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• In the opening chapter of Jo Nesbø’s The Leopard, a woman who is held captive has a bizarre metal object, about the size of a billiard ball, shoved in her mouth. A wire protrudes that her captor tells her not to touch, but she does. It is not a bomb, because that would be almost merciful compared with this sadistic device, but the net effect is the same and she has made a graphic exit from this world by halfway down page seven. The book may be less gruesome after that, but I never made it to page eight. The cover shouts that over five million copies have been sold worldwide, and Nesbø is acclaimed as “the next Stieg Larsson”.

Larsson, as every literate adult knows, wrote the trilogy that begins with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in which various women meet horrific ends. Ironically, the reason I picked up The Leopard is that I had put down Henning Mankell’s Sidetracked because on page 16 the novel’s former Swedish Minister of Justice was ruing not having photographed the young women he regularly held captive in his cellar. I didn’t like the way it was heading, although I needn’t have worried, because by page 17 his head had been split open – but there I go again, giving away the plot.

Mankell and Larsson are Swedes; Nesbø is ­Norwegian. There may well be a geographical explanation for the way they write. The long dark winters may mess with their minds, or perhaps Scandinavians are so fed up with topping all the OECD social statistics that they want to prove they can be bad to the bone, at least in books.

It never used to be like this. I grew up reading about Pippi Longstocking and the Moomin family, and although it was a long time ago, I would certainly remember if Pippi or Moomin­mamma had, for example, drowned in her own blood. Whatever the reason for this new grim snow/gore/misogyny genre, it is not so much the authors who interest me now as the readers. Larsson’s books have sold 65 million copies. The people who read the first one went back for more. I was one of them, but this week my feminist sensibilities said “enough”, and I retired from reading Scandinavian slasher fiction. It is not that I’m unable to distinguish between fact and fiction, but that I find it disturbing that the imaginary mutilation and degradation of fictional women is so popular. That is at least as depressing as the books themselves.

• A couple of days after five of its senior journalists, including the deputy editor, were arrested, the Sun newspaper published a piece decrying a police operation that the newspaper said was bigger than the investigation of the Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie. “Witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on Press freedom,” shouted the headline, because no reader of the Sun ever died wondering what the newspaper thought about any single issue.

The paper said the police investigation was over the top and journalists had been arrested for doing their jobs, and even if money had been given to sources, that was not illegal. Without good sources, wrote associate editor Trevor Kavanagh, no paper could uncover scandals in the public interest. The same day’s headlines in the Sun included “60 stone Brit is fattest in the world”, “Lags moan: Our hot chocolate’s too hot” and “Man becomes UK’s first ever to give birth”. Perhaps Kavanagh should have chosen to make his case in a different day’s edition.

• A young friend is doing naval-officer training and has had to forgo cellphones and laptops for the duration of her course so is keen to receive letters, and possibly even smoke signals, from the outside. My family wrote her a letter and I gave my son, who’s 16, the stamps. He looked at the envelope. He looked at the stamps. “What do I do with these?” he asked.

Photo David White

They say you can’t fight city hall – but for politicians, it’s a different story. No one who has witnessed the recent ratepayer fury at council chief executives’ pay rises can doubt that local authority spending is one of this year’s big steam-gathering issues.

But in an unexpected lightning-strike on the sector, the Government is about to announce a top-to-bottom reform of local authorities, the principal aim being to restrict the ambit of council activities, their ability to borrow, and their ability to keep cranking up rates. Although Local Government Minister Nick Smith is keen to stress that he wants to work with councils, rather than against them, he has also made it clear radical change is on the agenda. Like abolishing regional councils, for example, and encouraging more amalgamation.

Despite only taking over the portfolio in December, Smith has Cabinet support to pass legislation this year that will take away a number of key obligations introduced in 2002 – in large measure because the sector has become a worrying drain on the national economy. He says it’s an issue he and other senior ministers have quietly been working on for some time.

According to Smith, rates have become the biggest single upward pressure on the Consumer Price Index (a measure of inflation through household spending). If it feels like you have less in your pocket these days, one of the reasons is that rates have grown on average nearly 7% a year over the past decade – well ahead of inflation. In the same period, council debt has risen from $1.8 billion to more than $7 billion. And council staffing costs are still rising well ahead of private and state sector increases.

Although there are a number of reasons for this, not least the deteriorating state of much local infrastructure, the Government has fingered the 2002 reforms for loading councils with inappropriate responsibilities, expansion opportunities and burdensome bureaucracy. Before 2002, Smith claims, rates rises were only just ahead of the CPI, averaging 3.9% a year.

The Government is seriously worried about the situation, he says, fearing that some councils could even become insolvent. He concedes, however, that this isn’t entirely the councils’ fault, as the 2002 reforms gave them a plethora of almost open-ended responsibilities, including charging them with ensuring “four pillars” of well-being: social, environmental, cultural and economic.

“This has led to some incredible things. For instance, in the Auckland Council’s 10-year plan, it says it wants to raise the NCEA pass-rate. It’s a laudable aim, but that’s what we have the Ministry of Education for. It’s not the business of a local authority.” Also in the Government’s sights are reporting and consultation requirements. Vast resources go into producing district plans and 10-year plans that Smith suspects are largely ignored by the public – “not even the councillors”, he believes, pore over them – and that contain a preposterous level of detail. “People cannot be expected to be familiar with a document that’s several hundred pages long.”

The consultation provisions were well meant, he agrees, but in practice they are unwieldy and seldom achieve meaningful consultation. “You get situations like one I experienced where you have a public meeting with 16 staff and councillors, and three ratepayers.”

The 2002 legislation tried to take the politics out of local body politics, he believes. “You can’t now campaign for the council and say, ‘If I’m elected I’ll push for a new swimming pool’, because under the law, you’ll be prohibited from sitting on the committee considering the pool because you’ve already got a view on it. Now, that’s just ridiculous.

“Councillors have been reduced to consultation facilitators. We’ve desexed them to the point where, if I wanted to change something in my district of Nelson, I’d be better off becoming a full-time submitter than becoming a councillor.” Although Smith does not seem to be hinting that the Government plans to take over council responsibilities, he does seem to be wondering aloud about what would happen if a council became insolvent, and whether this would inevitably be seen as “the Government’s problem to sort out”.

“It’s like the situation with Greece. We don’t actually know what will happen if a local authority becomes insolvent.”

Local Government Minister Nick Smith, photo Mark Mitchell/NZH

Central to his plan to avert such a crisis is a back-to-basics approach, with councils made to stick to traditional services such as rubbish collection, footpath maintenance, libraries, public toilets and sewerage. “At the moment we have councils that run dairy farms. Manawatu District Council, which has responsibility for the most polluted river in the country, invested $10 million in a dairy farm. New Plymouth owns farms in Tasmania. That’s far from what councils were intended to do.”

Smith says although it’s plain there has been profligacy in council spending, much of it was based on a simple misapprehension of what the balance sheet could support. “People have said, ‘Why would you worry about debt of $8 billion when the sector has assets of $100 billion?’” The trouble is, those assets are mostly unrealisable, he says. On average, only 8% of each council’s assets could actually be sold. To be blunt: you can’t sell footpaths, sewage treatment plants and the like. And in this economic environment, even saleable assets such as buildings and land would be hard to shift.

New legislation could introduce strong new prudential limits on council indebtedness, although Smith says for some, it’s already too late. He mentions the Kaipara District Council, which according to him owes $87 million – more than $4000 for every local resident – largely as a result of having to replace a sewage plant. Other debt-plagued councils he mentions include Waitomo, Western Bay of Plenty, Tasman and Buller.

Besides the imperative of fixing or replacing ageing infrastructure, local bodies argue they are under ratepayer pressure to upgrade leisure facilities and sponsor events to discourage people moving to other regions. They also face what can feel like gratuitous costs from regional councils. That, on top of a growing list of government-imposed obligations, makes much council spending irreducible in a practical sense.

But Smith takes encouragement from his experience of dealing with the finances of the Accident Compensation Corporation last parliamentary term. “They said there was no way they could cut costs, but look, they’ve even lowered premiums.” In that case he was accused of overdramatising ACC’s problems for later political effect. Could similar scaremongering be going on here? He insists that the target of his present attentions is unambiguously worrying, and the sector needs “a reality check”.

“What’s often not realised is that local government is not like central government, in having a very big income. We [the Government] actually have quite a small asset base, but a huge income stream. Councils are the opposite.” Local government can, however, simply raise rates and fees. “It’s because it has a monopoly,” Smith says. “No other sector can do this any more. If petrol goes up, business doesn’t just get to build that into its pricing any more. But councils still think they can get away with it. It’s just a nonsense that this sector, at 3% of GDP, can escape the reprioritisation that the rest of the economy has had to go through.”

Smith won’t give details, but the Government is working on a “carrot and stick” approach to rating. He hopes that will make councils realise they have to try harder to prune their costs, and they cannot simply increase rates to cover their spending and debt-servicing costs. The legislation will build in incentives for rates restraint, and penalties for rates increases beyond a certain level.

The Government will not be requiring asset sales, he insists, nor does it intend to force councils out of activities that could now be deemed beyond their scope. There will be “grandfathering” of the changes over time. “It’s not really a question of divesting, but of narrowing the focus to the things that really matter. It’s like [Finance Minister] Bill English has said, for central government we’re not having a Budget process as normal this time, because ­everything you want to do has to be funded from savings made somewhere else.”

