And lost it was. And Then It Moved was this year’s chance for the New Zealand School of Dance to flaunt its mastery of contemporary dance for its 2013 choreographic season. But some of its ten short pieces dove too deep into a melting pot of different art forms while others teetered on the pot’s edge, neither sure what exactly they were—genuine dance or some avant-garde tanztheater (cue: Michael Gudgeon’s Reality Check). And within this pervasive doubt lay the problem in And Then It Moved.

“Contemporary dance is the exploration of the total movement of the body” (chur Wiki), which should open up a wider range of choreographic possibilities, since it doesn’t adhere to the strict rules of classical ballet say. But the pieces of And Then It Moved which faltered rewrote the genre of contemporary dance to choreograph something less than. When an artwork’s (plastic or otherwise) interpretation is greater than its form there is something amiss—by being too minimalist the mentioned works became a desert, barren of movement and thus dry and lifeless as far as dance works go.

Having sounded like a real dick thus far, other pieces did blossom where those mentioned were nipped at their creative bud. They used a wider range of movement to wondrous applause. The NZSD dancers—who did dance—did so competently and with fierce conviction, their choreographers using all manner of movements with a greater trend toward ground work this year. If dance were a religion it would be blasphemous not to utter some mention of the use of props in And Then It Moved. From the buckets in Mark to the ‘snow’ in Teeter, and a large box hidden in the stage’s corner, the props performed fluid segues from one piece to another and even shepherded our interpretations of pieces themselves. A personal favourite were the old tomes in Luigi Vescio’s One of Them used as symbols of oppression to denounce one dancer’s bid for self-expression. But performances couldn’t lean solely on avant-garde theatricality to keep And Then It Moved upright—as one work tried to do with the disturbing painting of one of its dancers by his peers.

And Then It Moved was powerful stuff, but also haughty in its interpretation of contemporary dance. When I pay $17 for a ticket to a choreographic season I want to see movement, goddammit! If choreographers are to marry dance with such flamboyant theatricality, dance can’t be forced to consent by the latter for the sake of entertainment.

Cue Random Access Memories. The album was recorded using session musicians, and live drums. The guitars you hear are actual guitars, the basslines actual bass guitars, et cetera. Everything feels real enough to touch; there’s a lush depth to each track, and funk in outrageously potent doses. The album’s opening track makes no secret of the impending sea-change: it’s called ‘Give Life Back to Music’, an unashamed dig at the status quo.

Track three, ‘Giorgio by Moroder’, features the voice of Giorgio Moroder, a disco legend famous both for creating an album entirely with synthesisers, and for using unusual recording processes to create sounds in new ways. Giorgio goes on to state, “once you free your mind about a concept of harmony and of music being correct, you can do whatever you want”. The beat hangs, as we ride an orchestral interlude—real violins, of course—before the beat drops again, and we realise: Daft Punk can do whatever they want.

The symbolism here is manifest, and the boundaries are crossed both at the end of ‘Giorgio by Moroder’ by way of a prog-rock climax, and through the rest of the album. Next up comes the introspective piano-based ballad ‘Within’, The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas featuring on a reasonably Strokes-esque number called ‘Instant Crush’, and then two tracks with Pharrell (‘Lose Yourself To Dance’ and the ubiquitous ‘Get Lucky’) which sandwich ‘60s-diner-style ‘Touch’. It sounds absurd, and it is. But, it works.

Before six-minute epic ‘Contact’, which closes the album in a headrush of excitement and energy, comes the album’s high-point ‘Doin’ It Right’. The song features Animal Collective’s Panda Bear, and is four beautiful, beautiful minutes of ecstasy. It’s no accident that the human (non-vocodered) voices on the album are those which exemplify the happiness of the human condition; the real emphasised over the artificial. In other words: giving life back to music.

Daft Punk have reached the point where they can subvert genre norms, and they’ve executed it perfectly. It’s not a hard case to make for Daft Punk to be considered the planet’s pre-eminent dance musicians. The most telling line of the album is the line you’re likely to have heard the most, and provides a fitting summary of Random Access Memories vis-à-vis Daft Punk:

“We’ve come too far to give up who we are, so let’s raise the bar and our cups to the stars”.

5/5

Porn hasn’t typically been a very accurate barometer of social progress or changing sexual norms. Sure, its mere existence might represent a more liberal attitude to sex, but it remains predicated on bizarrely impersonal notions of human sexuality. Steven Scarborough’s Major Asshole is a sad continuation of this trend. While a functional display of male sexuality, it fails to build any sort of erotic atmosphere, instead relying on trite stereotypes to stimulate its audience.

The story is, unsurprisingly, shallow, acting as a pretext to 20 minutes of fantastical penetration. A private (Jackson Wild) is called in for a verbal scolding by Major Asshole (Brandon Bangs). What starts off a simple conversation soon transforms into some elaborate sexual penance, with gobbies, rim jobs, and good old anal fucking! Unfortunately, the overt message underlying the plot is troubling, and relies on a remarkably heteronormative view of what gay sex involves. Throughout the proceedings, the feminine private is the willing plaything of the major, seemingly glad to pleasure his heterosexual superior. I don’t know about you, but I certainly do not have fantasies of being a ‘straight’ guy’s sex toy. After years of marginalisation and discrimination, gay-porn audiences deserve a more realistic portrayal of their sexuality than what Scarborough offers up.

In a more positive (and shallow) sense, both the men involved are relatively attractive, and don’t lack for impressive endowments. I cannot deny that the sight of Bangs’s gleaming (if pasty) chest and large cock did cause my heart to race. Wild isn’t quite as muscular, but does manage to remain hard throughout the film (uncommon among bottoms). They aren’t supermodels, but as far as porn actors go, you could do a lot worse.

However, Bangs’s obvious heterosexuality serves as a massive turn-off, simply because it’s clear that his pleasure is limited to the paycheck waiting offscreen. He’s more interested in ‘plugging the hole’ as opposed to satisfying the man attached to it. Moreover, both Bangs and Wild are appalling actors. Unconvincing bleats of “Yes, sir” and “Give it to me!” are repeated ad nauseum, just so you know that they are both in sexual heaven. It is forced and it shows.

Moreover, the action is also patently unrealistic. Bangs throws the private onto his desk and proceeds to ‘pleasure’ him with sheer brute force. My question is, who on earth would want to be drilled like a jackhammer? Additionally, some of the positions on display are more uncomfortable than alluring. Sex on a desk seems like a bizarre fantasy; my back is already crook and I’m not aggravating it just for a few minutes of physical jubilation. It comes off as a lot of contrived fucking, which isn’t especially erotic.

To top it all off, the poor production values make it extremely difficult to even focus on the aforementioned action. The framing of shots is relatively poor, making the act feel like a mechanical exercise in shoving fleshy bits into orifices rather than an expression of intimacy.

Extreme close-ups of penetration certainly convey the physical force of intercourse but little else. Pounding on flesh-coloured sacks of jelly would produce roughly the same effect. There’s no warmth or soul to the proceedings, and you never get a sense that actual human beings are involved in (or enjoying) this act.

In the end, Major Asshole comes off as an overly mechanical and narrow-minded rendition of gay porn. Sure, the actors possess large members and they certainly fuck with vigour, but this doesn’t equate to good porn. Scarborough has stripped an innately intimate act of all its emotional heft. View only if you have a desperate need to relieve sexual frustration.

2/5

I struggled to dredge up sympathy for the creators of this game, and thought they probably wouldn’t hear my angry tirade while submerged in their swimming pools of money. That was until I read that Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision, had treated himself to an 800-per-cent pay rise and bumped his salary up to $65 million. Maybe that one guy who coded the floor tiles isn’t buying his third Lamborghini after all. This got me thinking – maybe the indie market is where developers themselves, rather than the suits who boss them around, can rule as economic giants.

After an evening of browsing the internet, the results were inconclusive. The cost of a ‘cheap-to-develop’ indie game can fall in the ballpark of anywhere from a couple of thousand dollars to a couple of hundred thousand. Take for example David Galindo’s Cook, Serve, Delicious!, a game for multiple platforms developed for around $8000 (one-sixth of my current Student Loan—oh the better life choices I could have made). To date, this has made slightly over $28,000, not bad for a one-man development team. While not a sum which guarantees an early retirement, it is one of many stories of adequate success. Your game costs less than a used Ford Fiesta to make, you sell a few thousand copies and you get about a new Ford Fiesta’s worth of money at the end.

However, maybe you’re lucky. Just maybe you sell a few more than 5000 copies of your game. Maybe your game is Angry Birds or Minecraft. Angry Birds has hit a rare winning combination of success, as much as it pains me to say, by blending a simple physics-based catapult simulator with cute, lovable mascots that appeal to all ages. Reported to have a development and running cost of €140,000, the game, in all its various incarnations, has made over €50 million and is played for an equivalent of 200 million hours a day. I know Angry Birds probably falls in a category closer to triple-A rather than indie titles now, but the same basic idea is still there, and that’s what matters.

So gather up your remaining course-related costs and get cracking! Better still, get a Kickstarter up and running—the current indie game scene is brimming like a ball pit with Kickstartered projects. All you need is a wicked title and some sweet screenshots or concept art. Also, already being a known developer apparently doesn’t hurt. Tim Schafer of Double Fine recently surpassed his Kickstarter goal on the first day—in eight hours, the $400,000 threshold had been obliterated by a total that stood at over $1 million. Not bad for a man who just wants to make point-and-click adventures.

At the end of the day, being an indie games developer, or a triple-A developer for that matter, is all about having a passion for games. I’m sure many will tell you stories that don’t quite meet the rock-and-roll lifestyle you expected or hoped. You will probably hear stories of those who lead a comfortable life, happy if only because they live frugally. You will probably hear even more of those barely making a living, holding on by the skin of their teeth. However, the passion shines through, and the most common story you will hear is how regardless of how hard a developer’s life is, it is still a life they enjoy pursuing.

Set in 2002, the year of the incident, and using only words taken from interviews, we see a very different Germany to the powerful, economically successful country we know from the media. Potzlow is a town that has suffered from the reunification, where ex-GDR citizens are unemployed and their children are troublemakers; the West has not been gentle with them. This theme of the negative impact of reunification is one of the most interesting presented in the play, and it is a shame that is not explored further. What the play revolves around is what is too common here: kids drinking, doing drugs, dropping out of school, being cruel. In that sense, it is something that we have all seen too much of and there was not a fresh perspective provided, other than the sad reality that these social ills are not going away.

The tension between parents and their failings unites some characters, but also creates a tiresome blame game as distraught guardians defend themselves against their children’s actions.

The plot has little content, with the incident being recounted repeatedly, and the issues and sorrows of many of the characters being the same. The pace was too slow for such a long, static story, and the empathy created for the first few monologues dies out quickly.

Having a play where all the characters are constantly in a state of despair and talk of little else was not helped by the space at Studio 77 being too large for the intimacy required. The cast’s voices did not travel well and their anger and frustration got lost in the space, not giving it the force the actors were obviously trying to portray. There was honest sincerity from Hannah Kelly, playing Marinus’s mother, and Trae Te Wiki-Wall, playing his friend. Keith Labad makes a delightful turn as the Mayor of Potzlow and provides some much-needed light relief.

Tweddle’s decisions as to movement and use of space were effective, if at times, overly ‘experimental’. The gender- and ethnicity-blind casting was a good choice to challenge perceptions of gender roles. The cast had a great sense of unity about them, and worked well to support each other.

THEA308, The Scenographic Imagination, under the tutelage of Jim Davenport, designed the set, sound and lighting, which all displayed Davenport’s usual professionalism. While the lighting could have been stronger on some parts of the stage, the sound was an effective addition to the landscape. The set of metal frames created a fluid jail-block area and the plastic sheets had huge dramatic potential to further develop the uncommunicative nature of the village. The way this was used at the opening of the play was intriguing, then disappointingly redundant. Some of the other elements, like the sand and rubble, lacked the stylistic unity that pervaded the rest of the set.

It is an adventurous concept, to translate a documentary play and perform it using university students. The hard work of the cast and crew are evident, but the slow plot and pace of presentation are hard to move past.

1. Don’t try to understand it.

This is probably the most common mistake one makes in a gallery. Modern art especially is full of queer, strange things, and it’s easy to scoff at the pointlessness of it all. As Keith Haring puts it:

“The viewer should be able to look at art and respond to it without wondering if he “understands” it.

It does not aim to be understood! Who “understands” any art?

If art is that easily labelled, then it is only existing for those who “understand” it and all the others are ignorant of it.

To define any art is to destroy the purpose of it.”

So the purpose of art is that there isn’t much of one. Clear-cut meanings and intricate backstories are completely irrelevant here. Art should be thought of as something that serves no other purpose but to entice a feeling from the viewer—any feeling at all.

2. Art is your friend.

In ‘California Dreamin’, the Mamas and the Papas sing about stepping into a church and pretending to pray to get out of the cold weather. Instead of a church, why not step into an art gallery the next time it’s raining? Art galleries are able to provide viewers with an environment as conducive to self-reflection as that of a church, Buddhist monastery, or mountain top. In the hushed rooms of a gallery, paintings and sculptures are waiting for you to find solace in them. As the mind wanders freely over brushstrokes and as it tries to find recognition among some ambiguously shaped piece of clay, the entire process is strangely soothing. Whether it be a certain expression held by some painted figure, or the resemblance a shade of canvas might have to an ex-lover’s shirt, it is surprising how personal art can coincidentally be.

3. