Where does evil come from?

Recently I viewed two stories that were engaged with evil and the havoc it causes in the world. They were good studies of evil in that they didn't shirk the consequences, although I wouldn't say they were among my favourite experiences.

The first was a live play called "Gagarin's Way" set in Scotland in recent times when economic hard times have hit. There are four male characters, each reacting to the hard times in different ways.

The youngest character is the kind of modern liberal who espouses the "middle way". He is caught up in nefarious goings on because of his greed and sense of superiority about his degree in politics. He allies himself with two men who are plotting violence against one of the management. The manager himself is a study in cynism, a local made good, he is so world weary the prospect of meeting an untimely end at the hands of two kidnappers doesn't seem to bother him much. He understands that the proletariat of old has been seduced by the materialism of modern culture, something the older of the kidnappers doesn't understand. He is an old school political activist, trying to stir up a political movement. He is the most sympathetic character, in a way, because at least he believes in something and he also shows concern for his victim, to the point where he doesn't want to carry out the plan. In the end it is his tear stained face that haunts you as you leave the theatre.

The fourth character is a psychopath who enjoys violence and making trouble. He has no political beliefs at all and indeed, cleverly skewers them all in a way that makes you understand the futility of human systems of social organisation. His view of the world is bleak and completely amoral. The play is a comedy of the blackest kind, but the blackness only grows on you as you realise that the two kidnappers are completely different. The psycho has no interest whatsoever in the anarchist's agenda.

Where lies evil? In the amoral perceptions of a psychopath who uses the hatreds of others for his own ends? The play flinches a wee bit in making it clear that the psycho is, indeed, a psycho, having been in an institution. Although it is a clear eyed play about politics and its shortcomings as a philosophy, it cannot face the truth of the existence of pure evil. An evil man must be sick ...

The second was the movie "Four Lions" - again a black comedy. Here it was hard to locate an evil character at all. They all had their moral weak points (clearly, as they were jihadist bombers), but they were also sympathetic characters. Perhaps the least sympathetic was the white Moslem, who felt he had to be more jihadist than his peers because he was white. They were all idiots so it is hard to label any of them the source of the evil. It was more as if a source from outside had simply stoked their hate into a force for evil. This of course is the cause of fanaticism on such a scale. Get enough people hating hard enough and you can persuade them to do anything.

The most intelligent of them, their leader, was perhaps the most culpable. In one scene he persuades his somewhat intellectually deficient friend that his gut feeling that what they are doing is wrong is really the devil usurping God's place in his heart. It's a clever, amoral manipulation of someone who clearly doesn't have the capacity to make a properly informed decision about being a suicide bomber.

Although this is laugh out loud funny in many places they don't come to a good end. And it left me with lots of questions. These men were just ordinary British moslems with ordinary lives . And yet they were the type of people (not just men) who's hatred can be stoked to the point of violence.

Perhaps hatred is the biggest evil - the one we are all capable of and the one we should be on guard for all the time.

The latest NZ flick - patchy at best

We are interested in movies in our family. My husband and I enter the 48 hours (six years now and counting), my children help us in other productions, we even have a presence on YouTube (see a previous post on The Vintner's Duck), so we try to see New Zealand movies as they come out (if they seem at all interesting and/or suitable for young teenage girls). So we went off last weekend to see Predicament - the latest New Zealand flick, completing the filming of every work of fiction by iconic New Zealand writer Ronald Hugh Morrieson. I have not read Morrieson, nor seen any other movie made of his work, but Predicament did not change my impression - a black comedy, obsessed with the gothic and scandalous and black, black, black.

But the story was fun. Obviously the concoction of some sort of genius. Morrieson does not fit in the usual New Zealand literary tradition. This is not serious stuff - it's fun and thrills and blood and guts and a little bit naughty. Small town gothic. I doubt Morrieson was terribly worried about the Great New Zealand Novel (which is really refreshing).

The film looks beautiful but is so patchy. Also, it was useful to understand that Morrieson had not completed the story upon his death, for the ending is quick and perfunctory and leaves a lot unexplained. Jemaine Clement, who receives star billing, steals the show. He plays a character called Spook, whose main characteristic is appearing as if from nowhere - and it is impossible to imagine anyone else doing this so well. Unfortunately he departs the scene well before the end and takes most interest with him. None of the characters are in the least bit sympathetic, except the Gran, who is a very minor character and this is a problem in watching the movie. So after Jemaine departs it gets a bit tedious. Other reviewers have mentioned that the actor playing Toebeck overplays most of the time so that his secret sinister side is actually not so secret. Although the pivotal scene where we become aware of his possible involvement in his father's death is effective.

The main character, a callow youth who is terminally embarassed by his father, is extremely unsympathetic and this is a real weakness, possibly inherited from Morrieson - and put this together with the hustled up ending (not written by Morrieson) and you're left with an unsatisfactory cinema experience.

Big slick Hollywood movie making 101

Inception is the latest big event movie. As such it invites direct comparison with the other BEM of 2010 - but it's a much better movie than Avatar - much less gimicky, much less simple minded and a uniformly terrific cast.

But ... I can't call it great.

For example, it invites comparison with The Matrix, involving worlds that exist only in the mind, but it is not as primal as The Matrix, it's only playing with the concepts. It reminded me more of Wim Wnders Until the End of the World, which was a bit of a mess of a movie (coming for me, as it did, on the heels of Wings of Desire which is one of my greatest ever movies) - but has in common with Inception the idea that our dreams could be addictive if we were ever able to control our access to them. In Inception our dream worlds threaten to become our reality and the end (somewhat simplistically) plays with our inability to discern reality over delusion.

But, for me the deep issues of Inception are laid over the top, they're not really significant to the movie. They're more like a shallow attempt to make the movie important.

Basically it's a heist movie. The main characters are thieves on a mission impossible. The direction is almost flawless. At one point we are four dreams into the maze of the unconscious and we know exactly where we are at all points. The only thing that slightly confused me was the firefight in the snow where everyone was wearing white - I wasn't sure who was actually dieing and who was surviving.

The apparent emotional core of the movie, the main character's angst over the death of his wife, remained extremely unmoving, although it did complicate the heist.

There was remarkably little in the way of SFX, which was refreshing, and if you want to cast an action hero Leonardo DiCaprio is probably your best bet. The unbelievably dependable Michael Caine turns up, and Ellen Page and Marion Cotillard - I told you it was a great cast.

Inception is a brilliant action/sci fi movie that doesn't rely too much on gimmicks. Just don't expect a masterpiece.

How to write chick lit

I have read chick lit on and off my whole life, obviously being a chick and being into lit, and I have come to some conclusions about how it's done.