Bob Harvey, photo Doug Sherring/HoS

It will also be hard to be too prescriptive about what activities councils can and cannot undertake. But he says the Government will be making it clear that councils should not be risking ratepayers’ money in “nice to have” commercial ventures in the events-management realm, such as the ill-fated V8 Supercars event, musicals, visits by football stars and other expensive flops that have cost local authorities tens of millions of dollars.

Another part of the restructuring process will be laying out the parameters for further amalgamation of existing councils. “We’re not going to have a forced amalgamation driven from central government, as happened in the 1980s. And we don’t say bigger is necessarily better. But I think the Auckland Council’s efficiencies pose a challenge to other local authorities.”

Smith says a key reform will be abolishing the regional council system, because he believes it has unhelpfully separated issues that need to be tackled on a more co-operative basis, such as water and land management. “We just don’t need that extra layer of bureaucracy.” He has also mooted establishing a remuneration authority to tackle the fraught issue of council executives’ pay. But he wants to restore to councillors the responsibility for restraint in overall salary rates for council staff. At present, councillors decide the chief executive’s salary, but the CEO controls everyone else’s pay.

If there’s one part of this package that probably won’t come as a surprise or disappointment to many mayors, it’s the abolition of regional councils. “It was supposed to be a sort of monitoring system, I suppose, but it hasn’t worked,” says former Waitakere mayor Bob Harvey. “We just can’t afford a two-tier system. It doesn’t achieve anything – except more often than not stopping councils doing what needs to be done.”

Far North District Mayor Wayne Brown agrees. He says regional councils mostly gobble up money that should be going on infrastructure. Brown is sore, for example, that in his area, his council had to pay $1 million for resource consent to the regional council for the Ruakaka wastewater project. “That’s money that should be going on pipes.” According to Brown, what district councils want is for both central government and the regional councils to give them more autonomy to get on with their jobs. “We’re still driving on dirt roads up here. All these other things do is add unnecessary cost and delay us doing the things that need to be done.”

It will be no surprise to anyone who is familiar with Brown’s style that he describes the existing law’s consultation and reporting requirements as “a bloody waste of everybody’s time” – and of considerable amounts of money. “It takes a lot of staff to write those reports, and no one reads them. Where’s the Government’s 10-year plan, might I ask? Our biggest spend is on roading, and the Land Transport Authority only plans three years out, so you can see why I’m not impressed by the need to plan 10 years out. Especially when we want to be changed to a unitary authority, thereby making the plan obsolete overnight.”

Brown and Harvey are both fans of further amalgamation – but not if it’s imposed from Wellington. “There has to be a community of interest. The Far North council is more than 42 towns and villages. We’ve got nothing in common with Whangarei.” Harvey, once a vehement opponent of the Auckland amalgamation, now goes so far as to say he wishes “Roger Douglas had finished the job back in the 80s”.

“We were lucky, I guess, with the Rugby World Cup giving us the spur to get things done in Auckland, otherwise we’d still all be backbiting and bickering among ourselves. People had a hard time letting go of their fiefdoms, but I think now everyone can see it’s been a magical journey. It was ludicrous to have all those different computer systems that didn’t talk to one another, and in one street you could burn rubbish in your back yard, but in the next they’d put you in jail for it.”

But Harvey is unconvinced by arguments for restraining council activity and rating ability. He says although councils do sometimes go beyond their sensible remit, it’s vitally important that they provide facilities and events that give life to their cities. “Cities should be places of regular celebration. Yes, it all costs money. But that’s where you need big leadership. You have to be honest with people, and tell them: Auckland, for instance, is a wonderful place, and because of that, it’s expensive to live here. If you don’t like it, you can go somewhere else. But you won’t have these parks, this waterfront … [if] you want to be able to fly to work on a good motorway, you have to pay for it. You decide whether it’s worth it or not.

“The reality is, we’re paying for generations of meanness. Everything in Auckland was done on the cheap, not done properly. It’s time to start facing up to these costs, and it will be worth it.”

Council hot spots

HAMILTON CITY COUNCIL

Spent almost $40 million hosting the V8 Supercars events, resulting in an Audit New Zealand probe. The 2011 report found that former chief executive Michael Redman spent millions of dollars of council money without councillors’ knowledge or authorisation; that councillors had agreed to deals without seeing copies of the contract; and too many decisions were made in non-public meetings. Then-Local Government Minister Rodney Hide chastised councillors for ™poor decision-making and appalling governance∫. A round of spending cuts by the council has now cut the 10-year debt outlook from almost $1 billion to $420 million, with a decade of rates increases trimmed to 3.8% a year.

INVERCARGILL CITY COUNCIL

A 7.19% rates rise is planned for this year, prompting pensioner Alison Taylor to deliver a 950-signature petition protesting at hardship caused by rates rises. She says the council should concentrate on core responsibilities and stop trying to be entrepreneurs. “This is not a time to go out and spend money on new things. We are quite happy with what we have got. We aren’t trying to keep up with the Joneses up north.”

NEW PLYMOUTH DISTRICT COUNCIL

An average 5.5% rate increase each year for the next 10 years is part of a long-term plan currently under debate. Some of the increase is going to cover a new Waitara pipeline and the New Plymouth wastewater treatment plant. The council’s spending plans, which include a redevelopment of the TSB Stadium/Pukekura Raceway, are “progress with restraint”, according to council chief executive Barbara McKerrow.

KAIPARA DISTRICT COUNCIL

Has run up a net debt of $81 million, equivalent to $4395 per person, despite a small low-income rating base. This is mostly a result of a $57 million sewerage system at Mangawhai and the costs of a district plan review. A 2011 independent review says the level of debt poses future risks to the council, and any future infrastructure spending will require additional loan funding. The review found the council’s monthly financial reports do not provide sufficient information, such as balance sheets and cash flow, to properly monitor the financial health of the organisation, and there is an urgent need for regular financial monitoring, robust forecasting and detailed reporting.

AUCKLAND COUNCIL

The amalgamation of eight Auckland councils into one super-city was always going to be politically fraught, and many tough decisions have still to be made. For example, new legislation may be needed to smooth out potential rate rises of more than 10% for some residents and more than 18% for some businesses. Complicating this are Auckland’s transport woes. Although ministers are wary of the billions being talked about, Auckland Mayor Len Brown is convinced this problem has to be solved sooner rather than later. Brown has floated 13 options, including tolling new roads, a regional fuel tax, congestion charging and raising rates, as well as higher income taxes, a rise in GST for Aucklanders, a hotel/motel bed tax and raising the airport departure tax.

Roads, rates and rubbish

The head of a rates inquiry says there are ways to cut rates and lighten councils’ load.

Infrastructure spending drives rates rises, photo Tracey Grant/WGC

The last man to take a long hard look at rocketing local-body rates was former World Bank public financial management specialist and local company director David Shand, who headed a wide-ranging 2007 inquiry. He emerged from it with a 300-page report and the view that local authorities provide a good service for a reasonable cost.

“My own view is people whinge too much about rates,” he says. “What do you expect? You get all this stuff for nothing? You turn on the tap, water comes out. You’ve got free libraries around the place. You’ve got sport and recreational facilities, you don’t expect them for nothing.” Local authority rates cost households an average of $23 a week, or less than 2% of average gross household income, according to 2010 figures. “Do people know how much they spend on GST in a year?”

Shand, who is a former Labour Party candidate, agrees with new Local Government Minister Nick Smith that rates are rising too fast, but he disagrees vehemently with what the minister thinks should be done about it. Contrary to what Smith seems to be saying, Shand found that local authorities had very low levels of debt and were financially sound, and that their low borrowing meant they were pushing too many costs onto rates. And he found no evidence that a widening of local authority functions had anything to do with the rates rises.

“It’s unclear on what factual basis the minister’s obsession with debt has been founded,” says Shand. He says a pre­occupation with unsustainable debt seems a feature of local government debate. “When John Banks was mayor of Auckland, he made a big fuss about the fact he had made Auckland debt-free. Our view was, well, he’s crazy: this means your rates are higher than they need be, and that debt is a very sensible and equitable way of funding long-term assets, within certain limits.”

The rates inquiry concluded that rates bills could be cut by 10% if local authorities took two big steps: taking on more long-term debt, and stopping using cash to fund depreciation. At that time, local authorities were putting aside money from their income to cover depreciating assets – to the extent it was gobbling up one out of every five dollars of operating expenditure. Local authorities were accumulating huge cash reserves as a result. “It means you’re saving up money to put in a bank account for future capital expenditure. So you’re taking the money off the ratepayers earlier than you need to.”

Since the Shand report, local authorities have indeed loosened up, with debt rising and cash reserves dropping. Debt has been rising since 2005, and is projected to peak in 2016 and then fall, according to a June 2011 report by Department of Internal Affairs officials. The officials saw little cause for concern: interest costs on debt were forecast to peak at 12% of rates in 2016, “well under the average 20% ratio generally seen as the prudent limit”. The largest increases in debt have been for councils with rapid population growth. The officials concluded that “while debt levels and ratios appear to not be a problem for the sector at this stage, some councils are forecasting debt and ratio levels that could be of concern”.

