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Tonight I went to the announcement of the winners of the one-day short story competition. It was held in the Philip Carter auditorium at the art gallery, a place I hadn’t been to before. It’s a nice space, with comfortable steeply-raked seating, pleasant muted colours, and that rarest of things: an effective sound system.

The place seats around 200, and was completely full, with people sitting in the aisles. More and more people kept coming in, well after things got underway. I just don’t get people – why would you even consider arriving 25 minutes late to a 90-minute event???

The event was compered by Sarah from the art gallery. She started by saying how pleased the organizers were with the event: 190 people registered on the day, and of those 170 turned in short stories at the end of the day.

Then she introduced the three judges:  Sally Blundell, Kate De Goldi, and Gavin Bishop. In the first part of the evening the three judges read snippets of their favourite short stories from around the world, and quotes from various writers about the nature of short stories. The most dramatic moment came when Bishop reached a crucial point in the story he was reading and snapped the book shut in mid-sentence, leaving the story unfinished.

Then they moved on to the competition winners. Each judge talked about one (in the case of the kids’ division) or three (in the case of the adults’ division) of the stories from the competition that they really liked, reading snippets here and there. There was clearly a big range of approaches to the challenge, and even the kids’ stories seemed very sophisticated. At one stage De Goldi took a swipe at Fantasy writers, and then in the next breath she praised a story which featured a peacock from the Peacock Fountain coming alive and going for a walk. A classic case of “Fantasy is bad and this is good therefore it’s not Fantasy” I guess.

Finally the winners were announced. The winner of the kids’ division was there in person to pick up her $250, but the winner of the adults’ division was up in Wellington attending his graduation, and so wasn’t there to pick up his $750. De Goldi gushed about the winning entry, saying that it was the clear winner in the eyes of all three judges. She then read it out and… to be honest I didn’t really ‘get’ it. I’ll give it another go when it is published in the Press, but on first hearing I couldn’t see what the fuss was about.

Encounters is an uneven doco about Antarctica. While it has several worthwhile wildlife sequences, the movie is more about the people who choose the live and work on the continent. The guy who made the film certainly found some interesting folk to talk to, such as the linguist working on a continent with no languages to study, or the guy described as “Philosopher, Fork-lift Driver”. A common theme from these people concerned the type of people drawn to Antarctica, from the guy who recognized his traveling kind when he first arrived, to the guy who has a 20-kg rucksack (including tent, sleeping bag, and inflatable canoe) permanently packed so that he can be off on the next adventure at a moments notice. The type was best described by the guy who said that “everyone in the world who is not tied down eventually falls to the bottom of the world.”

I was horrified by the appearance of McMurdo Base. What a dreadful festering eyesore of a place. Certainly well out of kilter with Antarctica’s pristine image. Sure people have to live somewhere and have to move around, but does it really have to be such a grot-hole?

So the doco has much to recommend it, but I felt it let itself down in significant ways. The doco had no cohesion or overriding story to it. The film maker started by posing seemingly irrelevant and pointless questions (Why do we wear masks to disguise ourselves? Why don’t monkeys ride goats?) which he not only didn’t answer, but made no attempt to explore further.

But my biggest objection was to the disrespectful way the film maker treated some of his subjects. On two or three occasions he recorded his own summaries of their stories over the top of their own tellings. Fair enough if their (invariably interesting) stories had to be summarized for the sake of brevity, but there was no reason to do it in a way that suggested that the people being interviewed were long-winded bores.

I didn’t find the doco boring, but the three distinct sets of snoring from the audience  suggested other people did.

So, while it was good to see what life is really like in Antarctica, this film could have and should have been much more than it was.

OSS 117 is a sly French spoof of (1960s-era) James Bond movies. I find that spoofs work best when they are played straight, and this movie frequently veers too far into over-the-top spoof (such as when OSS 117 tries to spit-roast a crocodile to prove his manliness). The movie is at its best and funniest when OSS 117 plays it straight: particularly the frequent scenes where the secret agent reveals himself to be an ignorant racist misogynist pillock, while simultaneously expecting everyone in the room to love him by rights. Good fun.

Oh my goodness. Camino is astounding, one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. It’s pretty hard to describe. It is ‘inspired by’ (and I should imagine only very very loosely) the true story of a 14 year girl who died of cancer in 1985 and who is now in the process of being beatified. So the bulk of the story concerns the family’s tragedy as the the little girl deteriorates over the last few months of her life. The family is intensely, intensely Catholic, and the family is embedded in an intensely Catholic community. Everything is about God, leading to some spectacular mental contortions as people try to paint the unfolding tragedy in a good light. Added to this are the girl’s vision/dreams, which range from prosaic to downright creepy and disturbing. Another thread is the normal lives of the girl’s classmates, as they prepare to stage a school play.

The death scene is exceptional, and means one thing to one of those present and something completely different to the others.

A smaller side-story shows the life of Camino’s older sister in an Opus Dei chapter house, and the strange goings-on there.

The girl playing Camino is a gorgeous wee kid, and a terrific actor: I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more of her.

Red Cliff is a vast, sprawling, hugely entertaining Chinese war epic with a cast of thousands. It is nominally set in Imperial China in about 300AD. As well as chocker with action, it was surprisingly and frequently funny. The humour arises sometimes from the dialogue, but more often from the howlingly improbable action sequences. These are carried out with such panache that you are happy to just laugh and hang on for the ride.

I found the almost incessant fight sequences very hard to follow, especially at first, and I had to give up trying to figure out who were the goodies and who were the baddies and who was winning and just sit back and watch the arrows and spears fly.

As entertaining as the movie is, I found the cinematography appalling. The colour palette was very odd, it used a very limited depth of field (meaning that the amazing Chinese scenery was mostly reduced to fuzzy blobs), and the long CGI shots of vast armies and navies seemed deliberately blurred. I guess they were trying to give a sense of scale, but what it actually did was give a sense that they didn’t know how to use cameras.

But this didn’t matter much: for two and a bit hours of daft fun this movie can’t be beat.

Moon is a slow-paced SF movie about a man going slowly insane with loneliness because of his three-year solo assignment on a largely-automated mining moonbase. It’s reminiscent of 2001 and Solaris.

I had seen a trailer for the movie which showed a couple of key scenes that made it obvious what was going on. I had hoped that the trailer was deliberately misleading, but no. It wouldn’t have mattered much anyway – anyone with a SF background would have no trouble working out What’s Really Going On early on, which is a shame.

Still I enjoyed just sitting back and watching the moonbase operations. They ranged from spot-on (the lunar buggies) to believable (the spacesuits and airlocks) to unlikely (mining rigs looking and operating like combine harvesters) to flat-out wrong (Earth high in the sky despite being on lunar far-side).

A good movie for space geeks looking for some realistic (ish) moonbase action, but not I would imagine of much interest to others.

Today was the day for the one-day short story competition organized by the NZ Society of Authors and the Christchurch Art Gallery. It was quite fun arriving at the Art Gallery in the morning to pick up my registration pack – there was a much larger queue of hopefuls than I was expecting, with people striding across the plaza towards the queue with alacrity, while others left the front of the queue walking slowly, thoughtful looks on their faces, each reading the details of the challenge. The competition required you to write a 1500-word story incorporating at least four out of twelve things from central Christchurch. Here is the list:

I had an idea for a story on the way home, and quickly pounded out 900 words. But then I couldn’t think of an ending, and when I went back I decided that the story was crap anyway, so I didn’t submit anything in the end.

The announcement of the winners will be made at the Art Gallery in a couple of weeks time.

Coraline is an astounding, gloriously-surreal animated movie about an intelligent, inquisitive little girl who finds an alter-family in a magical wonderland at the end of a tunnel behind a door in a creepy old house. It is based on a Neil Gaiman novel.

The movie is available as a normal 2D movie, but we were fortunate enough to see it in 3D. Having had a few unsatisfactory experiences with 3D systems I was a little concerned how it would work, but the 3D effect worked perfectly, and added immensely to the out-of-this-world feel of the movie.

An amazing experience all round.

The Cove is a feel-bad doco about the yearly slaughter of tens of thousands of dolphins in a little secluded cove near the town of Taiji in Japan. While it is something of an open secret that this practice goes on (with the meat sold in Japan as whale meat), the cove was specifically chosen to shield the slaughter from the eyes of the world. A substantial proportion of this doco follows the team that, commando-style, managed to get cameras into the cove to record the atrocities.

The doco also covers larger issues, such as the ineffectiveness of the IWC and Japan’s blatant bribery of small nations to try and get the whaling ban overturned, the parlous state of the world’s oceans, and the high level of mercury in fish.

One of the men featured in the doco is the guy who, as a young man, captured and trained the five dolphins who were used to film the TV show Flipper. After one of his charges died, he decided that keeping dolphins in captivity was a terrible thing to do, and has worked since to free captive dolphins, and to bring Japan’s activities to world attention.

The movie made me despair for the state of the world, and for the callous, brutal creatures that humans can be.