Munster.
“They came out breathing fire and before we knew it we were in a real dogfight and just couldn’t get any momentum or flow on during the game. They just tackled their hearts out.”
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– Sunday Star Times
Review: The 100-year-old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
REVIEW:
Seriously What movie exec would approve so long-winded a film title
Well, in this case, it’s justified. This is the wholly fitting cinematic rendering of the best-selling and multi-translated Swedish novel of the same name (don’t make me repeat it) by Jonas Jonasson. But whether you’ve read the book or not, the absurdist caper, as ludicrous as it gets, is guaranteed to delight and entertain you for a worthwhile two hours at the flicks.
The improbable, absolutely-not-true story begins with the titular centenarian, Allan Karlsson, doing exactly what it says on the poster – absconding from his rest home while his fellow residents prepare to celebrate his birthday.
However, unlike the elderly British fellow who recently did a runner in real life and took off to France to attend the D-Day commemorations, his fictional Swedish counterpart is simply looking for a change of scene.
Karlsson trots into the village to buy a ticket on any bus out of there, where he encounters a frustrated skinhead and inadvertently kicks off an hilarious and oft-bloody chain of events.
Noticeable perhaps because the 100-year old Allan rather resembles F Murray Abraham’s performance as Salieri in Amadeus, the narrative employs that film’s devices of an (English language) voiceover and the intercutting of Karlsson’s contemporary escapades with tales from his past life. Advised by his mother at a young age: “Don’t think, just let life be what it is”, Karlsson evokes Forrest Gump as he unwittingly plays significant roles in all manner of world-changing events.
The fact that he’s a perennially naive and unassuming player may annoy some viewers but it is also core to the film’s charm.
Playing Karlsson at all ages is “Sweden’s funniest comedian” (apparently), Robert Gustafsson, and his likeability means we’re happy to trail along as Karlsson makes friends and influences people in veritable road-trip style. The two lively stories – a crime caper in the present tense, Karlsson’s extraordinary backstory in the past – unfold in tandem, and it’s enormous fun. The comedy is black, from the opening explosion through to its unexpected, laugh-out-loud conclusion. When Karlsson climbed out of that window he had no idea of the adventure ahead, and neither will you.
THE 100-YEAR-OLD MAN WHO CLIMBED OUT THE WINDOW AND DISAPPEARED (M) 114 mins
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– Sunday Star Times
Upper Middle Bogan shines
REVIEW:
Bess Denyar (Annie Maynard) is a hypochondriac with a really bad case of reflux.
Her work-from-home architect husband, Danny (Patrick Brammall), is a horny bugger, constantly trying to jump her, even with the kids in the next room.
Her children sit at opposite ends of the IQ spectrum: Edwina (Lara Robinson) is a sharp-tongued high achiever; Oscar (Harrison Feldman) is a mouth-breather whose understanding of the world is, let’s put it this way, a bit simple.
Her mother, Margaret (the incomparable Robyn Nevin), is a blue-ribbon matron, brimming with disapproval and busy with interference. Bess lives in a lovely suburb in a classy house and drives an expensive car. Despite her comfortable existence, she has never felt comfortable in her life.
Bess is also a doctor, so when her mother ends up at her hospital after a minor diabetic episode she quickly twigs when her own blood type does not match either of her parents’: she was adopted. Furious about the deception, Bess decides to meet her biological family. Cue tin opener applied to can of wriggly critters.
Bogans – the “lower socioeconomic sector”, “hoi polloi”, “unwashed masses”, pick your label – are free meat for comedians, easily taken down with cheap gags about taste and about how they talk, what they wear and their coarse, uneducated, unmannered ways. Upper Middle Bogan doesn’t go there.
Instead, series creators/writers/producers Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope – the husband and wife team behind the fabulous The Librarians and Very Small Business – have taken a more respectful route.