A few local authorities were picked out as having risky debt positions, notably Waitomo District Council. Its debt is set to peak at $5781 per person, but its population is expected shrink by 3%, meaning there will be fewer people to repay debt in the future. But Shand says the overall ratio of local authority debt to assets hardly seems to be out of control.

The Shand report called for the Government to lighten the load for local authorities by paying rates on government properties, stumping up with $100 million a year for water infrastructure projects, and to give local authorities access to a 2c a litre rise in petrol tax. None of this happened, and the petrol tax was instead used for regional roading. However, some authorities have begun to pick up the recommendation of greater use of water charges.

The Shand report also dismissed the view that a major driver of rates rises had been the 2002 widening of local government powers, which encouraged councils to move outside their core business. It concluded that the Local Government Act of 2002 was little different from the 1974 one. Councils had been involved for many years in such activities as social housing, backing major cultural and sporting activities, and commercial operations such as parking buildings and other enterprises. “Only involvement in economic development strategies appears relatively new, and this does not account for a significant portion of expenditure.”

David Shand

The inquiry also weighed up the claim that rates rises were a result of the Government passing on new responsibilities without appropriate funding. It found there was some basis to this, but that local authorities had a great deal of scope to recover costs under the Resource Management Act and the Building Act through user charges.

Instead, the inquiry found that infrastructure spending – such as on roads, parks, water supply and waste­water – was the biggest driver of rates rises. Construction costs for infrastructure were rising faster than the consumer price index, which accounted for some of the excess rates rises. However, the inquiry was unable to pin down how much of the infrastructure spending was necessary and how much merely desirable.

Overall, Shand found that local authority spending as a percentage of GDP had remained relatively constant for many years. “This does not suggest that local government spending is out of control.” The inquiry said a cap on rates would be a blunt instrument and would only cover 60% of council revenue anyway. Shand says the risk is that councils would simply recover costs some other way. “If you start to cap expenditures, you’re getting into real intrusion of elected councils. I don’t think these people are incompetent or spendthrift – they’re just people who are elected to do a job and most of them try to do a fairly honest job of it. I don’t see the argument for assuming that they’re all mad spendthrifts.”

Meanwhile, some critics remain unconvinced that going “back to the future” by considering further amalgamation will be any kind of answer. Town planning consultant Owen McShane recently suggested in his regular newsletter that the idea seems to be back in vogue as a result of major upheavals in Auckland and Christchurch: the former as a result of mega-amalgamation, the latter because of natural disaster.

“With Christchurch and Auckland now both suffering from ‘destructive waves of destruction’, can we really afford to have any more local economies undermined by years of paralysis by analysis?” he asked. McShane’s view is that there is “virtually no evidence” to support the view that bigger is better. – Ruth Laugesen

A Few Best Men As mad, bad and blackly silly as you’d expect from the writer of Death at a Funeral, this transplants a very British rite-of-passage comedy (weak bits and all) to the Blue Mountains and the wedding of Aussie Mia and Pommy David, hapless straight characters entangled in the farcical antics of David’s three best men. Bridesmaids it is not (pity), but to varying and sometimes hilarious degrees everyone behaves as badly as expected – although the Aussies, with the exception of Steve Le Marquand’s drug dealer, are completely outclassed by the Brits. Full review here. HW

Albert Nobbs Glenn Close’s playing of a woman disguised as a man won’t fool you completely, but you can’t take your eyes off her. And while her shy, naïve butler is the linchpin of this sensitive and unpredictable treatment of class, gender and identity, Janet McTeer, also disguised, gives her a damn good run for her money. HW

Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked Computer animation has so much to answer for.

Another Earth One of the delights of last year’s film festival, a lovely, strange, tender little movie about … I’d rather not tell you, actually. But the title does count as honest advertising. A second Earth-like planet is discovered in our solar system, and exactly how this tips two lives over into tragedy, and whether they recover, and what the hell is going on with this mix of the macro- and micro-cosmic, you’ll have a grand time figuring out. Only playing in Auckland – which is fair enough, because only Auckland’s film festival missed out on this last year, when the print arrived in the country late. Run, do not walk, Aucklanders: catch this gem on the big screen while you can. DL

B

Buck A quiet, sweet film about a quiet, sweet man: a real-life horse whisperer (he consulted for the Robert Redford movie) whose almost telepathic ability to soothe difficult horses we see demonstrated time and again. The sting in the story’s tail is the link between his astonishing sensitivity to tiny increments of equine body language and his appalling childhood. DL

C

Chronicle As elderly as the found-footage device is getting, this iteration feels fresh: you could take it for the work of talented newcomers who’ve digested the last three decades of genre film and want to make something exciting out of it. You’d be bang on. Three American high schoolers – the popular guy, the clever guy, and the obsessive reject with the home video camera – find a Hole In the Ground, wherein lies Something Not of This World. They acquire superpowers. They have adventures. Popular Guy and Clever Guy start to become aware that Obsessive Reject, who has years of bullying and parental abuse behind him, is not necessarily someone you’d want walking round lose with superhuman abilities. Can they save him from himself, or are they going to have to save everyone else from him? The last act sags a little, and the ingenious efforts to provide a plausible source for every last security camera image, TV report fragment, private video diary segment, etc, eventually become a distraction. Still, this is great fun: energetic and likeable. DL

Contraband

Contraband Without in any way being an interesting film, this is a fascinating artifact: a big-budget Icelandic thriller (I kid you not), remade in English, with the Icelandic star of the original as director. Mark Wahlberg, whose acting career continues to be a study in unlikely and occasionally fruitful zigzags, plays a retired smuggler and family man, forced by circumstances into pulling one last job. The ways in which it goes horribly wrong are not quite the ways you’d expect, which is not to say the film feels fresh: it feels both overly familiar and entirely bizarre, a case study in the effects of feeding a generic Hollywood plot through the prism of another film making culture and then feeding it back again. Wahlberg makes a solid center, and there’s enough energy to the proceedings (just) to sustain the film’s length. DL

E

El Bulli: Cooking In Progress A film about food that won’t necessarily get you salivating, but will astonish with the lengths some chefs will go to in pushing the culinary envelope. El Bulli is a Michelin 3-star restaurant on the Costa Brava, famed for its experiments in molecular gastronomy (that’s technically food, but not as we know it). Patiently observing the meticulous R&D that goes into the new season’s menu, while giving glimpses into the personalities of the chef-researchers, this absorbing documentary is the closest most of us will ever get to the El Bulli experience of culinary alchemy by way of science and art. HW

Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close One of us is a member of the set “has seen this film”, and one of us is a member of the set “has free time to write reviews this week”.  Neither of us is a member of both. Review pending. It is unlikely to feature set theory. Though the film may. I wouldn’t know.

H

Happy Feet 2 Penguins. Dancing. Not seen.

Hugo The film Martin Scorsese was born to make… and it’s a family feature about a little lost boy in a train station? That, and so much more. This is a mystery story, and though its 11 Oscar nominations have fueled a king-tide of spoiler-rich commentary even greater than the one already sparked by Scorsese’s name, I’m not going to go into plot details here. There’s been a great deal of discussion on social media & elsewhere as to whether rave reviews (like my one) have overstated the film’s merits; a small but impassioned minority claim it has none to overstate. Go form your own view. Myself, I don’t see anything knocking it off my top ten film list for 2012. In fact, out of the 150 to 200 films I’ll most likely watch this year, if I see three I love more than this one, I’ll be (very pleasantly) surprised. See it in 3D if you possibly can. DL

J

Jack And Jill We were not offered a chance to see this Adam Sandler comedy before its local opening date, which may or may not have anything to do with its current Rotten Tomatoes aggregate critical score of 3%. Now that it’s in theaters, we’ll be racing off to see it. You bet. We just love Adam Sandler comedies.

J Edgar Too long, and the aging make-up is applied with an overly enthusiastic hand, but this biopic about the legendary founder of the FBI is far and away the best film Clint Eastwood has directed for years. Leonardo DiCaprio does great work as a man driven by a turbulent mix of ideals and neuroses; Judi Dench is his formidable mother. Full review here. DL

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island Sequel to 2008′s Journey to the Center of the Earth. This substantial handicap is not the reason we haven’t seen it. We were just busy that day. And every day since.

K

Killer Elite Robert De Niro kidnapped by Clive Owen! Jason Statham to the rescue! How odd to realise that De Niro’s “just add a zero to the cheque” presence is now less of a draw than Owen and Statham’s honest action hackery. We have yet to find the time to watch this.

