Archive

EX, WAI & ZEE

Posted 4:26pm Sunday 19th August 2012 by Beaurey Chan

www.bit.ly/IOJCZj It was pretty much inevitable that this exhibition would interest me, considering that it deals with two of my favourite topics: language (hello, English major) and art (hello, editor of what section again?). On a very basic level, it might appear that words and images are Read more...

Sticky Date Pudding with Caramel Sauce

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 12th August 2012 by Maeve Jones

After hearing earlier this week about one Dunedin flat’s dessert of stingray, maple syrup, and ice cream, I thought it might be time to let up on the culinary innovation and return to the classics. Warm, hearty sticky date pudding just cannot be beaten on a cold, wintry Dunedin night. To find a Read more...

Collaborate bitches!

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 12th August 2012 by Isaac McFarlane

I have become obsessed with the idea of musical collaboration. Possibly because of my incredibly fan-boyish nature that renders me incredibly nervous and awkward whenever I encounter one of my idols, e.g. Grayson Gilmour, I have a massive love for a lot of artists and the music they produce. That’s Read more...

SCP-087

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 12th August 2012 by Toby Hills

SCP-087 is a never-ending, descending collection of thirteen flights of stairs on which a number of scary “things” happen. I say “things” because SCP-087 prides itself on being procedurally generated. A scary “thing” could happen on the second flight down, or nothing could happen for a painfully Read more...

Slender

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 12th August 2012 by Toby Hills

Slender has you hunting down pages scrawled in the dark, some pinned to trees in a forest made of lots of other trees, while being stalked by an unseen threat. Themes are beginning to emerge in these horror games. In this case the monster is the Slenderman, a sort of modern mythical creature forged Read more...

Hide

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 12th August 2012 by Toby Hills

Hide opens with a spacebar-shaped rectangle next to four typical directional buttons. The spacebar is labelled as allowing the player to “hide”, but really it’s an utterly useless crouch button. Squatting slightly closer to the freezing snow that makes up the game’s environment does not fool the Read more...

We the Living

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 12th August 2012 by Staff Reporter

“ …too strong to compromise, but too weak to withstand the pressure… who cannot bend, but only break.” Many Russian authors have a tortured relationship with their motherland, but for Russo-American author Ayn Rand, Soviet Russia was an object of hatred. This, her first novel, was written Read more...

Bits and Bobs

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 12th August 2012 by Beaurey Chan

Tetris is what my mind immediately conjured up when I first saw Suel Novell’s art installation Zoom. Obviously it was a foolish and uniformed first instinct, but it’s not hard to see why I immediately leaped to that conclusion. Novell’s installation consists of a series of small, interlocked Read more...

The Devil in Me

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 12th August 2012 by Beaurey Chan

The irony of walking into Unipol for the first time ever for the sole purpose of reviewing an art installation was not lost on me. Besides being interestingly unusual, however, the setting of Siobhan Wootten’s The Tao of Avery really did make the artwork that much more impressive. Walk into Unipol Read more...

Interview with Alyx Duncan

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 12th August 2012 by Jane Ross

New Zealand-born director Alyx Duncan took time out from the busy international film festival circuit to speak to Jane Ross about her debut feature film, The Red House, which is screening at the NZIFF this Friday at 6pm at Rialto. You describe The Red House as a fictional essay in which you Read more...

Magic Mike

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 12th August 2012 by Taryn Dryfhout

If you like shimmering well-oiled abs and perfectly tanned man-buttocks, then Magic Mike is the film for you. Magic Mike is based loosely on Channing Tatum’s life as a teenage stripper before he made it as an actor in Hollywood. Set in Florida, the movie follows 19-year-old Adam (Alex Read more...

Bel Ami

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 12th August 2012 by Brittany Travers

I am studying French, so was excited to see a modern-day film interpretation of Guy de Maupassant’s Bel Ami. However, from the first close up of Robert Pattinson’s pouty lips I knew sitting through the film would be torture, and it was. This film is firm evidence that casting Pattinson as the lead Read more...

Whole Mushroom and Ham Tart

Posted 4:49pm Sunday 5th August 2012 by Ines Shennan

The inspiration for this savoury tart came from a gorgeous Auckland café called Little and Friday, which sadly is no more than a welcome daydream when I’m in Dunedin. So when I venture to the humid north a trip to Little and Friday is always on the cards. My first true love was the dizzyingly cheesy Read more...

