Wellington Film Festival opens tonight!
It’s never been a tougher time to be running a film festival. In addition to the usual commercial considerations of just selling enough tickets to stay afloat, each year brings with it fresh wrinkles to be accommodated. The window of availability of titles shrinks every year because distributors don’t want to sit on their investment. There’s increasing pressure to get films into cinemas before downloading destroys the market and less time for films to build a deserving international buzz.
In previous years films like the Argentinian Best Foreign Language Oscar winner The Secrets in their Eyes might have been tent-pole features for a Wellington Film Festival but have already been and gone from local cinemas so it’s incumbent on director and chief programmer Bill Gosden (and his cohorts) to dig deeper to find more gems for our annual mid-winter fix.
People keep asking me, Dan, they say, what sort of Festival is it, this year, and I have to answer that I really don’t know. I’ve only seen 19 out of the 160+ movies in the book. That’s not enough to know anything, really, about the Festival as a whole. It’s less than 15% of an enormously rich and diverse smorgasbord of potential goodies.
As usual, I asked the Festival people to feed me the unheralded and unknown, the films that might miss out on attention from the big media, and they did. As might be expected, not all of them worked for me but I have some suggestions for films that I am assured will not be coming back on general release later this year.
In the drama section I was very affected by Honey, a beautiful Turkish film about a young boy with some kind of learning disorder, desperate for the approval of his teachers, classmates and his taciturn beekeeper father. A fine example of slow cinema, I feel certain that you will be absorbed by its beauty and the miraculous central performance.
The rest of the Wellingtonista preview, after the jump.
Eat and eat and eat: win a voucher for Elements Cafe
We already told you how excited we are about the upcoming Wellington on a Plate festival, and now we’re even more excited to announce that we’re working with Positively Wellington Tourism to help you get the most out of the event. Yes, that’s right, you! Over the next five weeks, we’re going to be giving away one $100 voucher each week to one of five different restaurants participating in Wellington on a Plate. That’s some serious deliciousness to be had right there!
First up, we have a voucher for Elements Cafe. Elements is a frequent nominee in our TAWAs for Best Surburban Venue, and with menu items like chargrilled lamb loin, lamb & porcini pie served with truffle mash on the dinner menu, it’s not hard to see why. The service is warm and friendly, the setting in an old butcher’s shop is lovely and the food is extremely tasty. It’s well worth a trip out to Lyall Bay either for brunch, dinner or their cooking classes. As part of Wellington on a Plate, Elements are offering a $35 two-course lunch, or a $40 three-course dinner, including a glass of wine. Yum!
Undo the top button on your pants
It’s time to eat eat eat! The programme for Wellington on a Plate has been launched, and it is making us mighty hungry. At the same time though, it makes us a little frustrated, because we’re not sure how to book events, or how much they’ll cost, and the descriptions are often quite vague. Still, there’s a lot of events that sounds fun, from Steampunk tours to murder mysteries, and there’s a range of special deals on at restaurants (finally eating at Martin Bosley’s is in financial reach!). Also new this year is a burger contest. We dare you to try each and every one, and report back to us with your findings. So, you’re taking us out for dinner then, yes?
Review: Mauritius
I tried stamp collecting when I was younger. It ended somewhat disastrously when I got bored with the gummed hinges used to afix stamps to the album pages and instead switched to PVA glue. My grandfather would not have been so proud of me.
And it’s another philatelic poppa that’s at the centre of Circa Theatre’s new play Mauritius. It tells the tale of New York half-sisters Jackie (Danielle Mason) and Mary (Lyndee-Jane Rutherford) and the stamp collection that belonged to Mary’s grandfather. And in that stamp collection is the extremely rare and extremely valuable Mauritius "Post Office" stamps.
I just can’t get you out of my garden
Here at the Wellingtonista we’d like to think we have a fairly diverse range of readers, but perhaps we don’t cover enough of the really pop side of pop culture. Luckily, others do so now we’re going to tell you what another website is up to.
This Friday July 9, AaronandAndy.com, along with ZM is having a party with Kylie at the Garden Club (Apparently she’s now just a one-word-wonder now though, so don’t be dropping the M word too loudly).
Come along and celebrate the release of Kylie’s hot new album Aphrodite. We’ll be giving away Kylie posters, copies of Aphrodite, signed copies of X, and whatever other goodies we can get our hands on!