L

Leonardo Live Leaping onto the HD Live bandwagon for the first time, London’s National Gallery takes us on a tour of its exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, filming on opening night and offering a rare opportunity to get up close with the works. Gathered from a variety of international sources, there are ten in all, some with linked histories, some with accompanying sketches. They are, however, outnumbered by the commentators – historians, curators, and artists – interviewed in pedestrian fashion by the two hosts. One or two seem astonished to have been asked, and have little useful to say. More useful are the interleaved chapters backgrounding da Vinci’s life and time in Milan, giving insights into the paintings and the man. So far, so documentary. Missing is a sense of occasion and excitement to what The Telegraph is rashly trumpeting as “the greatest exhibition of the century”. And it was opening night! I wasn’t expecting Russian Ark, but the filmic treatment is disappointingly dull. And when all’s said and done, though it’s nice to be given the opportunity to “see” the work from so far away, painting doesn’t really lend itself to this concept in the same way as theatre and opera. No amount of high definition can convey what these breathtaking works must be like in the flesh. HW

M

Melancholia Lars Von Trier knows how to get under your skin. Depression is the real subject of this astonishing tour de force; the ostensible subject is the end of the world, so it’s possible to get distracted. Kirsten Dunst has never given a better performance, and she’s also never been better cast. The Wagner excerpt that keeps looping back at us, over and over, is simultaneously maddening and gorgeous: and it’s meant to be: and there you have the film. Full review here. DL

Midnight In Paris Woody Allen goes to France, taking with him, as usual, a large ensemble of capable actors, and, far less usual, a rather lovely script. It’s years – it’s decades – since he’s written so well for the screen. This giddy intellectual romance is not invulnerable to the same critiques as every other Woody Allen movie since the dawn of time – he’s not kind to his female characters, and seems blissfully unaware of the fact – but it’s light-hearted, and funny, and seems genuinely, infectiously in love with its setting. Review here. DL

Moneyball Even if you’re not a fan of sports movies, let alone of baseball, I can’t recommend this highly enough. It seems like a standard underdog story to start with, but when you see what the team’s manager (played by Brad Pitt) and his Yale grad recruit (Jonah Hill) do to get out from under, it reaches deep into ideas about personal potential that speak to us all: the undervaluing of individuals, and the randomness of subjective judgement. Inspired by a true story that’s been adapted into a sharply-honed script by the definitely not undervalued Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian, it’s engrossing, insightful and graced with excellent performances all round. Full review here. HW

P

Puss in Boots

Puss In Boots He was the best thing about Shrek 2 – which probably encouraged them to push out the sequels further than necessary – and now, at last, he’s got his own show! Yes, the Ginger known as Puss (voiced by Antonio Banderas, natch), is back. The Shrekian tradition of mashing up fairytale and nursery rhyme characters has been retained, and it boots (sorry) the narrative along nicely; plus we get to learn Puss’s origin tail (sorry, sorry) and why he’s an outlaw. Yes, he does the thing with the eyes, but actually he has you from the very first frame; he is just so ready for his close-up. And for a lay-dee, too – swashing and buckling his way into a fandango with the feisty Ms Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek). While you couldn’t claim the film takes Hollywood animated comedies to the next level, or does anything much with the 3D, it’s perfect for the holidays. And proves that underneath the bravado there’s just a big ol’ pussycat. HW

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Romantics Anonymous Chocolate and anxiety. Really? Yes, but not in the sense of dietary guilt. Chocolatiers Angélique and Jean-René both suffer from the disorder. Hers is shyness and lack of self-belief; his is fear, especially of women. So when Jean-René hires Angélique to work in his shop, you know they’ll end up together, but the path is, naturally, a rocky road, strewn with smilingly comic encounters and misunderstandings. Lovely casting of the leads, more than a touch of Amélie quirkiness, and an almost storybook look to its Lyon setting. Soft-centred, but not gooey. HW

S

Safe House Ryan Reynolds, you are hereby forgiven for Green Lantern. Denzel Washington is the real draw in this tense, involving action thriller, ice cool as the CIA traitor Reynolds’s young rookie has to bring in, but Reynolds holds his own. Director Daniel Espinosa (who he?) takes his time putting all his pieces in place, and the visual style is initially oppresive. (Lots of fast-panning low-rez close-ups, for that you-are-there, don’t-throw-up feel). But the pay-off is considerable. The surprisingly dark story kept going places I didn’t expect – literally as well as figuratively; the main setting, which I won’t name because I had so much fun trying to place it, is non-American and non-European, and the unfamiliarity does a lot to keep things fresh – and the camera work, once you adjust to it, is immersive and visceral. (The film shares its cinematographer & editor with the Bourne series). There’s a rare sense, as artificial and generic as the basic shape of the story is, that actual adult men are facing actual adult choices. With Vera Farmiga and Brendan Gleeson, whose good instincts for picking their projects did not desert them here. DL

Shame

Shame Experimental film maker Steve McQueen’s second theatrical feature is also his second collaboration with Michael Fassbender, which is the main reason, and quite reason enough, to watch it. Fassbender plays a familiar enough type in this pop-Freudian age, the sexual compulsive incapable of accepting a true emotional connection. (And yes, the pop-Freudian locution was chosen with his upcoming performance as Jung in mind, opposite Viggo Mortensen’s Freud in Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method). (I’m so excited!) The film tells us far less about its characters than they know about themselves, an approach which needs better writing married to it than McQueen and screenplay collaborator Abi Morgan are able to supply – but Fassbender is a compelling presence, and the cinematography remakes New York. Full review here. Crackly and in places inaudible podcast of me discussing Fassbender with our arts editor, Guy Somerset, here. (Very much a trial podcast, offered in the spirit of “we’ll get better at this”). DL

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows An honest sequel: if you enjoyed the first one, rock on up for more of the same. Not everyone did enjoy the original, but as far as I’m concerned these films are the most (the only) entertaining thing Guy Ritchie’s ever done. It remains the case that the BBC Sherlock series puts this version of the characters deep in the shade. DL

Sione’s Wedding 2: Unfinished Business It’s nice to see the boys back. They might not have matured as characters (the “unfinished business”), but they have as actors, and it shows in the occasional flashes of comic chemistry. But it’s hit-and-miss humour, with overstuffed shtick taking precedence over story (flat and wobbly) and character journeys that drift, neglected, into simplistic resolutions. Never mind; diehard fans will stay loyal. Full review here. HW

Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace 3D Yeah, thanks, Mr Lucas. Pass.

T

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn Steven Spielberg and producer Sir Peter Jackson bring out the best in each other, a cast of fine voice actors do excellent work, and the wizards of Weta do their best motion-caption ­animation yet. Tintin purists will carp, but this is outstanding summer fun, and worth catching in 3D if you can. DL

The Artist Silent, black and white film about a silent film star. The film industry’s touching tribute to itself? No: this is slight, but its charm is real, its technology-driven unemployment storyline has obvious contemporary resonance, and it pulls off several coup de cinema moments that will stay with me a long time. Features yet another in the recent long line of bravura performances by dogs. Full review here. DL

The Descendants I would like to pretend I’m astonished and horrified that this cute little exercise in fishing the shallows while dressed for big game has emerged as a strong contender for Best Picture. That’s to say, I would like to pretend that the Oscars don’t routinely reward trivial emotional stuntsmanship, because I enjoy betting on them, and I like the frocks. But back in the world we actually inhabit – the world of harsh truths and difficult confessions, the world this George Clooney vehicle purports to be about – I am forced to admit that my frustration and occasional boredom did not completely stop me enjoying yet another round of “Clooney plays Mr Flawed Nice Guy”. His Hawaiian man of business, clearly a terrible husband and father, has to man up and help his daughters face their mother’s imminent death. Oh dear: it comes out that she was cheating on him. Does George search his soul? Goodness no. But we’re meant to feel sorry for him, and assume meaningful growth is taking place. What – as either of the daughters might put it – ever. DL

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Not a story I hold dear, and it’s already been filmed well once. On the other hand – David Fincher. This English-language version of the Swedish bestseller is just too cool for school: nearly three hours long, and I loved every minute of it. Full review here. DL

The Ides of March Treachery in high places, as the title implies. The place is Ohio, on the Democratic campaign trail to the White House. George Clooney plays Mike Morris, a state governor fighting for the nomination. Ryan Gosling is Stephen, his communications whizzkid and a believer in his boss’s liberal idealism. That belief, as you might guess, is tested, and no one gets out unscathed. But if you’re hoping for something Shakespearean – again as the title implies – this falls short. It’s a thin, timid and almost naïve treatment of the kind of behaviour in politics we’ve become depressingly familiar with. Yes, of course we know that jaded cynicism awaits everyone who works in politics, and that you can expect to get shafted or have to shaft someone else. So? If you want to make a movie about it now, you need to be bolder and edgier with the characters and the themes, rather than simply settling for, “This is how it is.” HW

The Iron Lady Meryl Streep is Margaret Thatcher, but no matter your view of Britain’s former PM, this tremulous, unfocused biopic is less than she deserves. People will no doubt project their own Thatchers onto Streep’s predictably excellent performance; they’ll have to, because what director Phyllida Lloyd and writer Abi Morgan think of their polarising subject never quite emerges. DL

The Muppets I admit I’m no longer the target audience, so best to stop reading if you wish to preserve your rosy-hued memories. It’s not that the movie’s intentions are misplaced or misjudged, for its storyline of “let’s put on a show to save the Muppet studio (and revive the franchise to hook in a new generation)” is entirely admirable. As is the production and performances. It’s just that for old buggers like me, there’s little besides a few potent stabs of nostalgia and some mildly referential humour to make it worth the trip. So, best seen with an accompanying ankle-biter. Still, a shout-out to Bret McKenzie for his nomination for Best Original Song, even though Oscar chose – of course – the serious one (“Man or Muppet”) over the catchier “Life’s a Happy Song”. Full review here. HW

The Vow Looks to be a tear-jerker romance. (Couple’s perfect marriage derailed by amnesia on her part; he sets out to woo her back). We’ve not seen. So it would be prejudicial and unfair to link to a quirky picture-blog review which rips it to shreds.