Always Read The Label

Posted 4:49pm Sunday 5th August 2012 by Isaac McFarlane

Yes, New Zealand has some pretty amazing music, but we have some pretty amazing music labels floating around as well — some in plain sight, some a little better hidden. Most geographically relevant to our cold little enclave of Dunedin would be the revered Flying Nun Records, the original home of Read more...

OSCURA

Posted 4:49pm Sunday 5th August 2012 by Toby Hills

In Oscura you play, in established platform-game tradition, as a small mammalian everyman who plies a noble trade. Not a bandicoot plumber, I’m afraid, but a non-specific rodentish creature who attends to the lighthouse on a fantastical island. One day the bulb is shattered, unleashing shadowy Read more...

The Grand Duke

Posted 4:49pm Sunday 5th August 2012 by Bronwyn Wallace

After 11 long years of “The Really Authentic Gilbert and Sullivan Performance Trust” presenting the famous works in Dunedin, they are winding things up with the big finale work The Grand Duke. W S Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan began writing their comedic operas in the late nineteenth century, Read more...

Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present

Posted 4:49pm Sunday 5th August 2012 by Loulou Callister-Baker

The New York-based, Serbian-born performer Marina Abramović is one of the most important artists of the second half of the twentieth century. Since Abramović’s career began in the 1970s she has continued to use performance art to enthrall, shock, seduce, and explore the possibilities of Read more...

Chasing Ice

Posted 4:49pm Sunday 5th August 2012 by Sarah Baillie

[FILM FESTIVAL PREVIEW] National Geographic photographer James Balog was a climate change skeptic before he saw for himself the immense recession of glaciers he had photographed on separate occasions. This moment of realisation led Balog to set up the extensive “extreme ice survey” (EIS) Read more...

Barbara

Posted 4:49pm Sunday 5th August 2012 by Loulou Callister-Baker

[FILM FEST PREVIEW] Barbara is set in the German Democratic Republic, informally known as East Germany, during the 1980s. Barbara (Nina Hoss), a doctor working in Berlin, has been banished to a countryside hospital after she expressed her wish to leave the GDR. In this hospital she works Read more...

Late Bloomers

Posted 4:49pm Sunday 5th August 2012 by Taryn Dryfhout

Late Bloomers chronicles the lives of Mary (Isabella Rossellini) and Adam (William Hurt), who have been married for 30 years. A series of life events and an episode of memory loss prompt retired teacher Mary to undergo a medical exam, which in turn stimulates a lot of contemplation about her Read more...

ZINEFEST 2012

Posted 4:49pm Sunday 5th August 2012 by Josef Alton

Glue Gallery - 26 Stafford St Friday August 10th 5pm-9pm & Saturday August 11th 10am-6pm THE ZINE MINUS THE MAG: THE UBIQUITOUS, TRASHY, PRETTY, TINY TAILORED TREASURE OF WORDS, SITTING RIGHT UNDERNEATH THE NOSE ON YOU. Zines. They’re in cafes, pubs, boutiques, and dairies. You Read more...

A Study in Vivacity

Posted 4:49pm Sunday 5th August 2012 by Beaurey Chan

Sensory overload is the first thing that comes to mind when you first encounter Micci Cohan’s stunning collage artworks. There’s so much going on in each piece that looking at them can be a jarring and overwhelming experience. Sizzling colours practically pop off the page, energetic squiggles and Read more...

Soy and Ginger Dumplings

Posted 2:15pm Sunday 29th July 2012 by Ines Shennan

When eating at Dunedin’s Japanese restaurants, dumplings are a favourite choice of mine. The art of balancing them between chopsticks while dunking them in the provided dipping sauce is comparable to the art of making them yourself – seemingly daunting, but remarkably easy after you’ve done it once. Read more...

Mixed Messages

Posted 2:15pm Sunday 29th July 2012 by Ally Embleton

Have you ever made a mixtape? Like, a real one? Maybe you sat eagerly by the stereo, waiting for your song to play, winding the take-up reel on the cassette by hand so you could get that perfect transition timing. Or sat in a locked bedroom with your friends playing a “borrowed” tape/CD from a Read more...

Travis Kooky

Posted 2:15pm Sunday 29th July 2012 by Bronwyn Wallace

"The constraints of the theatre are only limited to your creativity… and your lack of budget.” Hitting the stage this week at Allen Hall Theatre is Travis Kooky and the One Problem, an original work by Rosie Howells, a second-year student at Otago who is becoming renowned around campus for Read more...