True chick lit involves the friendships of women. Books and stories mainly about men/women relationships are romances. I think this is probably my arbitrary division, but it seems chick lit celebrates something about women. Chick lit is about how women are the best friends of women, how our relationships with our friends meet all our emotional needs, how wise and special women are. Men are in these books and stories only as objects or caricatures. So Sex and the City is the TV version, The Jane Austen Book Club or The Sisterhood of Travelling Pants or The Joy Luck Club are the book (and sometimes movie) versions. Another movie version in The Making of An American Quilt (I haven't read the book). In all these stories a woman's girlfriends put her back together after crisis, or help her mature and grow up, etc.

Another strand of chick lit builds on the premise that women are wise and loving and the fount of all that is good. Examples here are Chocolat, Babette's Feast, Like Water for Chocolate, The Colour Purple (I'm aware that these are movies, but they started as books, three of them are also about food - hmmmmm).

Most of the sisterhood books have in common that you really can't understand what brought these women together in the first place. Margaret Atwood's Robber Bride comes close to answering that. The three friends are drawn together over each other being the victim of the same Other Woman stealing their men. Atwood correctly identifies that sometimes the enemy is one of us, not all are sisters.

So my recipe for chick lit:
1. Take three or four women as different as possible
2. Put them together over a particular past time (quilt making, a book club)or
3. Have them share an experience (the same woman stole their husbands)or
4. Just have them be friends for no apparent reason (Sex and the City)
5. Have them meet and talk endlessly
6. While recounting their rotten marriages, rotten children, thwarted dreams
7. Have them come through a life time of friendship stronger and happier

OR have one particularly strong woman befriend a whole lot of weaker, more victimised ones
have her power be absolutely benevolent and mysterious and have every woman (remember men are the enemies or the weak ninnies) who comes near her be blessed and live happily ever after.

See, they're fairy tales!

Patchwork and Quilting - how to write a short story

Just recently I have been writing short stories (Lankaren is taking a rest) and I have realised I make stories in much the same way I make fabric art. That is, I save little scraps of this and that and look for ways they work together to create an overall "something" that is more than the sum of its parts. I suppose all art is like this - the juxtaposition of pieces that contrast and reflect on each other - creating a resonance between them that is a whole new thing.
A writing friend once described her way of writing as casting a fishing line into a pond and pulling something out which had something else tangled in it, and that something else had something else dangling off it ... in a little string of things that together made a story - not just a sequence of events, but also details that when added together give the story depth and richness and truth. So for example a character loves shoes - this fixation is both a detail of character and a device by which ideas about materialism, luxury, the Cinderella myth and even political comment (Imelda Marcos anyone?) can be explored.
I have also been reading about writing again - including Writing from the Inside Out, by Dennis Palumbo (a therapist who specialises in creative issues - only in America!) and Negotiating with the Dead by Margaret Atwood. Palumbo manages to be both encouraging ("you are enough") and depressing ("writing is hard"). Atwood is a very intelligent writer who makes me feel like an intellectual pipsqueak. she is one of the few current writers I actually admire, so perhaps this is not surprising. Her book explores issues such as "Is a writer a prophet, a high priest, or a court jester?" and "Who are we even writing for?" (ourselves, critics, the masses, etc). Heavy stuff.
Maybe I should stop reading and get writing!

History, like politics, is personal

Recently my family attended the unveiling of a plaque on my great great grandfather's previously unmarked grave.

It has long been considered among many, certainly the young I think, that history is irrelevant. Who cares about what dead people did long ago? I have the usual barrage of answers to this - those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it, ideas have consequences (so we better know where they came from), our identities are rooted in the history of our culture. However, great great grandfather's ceremony has reminded me that history is personal.

You see great great grandfather's plaque was donated by the US government because he was a Civil War vet. Yes, he fought (in the navy) in the 1861-65 war when the US finally abolished slavery. He fought in the conflict that posed the greatest threat the Republic of the United States of America has ever faced and the American Government is still grateful!

The ceremony was held on July 4th, the day Americans celebrate their country, their democracy, their way of life, and it was carried out by the deputy consul of the American Consulate in Auckland, and he took the time to explain to us how important our ancestor's contribution was to the survival of his country. It was moving and revealing.

Suddenly my daughter's studies of the Civil War and black American civil rights came into clear focus for her. She has a stake in that story.

But there is more. The day was a family reunion. Great great grandfather married the grand daughter of a pre-Waitangi settler. His wife was also half Nga Puhi. His last surviving grandchild, a lady of 103, was at the reunion. She is the carrier of a sacred taonga - a name given her by her grandmother. Again, my children could see how they fit into history. They are Nga Puhi, from the Bay of Islands, and they both bear Maori names handed down as taonga.

Suddenly they understand the precious gift of heritage, of history, they can see how history has made them.

I amazes me when I see on television various celebrities researching their family histories and being surprised to find out things about their grandparents. For our family, our history goes back all the way to settlement in New Zealand. Also, of couse, there is the whakapapa that goes back to Kupe.

As settlers we grasp onto our history, we are proud. The courage and tenacity of our forebears sets us apart as a people, it is our identity. Tribal peoples also have this sense of pride in forebears, hence the whakapapa. Such tribal memory gives a people it's sense of separate identity, of being special, if you like. We settler peoples perhaps also have the same sense. I'm not enough of an anthropologist to really know. But it's kind of sad that for all but the Maori branch of my family, knowledge stops at England's sea ports.

Goodbye Betty! a bit more about endings

Ugly Betty finished on our screens tonight. Not such a classic in my opinion, but worth a look occasionally, and certainly worth my attention for its final episode ever.

And they got the ending right!

Ie, everyone had a happy ending and there was a good hint that Betty and Daniel just might, just might, put Mode behind them and have the relationship they are free to have now Betty's following her dream and Daniel's grown up.

That's how it's done!

Obsession

It seems that most teenagers are obsessed with something. I suppose as parents the best we can hope for is that the obsession is harmless. I have been thinking about this for a while, ever since my youngest daughter became a bona fide GLEEK, that is, a fan of the TV series Glee, about a high school show choir consisting of geeks and freaks and various other "uncool" types in the American high school culture. (Honestly - these programmes, and the various high school movies, make me soooo thankful we live in NZ.)

Currently the other major obsession I know of is everything vampire, focused mostly on Twilight and its various sequels. I have read the Twilight books and enjoyed the first one as I enjoy most romance novels - it was like candy floss, nice but not good for me and not much to it. But I must confess I do not think vampire obsession is healthy.

Twilight is about adolescent love - a love that is obsessive and juvenile, a manipulative boy who controls the actions of his so-called beloved and a masochistic girl who laps up the danger and is willing to literally die for love. Her willingness to embrace eternal death for his sake is chilling. (On an unwittingly telling note, he is freezing cold to the touch and hard like marble.) She is in constant danger, not least from him, and is seriously damaged many times, until, in the most gruesome birth scene I have ever read ... anyway suffice to say she gets her desire and becomes one of the undead to be dead with him for ever. Shudder.

And some grown women say this story has spoilt them for their husbands. Eh? What is this teaching our girls about real love and relationships? That a cold, manipulative dangerous man is worth dying for? Has anyone considered how totally boring being a vampire would really be?

OK. So back to Glee. Is that really as bad? No - I can't bring myself to say so. It is very affirming of geeks and freaks and has some really fantastic music - my kids are now familiar with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and show tunes from ages past. However, it is preoccupied with the sex lives of its characters, a recent episode was all about whether certain characters should lose their virginity or not (is sex really the most important thing in life? Really?) Also, while it is just possible stories about teen pregnancy and coming to terms with being gay are relevant for teenagers, the break up of a teacher's marriage and his subsequent (almost) relationship with another staff member are not. I think this story line introduces something far too adult into the mix.

BTW - Sue Sylvester, the cheer coach, is one of the best comic characters to appear on TV in ages.

As usual, parental guidance recommended.

The Idolatry of Bernada Alba

We do not frequently attend the theatre, but on Saturday my husband and I ventured forth to see The House of Bernada Alba at TAPAC here in Auckland. We had many reasons for this, not least we both knew the main actor and the director (from a long time ago) and I, personally, like the writings of Frederico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish playwright who was executed by Franco's army shortly after the play was written - either because he was a communist or because he was gay - take your pick.

The play was pretty much standard socialist fare - ie, playing up the injustice and prejudice of the "upper classes" against the honest desires of the proletariat. The main character reminded me of many old women I knew in my childhood - bitter and oppressed and always worrying about what people think. Those who are ignorant believe this is the lot of Christian women. Others of us know such women have replaced the opinion of others for the genuine love of God.

The cast was entirely female - those who worship the idol of public (or the neighbours') opinion and those who worship the idol of sex. Bernada Alba, a widow with five daughters, was malevolently controlling, and her daughters by turn subservient and rebellious. Repressed passions abounded. Obviously they came to a bad end.

By the way - the production was fantastic and our friend in the title role was brilliant.

And the programme was a work of art - a bargain for a gold coin donation.

The perplexity of endings

Endings. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, in the wake of the recent demise of LOST and the more distant last episode of ER, after 11 years, some sort of prime time record.

I am not a LOST fan. I was cured of the "mysterious" in TV series in the 90s when I sat through a couple of seasons of the "X Files" which promised "the truth was out there" until I discovered it wasn't and gave up. So with LOST I watched a couple of the first episodes, then whenever I caught up it was so incomprehensible, I couldn't be bothered. However, after reading a magazine article about the difficulties of ending a long running, and very popular TV series, I watched the final episode of LOST and was intrigued by the old cliches that it relied on to tie up what was obviously a very complicated saga.

What we got was essentially the "happy ever after in heaven" thing - which was probably very annoying for the sci fi freaks who were addicted to the thing and wouldn't embrace visions of heaven if paid to. For myself, of course, the heaven depicted was so unlike the real thing I'm not offended, just perplexed. Why do such a cliched thing? I'm left wondering if the whole series was Jack's hallucination as he lay dying. What was the point, really?

But beyond LOST, the article I read spoke about endings in general, and I realised that almost every ending I can remember, of a long term story, has been disappointing. When I say long term, I mean a long term TV series or a movie franchise that includes some sense of ongoing story.

I have noted here before that I dislike the third Lord of the Rings movie because (although the books actually end OK, because they were conceived as one book) Peter Jackson did not honour the whole story of all his characters. Specifically, he left Eowyn and Faramir dangling. He spent time on their stories and their triumphing over their individual struggles, but he did not give them enough screen time to triumph. In the book they fall in love. Even in the extended DVD version he gives them a brief incomprehesible head-leaning scene.

The Matrix trilogy is my favourite example of a trilogy that should have remained one movie. The Matrix is a brilliant sci fi story channeling Alice in Wonderland and the Gospel (oh yes, forget that the film makers are very woolly about this). The second and third movies are muddled rubbish. I don't even remember them that well. Too much money spent on too little imagination.

Star Wars, alas, is probably the highest profile and most expensive example of this phenomenon. The first Star Wars movie was brilliant, ground breaking (name a block buster from before?????) fun. Number two was great (movie geek types say it's the best, I like the sheer romance of the first better), number 3 was stupid, but it finished the story. The last three Lucas made were .... execrable rubbish. Wish he hadn't bothered.

I could go on and on. Especially film makers, but I regret to say book writers also often, fall prey to the impulse to try and end things off, and relapse into silliness, triteness, or sheer craziness. Mostly things should be left in mid air. Real life endings are messy. Let's not bother with them in our made up stories! (Books that end badly - Twilight. First book - fantastic teen romance with added vampires, book 4 - yeech! Harry Potter - actually book 7 is OK, despite or perhaps because of trite happy ending - but some of the in between volumes (no 5????) forget it!)

So why am I writing a sequel to ASKAR? I hope I'm writing a Godfather II and not a Godfather III - that's why.

The new Who

It's time to commit to some opinions about the new Dr Who, although I haven't quite made up my mind. Also, we don't get terrific reception on Prime, so I haven't had a proper look at him yet. But he seems young and angular and awkward enough to be geeky and still be attractive. Kind of perfect for a very young Doctor.

He is, however, quite cranky. He is often wrong (tonight he made an error in leaving Amy alone in the dark) and he was critical of River Song when in the end she saved the day. He lies as well, when it suits him, and is brutally honest when that suits him. He loses his temper and shouts a lot. But we've only seen four episodes (sadly missing the first one about the stone angels) so he could grow on me.

However, I've decided I don't like Amy. Or perhaps I don't like what the writers are choosing to do with her character, because on the whole she's the usual perky help mate the Doctor usually requires.

However, whoever is in charge of Dr Who REALLY doesn't like matrimony or any sort of committed relationship. Rose's relationship with her boyfriend was completely despised by both Rose and the script; Donna's putative marriage was a fraud; and this Amy person has taken off with the Doctor on the eve of her wedding. Furthermore tonight she tried to jump the Doctor's bones, which wasn't only wrong because I don't approve of it, but was also wrong because the Doctor's relationship with his companion is always based on love - usually deep affection and respect, sometimes (as with Rose) romantic love, sometimes merely affectionate irritation - but always some sort of care. What Amy was proposing was the opposite of love - sex for sex's sake is a complete affront to love, and to the affection that Amy and the Doctor have already shown to each other. Of course the Doctor declined (basically protesting he was far too old for her "I'm 907!"). He had to. Dr Who is first and foremost a family show. Meaningless sex between two main characters would be completely contrary to the spirit of the thing.

