Comet C/2006 P1 McNaught

The McNaught comet - we could see this clearly in the sky at around 10:30pm on Saturday. It wasn't quite as bright as it is in this picture (which I found online) but otherwise very similar - a little more orange when we saw it, perhaps. Apparently this comet was only discovered on 7 August 2006 and it won't be visible again... ever! It's the brightest comet to be seen in 42 years.

Wellington Cup Day

Yesterday we caught the early train to Trentham Racecourse (in the Lower Hutt Valley, ringed by high hills) and spent the day at the races. It was the Wellington Cup, a big day for NZ racing by all accounts, and a pretty big event with thousands of very dressed-up punters (it was a lot busier than it looks in these photos - unfortunately taken on my mobile as i forgot my proper camera). Although this was my first time at a racecourse, I refrained from gambling all afternoon before putting $10 each was on Far Away Places and Sordid Affair in the Cup race itself. Predictably neither of them placed. Judith gambled on every race and picked a fair few winners (1st and 2nd in one race) but placed small bets and so only ended up breaking even. It was also a lot hotter than it looks in these photos - the sun was blasting us through the clouds you can see here with at times almost unbelievable intensity. Having learned my lesson whilst bowling (see December's blogs) I was ready with sunscreen and my diesel cap.



Champagne was the weapon of choice, with corks popping through the air all day.



The finish line. Most of each race was watched on a big screen with frenzied commentary booming out over the PA, but we had a good view of the last 50 metres of so - a fair number of the races were won in these last seconds too, with the winners suddenly breaking from the pack and snatching victory by a nose or neck.






The birdcage (left) and members stand (right).

Much to our surprise, when they came to award the trophy to the winner of the Wellington cup race - one of 10 races on the day - Prime Minister Helen Clark appeared, about 30 feet away, in 'the birdcage'. That's her dead-centre in the pink top!

Art and music updates!

Some pictures of an interesting exhibition we went to at Wellington's Civic Art Gallery, plus a street-side tribute to James Brown (presumably) and the poster for the M. Ward gig we saw recently...

View from Work

More rubbishy phone shots, but taking pictures out the window at work is a clandestine business. Every time I turn my head the sea is there (assuming the weather is behaving itself...).




I don't remember where I took this last one, but felt the addition of a 'the' might have been a good idea?

Dusk snapshots

I took these on my (somewhat ropey-quality) mobile phone camera as dusk fell in Wellington.









This last one is the NZ parliament (The Beehive), from where I sometimes sit at lunchtime - work is a couple of minutes away.

A weekend in Taranaki

Last weekend we flew to New Plymouth and spent the weekend (and Monday, which was Wellington Anniversary day and so a public holiday) there exploring the 'Wild West Coast' of Taranaki. The last few posts show some pictures of the area, which is known for good surf and is dominated by Mt Taranaki, a not-so-dormant volcano (regularly erupting for the last several million years, most recently only 250 years ago!). As you can see in the pictures, it's a sparsely-populated and densely-vegetated, fertile area. With great cafes!

Also notable for having its very own Cardiff, Stratford and Brixton.

Taranaki 4

Taranaki 3

Taranaki 2

Taranaki 1

NZ Pics

Street sign on Willis Street - our street! I walk past this every morning on my way to work (it's about 2 minutes away).











The IBM tower on Willis Street, central Wellington.

This is also about 2 minutes walk from our apartment - I'm sanding in the same place more or less as the last photo but... looking up.







This is the view looking in the opposite direction to the first two pictures - back up the street towards our apartment building.











Civic Square

Between the Library and Art Gallery... about 5 minutes away!















Hamilton - Christmas Day 2006.

Films of 2006...

Brokeback Mountain

Ang Lee's The Ice Storm is one of my favourite movies, and I really enjoyed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hulk (yes Hulk) as well. I keep meaning to see some of his other movies (not his version of Sense and Sensibility though as I am running a one-man boycott of Emma Thompson - as well as of Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones - for crimes against humanity) so I was keen to see Brokeback Mountain. I found it a bit mystifying though. Yes, it was engaging, yes it was beautifully shot and reasonably acted (only reasonably - obviously mainstream heterosexual culture considers a straight man playing a gay role as in itself some sort of superhuman feat of acting, but I do not). But I found myself asking - what sort of film was it? It seemed to keep slipping a track and becoming something else... which I'm sure was the point and I'm sure it was very clever but.. I found it left me feeling frustrated. It was a fairly straightforward narrative movie at the end of the day, but without any realist pay-off. I also found the haphazard approach to creating the passage through time troubling at times - characters seemed to age rather unevenly, to say the least! Possibly I saw it with the wrong expectations - after it had been nominated for Oscars and so on... but regardless, I remain unsure what the fuss was all about.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

After Steve Coogan's disappointing The Parole Officer, this film was a real treat. I was meant to read Tristram Shandy on my English degree course but I never did (I was probably playing Mario-Cart on the Super Nintendo instead) so I can't claim to understand the inter-textual profundities the film no doubt contains (although most references to the book seemed to be about not having read it). Nonetheless, I thought it was a very witty, moving, and successful film in every respect. Easily my film of the year.