Their portrayal of the car-mad, drag-racing outer-suburban Wheeler family is affectionate, not judgmental. The humour is honest without being belittling, as Kath & Kim was, nor patronising, like The Castle. And they are not depicted as dumb, as those two productions did their characters.
The habits and fashions and idiosyncrasies of the “lower” class are in plain view – and implicitly made fun of – but that’s OK, ribbing can be worn as a badge, too. Besides, every comic observation is played straight and rings true. I write as someone with flourishing bogan branches on his family tree.
Hope’s direction is accomplished, the scripting is tight, observant and very funny, and the performances are top shelf. The humour has a satisfying depth that comes of a storyline that creates genuine drama and pathos.
It’s unfair to single out anyone in a universally terrific cast, but special mention must go to Glenn Robbins, who is brilliantly restrained as Wayne Wheeler, the one-glass-eyed bogan dad, loving, loyal, head of the family drag-racing team, and to Michala Banas as Amber, Bess’s new-found foul-mouthed bogan sister unwilling to accept her new sibling.
Quibbles The jiggling camera work, jumping in then out, wobbling left then right, is annoying. That aside, if Upper Middle Bogan fulfils the promise of its opening episodes, it’ll be a gem.
Review: Postman Pat: The Movie
REVIEW:
An unavoidable clash with a vital Warriors rugby league match saw reviewing duties for this full-length reimagining of the children’s classic deputed to a 4-year-old and his 68-year-old grandmother.
Pat has already endured one modernisation – the more recent television offerings have seen him become a victim of the internet age, delivering eBay parcels instead of letters – but here the threat is to his very livelihood as an evil consultant plans to replace Pat with a troupe of robotic replacements.
When Pat (Green Wing’s Stephen Mangan does the spoken word, boy-band burbler Ronan Keating the songs) is denied his well-deserved holiday he sets out to win one instead by triumphing in one of those interminable Simon Cowell talent quest things.
Grandma thought it was above average, because the plot actually hung together, didn’t patronise the kids or try to be too ironic, but still retained intelligence. However, she thought the 5-8 crowd would prefer it to the pre-schoolers. The 4-year-old considered: “It was really funny. It was better than the TV because it was so long. The robot was really bad. The robot cat was amazing – its teeth were so big it could probably eat your ear off your head. But I didn’t feel good at the end, I started crying, because it gave me a headache.”
Fun though it would be to attribute the headache to Keating’s chirrups, we cannot in good faith attribute a subsequent Starship visit for flu on Pat or even the evil management consultant (though they can usually be blamed for most things).
POSTMAN PAT: THE MOVIE (G) 87 mins
INXS biopic tells an all-too familiar story
He was, at the end of the day, a charismatic narcissist with a Jim Morrison complex. Arms spread wide like Jesus, leather pants painted on, a second-hand Jagger swagger and, according to one girlfriend, “the Taj Mahal of crotches.”
Talent, too, of course. The boy spoke fluent Mandarin. And there’s no denying Michael Hutchence could sing. “He was one of the greatest frontmen of all time,” reckons young Aussie actor Luke Arnold, who plays Hutchence in INXS: Never Tear Us Apart, a two-part mini-series kicking off this Thursday on TV3.
“People who knew Michael told me he made you feel like you were the only person in the room, whether you were talking to him at a party or he was singing in a huge stadium. He seemed to be a really creative, caring, inventive guy, at the start of his career, anyway. And he never dreamt of being a singer. He was this wannabe poet, and it was only because he became friends with a bunch of musicians at high school that he was suddenly thrown in front of a microphone.”
Arnold is in LA, taking a break from shooting another series. As he drives around looking for a place to park, he jokes that he was born to play Hutchence. “Oh, yeah! For me, this was a dream role. Even in high school, I’d joke that if I ever became an actor, this would be the role I’d be called on to play because of my long, curly hair. Whenever INXS came on at parties, I was on the dancefloor, hamming it up. So yeah, it was weird that I really did end up playing him in this story.”