But why include it at all? And why have a girl about to get married propose such a thing?

The creators of this show really hate matrimony.

Our wonderful teenagers

Last week I had the privilege of taking some of my daughter's year 11 English class to the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival. There was a special day for secondary school English students and they listened to three authors present their works and talk about the life of a writer and Ivy Lies talking about writing pop songs. Ivy Lies came to life when they played their music. Obviously happier expressing themselves in music than the spoken word.
But it was also the week when a King's College student drank himself to death, and this week, we learn that another boy from that college has died. Also last week a 13 year old knifed his maths teacher. What's going on with our young people?
I was, I must admit, impressed with the intelligence and depth of the questions asked by the young people at the readers and writers programme. I was impressed with their behaviour. I was completely unimpressed by one of the MCs, who decided telling off colour jokes was appropriate for a secondary schools programme. I don't know the name of the MC, although his face was familiar to me, I think from TV comedy programmes, but his likening of reading to making love to a woman (in graphic detail) and his joke about an octopus and a set of bagpipes (use your imagination) were completely inappropriate, and our lovely Christian College kids were not the only ones gasping in disbelief.
How do I connect this to the horrible events in the news?
I can only conclude that somehow we are selling our teenagers short. We are forcing them to grow up too early. We are teaching them that adult stuff - drinking, sex etc - is fun, and that there is no price to pay. So the young man who drank himself to death was kicking over the traces just one night. He almost certainly had no idea that a bottle of vodka could kill him. Why not? Because we are selling lies about adult vices. We are telling them it's fun, there is no price to pay. They can play in the adult's play pen and not pay a price. And the MC was pandering to this. "Hey kids, I know you really want to be adults so I'm going to treat you like adults. Not like your nasty teachers and parents who want to keep you children."
Research has shown that our brains are not fully formed, not connected up completely, until around 25 years of age. That means that all of our secondary age children are still growing, still susceptible, still able to suffer damage from careless adults peddling adult things. It's time we, as a society, took better care of them.
Someone asked me the other day if I thought I was wrapping may children in cotton wool having them at a Christian school.
My answer is - until they are adults (legally 18, biologically 25) - I am going to protect them from the adults that do not have their best interests at heart, who want to exploit their natural inclination to want to separate from me, to protect them from a society that is determined they experiment and experience everything before they are mature enough to work out what they really want from life.
And I do not apologise.
BTW I know King's College very well. I know that the events of the last week would have had a completely devastating effect upon the community of that school. I know that, as far as it is possible to tell, the events of the last two weeks have nothing to do with the school.

48 Hours of disagreement with the judges

As usual I didn't agree with the judges at the 48 hours Auckland finals on Saturday night. I felt there were at least three movies among the 16 finalists that outdid the winner and runner up.
Runner up was Confessions of a Fabricator - dodgy undergraduate sexual insinuation with a sock (yawn). Winner was Only Son, by the Downlow Concept who have won before with something very similar. This wasn't a bad movie, just not exceptional among the 16 on offer.
One made it from our heat (heat 10). This was Humanity: the Last Seven Minutes which was at least original - the filmmaker obviously has contacts all over the world and they sent in their contributions over the net - and IMO boasted the best performance by an actress of the night (a woman in a subway train somewhere - in Europe or Australia, I couldn't quite figure out where). The judges' "best actor" was one decision I agreed with - this was the desperate father in Carousel - a magnificent exercise in suspense, marred somewhat by a weak ending.
OK - my favourites (I actually can't pick a winner):
The Pool - car pool goes wrong. Clever idea, neat trick ending, cool use of the required line.
Lost Call - ghost movie. An idea I have heard somewhere before, but still very well done and subtle.
Two Timer - a rarity. A love story that champions commitment, marriage, kids - the whole deal.
There was some stylish work among this lot - how the judges came up with the two winners is beyond me.

Taking on a sacred cow

I've been contemplating our "state religion", wondering why it is so sacred to New Zealanders and what its prominence means for our country.

When I was a child, and there were a lot of WW2 veterans around, Anzac Day was commemorated with poppies and we sang God Save the Queen (our national anthem then) at school. I think we even raised the flag. But it was a day - we commemorated the fallen, we were grateful - but it was just a day.

Sometime in the last 20 years, just as the veterans were disappearing, the whole Anzac thing has taken off and thousands of the younger generation (younger than me) are turning up for dawn parades and solemnly praying - something ...

And that is my problem. We have lost our religion in this country. Many of us still believe in something, but as a nation we have lost it. God is invisible in our public spheres. So Anzac Day has become a kind of secular celebration, an elevating of fallen heroes with no acknowledgment of who we are praying to. Are we praying to them as their ghostly shades haunt our land? Are we simply going through a form of words unable to acknowledge that there is nothing to which we pray? Or should we perhaps acknowledge that they died not only in the service of their country but also in the service of the freedom endowed upon them by their Creator?

Alas, Anzac commemorations are the only form of public spirituality available to Europeans in this country. (In a curious twist it is OK for Maori and Polynesian and the different Asian communities to be publicly spiritual.) I believe Anzac Day has become so prominent because we are being denied other public avenues for expressing the sacred in our lives.

And we have an odd attitude to war itself. I recently read an article about the shock expressed when it emerged NZers had actually fired shots in Afghanistan. The article basically said: "Well, d'oh, in a war you shoot people." I would say we're almost schizophrenic about war. At the same time as we honour our war heroes, our culture dislikes and devalues the current defence forces, consistently downsizing them and reducing their resources. I saw Gaylene Preston on TV recently (Sunday April 18 TV1), in a clip promoting her film memoir of her father's war (Home by Christmas), say war was always pointless - "Just remember, don't go." "There's no need for war." "There's no just war." (Actual quotes from TVNZ OnDemand.)

I don't think that's very honouring to our war dead and veterans.

War should always be a last resort. Many modern conflicts do seem pointless, resembling tangles more than the nice surgical operations the politicians tout before the event. But we need to think very carefully before we decide all war is pointless. Gaylene's movie was about WW2. Has she thought about the implications of allowing the aggressors their way in that conflict?

Simply put - sometimes the enemy is bent on aggression, injustice and intimidation. If you don't fight them, you lie down and die.

And that's pointless.

Heat 10 Rocks - 48 hours 2010

Up front I must confess we had an entry in Heat 10 of the Auckland competition of 48 Hours. I'm not going to include it in this review. It was cool. I helped write it. Enough said.

