Away We Go (2009)

This is one of those films that you’ve been walking past at the DVD store for about a year, and every time you almost get it out, but you always end up finding something else instead.

Well I finally got it out, and I’m going to tell you about it. However, I should point out that this woman wrote a really good, fancy review of it that is really smart, so you should probably just read hers instead.

So straight away this film had two things going for it: rad cover art and John Krasinski. John Krasinski (aka “that cute guy from the Office) has a great smile – I mean a great smile – and has the advantage of playing lovely guys. Advantageous in that he does it well, and it makes him lovable. He’s so lovable. Also his last name isn’t as tricky to spell as you think – just sound it out: kra-sin-ski. Neat. 

Maya Rudolph is also pretty stunning, but previously I’ve only seen her as the bride in Bridesmaids (2011)

The film has a pretty rad opening scene. I say “rad” – it could so easily have not been. It opens with a sexual scene which shocked my conservative self (I know, I know – that’s not hard), however the fact that I’d completely fallen in love with the couple anyway after the first minute just shows what great writing and acting this film has.

So our two heroes Verona and Burt are a young couple very much in love, who find out that they’re having a baby. Six months later their world is altered when Burt’s parents, their only family nearby, move away. They realise that they’re alone at a critical juncture in their lives and are free to do whatever and go wherever they want. Only they don’t know what they want. They’re at that stage of self-doubt that we’ve all felt before (and will again) and question who they are and what they’re doing with their lives.

Verona: Burt, are we fuck-ups?
Burt: No! What do you mean?
V: I mean, we’re 34-
B: 33
V: -and we don’t even have this basic stuff figured out.
B: Basic, like how?
V: Basic, like how to live.
B: We’re not fuck-ups.
V: We have a cardboard window.
B: We’re not fuck-ups.
V: …I think we might be fuck-ups.
B: We’re not fuck-ups.

So they decide to take a trip and visit various family and friends in different cities – Phoenix, Tucson, Montreal, Miami – and then decide where they’d like to settle. So they set out and in each place visit different families with varying degrees of eccentricity. In each place bar one they visit friend/s with children and they experience different ideas of what constitutes “family” – and what constitutes “parenting”!

Maggie Gyllenhaal does hilariously well as an old friend with two kids who is a “new age-y” mum who believes in parenting without “the three S’s”: Separation, Sugar and Strollers (“why would I want to push my baby away from me?!”)

Each place they visit – heralded in the film by bold titles, e.g. “AWAY TO PHOENIX” – is like a separate vignette and while the scenes with Gyllenhaal are almost farcical, many do deal with real challenges relating to life, relationships and parenting.

Personally I really enjoyed the way the film dealt with the journey (not just geographical) of Verona and Burt in a way that showed real emotions that were sometimes softened by and sometimes sharpened by humour. Humour which was at times sombre, silly, wry, sweet, dark, and just snort-out-loud funny (yes, I ‘lol’ed. Or ‘sol’ed?)

Something which bugged me about the film was also partly my favourite thing: Burt is just so damn great. He’s like the perfect guy. I mean, he’s got annoying habits, but that just highlights how perfect he is the rest of the time. Perfect for Verona. He loves her and genuinely wants to please here. He doesn’t say the right thing all the time, but he gets a lot closer than any other guy I’ve met! As Katrina Onstad notes, “Much of the film consists of Burt and Verona side by side, reacting to the absurdity around them.” Burt seems perfect because he’s perfect for Verona. Just like she is for him. They’re a real unit in this film.

Her name isn’t the only awesome thing about Verona, either. She’s really well-rounded (no pun intended) and you see her insecure side as well as her fun one. I like that she’s so comfortable and familiar with Burt that she doesn’t fall for his charms, she still gets mad at him and grumpy about stuff. She’s not self-conscious because she knows he loves her. That sounds cheesy ay? I can’t explain it very well. As a character she does being pregnant really well, in that we see her living her life like real pregnant people do, not just sitting around “being pregnant”. She’s still herself and she’s still living her life and making decisions. Like John Krasinski said in an interview,

…the coolest part about the movie is that it’s not a pregnancy movie. Us getting pregnant is just the catalyst to us, basically, taking another look at our lives and being like: Oh, wait, are we ready? Are we good people? Have we done all of the things we want to do?