This Means War An eyebrow-raisingly improbable plot, but gosh, it’s fun to watch. Mainly because it zooms through the what-the? moments and has actors smart enough to make it work. Plus they’re pretty darn attractive. Reese Witherspoon’s legs go all the way up to her shoulders, and the wardrobe department have knocked themselves out showcasing them with a different outfit for every scene. Tom Hardy, who’s everywhere at the moment, is not only hot; he has a comic funnybone, an understated British one. Chris Pine? Hmm. Nice eyes. As for comedienne Chelsea Handler, she rocks her dialogue and almost upstages everyone else. That plot? Two CIA agents, brothers-in-arms, fall for the same girl. There’s also a bad guy called Heinrich who pops in every now and then to remind them they have jobs, but essentially it’s a buddy movie fuelled by starpower and some pretty funny spy vs. spy gags. Oh, did I mention Tom Hardy’s hot? HW

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Just as in John Le Carré’s novel, you’re expected to hold far too many characters and subplots in your head at once, but rarely has so much confusion been so absorbing. It’s due to an extraordinarily deft adaptation by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, cutting and telescoping where they should while leaving plenty of room for the equally extraordinary actors to fill in the gaps, not with dialogue, but with looks and actions. Captures the gloomy, chilly sterility of its environment, but at the same time manages to hint at the human emotions struggling to survive beneath the façade. HW

V

Vincent Wants to Sea

Vincent Wants To Sea Tourette’s syndrome comedy-drama about a trio of variously compulsive characters who break out of a treatment center on a mission of mercy. German; and I admit Germany’s is not a culture my possibly blinkered mind associates with great humour. But in fact, the last German comedy I saw was touching, unexpected, a rich experience in all sorts of ways. Alas, this one is a stereotype reinforcer. It manages to feel both formulaic and lost in translation; an achievement, when you think about it. DL

W

War Horse Steven Spielberg can still frame an impressive set piece, but this episodic meander through the First World War is boring, lifeless, and all in all as poor a film as he’s made since (though not, I hasten to add, as poor as) Hook. (I do not believe Spielberg has another Hook in him, though that may just be desperate denial on my part). It’s intended as a family-friendly war film, which may not be an inherently perverse notion, but in Spielberg’s hands means, “Oh, are millions being slaughtered? Quick, look this way, kiddies – there’s a horse in danger!” DL

Weekend There are a handful of moments in this beautifully well observed ships-passing-in-the-night love story when the hand of artifice weighs heavy on your shoulder. Most of them involve Glen, the pushy, artsy bundle of attitude whom our morose young viewpoint character, Russell, finds in his bed one morning after going out clubbing. Glen has a lot to say on a lot of subjects, one of them being the difficulty of accepting yourself as a gay man when you never glimpse anything that looks like your own life on film or TV. If most straights saw a gay sex scene they wouldn’t know where to look! They never get the chance to start finding it natural! The “just in case you didn’t get what we’re doing here” signposting mostly serves to underline how relaxed, easy and rich with subtext the rest of the film is: in contrast to most of the young couples we see on the screen, Glen and Russell feel more like real people the more time we spend with them. We had to wait years for a sequel to the somewhat similar Before Sunrise. Part of me wants more Glen and Russell right now. But on the other hand, their story’s nearly perfect as it is. DL

When A City Falls Stunning, heart-breaking documentary on the Christchurch earthquakes, filmed on the ground over the course of a long year, by a team of Cantabrians who somehow kept their focus through the quakes, the liquefaction, the deaths. 2011 was quite a year for New Zealand documentary features (Operation 8, Brother Number One), but in 50 years’ time, this is the film they’ll still be watching. Full review here. DL

Check theatres and movie times here.

Click here for more stories and reviews by David Larsen, here for more stories and reviews by Helene Wong.

Shame

There are no mesmerising shots of human excrement in Steve McQueen’s new film. There are mesmerising shots of Michael Fassbender, but where’s the lengthy sequence in which his character starves himself to death? Fassbender and McQueen first collaborated on Hunger, the hands-down winner of the David Larsen “film I’ve praised the most that friends and family subsequently told me there was no way they would ever watch” prize. Their second film together – and McQueen’s second full-length feature (Fassbender will also appear in his third) – is on the face of it a far more accessible chunk of celluloid, but it is not out to ­capture itself a mass audience. Nor, as good as it is, does it entirely deserve one.

Shame is the story of Brandon Sullivan, a New York professional type (one of contemporary urban film’s favourite classes: “expensive lifestyle, works in office, exact field and job responsibilities unclear”) and a sex addict. I use this phrase despite its failure to appear in the film and its dangerous cargo of questionable assumptions, one of which is that Brandon’s behaviour will tamely submit to parlour psychoanalysis. For reasons both good (Fassbender manages to suggest oceanic depths beneath a forbiddingly cryonic exterior) and bad (the script has little idea who he really is), Brandon is not a character to wrap up in easy psychobabble. But “sex addict” tells you three things: there is a lot of explicit sex in this story; there is not one single jot of joy; and Brandon is fully in the grip of compulsions he doesn’t understand.

We now live in a world where certain highly codified types of (mostly female) nudity are standard fare even on free-to-air TV, but it’s a brave film that will show you a penis, and films that have attempted to bring those fearsome objects, erections, in from the pornographic hinterlands have not generally been thanked for it. Hunger made it clear that McQueen – a Turner Prize-winning experimental film-maker before he turned his attention to dramatic features – is capable of visual imagery that is at once astonishingly beautiful and astonishingly transgressive, but he carefully refrains from upsetting any apple carts here. Although we see Brandon naked, and having sex, and (gasp!) masturbating, we do not see any of the conventionally offensive body bits at any of the conventionally offensive moments; the film’s treatment of what might be mistaken for its primary subject matter is nowhere near as daring as Ang Lee’s in Lust, Caution.

The truth is that McQueen is more interested in Brandon’s pathological caution than in his equally pathological lust. Lee had the same focus, and it helped reduce Lust, Caution to a flat technical exercise. Shame works far better, because Fassbender makes Brandon’s reserve genuinely interesting, at once a trap we see him struggling to escape and a shield we know he’d be terrified to lose.

The film also benefits from the presence of Carey Mulligan, as Brandon’s needy extrovert sister; playing his equal-and-opposite makes for a much easier role, but she hits it out of the park. The other major contribution comes from director of photography Sean Bobbit (also a key presence in Hunger), who has somehow found a new way to shoot Manhattan. He converts one of the world’s most cliché-ridden urban environments into an externalisation of Brandon’s mind: sombre, geometrically regular, yet full of glossy, eroticised danger.

There’s no denying this film has nothing new to say about sexual psychology – or, really, about anything. McQueen co-wrote it with Abi Morgan, writer of The Iron Lady, and it suffers from the same core banality as that film: it tells us far too little about its protagonist, thus achieving the appearance of subtlety at the expense of insight. What Shame does do is showcase the power of fine acting and cinematography to transfigure the familiar. Hunger this is not. But bring on the next film from Fassbender and McQueen.

SHAME, directed by Steve McQueen. Click here for theatres and times.

Click here to hear a podcast with David Larsen and Guy Somerset talking about Shame; click here for more stories and reviews by David Larsen.

Grand Designs

Grand Designs (TV3, 7.30pm). It’s always more fun watching other people build houses, these “grand” ones especially. Homeowners like to dream big, and in the ninth series, Kevin McCloud meets a couple restoring an 18th-century castle; another having a go at a New England-style water mill; and another with a 15th-century castle that is on the At Risk Register. Quite a few of the home renovators featured have sustainability plans, such as the oak-framed straw-bale hexagonal house in the Cambridgeshire Fens and the earth-sheltered home made from recycled materials in Brittany.

Bored to Death (SoHo, Sky 010, 8.00pm). America might have invented the go-getter, but it also invented the self-conscious slacker – the over educated, underemployed nerd who can pontificate about Hemingway but barely tie his own shoelaces. Bored to Death is created by New York writer Jonathan Ames and is based on his story about a writer called Jonathan who has just given up drinking and is looking for some distraction. He decides to become a detective and places an ad on Craigslist. As you do. Happily, the series is not as laboured as the story was on the page: Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore) is the inert New York writer and Zach Galifianakis – whose career has taken off since The Hangover – is his offsider. The revelation is Ted Danson, as the hyper, sweary editor of a magazine firmly putting Sam from Cheers behind him. Interesting in a clever New York kind of way.

Once Upon a Time (TV3, 8.30pm). Will Snow White wake Prince Charming or risk a sexual harassment suit by kissing a comatose patient?

Museum Secrets (BBC Knowledge, Sky 074, 8.30pm). Visit the world’s museums without leaving home. Each episode focuses on one museum – in season one, there’s the Egyptian Museum, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Vatican Museums – and explores stories behind the treasures. At Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, the mysteries of animal mummification, Ramses’s coffin and a poor man’s hoard of gold are revealed. At the Met, the story of Evelyn Nesbit, the It Girl of her day, who was once thought to be the model for the nude Diana created in 1892 for Madison Square Garden.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood (UKTV, Sky 006, 9.30pm). The BBC has been partying itself stupid for the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens – there have been retrospectives, new TV and radio adaptations, dramas and documentaries. Plus, there have been theatre productions, exhibitions and festivals going on all over the shop, if you were actually in the UK to enjoy them. UKTV has just screened a new adaptation of Great Expectations, and here’s another specially made Dickens – it’s an interesting one at that, as he died before he finished this story. Screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes took up the challenge, and her “completion” of the novel is phenomenal, said the Guardian: “others have tried before but none to better effect”. Drood is a dark, dank and nasty tale of lust and murder, involving the unloved, leery choirmaster John Jasper, who may or may not have murdered his nephew, Edwin Drood. Matthew Rhys (Brothers & Sisters, yes) plays Jasper, while Freddie Fox (another of the Fox acting dynasty) is Edwin. Alun Armstrong (whose face was made for Dickens), Rory Kinnear, Julia McKenzie and Tamzin Merchant also star.

Crash Course (TV2, 11.30pm). Greg Murphy’s series has been consigned to late-night, which is something of a shame. Tonight, he explains how to survive brake failure.

FILM

127 Hours (Sky Movies, Sky 020, 8.30pm). Or “Gone in 60 Seconds” – the amount of time it takes James Franco, playing Aron Ralston, to extricate himself from a bad situation using a cheap Chinese multi-tool. Based on Ralston’s true account, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, and so much more rewarding than a feature-length film about a guy trapped under a rock could be in the wrong hands. Writer/director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting) wrings every available emotion out of a truly outstanding Franco, and gives us a movie as much about the human spirit as it is about the actual grisly events. And Ralston? He played himself in The Simpsons last year. (2010) 8 – Diana Balham

Salt (Sky Movies, Sky 020, 10.05pm). Philip Noyce takes a role originally intended for Tom Cruise and gives it to a girl – results are … basically the same. Angelina Jolie is the Energizer Bunny who can never slow down because she’s on the run from her own people. When a Russian defector announces that CIA agent Evelyn Salt is a Russian sleeper spy, off she goes on an increasingly more ridiculous stuntfest but, says Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir, at least Noyce doesn’t waste anyone’s time. A slick night in. (2010) 6

RADIO

Nine to Noon with Kathryn Ryan (Radio New Zealand National, 11.20am). Ryan’s feature guest this morning is Cynthia Bulik, a US psychologist and expert on eating disorders who discusses the difference between self-esteem and body esteem and what to do if your daughter decides she doesn’t really look like a fairy princess. – Diana Balham

Music Alive (Radio New Zealand Concert, 8.00pm). In what we’re sure couldn’t possibly be urban one-upmanship, the APO launches its splendid, put-on-your-best-frock-and-heels season Gala Opening in Auckland tonight, direct from the Town Hall. The classical bash features Ukrainian pianist Alexander Gavrylyuk with the orchestra, conducted by Eckehard Stier, and on the programme is Strauss’s Don Juan Op 20, Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No 2 in G minor Op 16 and Respighi’s The Fountains of Rome and Roman Festivals. – Diana Balham

By Ken Levine

“Levine’s posts are serious, funny, sarcastic and contemplative — sometimes all at once,” enthuses Time.

Earlier this week Levine shared the missing scene from the new Clinton biopic – the one set in “the Clinton bedroom right after Bill confessed to Hillary that he had been sleeping with Monica Lewinsky”.

In recent weeks, Levine has been pootling around New Zealand and Australia, as a guest speaker on a cruise ship. After making the obligatory jokes about sheep and Hobbits, Levine describes his day at the Wellington Sevens:

This is what I call a spectacle! Everyone comes dressed as if they’re going to the West Hollywood Halloween Parade. I drew more attention than a guy in drag wearing a Hooters’ outfit because I wasn’t wearing a costume.

All your favourite Flintstones, sheiks, satyrs, Fruits of the Loom, hairy nuns, brides, men in bunny suits, angry babies, storm troopers, M&Ms, pixies on steroids, Santas, Vikings, 300-pound Barbies, Ronald McDonalds, and Zulu warriors were there in full-force.

He seems to have been less impressed with Auckland – or, at least, by the guided tour.

He drove us through suburbs. Big whoop! That’s like having one day to see Los Angeles and going to Reseda and Pacoima.

And – everybody cringe now:

The guide announced that the population of Auckland reached 1.5 million last week and then added, “I’m pleased to say it was a birth not immigration.”

It seems Levine has had his fill of tour guides. Where typically he dispenses advice to would-be screenwriters, from Auckland he posted some advice for the people who point things out to tourists. Specifically, what not to do:

Don’t laugh at everything you say. Had a guide yesterday who occasionally did say something funny but killed it every time by chortling like an idiot after every punchline. Amuse us, not yourself.

Don’t try to be funny every second … Don’t be constantly “on”. You’re not hilarious. You’re desperate.

Don’t wind up before the joke. Or, as we like to say – telegraph it. Our guide in Hobart was genuinely funny. Every so often she would just slyly slip in a zinger. We drove by a McDonalds’ and she said, “Over there is the American Embassy.” Jokes are funnier if you don’t see them coming.

Puns may be clever but they’re rarely funny. And worse than no laughter, you run the risk of groans. Save puns for pithy prose or titles of blog posts.

If you do a joke about a subject and it doesn’t get a laugh, don’t do six more on the same subject.

And finally, don’t steal material from Robin Williams. First off, it’s already been stolen and second – you won’t be able to do it as well.

Badd Energy/Roy Irwin, Recorded Live at Roundhead Studios (95bFM, 11.00am and Friday, 2.00pm). Badd Energy, a “trippy quartet that kick out motley jams blending stoner-swamp riffs with laid-back 808 raps” (whatever they are), are finally getting the exposure they want with the upcoming release of their second album, Underwater Pyramids. Adding a second “d” to their name helped, too, now that they’re not being confused with the “crazy German dance act on YouTube” or “a bunch of stuff about crystals and chakras”, says band member Jessica Hansell – aka Coco Solid. Roy Irwin is an Auckland-based singer-songwriter with lovely hair, whose minimalist, reflective numbers often hide a darker message. Back in 2010, he summed up his second album thus: “3,2,1,2000 is all pretty personal, whereas my first album is kinda three parts personal with the rest being songs about serial killers.” It’s the quiet ones you have to worry about … There will be live streaming and podcasts on 95bfm.com and video on this website after February 25.

Coco Solid out of Badd Energy, photo David White

Jazz Concerts (Radio New Zealand Concert, 1.00pm). “It’s about as badass as highbrow gets” is how Rolling Stone magazine described American jazz trio the Bad Plus, who feature in Live Jazz from Europe today. The Guardian added that “if the Coen Brothers put together a jazz trio, perhaps it would be like this, the comic and the dramatic rolled together”. In this concert, recorded in Saalfelden, Austria, they are joined by sax player Joshua Redman, playing mostly original music with an anarchic smattering of pop, rock, country and classical deconstructions.

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 26

Spectrum (Radio New Zealand National, 12.15pm). It’s the size of 2000 football fields, but even so Pukaha Mt Bruce is like a pocket handkerchief compared with 70 Mile Bush, which once spread from north of Masterton to Norsewood in the Wairarapa. This week, Jack Perkins visits the 940ha wildlife reserve – all that’s left of the great forest – and reports back from the frontline of the war on vermin. With help from the Department of Conservation, local and regional councils and a team of tireless volunteers, the rangers at Mt Bruce are operating a captive breeding programme and reintroducing native species that may not have been seen in the area for decades.

MONDAY FEBRUARY 27

Sign Writing (Radio New Zealand National, 10.45am). This week’s book reading is a second series of tales from the Underworld, but instead of the souls of the dead, this Underworld is the haunt of characters who are very much alive. Skin Writing Series 2, playing from Monday to Friday, is five stories by Jamie McCaskill, Whiti Hereaka and Miria George about father-and-daughter tattoo artists Pushy and Niwa Te Aratapu, whose studio bears this mythical name.

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 29

Music Alive (Radio New Zealand Concert, 8.00pm). Tonight’s concert is the 2011 Adam Chamber Music Festival Grand Finale, a sort of Last Night of the Proms farewell that involves many of the players who appeared in the festival last February. Recorded in Nelson Cathedral, it includes Beethoven’s Duo in E Flat for Viola and Cello, Weber’s Clarinet Quintet in B Flat, Vieuxtemps’s Capriccio in C minor for Solo Viola and Schubert’s Octet.

THURSDAY MARCH 1

Appointment (Radio New Zealand Concert, 7.00pm). Donald Munro, known as the father of New Zealand opera, died on January 20, aged 99. Tonight, RNZ Concert is replaying an interview with the baritone recorded in 1995. Munro, who had the down-to-earth Kiwi desire to bring opera to the average person on the street, founded the New Zealand Opera Company in 1954, and proceeded to tour a wide range of works to rural areas where a man singing in a high voice was usually the victim of a shearing accident. He was awarded the MBE for services to opera in 1960 and was made an Arts ­Foundation Icon in 2005. Munro had been based in Australia since the mid-1960s and continued to teach singing until he was 97. He returned home each year and had hoped to celebrate his centenary in New Zealand.

