Fashion victims

Who decreed that women don't want to wear skirts any more?

Or, if they do, they're 14 years old, or your great grandma?

Who said that cardigan sleeves need to be so tight they cut the blood flow to your hands? Or that all tops flare out under the boobs so you look pregnant? Or that black or the foulest purples, reds and blues are the only colours to wear?

I made the mistake recently of attempting to upgrade my wardrobe. It was very simple. I wanted two winter skirts, not black (I have three black skirts), and a variety of tops to go with them.

I had to scour two malls to find the skirts. I am a size 18 middle aged woman. The skirts had to be relatively trendy and flattering. I did find two. And only two. There were others that fit - but putting all the detail on the hips of a size 18 skirt is not smart - who wants extra inches there?

As for tops - ALL manufacturers put the shirt buttons exactly where a decent bust makes them gape or, worse, pop open. I have one shirt where they were thoughtful enough to put a dome in the strategic place, otherwise I avoid shirts or provide my own extra precaution. Also, high round necklines make large-busted, no-necked women (like me) look like their head grows straight out of a uni-breast. This year, guess what? A decent v-neck was almost as scarce as a decent skirt.

Maybe if I was shopping at the top end I'd have more luck - but we don't all have that choice. If there's any manufacturer reading this - please note - different shaped women need different shaped clothes.

Meanwhile I have a teenage daughter who is interested in a career in fashion. Maybe I'll be able to get her to make my clothes?

Killings and uncomfortable laughs easy outs

It's "48 Hours of furious film making" season again. We attended "our" heat last night.

It was 9.30 on a Friday so they obviously thought they could play their most offensive entry. As my 14 year old daughter said (she is very wise) "it's easy to get uncomfortable laughs". My 15 year old daughter hit it on the head when she declared none of the films in our heat to be finals material.

To me they were mostly distinguished by almost every one ending in a death. I have decided I like my short films to be simple, so the one room movie where two characters, with almost no dialogue, play a lethal skill game was my favourite - even though it, too, ended in a death.

The MITCIT team (our team) once again foundered on the shores of technical ambition, but we had a great live cast this year (the heroine has received accolades on the review site for her performance). The second version will probably be a masterpiece as the final came unstuck with CG backgrounds and editing.

Shock and grossness and lots of violent death - easy fixes to plots with holes and implausability aplenty. Our script was great, our cast was great - one day we'll nail the tech stuff, then watch out!

Indie kiwi flick - well worth seeing

Our most recent NZ movie is The Curry Munchers, a low budget indie about the immigrant experience in Auckland. To me it had the feel of many British indie movies I have seen and, although it didn't have the production values, because of its budget, my family, who have seen Gazza Snell, rate it better than that. It is certainly better than Predicament. However, it would be fair to say it is patchy, especially technically, and some of the "crowd" scenes reflect the low budget. But some things they pull off miraculously - like the TV show set up.

The script is mostly funny and subtle, and I'll get to that in more detail - but some of it is a bit over the top. Our biggest belly laugh was in a slapstick scene in which an unconcious person was transported around in a rubbish bin. Silly and unrealistic, but we did laugh and I have seen worse in better-resourced movies.

The strength for me was in the subtleties of the script (yes, the scipt is uneven, but when good, very good). The careless racism of the policeman who will not pronounce Indian names correctly, even when gently corrected, the patronising TV commentators pronouncing the name "Curry Munchers" not politically correct, the agonising scene whether the hero's father fails a job interview, and above all the poignant relationship between the mother and father. They are both struggling in their new lives in New Zealand and yet they are not communicating. If they would just talk ... but then the whole thing is about cultural expectations and how a new country can turn all these upside down.

Most enjoyable - go and see it. It's worth it.

What makes a good story?

What set me off thinking about stories was watching The Time Traveller's Wife on television the other night and really not liking it, but seeing The Lakehouse the previous night and really liking it. And I wondered - Why? They're both love stories with fantastical twists and The Time Traveller's Wife arguably has better credentials.

So I arrived at a kind of philosophical question. What makes a good story?

OK - this is subjective, but not entirely. Often when we're left with a disatisfied feeling at the end of a book or movie it's because there is a fault in the story telling. I recently reviewed an action sci fi script, which is completely not my thing, but it was a good story. It is only partly a matter of what you like, because I should have liked The Time Traveller's Wife.

But here is why I think I didn't

a) The story has a time travel plot, but is nothing to do with science fiction. This is a romance. The time travel is explained as some sort of genetic disposition. That's not the problem. The problem is time travel should have some sort of meaning in the story. It doesn't beyond what a bummer it is when your husband keeps disappearing.

b) The two main characters are creepily manipulative. The time traveller, as a mature man, deliberately goes back in time to meet his future wife as a child and keeps meeting her, in secret, until she grows up enough to fall in love with him. Later he has a vasectomy without her agreement, so she hooks up with a younger him just passing through on a time travel in order to conceive. Further, he disappears on their wedding day so she marries an older him.

Contrarily, in The Lake House, which in theory is just as odd, the two main characters get together in one time zone and presumably live happy ever after. It was based on a French movie, which may explain why it seemed both more romantic and more plausible.

It is OK to have creepily manipulative characters, but I think it has to be clear that their behaviour is seen to be creepy and manipulative and is in some way, condemned. In The Time Traveller's Wife we are meant to think that these are two star-crossed lovers, not a paedophile and a control freak.

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.