The Hollow Men at BATS
Just a quick note to recommend Dean Parker’s theatrical adaptation of The Hollow Men, which is on now at BATS. My position in the theatre industry prevents me from doing a proper review which means I can’t tell you how funny and pointed it is, nor how expertly directed it is (by Jonathan Hendry) or how good many of the performances are (particularly Stephen Papps as Brash).
Several reviews are online at John Smythe’s excellent Theatreview resource so you can get the full down-low from there.
The Hollow Men plays at BATS until Thursday 11 October and then travels to Centrepoint in Palmerston North for a season.
Cinephilia: Opening This Week
Fully 60% of all the opening films this week are at the Paramount: first up indie thriller Unknown has a great ensemble cast including James Caviezel, Greg Kinnear and Barry Pepper. It’s a riddle of a thriller as five guys wake up locked in a deserted warehouse unable to remember what happened or which of them are the good guys and which are the baddies. A gas leak has caused multiple amnesia and the race is one to work out who is the kidnapper and who the kidnapped. By all accounts there are plenty of twists which make this a thriller to get the old brain box going.
The rest of this week’s new cinema releases after the jump.
White Fungus Issue 8 Release Party
Come see the new mag for the first time and enjoy a night of off-beat entertainment.
(details after the jump)
Time to veg out
October 1 is World Vegetarian Day, so we’d like you to comment and tell us about your favourite vege-friendly places to eat in Wellington.
We’d also like to encourage you to check out the Wellington Vegetarian Food & Lifestyle Festival on Saturday Saturday September 29 at St Johns in the City, Cnr Willis and Dixon Streets.
Join us to celebrate World Vegetarian Day with an exciting range of stalls covering everything from vegetarian cookery demonstrations and tastings, lifestyle products, cruelty-free beauty products, to nutritional information. View documentaries played on a big screen being run throughout the day, and hear informative speakers talk about human health, the environmental effects of food production, new education initiatives in schools, animal health, and animal rights.
Or if that all sounds like too much hard work, here’s a really easy recipe for dhal.
Jason Kahn and White Fungus
Jason Kahn is a sound and visual artist based in Zürich whose work includes drawing, sound installation, performance and composition. He was born in New York, grew up in Los Angeles and relocated to Europe in 1990. Kahn has been exhibiting his sound and visual works since the late 1990s, and has had solo and group exhibitions in museums, galleries and arts spaces pretty much everywhere in the damn world.
And he’s playing in Wellington on Sunday night.
Carfree transports – simply no better protection (for the environment)
What are you doing tomorrow? I hope it involves walking, or taking the bus, or staying at home in bed all day. Why? Because it’s World Car Free Day.
You can find out more on the Governement’s new sustainability portal:
Living sustainably means living smarter. Through this site you’ll learn how to live smarter, reduce your impacts on the environment, and save money. You’ll find information to help you make important choices about how you use fuel, electricity and water and what to do with your rubbish.
And if you recognise the joke in the title of this post, perhaps you might like to consider switching to an organic cotton alternative – or a moon cup?
Cinephilia: Opening This Week
The school holidays get under way on Monday and the major movie distributors are making sure you have plenty of choice about where to drop the sprogs while you head off to play the pokies. First up British fantasy film Stardust, based on a Neil Gaiman novel and featuring a catalogue of famous names, from Robert De Niro and Ricky Gervais to Sienna Miller and Michelle Pfeiffer. In the tradition of The Princess Bride (as the saying goes), Stardust is directed by Matthew Vaughan who produced Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch and directed Layer Cake so expect plenty of swearing and gunfights (perhaps not). Readings, Empire, Regent-on-Manners, Queensgate.
[The rest of this week’s new films after the jump.]
Events hand fed to you
As the interweb moves inexorably towards a “don’t make me come over there” attitude we are glad to report that two of Wellingtons most complete “What’s On …” guides are now available in glorious RSS
They are both providing explanations about what ‘RSS’ is and what they cover – Feeling Great | Wotzon
Wotzon has gone an extra step further and also provides:
- Customised RSS feed – sign-up required
- Wotzon widget – download required
Of course you have always been able to keep up-to-date with the real deal by subscribing to the fine Wellingtonista feed
Eat them all up in your reader of choice (which this author would surprised to discover isn’t Google Reader 🙂
Art on the streets
Let’s say this for the record: the Wellingtonista hates tagging. It’s just an inane and territorial fury of poodle-pissings scrawled around the town signifying nothing but a terrifying lack of imagination on the part of the tagger.
That said, there’s more to the world of graffiti than tags. And at some point graffiti changes from mindless and wanton property damage into ART, somewhere across boundaries as ragged and ill-defined and debatable as any cultural warzone. Around central Wellington, it’s all there to be discovered and mapped, tucked away in the alleys and byways of Te Aro mainly, but also scattered around the wider inner city.
[We show you some great street-art, after the jump]
Ponoko at TechCrunch40
Ponoko is perhaps Wellington’s hardest to categorise tech startup. The general idea seems to be to around empowering ordinary people to design items that Ponoko will help them manufacture and distribute.
This admittedly sounds a bit vague until you’ve been immersed in the service, as several of the Wellingtonista (and many of our readers) have been. In fact, it’s now possible to buy fellow Wellingtonista Sue’s designed-by-Sue, built-by-Ponoko jewellery via the Ponoko site, with more to come.
So we are all very excited about what Ponoko has to offer, and that view is shared by the people at TechCrunch, who invited them and a handful of others out of a field of 700 start-up hopefuls world wide to present to today’s TechCrunch40 conference in San Francisco.
This is a fantastic achievement (the immediate evidence being the occasional 503 bandwidth errors on the Ponoko site after co-founder Dave ten Have‘s presentation) and we hope this is the foundation for further and bigger success!
- Dave’s presentation is liveblogged here
- Noted by Engadget here.
- Zillions of mentions via Google Blogsearch