Jojo has dinner with his imaginary friend Adolf, and his mother, Rosie. Photo by Kimberley French.

MediaOctober 25, 2019

Review: The Spinoff’s verdict on Taika Waititi’s new movie, Jojo Rabbit

A bunch of people

Jojo has dinner with his imaginary friend Adolf, and his mother, Rosie. Photo by Kimberley French.

The latest film by New Zealand’s celebrity director Taika Waititi, Jojo Rabbit, is out in cinemas now. Spinoff writers offer their thoughts on the ‘anti-hate satire’, and whether it lives up to Waititi’s catalogue of hits.

Sam Brooks, culture editor

I had a lovely time watching Jojo Rabbit – it’s an enjoyable, tense coming-of-age film that leaves you wrestling with some ideology. But my main takeaway was how Taika’s new film fully justifies Rebel Wilson’s whole deal. Wilson’s has a weird career: she was the next big thing right up until people realised that nobody wanted that much of her and her loud schtick. Which is a shame because when she’s given the right role (she’s also very good in Netflix’s Isn’t it Romantic), she’s a delight.

Jojo Rabbit uses Wilson as a highlighter rather than a backbone, playing a sort of hyperactive sidekick to Sam Rockwell’s Hitler Youth camp leader – remember how joyous she was back in the first Pitch Perfect? This is that Rebel Wilson. She gets the film’s biggest laughs, and in a film like Jojo Rabbit, any laugh is much-needed.

Alex Casey, senior writer

Who would have ever thought that ScarJo was capable of being warm, maternal and… funny? She and Thomasin McKenzie were easily the standouts of Jojo Rabbit for me, their relationship blossoming in claustrophobic, candle-lit moments as Rosie (Johansson) gets to know the Jewish teenager Elsa (McKenzie) hiding in her walls. As Elsa’s only point of contact with the world (or so she thinks), Rosie’s twinkly-eyed musings on hope, life and womanhood, punctuated with swigs of wine, left me tear ducts scammed, bamboozled, and hoodwinked.

Me eyes also pricked every time Jojo hugged his ridiculously lovable little mate Yorki with his little arms, especially as the nightmare descends. What else? Thomasin McKenzie is ferocious. Stephen Merchant stars in the role he once joked about nailing on old podcasts. Alfie Allen wears a touch of mascara. Rebel Wilson is Rebel Wilson. And Taika Waititi as stroppy, zany, imaginary Hitler pops up every now and again but is thankfully much further from the central focus than the trailer would have you believe. Just go see it FFS.

Toby Manhire, editor

Joel Coen says that film directing is at its essence “tone management”, and Taika Waititi has confirmed himself as a virtuoso in that craft. It is an unoriginal thing to suggest, but Jojo Rabbit really shouldn’t work. The format and plot ingredients ought at the very least make for something discordant or earnestly Brechtian. But Waititi is so good at what he does – universe-creating – that you don’t pause to wonder why the fuck an effete, Māori, anachronistic Hitler keeps wandering into the frame of an otherwise tender period movie.

That’s not to say you don’t think about all of that, just that it never stalls the engine. It’s funny, it’s moving, it’s beautiful to behold – and Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie and Roman Griffin Davis knock it out of the Olympiastadion.

Thomasin McKenzie and Roman Griffin Davis in Jojo Rabbit. Photo by Kimberley French.

Duncan Greive, managing editor

A fog of fear descended around Jojo Rabbit a few months ago, a sense that now was not the right moment to be having a laugh about Nazis, and that either the movie or Waititi or both might be cancelled as a result. This resulted in the big bold lettering reading “an anti-hate satire” on the posters. The fear clearly can only have emanated from those who had not seen this sweet coming-of-age comedy, because its mild manners are present at every turn, from Waititi’s eager, insecure Hitler, to the comically inept Gestapo, to the well-worn haze of the soundtrack’s 60s-90s stalwarts.

Jojo Rabbit is essentially the same film he’s been making for a while now, familiarity making the trick a little more twee and gentle each time. It’s frustrating because he’s clearly a towering genius, and his public pronouncements have a brilliantly arresting quality that his films are beginning to lack. They’re now just funny when they could be that and so much more. Ultimately a little electric current of fear and danger is precisely what Jojo Rabbit lacks, and needs.

Catherine McGregor, deputy editor

Taika Waititi is the Māori Wes Anderson. You know it, I know it, anyone who watches Jojo Rabbit definitely knows it. Jojo Rabbit‘s arts-and-craftsy set design, all dark wood and jewel tones? Pure Royal Tennnbaums. The stylised, shiny-button uniforms? Grand Budapest Hotel. The retro pop soundtrack? Um, where to start. And it’s not just the look and sound of Jojo Rabbit that owes a debt to the American auteur. An early section set in an adventure camp for boys so closely mimics the scouting scenes in Moonrise Kingdom that Anderson really should look into royalties.

The thing is, I love Wes Anderson films – and firmly believe there’s a lot more heart beneath their art directed surfaces than they’re given credit for – so it’s hardly surprising that I liked Jojo Rabbit too. It’s weird and funny and sad and sweet – and yes, whimsical as fuck, but that’s fine with me. If your tolerance for quirk is lower than mine, I’d advise treading carefully.