Isn’t that sexy? “Us getting pregnant”. I think that’s awesome. Because that’s what it’s like in the film, as a couple they’re having a baby, so it’s a very “us” feeling. In that way it’s a very self-involved film. But isn’t that how life is? Onstad wrote

Rudolph’s stern demeanour suggests a woman adept at keeping her emotional life in check. Krasinski is her warmer foil, and the two are believably familiar together. They also look sort of normal; not artfully normal, but normal, which feels radical somehow in an American love story.

I think that’s it – they really do feel totally familiar and normal. The acting is superb and I think the styling is the icing on the cake in terms of creating great, real characters. They’re that cool couple that you wanna be friends with. They’re funny and stable and normal. But you’re also kind of envious of them, because their closeness and stability is kind of rare, too.

I think this film portrays my ideal relationship, one which is self-reliant and self-sustaining. I’m not really a social person, I just need that one person and I’m set. That’s the plan, anyway.

So I guess the moral of the story is: if you’re worried you’re screwing your life up, don’t be – everyone else is way worse! Or something like that…

I think this is the kind of movie you’ll either love or hate. If you’re cynical it’s probably soppy hipster drivel, or just plain boring. I thought it was inspired. If there’s a DVD-shaped parcel under my tree this year, I won’t mind if it’s this one.

(And if you’re walking past this DVD at the shop, too – stop, and take it home!)

Director: Sam Mendes
Starring: Maya Rudolph, John Krasinski

Craving Ghost Chips

Drink driving ads have always freaked me out. Some of them have been terrible, and some have been based around pretty cool ideas (like the “mate-mate-mate-Dave” one). But Waka Kotohi, the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) recently released a new drink driving ad that lots of people are talking about.

The ad features a Maori teenager (who shall be known as “Legend”) at a party where he can see that his sober driver mate (George) is really “wasted” and not fit to drive them home.

The ad follows the guy’s internal moral debate as he tries to decide what to do. He doesn’t want to look “dumb”, but he thinks about what would happen if his friend was killed. He imagines that he’d have to move in with George’s lame family, and that Ghost George would haunt him for the rest of his life, tempting him with delicious ghost takeaways.

Ghost George: Wanna chip?
Legend: You know I can’t grab your ghost chips.

The ad is pretty slick and looks more like a (really) short film than an ad by the NZTA. Which I’m sure is what they were going for. The lighting, cuts, use of slow motion, music and humour – it’s just really cool. It’s probably the first drink driving ad in the world by a government agency that’s really hip.

I love lots of things about this ad: the spotlight on Legend to show his separation and internal conflict at the party, everyone’s sweet accents, dead George’s brother’s hair, the awesome editing of the clip, but my favourite thing is in the party scenes near the end when one of the chicks does a wicked slo-mo party pukana.

According to the NZTA website, over 40% of all drink-driving crashes involve drunk drivers under the age of 24 years and in 2008-2010 38% of the drunk drivers under the age of 24 were Maori. So I guess an ad featuring Maori young people makes sense. Pity it came too late for the ad awards. Legend.

Watch the ad on the NZTA website.

BLFB Part Two: Preparing Pieces and Assembling Letters

 Finally, I got to do the next step in my Block Letters For Baby quilt! (Based on the Billboard Quilt-Along at Oh Fransson!)

First of all, I cut the freezer paper templates of each letter into pieces and grouped them by colour so that I had five wee piles. (I only did one letter at a time, so that the pieces didn’t get mixed up!)

I allocated the colour of each pile to a certain fabric. The fabrics I chose were random ones garnered from my meagre “stash” (and my Mum’s!) Then I got a pile of coloured paper pieces, e.g. purple, and ironed them to the front of one of the fabrics.

I had to keep reminding myself to iron the paper to the FRONT of the fabric, it just felt so weird. More than once I had to peel them off and turn the fabric over and iron them again. Lucky freezer paper lets you do that several times before it stops sticking.