Said story will be very familiar, not just to INXS fans, but to anyone who’s ever watched a rock’n’roll biopic. We meet a bunch of na
Making the Sound of Music hum
The Sound of Music is among the best-known musicals of all time – and will be in New Zealand with a cast of Kiwi kids next month. Michelle Duff gets the jump on what we can expect here, at the Singapore premiere.
Never work with children or animals, they say in showbiz. In their infinite wisdom, the producers of The Sound of Music didn’t just throw away the rule book, they punted it across the hills, possibly in the key of C minor.
When the Andrew Lloyd Webber production of the popular musical put out a casting call in New Zealand, the response was huge. More than 1000 kids pulled on their best tights for auditions in Wellington and Auckland, vying for the roles of the von Trapp children.
After three intensive days, 18 children were selected – a rotating cast to play the two cities, with understudies for each.
It’s the third time the producers have gone through the gruelling audition process, with hundreds of kids auditioning in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Singapore, the other main centres where the show has premiered. The amount of times resident director Anton Luitingh has heard the line “So long, farewell, it’s time to say goodby-ye” really doesn’t bear thinking about.
But on a muggy Singapore morning, he says it’s always worthwhile.
“Without the kids The Sound of Music isn’t the magical show that it is, the kids are the stars of the show and the kids are what makes it hum.
“I want the kids on stage to be kids, I don’t want them to be little machines – we need them to have that energy. The 18 kids we chose I can seriously say are stunning, and I can’t wait to work with them.”
At the Singapore premiere that evening, one of the show’s stars is the gorgeous Chloe Choo, who plays little Gretl von Trapp. While the cute Singaporean would clearly not be the product of a von Trapp coupling, the audience is too enamoured with her to care.
From the beginning, they made the call to cast “beyond Caucasian”, Luitingh says.
“They look a little bit like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s kids, but it’s great. They bring a little bit of international flavour into the show. It also gives non-Caucasian children the chance to flaunt their skills.”
The Sound of Music opens in Wellington on September 12, with the Auckland season beginning on October 3. Based on a true story, it follows the spirited Maria, who is sent from a nunnery to become the governess of the widowed Captain von Trapp and his seven children.
It is set against the backdrop of an imminent World War II, as Maria transforms the von Trapps lives through music before they are forced to flee from the Nazis across the alps from Austria to Switzerland.
This latest incantation of the London Palladium production has a largely South African cast, and began in Cape Town in January. Singapore is the second stop on the tour, which will head to China after New Zealand.
“South Africans do tend to be the flavour of the month, because there’s so much talent in South Africa and people enjoy working with South Africans,” Luitingh says. “And, obviously, from a financial point of view we work well for the producers.”
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As resident director, Luitingh is in charge of making sure the show hits the highest notes in each city, “a complete blueprint of anything you would see in London or New York”.
It’s not without its challenges. The cast of a touring show tends to be younger, because it is difficult for those with families to be away from home. A tired cast and crew who had been living in each others’ pockets for eight weeks has to be managed with tact.
Staging the show in different theatres brings its own headache. “How wide is the stage, what are the lights like, where are the nuns going to walk . . . they are the practical challenges.”
The only part of the show that has changed between countries, apart from the children, is the pace of the humour, he says.
“Sometimes I will change the rhythm of it – some jokes work really well in South Africa, but they don’t go so well in Singapore. For some reason, in Singapore, they find the religious aspects of the show really funny. I don’t know if that’s because there’s so many different religions here.
“I’m frantically there with my notebook saying ‘OK, they didn’t pick that up. We might have to do that in another way’.”
Producers also sought advice on whether using the swastika on stage would be appropriate in Singapore, because it had been traditionally used in Buddhist culture as a symbol of peace.
Luitingh auditioned the New Zealand kids in April, alongside resident choreographer and kids director Duane Alexander.