It promises to be a fun-filled night — and don’t worry, we won’t just be playing Kylie! — we’ve even got the country’s leading Kylie impersonator on hand to add to the festivities, and she’s still looking for some hot dancers if you’re keen!
Friday 9 July 2010
9pm til late
The Garden Club, 13 Dixon St, Wellington
$10 on the door, or find a flyer for free entry
Smell the ‘glove
It may not be what we were expecting from a "West Hollywood lounge experience", but all that money certainly has ensured that Foxglove is a vastly more impressive visual experience than the ol’ Loaded Hog. But a bar is not just about the pretty, so how does it stack up? See what the ‘fly thinks after the jump.
Checking out the checkins
Since location-based social media website Foursquare became available in here in November last year, iWellingtonians have taken to it with enthusiasm.
But, you may find yourself wondering, with all the checking-in going on, just where it is that all these iPhone-wielding hipster geeks are going?
Well, website Map.pr is able to calculate a list of the top 20 Wellington locations, based on highest numbers of Foursquare checkins:
Reviews in brief: the Recovery Room
If you’re looking for a fairly affordable dinner, let me recommend the Recovery Room in Newtown to you. We’ve only mentioned it before in a post that we archived due to infighting, so it’s time to talk about the food.
During the day the cabinets are stuffed with large fresh-looking sandwiches and luscious cakes for food on the go, but there’s also a menu offering standard cafe food. I stopped in for a quick dinner the other night, and was delighted with what I found. The Recovery Room is BYO seven days a week, but if you didn’t bring your own bottle, they have a blackboard wine list that we think is based on the specials on Vine Online, offering an interesting selection with all bottles at $32 and glasses for $8.
To eat, I had pork belly with celeriac slaw and crushed potatos. The pork was moist and fell apart beautifully, but it really needed a good grilling to get the crackling going properly. My mother had the fish of the day, which was warehou, cooked with lemon juice and capers. Both servings were generous and the flavours were excellent, good value for $23.50 each. We didn’t really need the grilled sour dough bread with balsamic and olive oil, but it was tasty nevertheless. The dessert menu featured white chocolate creme brulee and rhubarb crumble, but we were too full to indulge. Service was friendly, and the room was warm. The Recovery Room does all the things a neighbourhood cafe should do. Nothing’s too fussy or frilly, the simple flavours of the food stand for themselves.
Review: Te Radar’s Eating The Dog
Te Radar’s show Eating The Dog has the hypothesis that New Zealand’s history and national character have been shaped by all the crazy fools out there, having ill-fated adventures, making things that don’t quite work, and generally getting a bit carried away.
Eating The Dog is a slideshow at heart, but the selection of subjects and Te Radar’s enthusiastic delivery make it more than just a bunch of old photos. It’s like visiting a provincial museum and getting a guided tour from a fellow who shows you all the weird objects out the back and tells you all the good stories.
And I get the feeling that a show like this wouldn’t be possible without the excellent online collections available via the National Library. In fact, I’d love to see more interesting photos and stories from the archives presented in such an interesting way.
About halfway through the show, I was hit with a sudden realisation – there are no women in Te Radar’s stories. A few wives are mentioned, but all the main characters are men.
Te Radar did address this. He swears he looked for some interesting women’s stories to include in the show, but it turned out that all the people doing bloody stupid stuff in the olden days were men. Or, at least that’s how history records it.
But based on the wide range of bloody stupid contemporary handcrafts showcased on comedy website Regretsy, I suspect that looking back at the handcrafts of New Zealand’s pioneer women would reveal a comedy goldmine.
An Eighties Eye
We’re indebted to the Architectural Centre for pointing out this fascinating architectural time capsule at NZ On Screen. David Mitchell (the architect, not the poet, novelist or comedian) talks us through the debatable delights of Wellington’s 1984 streets in this episode of his series The Elegant Shed.
Marvel at the sparkling mirror-glass towers! Admire Ian Athfield’s funktastic interiors and dashing scarf! Wonder at Roger Walker’s round windows and even rounder bouffant! Delight in the crisp daring lines of Massey House and Futuna Chapel! Be astounded by the "urbanity and drive" of mid-Eighties Wellington, when even the Oaks Arcade looked fresh and enticing!