Love Birds and a few others disprove that rather bitchy statement.
The second point I want to make is that last week I undertook to do a kind of mini roundup of Kiwi films on circuit right now, but something rather momentous happened: I was offered three days’ work.
Anyway, Rhys Darby plays Doug Gordon, a freak as far as being a white New Zealander is concerned, and I’m making the racial distinction for a particular reason.
But he’s a freak because he hasn’t done his OE – his overseas experience. This is because he doesn’t like flying, literally and figuratively.
In fact, he might be a bit of a freak as far as the world is concerned too: he’s quite content with his life, as is the wont of many a Kiwi. He loves his girlfriend and the rock band Queen, and he seems to like his job and his workmates, which include another Pakeha, a Sikh and a Maori.
Moreover, he lives in one of the safest, cleanest and most prosperous cities in the world, Auckland, so what’s to be unhappy about? Okay, it might be to hell and gone from the skirts of the mothership, England, as mentioned in the script, but that’s about it.
Darby, who usually plays slightly hysterical characters to good effect, or the officious Murray in Flight of the Conchords, is now required to play a romantic lead and of course we all want to know whether he can play it straight.
Let's just say he takes to it like the proverbial duck. It’s one of the many surprises of this film, which is really just a romantic comedy with its feet, as the visiting Don McClean implied about Kiwis, on the (shaky) ground.
If Doug’s social climber of a partner leaves him rather abruptly at the beginning of the film and he ends up with a real quacker as consolation, then his new romantic interest will have a child, like so many New Zealanders have too. And, like so many Aucklanders, she’s not from here. She’s from the UK.
But to get back to the issue of race: it is touched on by the Sikh guy (What do you call an Indian guy who flies a plane, he asks. A pilot), yet we don’t get to know much about his or his Maori workmate’s life. It’s the other Pakeha who’s also going to have a fling.
One could read all kinds of unnecessary, probably unintended but careless biases into what is, essentially, a light, fluffy comedy. Maybe it would have been better just to leave out that kind of theme - or give these guys slightly more developed characters. They could be married (to each other or others), divorced, whatever.
Right now they’re just background colour, no pun intended, with very little to do.
As for Doug’s romantic interest, Sally Hawkins is not just good at playing a woman who’s had her fair share of life’s little and larger blows, she also does a very sexy screen kiss.
If the film is a bit slow for a romcom and some of the dialogue is a bit forced – surely there’s a more creative way to make a cheerful Bryan Brown imply what a twitcher is – then Love Birds is still a warm-hearted film that will go on to do good business (and let us not forget that film is a business) in its secondary markets of TV and DVD.
Pity it was a week late for Valentine’s Day.
Shock, horror as blogger’s wish list almost matches Oscar winners!
The cynical view would be that The King’s Speech won the most categories (tying with Inception’s technical ones) because America needs to remain on good terms with the UK for the war effort in the Middle East, or maybe it’s that old nostalgia for the Nazi-sympathetic royals.
The good news is that winning screenwriter David Seidler has a Kiwi connection and that you too can win your first Oscar at 72, so keep writing, directing or sewing.
If I’m pleased about being wrong about one thing, then it’s that the documentary Inside Job was taken seriously. It’s time those greedy bastards who caused the recession were exposed for what they are, worldwide.
True Grit and 127 Hours scored nada, deservedly, and The Fighter is still the movie of the year in my book. It even proves that a good director can make a script-by-committee into something shit-hot.
Neil Sonnekus
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