The audition process was intensive, with two days of vocal workshops and dancing – with cuts made at each stage – before whittling the list down. “Yes it is terrible to be cut at the end, especially if you make it to the last 50 or 60, but I’m not a ‘bad cop’. We want to give these kids an experience rather than a harrowing audition process,” Luitingh says.
“You’re looking for the theatre kids who are singers, actors, dancers, and who have that little bit of magic you’d expect of someone who is going to make it into the top 18.”
Luitingh will fly to New Zealand almost immediately after the show’s Singapore run, where he and Alexander have three weeks to work with the children to get them to an international standard.
For the cast, it’s a hectic life. They perform an average of eight shows a week from Tuesday to Sunday, with vocal warmups beginning before lunchtime for the weekend matinee shows.
There will be a few cast changes from Singapore to New Zealand. International opera star Lesley Garrett, who played Mother Abbess in the original West End show, will replace South African soprano Janelle Visagie to reprise her role here. And Captain von Trapp, played by Andre Schwartz in Singapore, will be taken over by Mark Rayment.
But the role of Maria belongs to Bethany Dickson, who was last on stage in New Zealand as Sandy in Grease. When I meet her she’s nervous about opening night. “I generally try not to talk too much during the day, and try to save my voice so I can give my very best. I always find opening night stressful, but I just try and stay as relaxed as I can,” she says.
At 26, Dickson is much younger than the Maria in the original 1959 Broadway production, which starred Mary Martin, aged 46. When The Sound of Music film was released in 1965, Julie Andrews was just 30 when she played Maria.
But the original Maria von Trapp, who inspired the musical, was around 19 when she was sent to become a governess in the Von Trapp villa.
For Dickson the character of Maria has come full circle, with her mum playing the role and Dickson playing Liesl in a South African production when she was 13. Her mum has been one of her greatest fans, coming to watch the show “a good few times,” in both Cape Town and Johannesburg. How many “Um, about 20 times.”
The role of Max Detwieler, Von Trapp’s boisterous best friend, is played by musical theatre veteran James Borthwick, 66. He had been part of several large international productions to cast from South Africa, including Chess, Sunset Boulevard and Singing in the Rain.
“It’s great for us as well,” Borthwick says. “It’s a huge compliment, because these companies have very, very strict artistic standards which they are not prepared to compromise on. These people have massive reputations that have to be held up and we get experience at this level of production that we wouldn’t otherwise.”
Before The Sound of Music, Borthwick had travelled through Seoul and the Philippines with Phantom of the Opera. But he pulled out of Phantom when four straight months on the road became too much. The Sound of Music was much more manageable, with performers having two weeks back home in South Africa before coming to New Zealand. And he loves the show. “It’s just got great, old fashioned values.”
Luitingh thinks it’s the themes of the musical that give it such a universal appeal – a family battles tragedy and finds love again, the nostalgic songs . . . all set against the chaotic background of a world war.
“There are themes there that aren’t exactly light and fluffy, and I think that has made it stand the test of time. It’s a story of humanity, of the struggles we face in our lives, and are still relevant in 2014. If a father can go home and hug his kids a little harder after watching The Sound of Music, then that’s what it’s all about.”
– Sunday Star Times
The directors who refuse to say cut
Visiting a retired Frank Capra at his Sierra Nevada hideaway, Clint Eastwood was baffled.
“I always thought he could be making a film right now. He’s as lucid as could be. Here’s the great Frank Capra not doing it.”
Eastwood is recalling the famed director at 94, three decades after his last film. “I always thought: I wonder why that is”
Eastwood, who at 84 just released the musical Jersey Boys and wrapped shooting on the Navy Seal drama American Sniper, isn’t the only film-maker blowing past conventional retirement age.
Later this month, Woody Allen, 78, will, like clockwork, release his latest, the French Riviera romantic comedy Magic in the Moonlight. He’s also already on to the next one, shooting in Rhode Island.