The "V 48 Hours" film making competition has become something of an institution in NZ film circles, with all sorts from professionals to school children having a go. This is the sixth year I've been involved. My involvement mostly involves late night Friday night trying to write a script that makes sense, conforms to the limitations of our resources, and includes all the required elements - up to 7 minutes long, a line, a character with a certain characteristic, a prop and a genre. There's also a required shot, but I leave that to the actual filmies - I haven't a clue what a dolly shot is.

This year Heat 10 (our usual heat) seemed better than usual. I liked all the movies. The couple I didn't really "get" were technically accomplished. Some of the usual teams were not present (in another heat?) - including some teams I recall being caught in a stylistic/theme rut. A risk of entering year after year - under pressure the same ideas tend to be rehashed.

One team had a character dressed as a steak - another danger of 48 hours - "we have a really cool costume and we're going to use it whatever!". In this case it kind of enhanced the skewed world of the film. One team had a major technical problem - their whimsical little tale of ghosts haunting a park was still cute and entertaining. Major technical problems are a major problem in 48 hours - the only thing worse is a major team walk out - there are many tales of those as well.

Standouts for me were the two movies made by teenagers. The first, from team "Non Chalant", was a mock reality doco about teen romance where three young people were interviewed about their relationships and then the film crew caught their delusions on tape. For me one of the best performances of the night was Maddie Peters as the third teen who was more seriously deluded than the rest. The second teenage movie was "Another Bloody Romance Movie", made by a team from Diocesan College, who cashed in on their notoriety by crediting themselves as "those bloody Dio girls". They made a classic rom com, complete with final scene at a wedding chapel - with BLOOD. The opening scene was one of the most impressive gore fests I've ever seen on screen.

All in all a good night. Can't wait for the finals.

Boy - a deserved hit

I recently saw Boy. This New Zealand film has proven a huge hit. Deservedly.

New Zealand movies tend to be gloomy, portentious, political or depressing. Not Boy. Even though it's a movie set on the East Coast in a Maori community there is no politics on display and only a tangential note that these people are poor. And, let's face it, poverty is relative. At one point the kids (who have been left alone in the care of their 11 year old cousin for a week) complain that they're having crayfish for dinner again!

The film is laugh-out-loud funny at the beginning as Boy introduces us to his interesting life, but after the appearance of his immature and irresponsible father things become more ambiguous. On the face of it his dad should alleviate Boy's responsibility for the kids while his gran is away. But he proves to be a burden. At first Boy and his dad are great mates - his dad has the mental and emotional maturity of an 11 year old after all - but gradually and with great subtlety the film's director (Taika Waititi, who plays the dad) reveals Boy's disillusionment.

I have seen some of Taika Waititi's work before (although not Eagle vs Shark his first feature) and I was very pleasantly surprised by Boy. I was expecting something much less mature and well developed, or something much angrier and more political. The film invites comparisons with Whale Rider (it is set in an almost identical community and the young protagonist is in almost the same situation) but Whale Rider was very much about the demise of Maori culture and its revival, while Boy is much more personal about the particular relationships in this family which could almost be any family with a drop kick dad and a dead too young mother. Although I enjoyed Whale Rider, I think I prefer not to be sledge hammered by a message.

Another thing I enjoyed was that the ending was mildly reassuring. The dad and his sons had a measure of reconciliation, but we knew that Boy no longer hero worshipped him. There was no violent blood bath (Once were Warriors) and no contrived happy every after (Whale Rider). These were just people learning to get on. (BTW the three main performances are excellent, especially the two young actors playing the sons.)

A sign, to me, of a quality film maker - there is a character called "Weirdo" in this movie. In any other NZ movie he would have been sinister and/or dangerous. A pedophile at the very least. Here he is just a gentle mentor to Boy's troubled little brother.

Introducing Lankaren

Askar's sequel now has a title - Lankaren - and it is 58,000 words long so far. This is about half of it, I think. It is about what happens in Urkan as a result of the Battle of Lankaren (at the end of "Askar"). How do the various prophesies pan out and how long do Jena and Zarek remain living a happily bucolic lifestyle in Deridea? There are more deaths and quite a few romances but obviously I'm not going to give away details.

A genre book (in this case fantasy saga) is plot driven. Although it has believable characters, and I hope says something about the human condition, the plot is what drives it along. So the first thing I had to do when devising Askar's sequel was plot it quite carefully. Even so I often find I need something in a certain chapter and have to back track to a previous chapter to put it in place. I had this problem in Askar when Galen had to have access to a knife. I had a lot of trouble figuring out how he would actually get hold of it and had to create a scene where he could do this. It wasn't easy. (Was it successful?) So a lot of energy goes into the sheer mechanics of plot.

Also characters can get away on you. On the face of it this doesn't make any sense, after all the writer creates the characters and is surely in charge of what they do. But what can happen is that you invent a character and as you work with him through the plot you get to know him better and begin to understand that the thing you wanted him to do to forward the story he simply isn't able to do. If you force him to do it the book will lose credibility. Say, for example (and this is not in "Lankaren"), you have a character who you plan will murder another character but, as you work with him through the story, you begin to understand that he is not capable of murder and you cannot invent any scenario in which he would do it. You have to change your story into something else. Of course in a literary novel, where character is by far the most important ingredient, changes like this are what make the art. In a genre novel you have to deliver on the expectations of the genre.

This is my trouble at the moment. I have a lovely hero that I want to do something that he doesn't want to do. I'll figure it out, that's what writers do, but it makes for interesting times. (Writers live largely through their work, that's why they tend to be anti-social and a bit peculiar.)

I find myself on a constant quest for the "perfect place to write". Right now I have access to a vacant apartment and that's proving a great boon. Oh that I could have an apartment purely to write in all the time!

I don't care about Tiger's pants

I really don't. I sort of care he's the greatest golfer of all time, but I don't care how many women he's slept with. Why do we have to hear about it, read about it and see it on the media all the time? Not only is it kind of cruel to his wife and family, it's also polluting my life with something that's none of my business.

Likewise that Aussie criketer's girlfriend and her nudie photos. I'd never heard of either of them and cared less until the news started wittering on, and her stupidity and his embarassment were forced into my awareness. (I think her name's Lara Bingle, I've forgotten his, but then I barely know any NZ criketers' names, let alone any Aussies.)


There's lots of other stuff. They think we're really interested in Michelle Obama, so we're actually told more about her than about Bronagh Key (see, how many knew that was our PM's wife's name? Not that I want to know that much about her either). They think we care that Sandra Bullock's husband is a letch - and so that poor woman's misery is everywhere. Maybe they think being rich and famous means Sandra isn't hurt by everyone knowing her business?

And there's the creepy stuff. I don't need to know about a man who kept a girl in his backyard for 18 years and had two children with her in America. I certainly don't need to know about how her and her kids are doing now. I don't need to know about like creepy stuff in Europe. I really don't even need to know about that stuff in New Zealand, unless it presents a threat to me and mine.