Music Alive (Radio New Zealand Concert, 8.00pm). It’s fair to say German cellist Nicolas Altstaedt probably has a soft spot for New Zealand: it was here in 2006 that he first grabbed the attention of the classical world when he won the Adam International Cello Competition in Christchurch. In Divine Poetry, tonight’s concert direct from the ­Auckland Town Hall, he performs with the APO in a programme that includes Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia, Scriabin’s Third Symphony, Le Divin Poème and Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto.

FRIDAY MARCH 2

Hear the World (Radio New Zealand National, 11.06pm). Dheera Sujan presents another programme in this series of concerts recorded by Radio Netherlands Worldwide. Tonight, it’s a recording from the Bree Afro Latino Festival and the Muziekth Theatre in Amsterdam, with Lura and the Garcia Lorca Project Metropole Orchestra.

ET: The Extra-Terrestrial (Four, 6.30pm). Steven Spielberg presents a delightfully enduring fable about courage and childhood and the loneliness of the long-distance alien. (1982) 8

The Hot Chick (TV2, 8.30pm). A carefree young woman wakes up to discover her greatest nightmare is a reality – she’s trapped in a criminally feeble comedy with Rob Schneider. Since her time in body-switching purgatory, the now A-list Rachel McAdams (Midnight in Paris, The Notebook) has reassessed her movie-selection process and won’t make this mistake again. Schneider will probably continue to produce movies that are each more puerile than the last. (2002) 3

ET: The Extra-Terrestrial

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (Rialto, Sky 025, 8.30pm). We all know the wicked stepmother is a hard stereotype to overcome but young Emilia has a much greater challenge on her hands in this weepy drama. Natalie Portman delivers an intense performance and Lisa Kudrow is great as the bitchy ex-wife, but how can you care about these awful people? (Aka The Other Woman.) (2009) 6

Silent Hill (Four, 9.15pm). A horror that strikes fear into the heart with these five words: “based on the video game”. Strangely, in the macho, crotch-scratching world of the gamer, there were no male characters until director Christophe Gans added Sean Bean. (2006) 5

The Visitor (Maori, 9.30pm). Richard Jenkins was nominated for a best actor Oscar for playing a very grey US academic in this drama about a man whose world is opened up when he arrives in New York and finds two illegal immigrants squatting in his apartment – Syrian musician Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Senegalese street vendor Zainab (Danai Gurira). Learning happens, but if you’ve seen director Thomas McCarthy’s earlier film, The Station Agent, you’ll know to expect a light touch. (2007) 8

Wimbledon (TV3, 10.25pm). A romcom with balls. Nice Paul Bettany (A Beautiful Mind, Master and Commander) struggles to be sexy as an ageing English tennis pro who plays a round (or two) with Kirsten Dunst, an up-and-coming player. This is pleasant if not terribly convincing and the leads look as if they’d rather sit down with a plate of strawberries and cream than kiss each other. Sam Neill’s frown suggests he’d prefer to skip the strawbs altogether and be in another movie. (2004) 6

Find Me Guilty (TV2, 10.40pm). The penultimate film by Sidney Lumet, who died last year, is a courtroom drama set in the 1980s that seems to be longing for the stylish good old days when the Italian Mafia held sway in America’s cities and Sinatra was king. It’s based on the true story of Jackie DiNorscio, a mobster who defended himself during the longest Mafia trial in US history – an astounding 21 months. The greatest, and scariest, revelation is that action lunkhead Vin Diesel, as DiNorscio, is funny and charming – scary because the jury also found him funny and charming. Twelve Angry Men is still Lumet’s best law and order movie but there are a lot of pleasant surprises here. (2006) 7

How About You (TV1, 11.30pm). A strange time to schedule this primetime pleaser that ticks so many TV1 demographic boxes: gentle comedy drama, Irish accents (even better than British!), the sad, clever one from TV’s Mistresses (Orla Brady) and a handful of first-rate acting talent (Joss Ackland, Imelda Staunton, Vanessa Redgrave, Brenda Fricker). These last four make up the horrible quartet of nursing-home residents who resemble a posse of Jack Hacketts from Father Ted and it’s going to take a Pretty Young Thing (Hayley Atwell) to sort them out. It has about as much tension as the elastic in an octogenarian’s underpants – will they, won’t they turn into dear old duffers in time for Christmas? – but this is a charmer, nonetheless. Based on a short story by Maeve Binchy. (2007) 7

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 26

P.S. I Love You (TV2, 8.30pm). Hello? Is that Dial-a-Celt? Ah well, Scotland, Ireland, close enough. Colin Farrell must have been busy, so here’s Gerard Butler playing a chap from the Emerald Isle who charms the freckles off Irish-American Holly Kennedy and then croaks. Men will hate it, and Hilary Swank will stick to real drama from now on, if she’s got any sense. (2007) 5

Jurassic Park (Four, 8.30pm). There are dinosaurs everywhere and they’re particularly dangerous if you’re sitting on the dunny. More excellent Spielberg fun with Sam Neill (who would clearly choose adventuring over tennis), Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern, Richard Attenborough and Bob Peck, who plays a park warden called Robert Muldoon. He gets into trouble when he calls a snap election gets eaten by a party of voracious ­velociraptors. (1993) 8

The Necessities of Life (Maori, 8.30pm). While this week a lot of our heroes are coping with aliens, dinosaurs, immigration troubles and unauthorised body-swapping, Tivii, in this French-Canadian drama, is struggling just to find the will to breathe. It’s 1952: the Inuit hunter (Natar Ungalaaq) has tuberculosis and is packed off to a Quebec sanitorium where his broken heart threatens to kill him quicker than his ravaged lungs. A beautiful quiet film that was Canada’s nomination for the foreign language Oscar in 2009. (2008) 8

The Fighter (Sky Movies, Sky 020, 8.30pm). Another fact-based drama that presents America as a deeply tribal society (see also Find Me Guilty, Saturday). This time it’s the fightin’ Irish and the guy in trouble is a Massachusetts boxer called Micky Ward, whose main problem is his crack-addicted ex-boxer half-brother, Dicky Eklund. Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale are extraordinarily good at the people stuff as well as the hitting stuff and this is a superior sports underdog film that skips over the potholes this genre tends to wallow in. Bale and Melissa Leo won best supporting actor and actress Oscars. (2010) 8

MONDAY FEBRUARY 27

Bedazzled (Four, 8.30pm). It’ll be a cold day in hell before Elizabeth Hurley convinces us she can act, let alone impersonate Satan. The opposite must be a hot day in heaven – what Elliot (Brendan Fraser) is fantasising about with his out-of-reach dream girl Alison (Frances O’Connor). The 1967 version is much more entertaining: it stars Dudley Moore as the hopeless dweeb and Peter Cook as the devil. Cook is funnier than Hurley, but he wouldn’t look half as good wearing a snake. (2000) 6

FRIDAY MARCH 2

The Hangover Part II (Sky Box Office, Sky 202 & 207, 8.05pm and 8.35pm). “I can’t believe this is happening again,” says Phil, as unscheduled monkeys, facial tattoos and inexplicable madness break out when the gang hit Bangkok for a quiet pre-wedding brunch before Stu’s wedding. We can, and that’s the problem. Haven’t we seen this film before? (2011) 6

Elektra (Four, 8.30pm). A dreadful spin-off from Daredevil (which played last week) about a sexy action heroine who wears a red silk leotardy thing and always speaks in a whisper. Jennifer Garner, who plays her, told a reporter she thought this movie was “terrible”. Perfect for guys who can’t decide between porn or fantasy tonight. (2004) 4

Cricket (Sky Sport 2, Sky 030, 1.31pm). After three Twenty20 matches, the Black Caps are into the one-day series with South Africa. Tonight’s match is from Westpac Stadium in Wellington; on Wednesday, the teams meet at McLean Park, Napier; and the final match is at Eden Park on Saturday, March 3.

The Almighty Johnsons

Terra Nova (TV3, 7.30pm). If you saw our interview last week with Jay Ryan, you’ll know that Steven Spielberg is an executive producer of this big-budget family adventure-style series – and that it has dinosaurs! Cool, exciting, dangerous dinosaurs, which happily also serve to take your mind off the pretty standard plotting, ordinary scripting, and family values straight from the 50s. It begins in 2149, and the world is overpopulated and running out of breathable air. Nek minute, humankind discovers a rift in the space-time continuum that is a doorway to a Cretaceous-era Earth in a different timeline (handy: they’re not changing the present, see?). Jim and ­Elisabeth Shannon (Jason Mara and Shelley Conn), who are in trouble for having a third child, manage to get through the stargate, er, gateway, to start new ecologically friendly lives, although they seem to have brought through some of the plotlines from Little House on the Prairie. Bonus: Kiwi actor Simone Kessell is a regular cast member, and Ryan turns up in episode five. Also, y’know, dinosaurs.

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 26

History Under the Hammer (Prime, 7.00pm). New local series in which the history of interesting objects is revealed just before they are auctioned off to the highest bidder. Tonight, a 1929 Douglas motorbike once raced by speedway star Wally ­Kilminster, a beautiful arts and crafts brooch, and a stock whip handle.

All New Simpsons (Four, 7.30pm). Tonight’s guest star: Glee’s Jane Lynch, who plays Homer’s new assistant at the nuclear power plant. Naturally, she is evil.

Top Gear (Prime, 7.30pm). Thank goodness, Jeremy Clarkson has been captured and released back in his natural environment, the petrolhead world of Top Gear. Tonight, Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May are testing supercars at Italy’s Nardò test track, which is so large it can be seen from space. Much like Clarkson’s ego. They also drive around the centre of Rome – not for the faint-hearted – and go up against the Stig at the legendary Imola circuit. Now, please, God, do not let Jeremy out again.

The Grand Plan (Prime, 8.45pm). When life gives you lemons, so they say, make a TV show about it (just ask Fran Drescher). Here’s a new series that was first commissioned as a kind of Grand Designs-meets-Jamie Oliver. Cameras were to follow Nick and Sarah Freeman, Sarah’s father, Graham Harris, and their friend Stephen Cohen as they restored Christ­church’s dilapidated Provincial Hotel and turned it into a modern gastro-pub. That was until the first earthquake in September 2010, anyway.

Emma (TV1, 10.30pm). The last of the Austen adaptations before, in 2009, the BBC called a “bonnet moratorium”. Romola Garai (The Hour) is Austen’s exasperating heroine, and Jonny Lee Miller, wearing an excellent set of sideburns, is the kind and moral Mr Knightley, waiting in the wings for Emma to just grow up. This version (in four parts) is played as a comedy of manners, featuring lovely turns by Michael Gambon as Emma’s hypochondriac father and Tamsin Greig as sad, penniless chatterbox Miss Bates. It is a bit syrupy, however, and Miller doesn’t do much apart from stride manfully about, but it is pleasant enough.

MONDAY FEBRUARY 27

The 84th Annual Academy Awards (Sky Movies, Sky 020, 2.30pm). Darn. Why did we cancel Sky Movies in favour of SoHo? This year’s Oscars, live from Hollywood, and only on Sky Movies (no replay on Prime! Boo!). Billy Crystal is back, too, after Eddie Murphy stepped down. It seems the French are taking over this year: The Artist is on a roll, having won Golden Globes and Baftas, although expect strong showings from Martin Scorsese (Hugo), George Clooney (The Descendants) and Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady). Conchord Bret McKenzie should win for his Muppet movie song, which means he probably won’t. For red-carpet fun, E! channel (Sky 011) has live coverage from noon.

Wish You Were Here: The Making of the Pink Floyd Album (Prime, 9.35pm). A fact journalists sometimes forget is if you want to get a musician to talk, ask him or her about the music. Following that rule, this “making of” album series is a corker, and Wish You Were Here: The Making of the Pink Floyd Album is no exception. The musicians, producers and studio engineers discuss the process of making Wish You Were Here at Abbey Road Studio after the massive success of Dark Side of the Moon, including the now-infamous visit by former band member Syd Barrett, who had physically changed so much no one recognised him. The band wrote Shine on You Crazy Diamond as a tribute to Barrett.

TUESDAY FEBRUARY 28

East West 101 (Maori, 9.30pm). A cut above the usual cliché and clunky dialogue of most Aussie cop shows – in fact, one of the finest cop shows in the history of Australian TV, according to the Daily Telegraph. This is because it has the guts to confront racial tensions in Oz, focusing on western Sydney, and has a Muslim as its lead character (the lovely Don Hany from Offspring). And the third season, which starts tonight, tackles the impact in Australia of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – although there will also be stories featuring the Somali, Palestinian, Israeli and Maori communities.

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 29

World’s Deadliest Roads and Road Madness (TV3, 7.30pm and 8.00pm). Programming for blokes – and why not? Between the housewives who are desperate, the girls who want revenge and the fairy tales, there’s not that much left over for the boys. In World’s Deadliest Roads Lisa, Alex and Rick from Ice Road Truckers are sent to India to haul stuff into the Himalayas. Guess who turns out to be the toughest of all? Yep, Lisa. Sorry, guys. Road Madness is closer to home – comedian and petrolhead Ewen Gilmour presents footage from traffic cameras here and abroad that shows what terrible driving is going on out there as we speak. We shouldn’t be surprised, really.

I Am an Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and Peta (SoHo, Sky 010, 7.30pm). Film-maker Matthew Galkin is unflinching in his portrayal of a zealot in this doco about the co-founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta). It is the most recognised animal-rights organisation in the world, probably because Newkirk is known for her high-vis stunts, such as chucking red paint on catwalks and pie-throwing. Celebrity endorsement of Peta’s slogan – “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” – has also given the organisation huge amounts of publicity. However, Newkirk is radical and prepared to do almost anything, and she runs Peta as a cult of personality. Galkin (who made the documentary Kevorkian) follows Newkirk in strategy meetings, press conferences and galas and watches as she rubs fake blood over a Jean Paul Gaultier storefront. Interviewees include Pamela Anderson, Bill Maher and the singer Pink.

The Almighty Johnsons (TV3, 8.30pm). After vampires, werewolves, witches, faeries and ghosts, a zombie apocalypse and ordinary people becoming heroes, nothing is unreasonable on television these days – not even Norse gods in Aotearoa. So, welcome back The Almighty Johnsons, our own supernatural – within a budget – series about gods on Earth searching for their bliss. As a metaphor for the common bloke, it’s a good one: the four brothers Johnson are living emasculated lives as ordinary mortals, their powers watered-down and their inner gods kept, well, inner. There’s Mike (Tim Balme), the god of skill and the hunt; Anders (Dean O’Gorman), the god of poetry; Axl (Emmett Skilton), potentially Odin, the god of everything; and Ty (Jared Turner), the god of winter and darkness. The first season was taken up with Axl coming to terms with the whole god thing and then searching for Frigg (not a metaphor), in mythology his wife. This somehow culminated in Ty marrying Eva (Brooke Williams), the goddess of the Underworld. As season two begins, Ty and Eva are locked in a love-and-hate and rough-sex relationship to rival Buffy and Spike’s doomed season six liaison. It’s not going to end well. Meanwhile, the other brothers continue the search, but Axl receives some sage advice, from Michael Hurst no less, that he will first have to become a man. Then Frigg (possibly not a metaphor in this context) will come to him. If there’s one criticism that can be made of this cheerful series, it’s that there’s often a lot of splainin’ to do. The quest, the gods and goddesses, their factotums, the various bits of paper that turn up written in ancient Nordic (or something). But when lines like “I’m Odin, don’t call me an egg” count as exegesis, it hardly seems to matter.

THURSDAY MARCH 1

World’s Strictest Parents New Zealand (TV1, 8.30pm). Hurrah, another stupid reality franchise is remade here. This is the one where naughty teens get sent to stay with strict families in other countries. Because being sent to live with strangers half a world away while being filmed for a reality TV show is definitely the best parental response to bad behaviour.

FRIDAY MARCH 2

The Good Word (TVNZ 7, 9.05pm). New Zealand Book Month is always an exciting time here at Listener Towers (we’ll be having some online-only treats during March, say tuned!) and we’re happy to see the return of The Good Word, the local book-discussion series. Novelist Emily Perkins presents, and features include a discussion with a studio guest about his or her favourite book; a look at the working habits of various Kiwi writers; a peek behind-the-scenes of some famous New Zealand books; and a book review panel. Contributing are Miriama Kamo, Carol Hirschfeld, Te Radar, Bill Hastings, Jennifer Ward-Lealand, Gordon McLauchlan and Steve Braunias.

The Japanese Yomiuri Shimbun travels with families of the 12 Japanese students who died in the collapsed CTV building which housed their foreign language school: “Quake victims’ relatives arrive in NZ”.

Miller-McCune: “Christchurch still shaken by quake, one year later”.

AAP: “Aftershocks slowing Christchurch earthquake recovery”.

AP’s Nick Perry: “Christchurch still quake survivors’ haven”.

AFP: “Christchurch residents living on their nerves”

The Bloomberg agency year-on piece looks at predictions that the accelerating rebuild could “spur inflation and end record-low interest rates”.

Daily Telegraph, UK: “New Zealand earthquake victims laid to rest as country prepares for one-year anniversary”.

Guardian, UK: “Darkness at the heart of Christchurch, one year after the quake” (in the print edition, the piece carried the headline “Hope and faith return to Christchurch”).

From January, online at the Economist: “Not quite risen”.

“It feels like starting over” – a substantial feature in the Australian newspaper.

In “Christchurch finding its way back from devastation”, the San Francisco Chronicle’s travel editor visits Canterbury.

An upbeat piece in the Sydney Morning Herald travel section is welcome, but I rather doubt whether many Cantabrians will delight at the word “plucky” in the headline: “Plucky Christchurch is open for business”.

A British expat based in Christchurch recounts a year of shaky living in an interview with BBC News Online.

An interesting piece at the Arup “Thoughts” blog by Andrew Wisdom: “Christchurch should become a living lab”.

“Christchurch rebuilds a year after quake”, Reuters (video).

“Quake-weary Christchurch still on edge, one year on”, AFP (video)

“Quake survivors rebuild lives in Christchurch”, AP (video)

“Frustration in New Zealand a year after deadly quake”, ABC Australia (audio)

And Dominique Schwartz’s report for ABC TV is here.