Also out in New Zealand this month is Venus in Fur, from 80-year-old Roman Polanski. And in May, 83-year-old Jean-Luc Godard, the perpetual enfant terrible, premiered his 3-D Goodbye to Language at the Cannes Film Festival.
Both European iconoclasts remain as mischievous in old age as Allen and Eastwood have been steadfast.
Polanski’s film is a gloriously comic, self-referential gender play.
Godard’s film – in which his dog played a starring role – was more experimental than most 25-year-old’s would dare. It was greeted in Cannes by an audience member’s cry: “Godard forever!”
At a time when literary giants like Philip Roth, 81, and Alice Munro, 83, have quit their craft, many of cinema’s auteurs have stubbornly persisted, while at the same time churning out frequently acclaimed, often vibrant films in a youth-driven industry.
“In Hollywood, there is that kind of hackneyed, commercial thinking where they think, ‘oh, this guy is over the hill, this guy can’t direct that kind of picture’,” says Allen.
“But the truth of the matter is that in my lifetime there have been many directors like John Ford, John Huston, Billy Wilder who were wonderful as they got older and they made sometimes better pictures than they made when they were younger.”
Certainly, film history is littered with directors who worked well past retirement age. Akira Kurosawa, Sidney Lumet and Robert Altman all worked into their 80s, producing some fine films: Altman’s Gosford Park, Kurosawa’s Dreams, Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Huston, at 81, died months after the release of The Dead, his Oscar-nominated adaptation of the James Joyce story. The French film director Alain Resnais was active right up to his passing, at 91, in March.
Such longevity would only be possible for widely admired film-makers who still have the drive to tell a story and the industry weight to attract financing. Because of tight-fisted studios, it’s arguably harder today to get a movie made than ever before, adding to what’s already a hugely taxing profession.
Martin Scorsese, 71, sounded slightly dejected by this part of contemporary moviemaking when releasing The Wolf of Wall Street, an explicit romp of a movie few would associate with a director in his 70s. But it also took years to get a green light.
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“The problem is, it’s too much,” Scorsese said last year.
“It’s almost becoming that I want to do so much, and when you get to this vantage point, there’s not much time left.”
Around the same time, Scorsese guessed he had about two movies left in him.
Ridley Scott, 76, has mirrored Scorsese in prolificacy. Along with the Moses tale Exodus: Gods and Kings due out later this year, he has a dozen projects in development as a producer and plans for a Blade Runner sequel.
But few have kept their edge like Scorsese.
Late-period films are generally more placid things. Often, even a good film for a master film-maker late in life is merely a footnote to their younger, more urgent work.
Such a fear has previously prompted Quentin Tarantino, 51, to declare that he’ll never become “an old-man film-maker”. He has instead suggested he will quit moviemaking around 60 so as to not dilute his filmography with weaker rehashes.
But such catalogue care is of little concern for others, who continually filter their lives through a camera lens. Between the two of them, Eastwood and Allen have combined to make a staggering 20 films since turning 70.
What compels them to make a film year after year The answer, Allen said in an earlier interview, was pure distraction from sitting at home pondering, “gee, life is meaningless. We’re all going to die”.
“I get to get up in the morning and go into work and there’s Penelope Cruz, these beautiful women and scintillating guys – Alec Baldwin, Jesse Eisenberg,” said Allen.
“So I’m distracted for the day with trivial problems.”
If for Allen, film-making is a way to order his day-to-day life; for Eastwood, it’s a means of staying young. Age, he says, is “a mental outlook”. Maintaining interest – in moviemaking or anything else – is his secret to life.
One striking commonality between the likes of Allen, Eastwood and even Godard is that none are abundantly precious about their films. None, for example, are likely to go past take two or spend five years labouring over a project.
Whatever keeps them going, one director has them all handily beat. The Portuguese film-maker Manoel de Oliveira is 105. Earlier this year, he shot his latest, a short about Portuguese history.
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