Summer city
For some of the smallest Wellingtonistas the most important part of the council’s Summer City festival has finished with the end of Fairy Trina‘s wildly popular run of Enchanted Tales on Saturday.
And this evening marked the end of a series of pretty interesting evening Gardens Magic events with a gig by OdESSA. But fear not – there’s still lots more excitement for everyone between now and the end of March when the festival wraps up.
We’d recommend picking up one of the guides from the library or other spots around town; or failing that, download a copy from the council’s event website.
Then, assemble your own programme of activities. Hmmmm… maybe those same small Wellingtonistas would like to see The Phoenix Foundation on Valentine’s Day? Because their parents sure as hell would…
(FTW) Wigs for Whigs
Let’s say that you have a dress-up party to go to, maybe with an ‘American Mistakes’ theme, and maybe you want a blonde wig to go with your red dress so that you can be Anna Nicole Smith. Where should you get that blonde wig from? Well, if you’re a public servant at the Molesworth end of town, you might head down to Creative Show Off Costume Hire on Thorndon Quay, and pay $20 for a wig. But if you’re smart, you’ll go to the Costume Cave on Wakefield Street instead, and only pay $10. Costume Cave for the win!
Cinephilia: Opening This Week
There are at least two crackers in this week’s line-up. Firstly, Johnny Depp re-unites with Tim Burton for faithful adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s acclaimed musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Depp is in his finest form (despite not having a Broadway-strength voice) and is joined by a wonderful cast including Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall and Sacha Baron Cohen. Readings, Empire, Sky City Quensgate.
“The West Wing†creator Aaron Sorkin returns to DC to script Charlie Wilson’s War: the true story of a renegade but principled playboy Congressman (Tom Hanks) who almost single-handedly funded the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. I was surprised to see this wasn’t nominated for an Oscar in the Best Adapted Screenplay category but Philip Seymour Hoffman is in there as Supporting Actor for his excellent turn as impolitic CIA operative Gust Avrakotos. You can see this one at the Embassy, Readings and Sky City Queensgate.
[The rest of this week’s new release summarised after the jump…]
Random Art Story, Two
Next in our series of overlooked Wellington public art is this beauty here to the right.
If you’ve not seen it before I’d be extremely surprised, because it’s plonked pretty much squarely opposite the Lido, somewhere seeming to always be awash with punters tipping the usual variety of liquids and solids into themselves.
As you can see, it’s a great piece, bronze, and textured in a marvelously subtle way. The slightly abstract lines just make it all the more curious to look at, and the complete absence of nose-hair suggests the model was extremely well-kempt.
So… what is it?
Cinephilia: Opening This Week
After a few weeks off listing new releases I’m returning to record a typically eccentric mix of blockbuster and art-house for you to while away those long, balmy summer evenings.
First up is Oscar-winner Ang Lee’s first film since Brokeback Mountain, an erotic espionage thriller set in wartime Shanghai. Already nominated in last week’s Golden Globes Lust, Caution is a Paramount exclusive.
New York gets yet another terrible pounding in Cloverfield, as a monster of some description rips the head off the Statue of Liberty among other atrocities. The catch here is that the entire tale is told by “ordinary people†with their camcorders, a little like Blair Witch a few years ago. It’s produced by J. J. Abrams (“Lostâ€) and directed by another t.v. alumni Matt Reeves (best known thus far as creator of “Felicityâ€). At Readings Courtenay Central and Sky City Queensgate.
Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan have been up nights devising yet more sadistic tortures for deserving and undeserving suckers and have come up with Saw IV. Jigsaw carked it at the end of Saw III but that doesn‘t appear to slow things down at all. You’ll find it at Readings, Sky City Queensgate and Regent-on-Manners: look for the teenage boys trying to sneak in on borrowed ID’s.
Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen crosses over to the side of the angels in Susanne Bier’s acclaimed After the Wedding (Paramount and Penthouse). He plays Jacob, an aid worker who returns to Denmark on a fund-raising mission but instead discovers a life-changing family secret. After the Wedding was nominated for an Oscar last year in the Best Foreign Language Flick category. Finally, a geriatric romance is on offer in Elsa and Fred, from Spain. Described by one critic as “simultaneously heartbreaking and heartening†this one seems tailor-made for the Penthouse.
Readings, in their wisdom, have decided not to offer the Capital Times any reviewer’s passes in 2008 which makes writing about their films very close to being more trouble than it’s worth. So, Cloverfield and Saw IV may not be reviewed there (and thus also at Funerals & Snakes) next Wednesday but the others will.
Are we a modern city?
Case in point … why do we not have broadband access to everyone in the (wider) city?
This from Singapore:
Singapore gets free wireless connectivity with Wireless@SG while no one gets left behind in the digital revolution. Find out about how the Singapore Government is reaching out to more Singaporeans and equipping everyone to take full advantage of the digital opportunities that are opening up.
So why don’t we do that?
Is it a case, as some think (in the comments), that the Government should stay out of providing infrastructure and leave it to the private industry (to which I assume they are referring to Telecom or TelstraClear)?
To be fair the Council is doing something about it – read their broadband plan
Wellington City Councillors have agreed to a vision that could see affordable, high-speed broadband access throughout the city by 2012.
But we all know how fast technology moves (have you seen the just announced, 2cm deep Apple MacAir?) and so this promise for 2012 by our Council seems, at best, limited in vision and at worse, a huge missed opportunity. For instance, what we’re promised for 2012 South Korea has had for 3 years.
A possible solution for you after the jump …
Wellingtonista Radio Show ep 02
Last week saw the quiet but confident debut of the Wellingtonista Radio Show on The VBC. You can listen to an edited version of the show here Wellingtonista_Show_EP01 (right-click, save as), and hopefully we’ll get our podcasting steez together and start publishing the shows as umm.. podcasts.
I’ll be presenting the second show, same time: 7pm – 9pm, tonight.
Tech info after the jump…
These are the fixtures of your neighbourhood
One of the things about living in a great city like Wellington is that there are a hell of a lot of things to take for granted.
I mention this because while listening to Don McGlashan in Civic Square the other day he mentioned that Auckland doesn’t really have any civic art. I’m not sure that’s entirely true… But, in the spirit of parochial one-upmanship I thought I’d bring you some of Wellington’s oft-overlooked art and sculpture.
Why oft-overlooked? Well, we have the Wellington Sculpture Trust and its glamourpuss art all over the blimmin place, but there’s also a lot of smaller, less noticed stuff that we here at the Wellingtonista want to celebrate.
So with no further ado, here is a sculpture. And ain’t it a little cutie?
The real question is of course whether you recognise it. And you probably don’t. This of course being the problem with a place like Wellington, sometimes there’s so much bloody public art you can’t walk three feet without tripping over the latest “abstract something”…
But I digress. So what is it?! More after the jump!
The Wellingtonista events calendar – you know you want it
The Wellingtonista has a calendar of events that we think you really REALLY want to know about. We also know that you want this vital information delivered into your own calendar – easy peasy, just follow the instructions after the break …
Tui hooligans
The recent flap (no pun intended) over noisy tui may seem like a typical silly season non-story, but believe me, it’s a real problem. I live above a major central city intersection, and people sometimes ask whether I’m disturbed by road noise. “No,” I say, “but those bloody birds wake me up at 5 in the morning!” A small patch of harakeke eight floors down is enough to attract hordes of juvenile tui flitting around and chattering and generally carrying on like kids in Manners Mall. Tsk tsk, youth today!
It’s probably just the morning-averse urbocentric biophobic grump in me, but does anyone else notice it? And what is the best collective noun for tui? A disturbance? A larrikin? A raucous?