Film in Elsewhere

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BOB DYLAN, AND DA PENNEBAKER INTERVIEWED (2007). Looking back on Bob

19 Aug 2007  |  4 min read

Fortysomething years ago the New York filmmaker DA Pennebaker received an offer he couldn’t refuse -- and which would subsequently define the genre of rock documentaries, rockumentaries if you will. The phone call came from Albert Grossman, the most important manager in music at the time after the Beatles’ Brian Epstein. Grossman -- who later managed Janis Joplin, Todd Rundgren... > Read more

THE BEATLES ANTHOLOGY ON DVD (2003): And the songs remain the same?

1 Nov 2005  |  3 min read

For a record company it was the cross-marketing opportunity of a lifetime. Well, maybe a lunchtime. But it seemed an uncanny coincidence that Neil Innes -- aka Ron Nasty of the Beatles-parody band the Rutles -- was in Auckland last week just days before the Beatles' remastered, digitally enhanced, but-wait-there's-more Anthology series was released on DVD. If it was me I'd be out... > Read more

The Beatles: You Know My Name

WILL SMITH INTERVIEWED (2002): Taking Muhammad to the movies

24 Feb 2002  |  6 min read

He works the crowd brilliantly, stopping to chat informally, shake outstretched hands and pose for photographs with his lovely wife. He smiles and quips, and has perfected that Bill Clinton gesture of pointing and waving into the middle distance of the throng. If you are the chosen one it's as if you've been singled out for special attention. To the outside observer it looks as if... > Read more

THE WHO'S QUADROPHENIA ON DVD (2001): The Mods will ride again

9 Nov 2001  |  <1 min read

Quadrophenia -- the story and music written by Pete Townshend of the Who -- shifted the focus back to pre-Beatles Britain, to the world of Mods and Rockers, of battles on Brighton Beach between the two, and Townshend's famously disenchanted lost boy at the centre of it all. This was a dark world of early British pop culture that cheery Beatlemania erased from memory and it took the... > Read more

BARRY BARCLAY, INTERVIEWED (2001): Past imperfect. Future imperative

3 Jun 2001  |  6 min read

Imagine says Barry Barclay, his eyes glittering with enthusiasm, if there had been a camera on Cook's first voyage to New Zealand. Just imagine ... There was a moving moment which Joseph Banks recounts, he says, when two young Maori who had been kidnapped by Cook were aboard one of the ships. One night they were up on the deck crying. Then Tupaia, the Tahitian tohunga Cook had brought... > Read more

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER INTERVIEWED (2000): The beginning or the end?

30 Nov 2000  |  8 min read

Arnold Schwarzenegger is somewhere in a scrum of photographers at the finish of a press conference for his new action movie, End of Days. At Sydney's Hotel Intercontinental the lens-wielders jostle around him and his co-star, Robin Tunney, and from little more than a metre away fire flashbulbs in their faces.The man we know as Arnie is gracious, grinning and obliging - then retreats to... > Read more

STAR WARS; THE PHANTOM MENACE REVIEWED (1999): A Miami vice, with dazzle but dazzlingly dull

11 Jun 1999  |  4 min read

Phew! Talk about queues to get into Star Wars in America. One insensitive citizen likened the camp-out crowd outside cinemas in New York and Mann's Theatre in Los Angeles as being like the tent villagers of Kosovo. Yep, talk about queues ... Well, talk about them if you must, but the day after Star Wars, Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace opened at a multiplex on 71st... > Read more