Tag: New Zealand Herald

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STILL LIFE WITH CHICKENS: it begins

Image courtesy Auckland Theatre Company.

The lead up to the opening has been more public than I expected. The write-ups and mentions continued in the Herald, the Listener (hardcopy only), and Tagata Pasifika have been nice to read and watch.

On opening night I was accompanied by  The Lovely Wife, The Girl and The Boy, and I was very, very happy to have my family with me. The opening night audience liked the show — that’s always grafifying. The early reviews in BroadwayWorld and Concrete Playground are positive.

For some reason this doesn’t feel real. Maybe it’ll hit me at some point — soon, hopefully, maybe — that I’ve achieved something tangible, something to be inordinately proud of. Instead I’ve been looking over my shoulder, waiting to be awoken from some impossibly good dream.

I’m biased so I shan’t exhort you to see the show.  But I will point you in the direction of the Facebook page and Twitter feed so you can decide for yourself.

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Tony Scott, 1991-1995

When I heard that director Tony Scott took his life, I paused more than I expected. I’d long written off his films as overcooked excuses in directorial excess but… there was something about his oeuvre that nagged at me, something I suspect I didn’t want to acknowledge.

Then I read Dominic Corry‘s love post in the New Zealand Herald and I realised the mark Scott had left on me as a filmgoer. Despite inflicting Days of Thunder, Deja Vu, etc, on the world, between 1991 and 1995, he defined action films with muscle and panache with three films: doing justice to Shane Black‘s multimillion dollar script with The Last Boy Scout, showing a deft restraint with Quentin Tarantino‘s True Romance, and showing a hitherto unknown knack for intelligent, buttock-clenching tension with Crimson Tide.

Those films are among my touchstones.

And for that, I’m grateful to Mr Scott.

Travel safe.

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