I also had to redo some of them because I didn’t leave a big enough seam allowance. I hate waste, so I’m always really stingy when measuring and cutting fabric.

I didn’t have a rotary cutter and a board, so I used a ruler and a pencil to mark the seam allowance around each piece then cut them out with fabric scissors. It seems to have worked fine

I then put the fabric/freezer paper pieces into piles again, this time by number rather than colour. The little codes I put on at the start really helped here. That Elizabeth really is a smartie.

I used the codes to help me put the letters together like a puzzle. It was really cool seeing them take shape.

After checking that they all matched together I put them back into their column stacks next to the sewing machine. That made it nice and easy to get them in the right order.

The really tricky part was lining up the “wonky” seams – you can’t line up the edge of the two fabrics, inside you’ve got to try and pull the edge of the top one up so you can peek inside and line up the edges of the freezer paper.

I sawed together all the number ones, then the twos, threes, fours, etc, until all the columns were assembled. Then I pressed the seams open with ma trusty iron!

Lastly I just had to sew the columns together and voilà!

Now I just got some thread trimmin’ to do and then we’re read to appliqué!

Did I scare ya?

1 in 7 people in the world don’t have enough food. (That’s about 925 million people).

22,000 children die every single day due to poverty.

Almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day.

The poorest 40% of the world’s population accounts for 5% of global income. The richest 20% accounts for 75% of world income.

Happy Halloween – enjoy your candy!
(Ok, that was mean)

 

+Infos
Poverty Facts and Stats @ GlobalIssues.org
2011 World Hunger and Poverty Facts and Statistics @ WorldHunger.org

Kakariki

I think this is a really cool election poster. The wordplay on “richer”, the cute (Maori?) kid in the green shirt, the idyllic but not tourist-y natural green setting.

Well played.

Stop! Unconsume it!

Today I read about quite a cool new initiative called Unconsumption.

As Chappell noted on Etsy: these days “we are overly branded” – we live in a branded world! So Rob Walker, author of Buying In: The Secret Diary Between What We Buy and Who We Are, has been looking at our addiction to brands and how this could be used to work for sustainability, without churning out more things for people to buy. In the same Etsy article, Chappell quotes an interview with Walker:

Branding has been one of my main subjects as a journalist, and for a few years I’ve pondered if there’s a way to borrow some of the tools of brand-making to advance an idea, but without actually creating products.

On the Unconsumption tumblr homepage is a quote from Allison Arieff

Making sustainability a trend has minimized its relevance and stymied its progress. Climate change, declining resources, peak oil — these aren’t passing fads. “Green is the new black,” “eco-chic,” “eco-fabulous,” … All that marketing-speak has done little for sustainability except validate old behaviors. It’s a notion that you can go green by buying more stuff.

Controversial? Yes! But true? I would say absolutely. We take along a flimsy designer “reusable” bag to put all our pre-packaged purchases in to alleviate our guilt about all the stuff we get all the time. It’s an ongoing challenge for all of us to walk the walk in terms of making real changes towards less consuming in our lives.

One solution that Rob Walker came up with was to found Unconsumption and develop a logo (designed by Clifton Burt) which can be used to rebrand reused and repurposed items instead of simply buying new ones to replace them. From Chappell’s article,

In exploring how to build excitement around repurposing our old belongings, Walker realized that, for now, branding is the way we add value to our objects. In other words, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

The result is the cute Ms. (or Mr.) Cart, a wee upside-down shopping cart who is empty and happy.

(She’s saying, “Look, no stuff!”)

Unconsumption encourages you to borrow, use and even remix this logo and use it to rebrand existing (noncommercial) products which you use or reuse instead of buying new ones.