You see all this rubbish, the sleaze, the filth and the murk (as well as the nonsense about lost kitties and brave doggies) is stealing time and attention from stuff that really matters. Stuff I feel really fuzzy about - like is the economy recovering? how much is global warming really going to cost me? why is the government doing x y and z? what are the arguments for and against? how is the super city going to work? etc etc. These things are all far more important but ... not so sexy, sleazy, exciting ... what have you. They are BORING. And heaven forbid we should be bored.

Film making is like wine making

One New Zealand novel I love is The Vintner's Luck, published about 10 years ago now. I love it I think because it is so rich in language and theme. It's like fruit cake studded with sultanas and cherries and laced with brandy. A lot of kiwi literature is like gruel.

The Vintner's Luck has a patchwork structure, starting episodically with the annual meetings of the vintner and the angel and gradually expanding into a beautiful poetic evocation of things foreign and in the past. It has very weird theology. The angel is a fallen angel and Satan himself makes an appearance. There's also some very dodgy stuff about the angel being a dry run for Jesus. The gay stuff is not so bothersome. It's certainly not terribly explicit and seems kind of superfluous, especially as the vintner in question also has a wife and a female mistress. I have no particular trouble reading novels with fantasy elements, being quite willing to suspend disbelief or take them to be symbolic in some form.

So when I heard Niki Caro (of Whale Rider fame, a New Zealand movie I love) was making a movie of The Vintner's Luck, I looked forward to it with some excitement, but when it was panned I decided not to see it. I couldn't bear to ruin the book. However, the book's author was so publically outraged by the treatment of her book a few of us (who love the book and hadn't seen the movie) got together to make a send up of the movie (not the book, which we love). The result is The Vintner's Duck (see link below) based on an interview Caro gave defending her movie at the height of the uproar.

For those not in the know the specific points about the movie were - the vintner was played by a Belgian actor, the wife was played by a teenager who was not aged well, the movie was not gay enough for the author, and the director famously compared film making and wine making.

Enjoy!

Foibles and fetishes - how writers write

Which writer regularly wrote stark naked? Which drank all day and pretty much all night? Which had to have sex to get in the mood to work? Which were addicted to narcotics? Which were stark raving bonkers? Which were heavily addicted to caffeine? (The last was Balzac, "the only great writer to drink himself to death with coffee".)

Many readers and most aspiring writers are fascinated with how writers actually write. I think for aspiring writers it's something to do with finding the secret, the trick to it - even if it's Victor Hugo's trick of writing stark naked in a glass walled room on the roof of his house on the highest spot on Guernsey (no helicopters in those days).

I found several titbits of like value in Page Fright (by Canadian writer Harry Bruce), a vastly entertaining read of the gossip page variety, but also extremely helpful for the aspiring writer wanting to find the "trick to it". From the evidence of these pages there isn't one.

A lot of writers turn out to be complete luddites, eschewing typewriters for fountain pens or new fangled word processors for their trusty IBM electric typewriters (this book was published in 2009!) A great many were bonkers, or at least very sad and rather tragic (Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath) but many are completely sane, including a writer I admire very much - Margaret Atwood.

Some were prolific (eg, Balzac) and some very non-prolific (eg, Flaubert). Either prolific or non-prolific they could be junkies (Coleridge) or alcoholics (Fitzgerald). They almost all wrote with drive and discipline, even while continually boozing (Carson McCullers).

The lesson from all this is profoundly encouraging for the aspiring writer - there is no trick, everything has worked for someone at some stage, so just do it. You don't have to be crazy or even write much (see JD Salinger who recently died after years of silence and still achieved extensive retrospective analyses of his work). However, most of them were dedicated to their craft. Whatever else, they wrote.

Bruce also includes a long introductory section about the actual development of writing tools, enlightening me, anyway, about why goose quills were used for writing for so long (until they invented steel metal wasn't springy enough) and how much time it took to keep them fit for writing (continual sharpening).

So if you want to know how many alcoholics have won the Nobel Prize for Literature (5), who was the first great writer to use a typewriter (Mark Twain - he didn't like it), who was an insomniac (Dickens, among many) and which writers had execrable handwriting (most of them) this is the book for you.

Your Bog Standard Fantasy Quest

Our latest trip to the movies involved Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. I approached this with preconceived views of Tim Burton, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, none of which were overturned. I had also had preconceived notions of Alice in Wonderland, which is only to be expected of a venerated classic.
First the good stuff - the lead actress, Mia Wosikowska, and an all too short turn of one Marton Csokas as Alice's dad. Obviously there are impressive (3D) computer graphics. But I'm getting over them. Gee whizz does not make up for the formulaic dumbing down of a masterpiece.
(Interestingly my favourite movie of the last few months Where the Wild Things Are contented itself with a bit of work on the monsters' faces.)
When it comes to reimagining classics the question has to be "Why bother?" Alice has been reimagined before and far better (The Matrix) without actually destroying the original story. Tim Burton is trying here for a coming of age parable, however even this was done better in the remake of Peter Pan a few years ago. The aforementioned Where the Wild Things Are was an extension of an original entirely within the spirit of the original with the active cooperation of its original author.
With Alice I found I had to get over Tim Burton's signature gloomy twisted gothic aesthetic (one of the few directors whose films you can recognise simply by their look), Bonham Carter channelling Miranda Richardson's Queenie (from Blackadder 2 - with all the toddler temper tantrums and none of the giggling school girl charm) and Depp stealing the show. Of course he was the above the title star and deserves it, being the best movie actor around. But here he was playing one of his pathetic clown characters which are deeply unattractive and rather difficult to watch (check the creepy Willy Wonka in a previous Tim Burton effort). His was a split personality Mad Hatter (check Gollum/Smeagol - it was that type of movie, where everything reminded you of something else) whose less confused, more deluded personality sported a broad scots accent (why?).
Another thing I had to get over was the nudge nudge wink wink sexuality. There was prolonged preoccupation with clothing Alice, for every time she grew or shrank her clothing refused to likewise change shape. There was also a creepy subtext about the Red Queen's knave lusting after her. As well as the frame story of her being married off to a pompous and weedy aristocrat.
There was also the false parallelism between her having to decide whether to marry the pompous weed and having to decide whether to fight the Jabberwock. (The scenes were almost identical in composition and colour design.) Of course she decides against the first and for the second - they are not the same type of decision. The first is a decision for her own happiness, her own autonomy (and frankly, we cheer her for it). The second is a decision to do something entirely for other people because it is her duty. The film offers no real way of discerning between the two decisions.
So I did get past all that and in the end enjoyed it as your bog standard fantasy quest. Oh how I wish Burton had just made a bog standard fantasy quest and left Alice out of it.

