The Spinoff’s winners and losers of the week.
It was a good week to be a school lunch. After gaining national notoriety for being “disgusting”, burning a kid and either showing up frozen or not at all, their fame was starting to fade. Then David Seymour stepped in and stripped the te reo Māori from the name Ka Ora Ka Ako | Healthy School Lunches because “people need to know what things are” for a much-needed shot of controversy.
It was a bad week to be a Winter Olympics medal, several of which broke shortly after being awarded – including a silver belonging to New Zealand sensation Zoi Sadowski-Synnott, which broke after it “whacked [her] snowboard”. Actually, though, maybe this is the moment the Winter Olympics finally become relatable – it’s hard to feel a connection to elite athletes, what with all the counting grams of protein and early nights. Easier to get what it’s like to feel shiny as fuck one minute and a broken mess the next.
It was a good week to be a turd, floating free in the Cook Strait off Wellington’s south coast and more famous than ever before.
It was a bad week to be the long-buried past. More than two years into the government’s term, Nicola Willis, minister of finance and chief cemetery worker, has decided to exhume the Reserve Bank’s pandemic response. The review into the bank will be complete just before the election. Standing graveside, as Willis handed monetary policy experts Athanasios Orphanides and David Archera shovels, Chlöe Swarbrick called the timing “a bit sus”. Willis said the timing made sense because there’s a refreshed Reserve Bank board and a new governor. No one and nothing is resting in peace.
It was a good week for Lorde fans as our pop superstar finally brought her Ultrasound tour home to Tāmaki Makaurau to rave reviews. She arrived on stage wearing a Blues T-shirt, so it’s probably the best week Auckland’s Super Rugby franchise has had in a while too.
It was a bad week for director Emerald Fennell, whose adaptation of Wuthering Heights has been met with withering reviews from bookish sticklers and cinephiles alike. The Guardian called it “a hollow, bodice-ripping misfire”, Roger Ebert said it feels like “an artificial music video” and The AV Club called it “overlong and undersexed.” The Spinoff’s Claire Mabey came off the top ropes with this: “all the horse tackle, shiny red floors and that gelatinous fish are pointless distractions from a weak script that sought to reduce a complex, brilliant story down to something you might chuck on on a rainy day after you’ve finished bingeing Bridgerton.”
It was a good week for food preparation professionals in need of industrial quantities of whipped cream, because those 2kg canisters of Miami Magic Infusions will be perfectly suited to their needs, and clearly are not used for anything else.
It was a bad week to be the ex-girlfriend of Olympian Sturla Holm Laegreid. You were cheated on months ago, you’re trying to move on and now here’s your ex telling the whole world about the miserable episode on live TV. Thank you, next.