Josie Adams, staff writer

Taika Waititi has stopped just short of humanising those who dehumanise others. The most “Nazi” character is Jojo, who is described by his mother as a “fanatic”. The adults all laugh at Jojo when he describes how weird Jewish people are. “We’ve got bigger problems than the Jews,” says Yorki, an 11-year-old soldier. Captain Klenzendorf (the ridiculous Sam Rockwell) is too busy designing the flamboyant costume he’ll fight the Allies in to care about hunting Jewish people. Jojo’s mother, a witty, high-energy Scarjo, is sympathetic to the Jewish girl hiding in her roof.

Ahead of Jojo Rabbit‘s release, we were all terrified the phrase “anti-hate satire” would prove more meaningless than it sounded and that this film would be a mess. We had nothing to worry about. Child/teen actors Thomasin McKenzie and Roman Davis carry the emotional weight of Nazism and dehumanisation better than any adults on screen. They’re allowed to feel fear and grief. In short: no-one’s making light of the war, but also this movie is funny.

Keep going!

Hal Crawford is leaving Newshub and returning to Australia. Photo: supplied

MediaOctober 24, 2019

Newshub chief Hal Crawford: The New Zealand news media is broken

Hal Crawford

Contributing writer

Hal Crawford is leaving Newshub and returning to Australia. Photo: supplied

A scathing account of the state of television and the wider media, from the departing Newshub boss.

Less than a week after Mediaworks put its television operations up for sale, the head of its news arm, Hal Crawford, has announced he is leaving. Crawford’s departure – he is returning to Australia with his family – has been rumoured for some months, and Newshub is reporting that it is unconnected to the Mediaworks sale offer.

He has not been shy of expressing a view on the state of New Zealand media, however. In this comment piece, originally published by Newshub in August, Crawford urged the government to take action.

Recently it emerged that TVNZ isn’t paying a dividend to the government this year and for “the foreseeable future”. So they are not a commercial entity in the normal sense and neither are they are a public broadcaster.

They inherited their infrastructure and audience from a public broadcaster and pretended for a few years to be a commercial enterprise. But when the going got tough, instead of shrinking, they were allowed to act in a non-commercial way. While their revenue stalls, they are increasing their costs. They are still selling advertising in a putatively open market and commanding a higher rate than their competitors.

Next year, on their own forecast, TVNZ will lose $17m. And while they are losing this money, they will be taking a disproportionate amount of government funding from New Zealand On Air. In terms of local content quotas or adherence to a charter, they are sweet as. They have no quotas and no charter. They can do whatever they like to not make a buck. They will never fold, because they are 100% state-owned.

Being one of their competitors, I’m angry about this. I’m angry that the market for television advertising in New Zealand is distorted by this bizarre, anti-competitive set up. I’m angry that my newsroom, Newshub, is part of a business struggling to keep its head above such polluted waters.

I’ll be damned if I lay off one more person or say “no” to one more important assignment without expressing it: TV in New Zealand is broken. And it could have a big impact on news in this country.

But the truth is that while TVNZ is a problem, it’s not the biggest problem. If it were as simple as a quasi-Government broadcaster with no commercial imperative and a dominant market position, we could solve it. It’s even possible the government has recognised the issue and is slowly getting around to it. Maybe we’ll have a proposal to merge TVNZ, Māori TV and RNZ. A good idea that will probably end in a morass of working groups.

But it’s bigger than that. Look at news across the board. It’s said to be a good thing that Stuff can’t find a buyer, because that means Nine has had to hang on to their accidental Kiwi purchase. Nine is a media company, right? If this gives anyone any relief, they are deluding themselves. The first and key part of the story is that no one in the world wants to buy New Zealand’s premiere digital news company. That isn’t a good thing.

Don’t think NZME are off the hook. No one reports on their regular staff culls because there’s no one there to pull a Herald on the Herald. These guys are enthusiastic chroniclers of every other media company’s woes but are naturally silent when it comes to their own inch-by-inch subsidence. They are closing papers. They are up to their necks in trouble.

I take no consolation in any of it. The market can’t support the newsrooms we have right now, and already we are probably failing to cover what we need to cover. It’s anyone’s guess what percentage of important court cases aren’t reported on. We don’t account for what we don’t know.

The root cause is as simple as it is profound. All our businesses rest on human behaviour, and that behaviour has changed. People don’t do what they used to do. Most news media businesses have been able to deal with that behavioural change by reaching audiences on different platforms: web, app, video-on-demand.

But when they get there they find that the value they can extract from the same audience has declined by an order of magnitude. The market of attention is flooded while the competition for attention is furious. It’s a diabolical equation.

I’ve been talking to my colleagues about news. Most agree that this is a good old-fashioned market failure.

The thing that we need, that society needs, is not only under threat, it’s not being provided right now. The small public broadcasting news operations and the commercial players can no longer provide enough news to keep our society healthy at a local and national level.

Unfortunately all the cliches about the free press and democracy are right: we need news to keep this lemon on the road. When markets fail, governments must step in, and this doesn’t necessarily have to result in the Kremlin-controlled Pravda newspaper.

Many see a publicly funded model as unrealistic, but we already have an example of an independent, publicly funded operation essential to the functioning of society: the judiciary. It is time to start taking the term “the fourth estate” literally, and to find a new model for surfacing everyday truths.

The government must act now.

Hal Crawford is the outgoing chief news officer at Newshub.