We are living in a material world

Many people believe the meaning of life lies somewhere in the concept of "progress". They believe this both personally - they have goals and ambitions - and cosmically - everything is evolving towards something better. And if the world isn't getting better on its own, it can be made better. This is where causes come in.

While I heartily endorse the impulse to improve the material conditions of people's lives, I do not believe the world is improved by fighting causes. For one thing, while you can feed, clothe and house people, you cannot make them happy - no matter how much money you throw at them. I recently heard of a study which found, given they are adequately housed, clothed and fed, the happiest people in the world are in South America, the most miserable in Western Europe.

However, most people don't get much more involved in causes other than voicing loud complaints that the government isn't giving them enough money because the prevailing philosophy in our society is "eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die". So our quest for happiness has led to a headlong competition for stuff - money, possessions, fame, choice, fun, adventure.

At present our local mall displays bill boards of a very photogenic family who are "champion shoppers" - consuming as a family activity. It's not news, of course, that we're a materialist society, but it's a belief that's so ingrained it catches us unawares - "oh, if only I could afford a new dress ..." But we know more stuff doesn't make us happy - just look at the stories in the women's mags - it's just that we have no other answers.

There's a singer I'm kind of fond of who sings biting satire in a little girl cockney voice who sums up this modern dilemma nicely: "I want to be rich and I want lots of money/ I don't care about clever/ I don't care about funny." Lily Allen's "The Fear" is a catalogue of all the stuff a modern young woman thinks she needs: "But it doesn't matter cause I'm packing plastic and that's what makes life so ...ing fantastic" and she finishes with that anathema to the women's movement "Not I'm not a saint and I'm not a sinner/ But everything's cool as long as I'm getting thinner."
So far, so good, but Lily's chorus packs the punch:
"I don't know what's right and what's real anymore
I don't know how I'm meant to feel anymore
When do you think it will all become clear?
Cuz I'm being taken over by the Fear."
Maybe she needs a good cause, but I've always found causes kind of naive. They have too much faith in mankind's ability to change.
What's missing here?

Laying track - all about being inspired

I have been engaged in "laying track" across the vast continent that is Askar's sequel. Laying track is the term Julia Cameron uses for writing flat out, getting it all down, worrying about the niceties of craft later. It is a good way to think when addressing the vast blank page or, these days, the vast blank screen. It is the step between inspiration and art, the bit where a writer actually has to work. In the process inspiration can flourish.

Julia Cameron is a creativity guru who addresses most of her books to artists in general, but she is a writer by profession and so her books tend to have that slant. Books written directly for writers are The Right to Write and The Sound of Paper. Her most famous books are more generally on the topic of creativity - The Artist's Way and its sequels. These books do not so much teach you how to write as teach you how to be a writer - how to free yourself up to express your unique voice, how to overcome psychological obstacles to creativity and how to "blast through blocks".
Anyone who aspires to writing should be at least curious about how great writers approach their profession - I have read books by Ursula le Guin, Orson Scott Card and Jerome Stern on the topic. In New Zealand I think Joan Rosier-Jones book So You Want to Write is hard to beat for practical how-to advice (her character building exercises are great). Sarah Quigley's Write: A 30 day Guide to Creative Writing is great for finding inspiration. Celebrated Australian writer Kate Grenville has contributed The Writing Book, which, among other things, shows the development of one of her stories which she went on to publish.
There are great classics in the genre, my favourite of these is Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. It was published in 1934. Brande addresses the distinct characteristics that make a writer, the sheer need for will power and focus, the daily practice of putting words on paper. Some of her advice is quaint (it is 75 years old!), but mostly it's sound common sense (and some truly great writers have found her advice the best of all).
But I think Julia Cameron is my favourite because she has recognised that creativity is essentially a spiritual exercise. It is a process of tapping into "something" that is larger than ourselves. But her spirituality and mine don't exactly match, so I'm going to turn to my favourite writer (CS Lewis) for a quote about originality and creativity, possibly explaining why in this post modern age "Art" has degenerated so much:
"Applying this principle to literature [our whole destiny to become mirrors filled with the image of a face not ours] we should get as the basis of all critical theory the maxim that an author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom." (from "Christianity and Literature" in Christian Reflections first published in 1967).

Objectification of Women

A few years ago, while watching the sci fi classic "Forbidden Planet" made in the early 50's, I noticed something I hadn't noticed before. In the movie a young girl had been raised by her father alone on a distant planet. She had no experience of men, so when a bunch of spacemen turned up their leader (our hero) saw fit to tell her to dress more appropriately (she was in the habit of wearing skimpy short things - much like you see every day in the street these days). What struck me was not how patronising and sexist this was, but how, if the movie were made today, no one in it would mention the girl's wardrobe and the hero would, no doubt, have managed to shag her by the end.

What I noticed was how women are still being objectified by our culture, despite the intervening years seeing the rise of the women's movement, one of its aims being the elimination of the objectification of women.

In the 50's and 60's women were babied. For example, they were not allowed to compete in endurance sports and they found borrowing money difficult. Many professions and pasttimes were completely barred to them. There were powerful and successful women in many fields but they were the exception rather than the rule. The women's movement succeeded in changing all that but ...

In those dim dark ages there was sexual objectification of women, but it only involved certain "types" of women (a sexist concept in itself) and was kept very firmly behind closed doors. Nowadays it's in your face 24/7 - on television, in all modes of advertising (banks are advertised as extra-marital affairs, sanitary products are advertised with "cute" little furry creatures, cattle "do it" in Toyotas) and in the general culture (Boobs on Bikes anyone?). Now I know the owners of these boobs believe they have been liberated to flash their assets, but I believe they are deceived. The men who line the streets are not there to celebrate their liberation. They're there to oggle boobs.

Women have been liberated to be objectified sexually. Now men expect every woman they meet to be sexually available, because that is what the culture tells them. I recently read two magazine articles from radically different points of view. The conservative writer lamented that women who engage in casual sex have trouble forming intimate relationships (maybe that's been men's problem all along?) and the liberal writer lamented that sexually predatory women are as bad as sexually predatory men (and this surprises you how?). It's been a jolly good win for men though. They might have to compete with women for jobs and what not, but they've gained a whole lot of "liberated" sexual playthings.

