Pop CultureAugust 23, 2024

Our bite-size reviews from the third week of the NZ International Film Festival

A bunch of people

Week three of Whānau Marama: The New Zealand International Film Festival, including humanist vampires, a Grand Prix Cannes winner, and a monstrously good Tilda Swinton.

All We Imagine As Light

All We Imagine As Light is an incredibly dreamy film set in monsoonal Mumbai, where central characters Prabha, Anu and Parvati work together in a big hospital. Prabha, played by Kani Kusruti, is a gentle and capable nurse, slightly bemused by her husband moving to Germany and stopping calling her. She’s a compassionate roommate to Anu (Divya Prabha), a younger nurse who is controversially in love with a Muslim boy, and whose quick efficiency – prescribing birth control pills to a worried patient, for example – is offset by her love of sauntering around Mumbai, trying on sunglasses and kissing in the rain. Prabha and Anu work together to help their colleague Parvati, a cook, move after a lack of documentation means she is forced from her home by property developers. As the characters shift between speaking Malayalam, from their home state of Kerala, Marathi and Hindi, the film investigates what women’s freedom looks like in contemporary India, and how there is space for playfulness and intrigue even within restrictive social codes. With lush shots of monsoon downpours, apartments at night and beaches, the movie has a total confidence in the beauty of the world. It’s by far my favourite film from the festival this year, and if the packed out Civic is anything to go by, lots of people agree. / Shanti Mathias

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person

Move over Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, for mine eyes have never seen two faces better suited to an adolescent vampire movie than Sara Montpetit and Arnaud Vachon in Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person. When reluctant vampire Sasha (Montpetit) realises her unusual streak of empathy is going to make feasting on random strangers untenable, she starts to explore other options. What transpires is a quite sweet and sometimes sad teen rom-com about two misfits finding each other in the literal and metaphorical darkness. There’s also an incredible shot which looks exactly like when Natalia Kills and Willy Moon swept through Auckland International Airport after suit-gate. Adored it. / Alex Casey

Problemista

Problemista is magical, chaotic, hilarious and moving. It follows Alejandro, who moved to New York from El Salvador following a dream to become a toy designer. Having not heard back from Hasbro about his application, he works at FreezeCorp, a company which cryogenically freezes people in order to reawaken them in the future, if they ever develop the technology, that is. It is here that the meek, dorky immigrant meets Elizabeth, the highly strung wife of an artist (frozen) who exclusively painted eggs. Elizabeth, played by Tilda Swinton, is a magnetic monster pulling Ale into her obsessive orbit around her husband’s work. If we’re talking about its stars we also have to say Ale is played by the writer and director of the film, Julio Torres, who apparently has too many talents. Then there’s also Craigslist, brought to life by Larry Owens. The costuming and characters are recognisable, if exaggerated. Parts of this reminded me of Michel Gondry films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep. Another new favourite! / Gabi Lardies

Dìdi

There’s a delicious banquet of great coming-of-age films in the festival, but Dìdi is easily the most hyped and the very best I’ve seen from the genre since I sobbed my way through Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? last year. Set in 2008, when your Myspace top eight was the defining social strata and YouTube was a place for skate videos and lo-fi parody songs, Taiwanese-American kid Chris is flubbing his way through friendship and family drama. Although its a classic case of being caught between worlds – the cute kid brother making videos with his grandma at home and the suave skater boy trying to woo his crush online – this movie firmly resists falling into cliche and stereotypes. Instead, it manages to be surprising, deeply moving and hilarious while still feeling kinda downbeat and low-key. Also is a really strong rendering of the primitive social media age, and a treat to be a part of a firmly millennial crowd gasping at the gravity of receiving a <3 instead of a :) on your flip phone. / AC

Read our week one reviews here

Read our week two reviews here

Click here to see the full programme from Whānau Marama: The New Zealand International Film Festival

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These comedians were arrested for the crime of bad spelling (Screengrab)

Pop CultureAugust 23, 2024

Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee gets bigger and better

Tara Ward

Staff writer

These comedians were arrested for the crime of bad spelling (Screengrab)

The New Zealand comedy show that celebrates spelling is back, and it’s still g-r-e-a-t.

This is an excerpt from our weekly pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up here.

Dai Henwood is standing in front of the nation, his eyes closed. He’s just been asked to spell the word “theft”, and the comedian is lost, adrift, alone in a sea of letters. “Why can I not spell theft?!” he cries in disbelief, as Guy Montgomery, host of Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee watches on, a delighted grin on his face. The seconds feel like years. Henwood puts his hands to his head, frantically searching his internal dictionary for answers that refuse to come.

Never before has such a low stakes challenge felt so important. When the answer finally comes to Henwood – “t-h-e-f-t” he spells out triumphantly – he receives a rapturous round of applause. Later, he’ll unleash the phrase “caesarean crumpets” during a powerful acrostic poem, a phrase surely never mentioned on television before, and probably never again. It’s all music to a word nerd’s ears, and a sign that the wonderfully hectic Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee is back for a second season.

Every TV show should have an acrostic poem round (Screengrab)

Spelling Bee is the brainchild of comedian Guy Montgomery, who gathered his comedian friends together over Zoom during the first Covid-19 lockdown and made them spell tricky words. Montgomery then developed the concept into a touring comedy show, before premiering it as a prime time panel series in Aotearoa last year. The show was so successful that an Australian version launched this month, and is already getting rave reviews.

Season one was a joy, and as season two premiered in Aotearoa this week (pairing with a new season of local comedy Double Parked), it’s clear the show has lost none of its hectic charm. In fact, episode one took things up a gear by locking the bad spellers up in jail (the stainless steel toilet was a nice touch). Episode one saw 2023 champion Henwood return to defend his title, alongside comedians Kura Turuwhenua, Tom Sainsbury and Nina Oyama. Sanjay Patel returns as Montgomery’s deadpan assistant, as does the glorious 1970s-style game show set, which gives the whole competition a disarming nostalgic vibe.

Spelling Bee is as sharp and confident as ever, and that’s mostly down to the energetic, quick-witted Montgomery. He’s in full force here, ensuring Spelling Bee is a fast-paced, slick piece of comedy that celebrates not only the weirdness of language, but the collective fallibility of human beings. It doesn’t matter if you can’t spell on Spelling Bee – in fact, there’s little advantage to knowing your “eyes” from your “ayes”.

“This is designed to be irritating,” Montgomery explains during the controversial homonym round, as he continues to take pleasure in making his mates spell weird words without ever having to spell one himself.

Tom Sainsbury crosses his fingers that Nina Oyama spelled ‘I’ correctly (Screengrab)

Much like Taskmaster, Spelling Bee’s appeal lies in seeing well-known performers pushed out of their comfort zone in a variety of wacky and pointless ways, and it too leans into its own sense of ridiculousness. Sure, some jokes landed better than others (a round that involved a Christmas gift swap went on too long, while a recurring joke about Montgomery sleeping with Nina Oyama’s mother was squeezed for more than it was worth), but the upbeat spirit of Spelling Bee never wavered.

As Henwood proved with that tricky little sucker “theft”, the pressure of spelling a word on television shouldn’t be underestimated, and in a landscape stuffed with international TV formats, Spelling Bee remains a refreshing feat of originality. This is fun, escapist television that champions the talents of our comedians, while also making us think about language in random ways. We still might struggle to spell “milquetoast”, but we’ll always have those caesarean crumpets.

Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee screens on Thursdays at 7pm on Three and streams on ThreeNow.