Posts by BenWilson
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And if I read this I'll learn how to 'see race' in the Wellywood sign? I just want to know before I commit.
Read it, dude. It's especially surreal after the McSweeney satire.
Not to mention it's quite interesting. Definitely as an urban latte-sipping middle class Pakeha, I don't spend any minutes at all most days thinking about anything that goes on out in the countryside. I don't get the spiritual attachment to land much, and I certainly don't have much empathy for house-burning, in any cause.
It does rather sound like the rock that got blown up was a bit of a travesty, though.
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With this.
Heh, some funny stuff in there. People see what they want to see. An old friend of mine who is entirely into his own pipe-weed thought the entire thing was really about that. I'd even go along with the argument that Saruman was bitter on Gandalf's access to the halfling's leaf. Certainly he was a secret toker, caught red-handed when Merry and Pippin find copious stores of Longbottom Leaf in his storeroom.
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With the help of large numbers of local bullyboys, if my teenage recall is correct.
It is not correct. The bullyboys are entirely foreign imported half-orcs and humans. There are some Hobbits who are working with them, more out of fear of the consequences.
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Orcs, in the mythology of the book, are clearly not indigenous - they were created in mockery of or from humans by an envious demigod. It's hard to integrate that with European racist mythology.
Elves actually. Not even humans. Orcs are a mockery of Fairy people. They are meant to be earthly demons of some kind.
The LOTR-is-racist trope is rather dull. It's a European story, certainly. If you want to see the orcs, trolls, dragons, spiders, balrogs, Nazgul, etc as other races, go for it. It stretches the metaphor, IMHO. I'm pretty sure they're really meant to be metaphors for the outcomes of the main underlying theme of the story, the loss of a beautiful natural past to an ugly industrial future, and a fantasy alternate future in which the natural past somehow wins through a built in weakness in the technological model. It's not really meant to be an allegory, but rather a fantasy. Something we might like to see, the mighty overthrown by the small. The indigenous fighting off invaders. The nobody from nowhere saving the world. Women beating men in a sword fight. The broken fixed. The lost found. The forgotten remembered. The foolish learning wisdom. The tree smashing the lumber mill down. The most valuable and dangerous thing in the world destroyed.
Massive inversions of reality, carefully designed and built in.
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Like the end of RoTK, where the hobbits return home and find that the biggest threat is internal, not external? Something Peter Jackson entirely left out?
An plenty more killing of Maori and Pacific Islanders could have been had! I was a little disappointed, but it was, after all, a movie, not a 1000 page book. Things work differently.
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someone upthread mentioned the problems of filming 3D using forced perspective (as was done for LotR).
I thought about it some more and realized that was the least of the worries for a 3D conversion. LotR is in exactly the same boat as anything that was never originally captured in 3D. In order to 3D it, a 3D model of every scene and every character needs to be built, so that the other eye can be rendered with the appropriate textures following the appropriate transformations.
So the whole forced perspective problem is irrelevant, I agree. What it was 'meant' to look like the shape/size was is what matters.
I love 3D illusions...there's a whole library here that don't need glasses, just the eye crossing technique...some of the Auckland ones look cool.
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One of the biggest post-9/11 gems was when Richard Prebble compared flying passenger jets into skyscrapers with this...
IIRC, he was using 9/11 as a cheap point scoring exercise about Labour scrapping our fighter jets. Quite what he thought they could have done about the plane, other than shooting it down over a city, was not clear.
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The thing Eden Park is in the biggest danger of being targeted for is jokes. It's wide open. We had our chance to fix that one, but we blew it.
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I also managed to smuggle half a dozen beers into the cricket the other day, cunningly hidden in my stomach. When mixed with what they were serving, it almost exploded spontaneously.
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Although more ambitious would be to build some symbol which was even more gaudy and massive than the original. Then Wellington would have it's Sky Tower.
My favourite suggestion is a giant Kong. It is a little bit symbolic of the NZ film industry, after all. A beast hidden on a remote island, worshipped only by the locals, is captured by an American film magnate, and displayed in chains for the pleasure of the crowds. But then it busts free, and heads straight for the nearest symbol of American Awesome Hugeness.
I hope it doesn't have the same sad ending, though. Shot down by critics, it slides from the dizzying heights, free falls, and smashes into the street below, giving hundreds of reporters their last money-shot and a chance for some cheezy analysis.
More likely is a far more NZ solution, it retires back to it's island, stalking it's home valley, chomping up all the prettiest local actors, and the legend is forgotten when some Australian actor puts on a Tarzan suit. Kong then moves to Australia for the tax cuts, and gets a job as a dolly grip. He loses the job after accidentally-on- purpose dropping a 200 kg camera on Russell Crowe's head, causing a huge brawl. Crowe is narrowly beaten, and signs Kong up for the Rabbitohs. The team fights it's way to the final, but Kong is accused of steroid abuse, and refuses to give a urine sample, and the Rabitohs are humped. Enraged, he climbs Centrepoint Tower to enjoy a revolving buffet of the winning team, the Warriors. A congenital heart condition makes this his last meal, the fatty meal clogging his arteries, and he plunges way less distance than he would have if it was the Auckland Sky Tower, straight into the monorail terminal, completely destroying it. No one is hurt initially, but the monorail does not shut down, and every single person in every carriage is dropped onto Kong's carcass over the next 30 minutes. Due to the Warriors victory, these are mostly NZers on their way to the revolving restaurant. The pile of NZ dead grows higher whilst the Australian parliament debates whether it is actually in the nation's interests to contact the monorail authorities. But the government is overthrown when it is found that Shane Warne was actually in one of the carriages, going incognito in his real hair, and to quote the Leader of the Opposition "They'd sat around on their fucken fat arses doing nothing while foreign monkeys crushed both their sporting dignity and one of their greatest heroes". The station is renamed "Googly station", and any NZ involvement in the affair forgotten.
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