The Last of Us - PREVIEW

Posted 2:15pm Sunday 29th July 2012 by Toby Hills

With The Last of Us, developer Naughty Dog replaces the lush temple vistas, charmingly witty characters, wholesome fun and will-they-won’t-they dynamics of their previous franchise Uncharted with lush overgrown cities, gloomy-but-still-likable characters, brutal strangulations, and adult Read more...

Watch Dogs - PREVIEW

Posted 2:15pm Sunday 29th July 2012 by Toby Hills

Watch Dogs, another intriguing title from this year’s E3, is about killing people using Facebook. Aiden Pearce, the painfully generic protagonist, wields dystopian “Google-goggles” to identify his target. In an instant, a juicy fact is revealed about every person he scans: “HIV positive”, “charged Read more...

Film Festival Picks!

Posted 2:15pm Sunday 29th July 2012 by Sarah Baillie

The New Zealand International Film Festival opened on Thursday night with Wes Anderson’s latest gem, the super-cute Moonrise Kingdom. Running from 26 June to 19 August, the film festival marks an annual academic slump in Sarah Baillie’s calendar – three weeks of not much study and lots of sneaky Read more...

Letters to Father Jacob

Posted 2:15pm Sunday 29th July 2012 by Taryn Dryfhout

Letters to Father Jacob is a Finnish subtitled film set in the 1970s, about a thick-skinned ex-convict named Leila and her experience working with Father Jacob. The recipient of a life sentence (presumably murder, though it is never explicitly stated), Leila is given a pardon (much to her disgust) Read more...

The Dark Knight Rises

Posted 2:15pm Sunday 29th July 2012 by Daniel Duxfield

The story picks up sometime after the end of The Dark Knight. “Batman” is a spurned memory from a darker time in Gotham City's recent history, and billionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne is a recluse. Christopher Nolan starts this episode of the Batman legend by planting the seeds of this story in Read more...

The Forgotten Waltz

Posted 2:15pm Sunday 29th July 2012 by Bradley Watson

Attraction works in mysterious ways, and we often find ourselves wanting things we cannot have. But what happens when we get what we want? What happens when our lust for our husband’s attractive, married friend shifts from fantasy to reality? What about his family, our family, and our marriage? At Read more...

Fun-Sized

Posted 2:15pm Sunday 29th July 2012 by Beaurey Chan

It’s probably become obvious to those who regularly read Critic’s art section that the majority of exhibitions I write about are “official” ones. What I mean by this is that these exhibitions, curated by various art galleries around the city, feature New Zealand artists who are well established Read more...

Cheat's Carbonara

Posted 10:46am Sunday 22nd July 2012 by Ines Shennan

From a young age I was mesmerised by spaghetti carbonara. My mother is in no way Italian, but she had a knack for producing the most lip-smacking bowls of pasta, overflowing with everything from olives, capers, and feta to the tongue-tickling saltiness of anchovies. It has remained a favourite Read more...

Home Brew

Posted 10:46am Sunday 22nd July 2012 by Tom Tremewan

"Shot to our olds for bringing us into existence, Avondale and Otahuhu for raising us, our girls for loving us even when it’s not dole day, the bros for helping us not kill ourselves on those Sunday mornings and you cunts for buying this bullshit. Fuck the Prime Minister. Fuck the law force. Fuck Read more...

Dishonoured - PREVIEW

Posted 10:46am Sunday 22nd July 2012 by Toby Hills

Platform: Xbox 360, PS3, PC | Developer: Arkane Studios | Genre: Stealth, Action Why can my telepathy grant momentum to granite boulders and dead people, but not living ones? Why can my fireballs ignite moist fleshy alien-scum, but not the wooden floorboards beneath them? Why, video Read more...

A Land More Kind Than Home

Posted 10:46am Sunday 22nd July 2012 by Lucy Hunter

A new pastor arrives in a small-town North Carolina, covers the windows of his church with newspaper, and puts a sign outside which reads Mark 16:17-18 – that’s the bit about speaking in tongues and daring snakes to bite you in the name of God. He leads services of faith healing, snake-wielding, and Read more...

Film Festival Preview: Shadow Dancer

Posted 10:46am Sunday 22nd July 2012 by Sarah Baillie

British spy thriller Shadow Dancer has just the right amount of thrill, a good sprinkling of snooping, and not too much dramatic music, eavesdropping, or complicated spy networks. Collette, a young mother and member of a family heavily embroiled in the IRA, gets caught dropping a bomb in the London Read more...

