And now, Thursday!
My first film was All In This Tea at Te Papa. I'll admit to not knowing too much about my favourite tipple, and I was very interested in the history, as well as the tribulations of a present-day American (David Lee Hoffman) trying to import organically-grown, traditionally harvested and prepared tea from China. For example, I didn't know that most black tea is Assam tea, grown from plants found on the Indian side of the Himalayan mountains when Victorian explorers were trying to find a way to break the Chinese monopoly on the tea trade. (Or "Him-aah-li-an" mountains, by the pronounciation of one the tea experts. :)
Hoffman's passion for tea was obvious, and the way that the various experts that appeared advocated describing tea was... well, no more ridiculous than the way that people talk about wine. Actually, I find that talking about taste or smell is surprisingly difficult; I'll often taste something, and recognize that I know it, but be unable to say what it is. Speaking of taste, they mentioned that green tea is picked from buds that are, at most, ten days old, so that the taste is influenced by not just the plant and soil, but by the weather of those ten days.
Also interesting was Hoffman's perspective on doing business in China -- he had to buy through a tea factory that he had no intention of using, whose focus is on bulk production (and buying tea from the farms that the factory owner also owned), rather than dealing in small amounts directly from small farmers. And the life of the man was interesting as well -- he'd dropped out of college, and wandered backpacking around Asia for many years before falling into the organic tea import business.
I think that a key indicator of the success of this movie is that I (and the people I saw it with) have been instilled with a desire to try more, different teas. Maybe I can pick up some Oolong from T-Leaf while I'm in town? :)
* * *
Next, I zoomed over to the Film Archive to see Michael King: A Moment In Time. The documentary makers were there to talk, and explained that this was basically a single interview that took place in 1991 at Writer's Week in Dunedin. They weren't able to convince anyone to let them make a full documentary at the time, and the material was tucked under the bed for a while; but they recently pulled it out (to see how it had dated), and realised that what they had deserved to be put in front of a wider audience.
Micharl King was a writer of popular New Zealand history -- "popular" in both the easily accessible and widely read sense. Although he had no Maori roots himself, he felt that the Maori view was important long before such an idea was popular, and wrote several books on Maori women, an aspect of Maori culture which had been largely ignored to that point. In the interview, he talked about this, as well as touching on the criticism he later received for "co-opting" these people, as if he could not tell anything worthwhile about their stories because he was neither Maori, nor a woman.
I thought that this interview stood up well, and I hope it gets a wider release. I think I might try and hunt down his book on his experience as a Pakeha; I think it would be interesting to read.
* * *
I followed this up with another documentary, this time German -- Con Man Confidential. It consisted of interviews with four con-men, as well as some of their victims and family. Some of them seemed obviously unbalanced, and their cons were more the result of mental illness than a desire to make money -- the guy who decided, on the spur of the moment, to set up a NATO security conference, for example. Others seemed remarkably without remorse -- the cons wouldn't have worked if people hadn't been so greedy, so eager to believe, people got their money's worth vicariously by seeing how the con-men got to live.
Some of the cons do sound unbelievable -- making up, on the spur of the moment, a 10-person moon landing that would coincide with the millennium celebrations, that no-one subsequently bothered to ask NASA about, for example. But people do prefer to trust other people; I just hope that my lack of financial ambition and innate laziness will keep me relatively safe. ;)
* * *
Gardens in Autumn was... odd, and not nearly as dreary as I feared. The basic plot is -- a government minister is disgraced, dismissed... and gets to have fun, instead. The booklet compared this to Tati's films, and I can certainly see the similarity. Talking to Ed afterwards, this director tends to make these kind of quirky movies, and all the odd stuff that I noticed (the fact that the mother is played by a man, for example) and stuff that I didn't (the orthodox priest, who has arrived, asks if he can turn the new tv on, and then grabs the remote from inside his cassock) is pretty much par for the course.
I liked this movie. It wasn't a big, showy thing, and it didn't have anything like a fast pace, and there were things that were simply odd; but it formed a pleasing shape for me.
* * *
Tragedy struck during Death of a President -- C accidentally knocked over and split my container of pineapple coconut crushed ice from Cha. This disheartening loss of my own made it very easy to sympathise with the plight of the American people in the hour of distress.
But to be serious for a moment; the scary thing about this film is how easily it could be real. If Bush were assassinated, civil liberties would be thrown out the window; and if they found a politically expedient suspect, I can easily believe that they would simply conveniently forget to release him, even if he were proven to be completely innocent.
Kung-Fu Monkey made a very coherent argument that the current U.S. Whitehouse have discovered the "exploit" in American politics, the "cheat code", if you will -- have no shame. If you don't care, you can do whatever you want, and they probably won't even bother you. And if they do tell them off, you can just stare them down -- tell your underlings to lie, make blatantly spurious claims about not needing to comply, add your own bits to laws that you're just meant to be signing, and generally be a jackass and dare them to call you on it.
Thank goodness that we're not anywhere near that stage here.
Posted by svend at July 29, 2007 1:11 AM