Fierce and endearing Joy Davidman

My favourite 20th century writer is probably C.S.Lewis. It has always seemed remarkable to me that, after a near life time of bachelorhood, he should marry Joy Davidman. They seemed an odd couple, he an elderly English don, her a younger American divorcee with two young sons. Furthermore she was a Jewish, ex-communist Christian convert.
I am presently reading a book of her letters which enlightened me considerably (Out of My Bone, edited by Don W King published by Eerdmans). As Debra Winger (who played her in the movie Shadowlands) says on the cover she was both fierce and endearing. In fact a kind of female American C.S.Lewis. She had a razor sharp mind and a quick wit and didn't mind commiting both to paper (in the equivalent of blogging in the 1940s). She was a ruthless but fair critic, writing to one poet that basically he needed a better education and appending a reading list (everything from Homer to T.S Eliot)!
This volume is most fascinating however in her detailing her disillusionment with communisim. She has the intellectual honesty to admit that she had been lazy and had joined the party without fully investigating it's philosophy. When she finally did she found it completely without substance. She came to believe, at the height of McCarthyism, that the American Communist Party wasn't so much dangerous as inept.
She remained a sharp social critic to the end of her life. The book includes a largely tangential description of her relationship with Lewis and an honest portrait of the trials and severe tribulations of being a freelance writer. It ends with her letters written during her final illness - a testimony to her wit and her faith.
All in all a role model for intelligent Christian women, and writers.

The Unique Perils of Loving Dr Who

Last Sunday we saw the end of David Tennant's Dr Who and the first appearance of the new one played by Matt Smith. Regeneration is something old time fans of Dr Who are used to and look forward to to a certain extent. But to my children the demise of Tennant's Doctor was a wrench. We saw a few seconds of the newer younger variety (Ew - he looks weird!) I tried to reassure them that all Doctors were cool in their own way. You always start off thinking - he's not right - but eventually you become fond of them.
However, my Dr Who memories go back all the way to William Hartnell (yes, the first Doctor) and I clearly remember the shock when he turned into Patrick Troughton. In any case the Doctor's regenerations are part of his appeal and absolutely the reason he's still going strong after nearly 50 years. (Yes, there was a gap. But the new Doctor has managed so far to be even better than the old Doctor.)
But Tennant's Doctor was becoming a troublesome character. The Doctor's always been a smart alec but Tennant verged on megalomania from time to time, and a new aspect to the Doctor's character - a tragic preoccupation with death and suffering - meant he was actually not such fun company as he had been. It seemed the character had nowhere further to go. He was too hurt by the suffering he was causing his companions to invite any more to join him, so he was lonely. He was without family or home, and was the last of his race (give or take the evil council imprisoned in a time lock). He had friends but put them in danger by his very presence. Tennant played the whole last two shows as if he was in great pain all the time. It was almost as if ending the character was a blessing.
I hope the young new fellow gets to have some jolly fun before he starts losing companions and making serious life and death decisions.

Natcoll Student Vid Blast

There were several excellent short films at last night's Natcoll end of year show for 3D animation and post production video courses. For us the outstanding item in the 3D was David Morris's "Breaking Point" which he rightly described as dark, but which was stylish and well executed. We also especially enjoyed "My Apocalypse" (Govind Dhir Singh) an interesting POV short about a dragon attack with an ear splitting sound track and an iconic shot of a dragon landing on the Auckland Skytower.
While the 3D show was obviously the work of a class of 100% young male artists (ie games, comics and movie influence) they were mostly original in their take on popular media.

The Video post production show was more diverse and included an excellent, although unfinished hand drawn animation by Joe Faga ("Fetu"), which I sincerely hope he finishes and we can see in its entirety, and a very accomplished live action short from Michael Miller ("And We Think in Colours"). This was a film that worked on every level and would have been at home in any professional short film programme. Miller tracked the story of a relationship in a symbolic, short form way that was emotionally and artistically complete.

The debate-stirrer of the night was the first item, the joint project for the 3D animation class. This was a film they made for a client and thus they were not responsible for the design of the characters. In fact they seemed embarassed by them. The two female characters were basically naked, which is not how any woman would (un)dress in order to "kick butt". This is a common fantasy in the gaming world, but is, in all practicality, laughable. Breasts flop around and are uncomfortable and get in the way, guys!

Good chance to play "spot the kiwi"

I have not read "The Lovely Bones" and having seen the movie I wish I had so I could understand what was going on. This is not good. A movie should make sense in and of itself.
There were many things here I did not get. I did not quite understand all the pfaffing around in the "in between" place, I didn't get why Susan Sarandon's character was played for laughs, I didn't get why Susie Salmon's sister took such a risk breaking into the murderer's house. On and on and on. My biggest problem was with the ending. No payoff. At the end there's a prolonged scene where you just know they're going to discover where Susie's body is, you just know it. Susie's been trying to lead them to the murderer all through the movie and here she is, just ready to tell the psychic girl, and she detours into a creepy possession scene to experience "love's first kiss". The murderer does "get his" in the end, but it seems much more down to karma than the legal justice system. Not the first time Peter Jackson's movies have failed to deliver in the ending department (see "The Return of the King" and his leaving Faramir and Eowyn, having won huge personal victories, just dangling).
However, that said, stellar cast and quite cool to play "spot the kiwi".

Askar now on Kindle

My fantasy epic ASKAR is now an Amazon Kindle eBook. This is special because Kindle only became easily available to non-USA writers on 15 January. The Kindle is a small reader machine but it also comes as a free program that can run on your home computer. You can use the free sample of ASKAR to find out what the Kindle is all about! You support me even by only peeking at the freebie because it makes my statistics look good. Go to http://www.amazon.com/Askar-ebook/dp/B00368B6QK

Dances with Na'vi

I read an article about young people getting depressed watching Avatar; they really want to live on Pandora, only there's no such place.
The story of Avatar is very black and white. Blue people good, human people bad. Pandora is a pantheistic paradise - literally a living network like a computer. The movie makes it very clear this is a measurable scientific phenomenon, not metaphysical. It's wish fulfilment spirituality as new age followers imagine it. The bad human people have "killed their mother". (While we might kill ourselves I think Mother Earth is a tougher old bird than that.) The Na'vi (natives) supposedly live at one with this paradise, and yet most of the fauna seems intent on eating them. This at-oneness also seems at odds with the Na'vi's respect for Jake when he says he's a warrior and their legends about the taming of the red dragon "in times of sorrow".
This I have found is typical of the new age world view which venerates pre-industrial societies and is blind to the violent nature of such societies. (I'm aware there are exceptions but most of these eventually succumbed to their more aggressive neighbours.) In fact such humanist creations as Avatar cannot imagine a world without violence, despite their non-violent pretensions. And Avatar's climax is relentlessly violent. Those who get depressed because Pandora doesn't exist are longing for a real paradise, a paradise before the Fall. Pandora is a fallen world, just like ours. The filmmakers are dishonest in labelling all evil human. It would have been a better film if there had been one or two Na'vi traitors, a few greedy ones, a coward, internecine warfare with the neighbouring clan. As it is we have "Dances with Na'vi". By the way, I saw it twice. It looks fabulous. It was the first time I ever truly believed in CGI characters - including Gollum.