Something inside me is repulsed by the blatant greed and consumer mentality of brands, but I like the way that this appropriates the function of branding while at the same time it emphasises the rejection of the fundamental concept behind capalist brands. Ms. Cart is the new “I’m a paper bag”. It’s showing people that you’re not wearing this shirt from the op-shop because you’re too poor or lazy to buy new flashy clothes, you’re wearing because it’s a good shirt, and you’re deliberately not buying new stuff at every opportunity.

by Diane Gilleland from 'the Uncollection'

On the Unconsumption page titled ‘Why “Feeling Like Part of the Solution” Matters’, the author describes listening to a radio show called “Climate change and behavioral change: What Will It Take?”

One of the ways in which people cope with what they could well believe is an apocalyptic threat, and maybe that will be the reality, is that they want to do something about it, they need to do something about it. And I think it’s terribly important that they take some kind of action. And that action might not have a direct spin-off in terms of reducing carbon emissions, but it’s psychologically very important. It’s motivating, validating and they can feel they are part of the solution as well as part of the problem, so it’s a very important way of coping with climate change.

 I think that this is really true and it’s easy for us to scoff and say “oh, that’s just a way for middle-class capitalists to ease their guilt…” but I think the point is that even if you’re just doing it to feel better – at least you’re doing it. We want to train ourselves to feel good about anything that lessens the harm we do to the environment. We want to normalise the idea of conserving, reusing, utilising things, and understand that endless consumption is unnatural, abnormal and totally unsustainable.

By Chelsea Conway (from the 'Unconsumption' Facebook page)

A 3 Generational Miracle

I admit that I haven’t been watching too much of the TV coverage of the earthquake diaster in Turkey. Having experienced it here, it’s so distressing to see others on the other side of the world going through the same thing (on a much larger scale).

However I was really happy to hear about the rescue in Ercis of three ladies from the same family. I say ladies – the first to be pulled out of the rubble by rescuers was tiny Azra, only two weeks old.

For two days she had been held by her mother, both of them trapped under the crushed concrete and metal of their collapsed 5-storey apartment building.

The young family reportedly live in Sivas in central Turkey, and were visiting the baby’s grandparents in Ercis when the earthquake struck. Azra’s father is still lost, buried in the rubble, from which there has been no signs of life.

But her mother Semiha (above) and grandmother Gulsaadet (below) were rescued a few hours after Azra was freed. The women were huddled together and managed to survive the freezing conditions. After being taken to a hospital in Ankara, little Azra was declared to be in good health. 

Rescuer Oytun Gulpinar reportedly said of saving the women

Bringing them out is such happiness. I wouldn’t be happier if they gave me tons of money.

 That rush of watching clamouring rescuers in bright orange extract a person from the rubble and the elation of hope that it brings was painfully familiar from the days following the Christchurch quake, but with these three women from the same family all saved in one day it really was an extra special moment.

(Visit Daily Mail Online for more pictures of the rescue and of Azra)

fleurs de printemps

Yesterday was a great day: it was a public holiday, the All Blacks had won the World Cup, it was warm, sunny and I went for a walk. 

Blossoms. They are spring. On a sunny day, they just look so delightful and fun, like they’re giggling. And they’re so ridiculously frilly. I feel like they should be a little bit embarrassed to be so over-the-top frilly and poofy.

I love trees. I love trees and I love leaves. I love sunlight shining through them. I love the shadows it makes on the surface of the leaves and on the grass, and the way they play as the wind moves them.

Then you turn your face up and let the pillow of light feathers touch your skin, and it almost feels like nothing. It’s soft, but cool.

A single blossom looks so different to an entire branch or a whole tree. Their beauty is different.

Sun + Leaves = Happy

Blossoms = Spring

Source Code (2011)

 Time travel! It’s the stuff of movies! One of those movies is Source Code, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Vera Farmiga.

To be honest, I’m not much one for science-y, nerdy time machine movies. However Source Code isn’t a nerdy time machine movie. It’s less about time travel and more about people and relationships and identity. I don’t always like “thinking” movies at the end of a long day, and although any film with time travel in the plot is going to require you to pay a certain level of attention, Source Code drew me in and got me thinking about the story and the people involved, not just the mechanics and plausibility of the thing.

Another film with close parallels to Source Code is Deja Vu, the 2006 movie starring Denzel Washington. I enjoyed them both, and think they do well as two films from the same genre which are both interesting and worth watching in their own right. (Minor spoilers ahead!)

'Source Code' (above) and 'Deja Vu' (below)

In both films the ability to see or travel through time is developed and accessed through computers, and the nature of the time travel is quite interesting. In contrast to the traditional idea of a time machine that can just travel freely through time without limitations, in each of these films the window of time that can be accessed has very specific restrictions.

In Deja Vu a “time-folding” computer program called ‘Snow White’ allows a small group of computer scientists to see the past, but only a very specific point in the past, about 4 days before the present. Supposedly one can’t “travel” to that time, but you can view it like a movie, and you can move around in space, within that point in time.

In Source Code a soldier is sent back in time using a “time loop” computer program called ‘Source Code’ to also live through a very specific time: the 8 minutes preceding the bombing of a commuter train. However unlike in Deja Vu the soldier can be sent back to relive the same 8 minutes over and over ad infinitum, despite dying each time the train explodes.

Colter Stevens in 'Source Code', played by Jake Gyllenhaal (above) and Doug Carlin in 'Deja Vu', played by Denzel Washington (below)

Although technology is used in each film to facilitate the time travel, in each case it is an amateur outsider who has to navigate the journey through time. This is a great cinematic device because it means that the protagonist is figuring out everything at pretty much the same time as the audience.

Christina Warren in 'Source Code', played by Michelle Monaghan (above) & Claire Kuchever in 'Deja Vu', played by Paula Patton (below)

Despite all their similiarities, however, the films are both different, and leave you with very different feelings. Deja Vu is all action-y and Doug has to race through time and space to save the beautiful stranger, Claire. There are lots of chases and explosions and shooting and crocodiles and stuff. While Source Code does have some of each of the above (except the crocodiles), it is a much more introspective film. I think this reflects the closed loop of time that Colter Stevens finds himself trapped in.

With echoes of Avatar, Colter Stevens, a marine fighting in Afghanistan, finds himself sitting on a Chicago train in someone else’s body. After dying in the explosion he wakes back in his own body, but trapped in a metal pod with no way of getting out. An airforce captain appears on a video monitor and tells him he must find the bomber on the train, and sends him back in time with another 8 minutes to do so. In both places/times, Colter struggles to find and stop the train bomber, and also to figure out why he’s trapped in the pod and how he can escape.

Source Code is a much more psychological film which causes the viewer to be more concerned with Colter, his experiences, and his increasingly desperate search for an escape. Time travel isn’t a gimic that the film is based around, but a device which facilitates the telling of an unnerving human story.

Director: Duncan Jones
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga

Kleeberger for Christchurch

Remember how I said that trying to imagine Adam Kleeberger without his beard was sad? Well, it is sad no longer!

A few days ago Kleeberger shaved his 30cm long beard (which he’d been growing for about 8 months) off to raise money for charity. I was so touched to hear that the Canadian rugby player did it to raise money for prostate cancer research and for aid for Christchurch in wake of the earthquake!

Through the shave Kleeberger raised $3700 for Christchurch – somehow it just feels personal when someone you don’t even know acknowledges something that affected your life in such a huge way, like a random act of kindness.

Sport24 reported Kleeberger describing his wildman beard

“Somebody said to me the modern-day beard is the urban antlers. I like that one,” said Kleeberger, who described his bearded look as “lumberjack.”

The beard became iconic for Kleeberger in the 2011 Rugby World Cup (RWC), and it made the talented player easy to spot on the field.

“The beard definitely became bigger than me. It gave fans something to identify with. Even non-fans were drawn to rugby as a result.”

Photo: The Canadian Press

The stylist shaved and shaped various styles as the beard slowly disappeared, including the oh-so-dainty moustache above.

Afterwards, Kleeberger said his bare face felt “cold”, and his head also felt “lighter”, as Stuff reported

“It feels cold. But I don’t have to worry about eating ice cream or saucy foods anymore, so that’s a plus.

Very practical – and saucy.

Thanks, Kleebs! You are an awesome guy.

(P.S. 7 hours ’til the final – GO ALL BLACKS!!!!)