Walk The Line

I've never much liked Joaquim Phoenix in anything - especially that god-awful Gladiator film, in which he was the absolute worst thing in a big pile of shit things - so I wasn't too sure what I'd make of this, but how could I not see a film about the Great Johnny Cash? As it turned out, ol' Joaq' does a top job, particularly with the songs, which he performs with a real sense of danger, and whilst sounding uncannily like The Man In Black himself. I guess it's a fairly conventional sort of biopic (I'm told Ray has exactly the same plot?) but I was gripped... even allowing for the artistic license they no doubt used, I had no idea how little I knew about Johnny Cash! I'm not sure why Reese Witherspoon got nominated for an Oscar though. She was fine, but not any better or worse than she usually is..? Although her singing voice was also mighty fine. Sure thing.

Good Night, And Good Luck

A modest sort of film, focusing its energies in the right places to make it an accomplished period piece. One could ask why they didn't just come out with it and make a contemporary film, given its heavy-handed drawing of parallels between McCarthy's anti-communist agenda and Geoarge W. Bush's War On Terror, but I felt the subject matter and treatment were sufficiently interesting in themselves to make this a side issue. Plus I have a soft spot for that fool George's not so hidden desire to be his generations' John Cassavetes. Sort of.

Capote

Great to see Phillip Seymour Hoffman in a lead role, he's a genius, but a strange film that left me a little cold. I couldn't relate to his character, so for me it was interesting in a sort of documentary sense (as it recreates 'real events') but not really engaging as a drama.


Wordplay

In the mode of Spellbound, the documentary about kids entering an annual US spelling competition, this documentary about the New York Times crossword is worth renting if you like that sort of thing. That sort of thing being the charming and quirky geeks 'n' freaks who just can't stop puzzling! And why not? I wish I could solve crosswords.

X-Men: The Last Stand

Not quite enough to snatch the 'best of the trilogy' prize from the first installment, but certainly sufficient to wipe away the utter tedium of the second. This one manages to pick up some of the aspects that make the idea of X-men interesting, but other than some soap operatics and special effects it doesn't really manage to be very interesting. I just watched the first two episodes of NBC's new heavily X-men-indebted show Heroes the other night and they had what this movie lacked in spades.

Thank You for Smoking

This is much more interesting than it seems it will be as it cleverly sidesteps the cliches one by one and captures avoids being the anti-smoking "issue" film you expect. It won't change your life, but it's well written, has a sharp script, and is worth a few hours of your time.


Superman Returns

I thought this was GREAT! I liked the casting, the script, the acting, and the action sequences aren't too shabby either - never has plummeting to earth in a burning airplane seemed so real! Contrary to the very snotty and snooty reviews I read, Kevin Spacey was a fine Lex Luthor and the actress playing Lois Lane was perfectly adequate, as was the evil ploy to take over/detoy the world. What I really liked, though, was the shift it made from the earlier movies (not that there's anything wrong with them) by emphasising SUPERMAN rather than CLARK KENT. Superman Returns is a movie about SUPERMAN. In the original movies, it's all about how difficult it is to pretend to be Clark Kent, whereas being Superman is easy (well,okay, he does have a few problems - earthquakes, tactical nuclear missles, marauding Kryptonian criminals - but.. he's Superman, so he deals). The new movie is more interested what it would be like to be this lonely, alien being who does not belong to Earth or really have anything in common with humans, it isn't interested in the comedy of the Clark Kent persona: it's interested in his alien, superness. And it's all the more interesting for it.

Nacho Libre

Not the greatest Jack Black movie ever - it all seems pitched at a giggly 12 year old but still funny in parts. It got me through a couple of hours of a long flight so I overlooked its shortcomings.





A Scanner Darkly

Along with Tristram Shandy, this was one of the year's real treats. I thought everything was just right - the look, the script, the whole treatment oozed an authentic, unmistakable Phillip K Dick-ness that no one has ever captured in film before (despite the many films based on his work). I was surprised, not just because it had Keanu Reeves voicing the main character, but more because I thought that Waking Life - made using the same animation technique and by the same person - was one of the worst films I've ever seen. Banal, pretentious drivel! A Scanner Darkly, on the other hand, is almost genius, completely screwed with my brain, and was almost transcendently beautiful and witty. No one will do better with a Dick story. Incidentally if you liked this film or are just generally a fan of PKD's work (he is the 20th century's second greatest science fiction writer, after all), check out I Am Alive And you Are Dead: A Journey Into The Mind Of Philip K Dick - an outstanding biography by Emmanuel Carrere.