Film Festival Preview: Undefeated

Posted 10:46am Sunday 22nd July 2012 by Sarah Baillie

A “sports documentary” which is about much, much more than sport, Undefeated is a heartwarming story of personal relationships, struggles, and American football. Before coach Bill Courtney arrived at Manassas high school, their football team had been on a losing streak for as long as anyone could Read more...

A Royal Affair (En kongelig affære)

Posted 10:46am Sunday 22nd July 2012 by Charlotte Greenfield

At first glance A Royal Affair screams “royal historical drama”, with all the sumptuous costumes, distractingly elaborate sets, stilted dialogue and wooden acting (paradoxically, often by the British acting elite) that the genre entails. Maybe it’s the Danish twist, but A Royal Affair some how Read more...

TED

Posted 10:46am Sunday 22nd July 2012 by Taryn Dryfhout

From the creator of TV comedies such as Family Guy and American Dad, Seth MacFarlane (who also voices the main character of Ted) brings us this crude, rude and hilariously indecent film about a young boy who wishes for his teddy bear to come to life. His dream comes true, and the film flashes Read more...

Off the Wall

Posted 10:46am Sunday 22nd July 2012 by Taryn Dryfhout

The Special Exhibitions Gallery of the Otago Museum is filled with colour, textiles, and ultraviolet light. It is being inhabited by the World of Wearable Art exhibition, otherwise known as “WOW”. WOW is a breathtaking demonstration of the imagination, originality, and ingenuity of the Read more...

Totally Boss Steak Sammies

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 15th July 2012 by Ines Shennan

With more grunt than a humble ham sandwich but requiring little in the way of preparation, these steak sammies will quell that gnawing hunger. Flash-fried schnitzel simply flavoured with garlic and salt is the foundation of this stomach satisfier. It’s ideal because it’s relatively cheap and cooks Read more...

Sexuality In Music

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 15th July 2012 by Isaac McFarlane

Whoever you are, wherever you are . . I’m starting to think we’re a lot alike. Human beings spinning on blackness. All wanting to be seen, touched, heard, paid attention to.” When I think of Odd Future, I think of #swag, chants of “free earl” (I think it worked?) and some more swag, never enough Read more...

Resistance: Burning Skies

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 15th July 2012 by Robert Hill

PLATFORMS: PSVita | GENRE: FPSz The PSVita is here, and the game that gets the title of “First FPS on a dual-stick portable device” is Resistance: Burning Skies. However, those who already have the Vita (and I doubt many of you do) might want to give this one a miss. Story-wise, Read more...

Dunedin's Globe

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 15th July 2012 by Bronwyn Wallace

Dunedin seems to have this great ability to hide wee treasures all throughout the city, with only the locals being in the know. From beaches to shops, you all know a nice secluded spot concealed from the world. On London Street, tucked up in a beautiful garden, is the Globe Theatre, one of these Read more...

Ping vs. Pong

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 15th July 2012 by Beaurey Chan

Yes, this is a review of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. No, I have not recently (or ever) been to New York (don’t remind me, I’ll just get depressed). But while procrastinating writing my dissertation this week, I discovered the wonderful realm of online exhibitions. As Read more...

The Hut Builder

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 15th July 2012 by Feby Idrus

It’s fair to describe Dunedin author Laurence Fearnley’s novel The Hut Builder as a portrait of the artist as a young Kiwi man. A character study rendered in luscious prose, The Hut Builder follows central character Boden Black from his early years as a 1940s rural Cantabrian with a love of poetry Read more...

Interview with Bill Gosden

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 15th July 2012 by Jane Ross

Critic film reviewer Jane Ross caught up with Bill Gosden, Dunedin-born Director of the New Zealand International Film Festival, for a quick chat about his lifetime love of film and what to expect from this year’s NZIFF. Critic: So from where I’m sitting I think you probably have one of the Read more...

Rock of Ages

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 15th July 2012 by Emma Scammell

Rock of Ages is a musical adapted from a popular Broadway show, set amidst the turbulent atmosphere of sex, drugs, and rock‘n’roll in the 1980s. The film follows small-town girl Sherrie (Julianne Hough) and aspiring rock star Drew (Diego Boneta), both wannabe singers lured in by the seductive Miami Read more...

The Amazing Spider Man

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 15th July 2012 by Alec Dawson

The last film telling the story of Spider-Man’s beginnings was made only ten years ago. Since then, the huge success of the Batman and Avengers franchises, as well as the subversions of the genre through films such as The Incredibles and Kick-Ass, have developed a whole new set of expectations Read more...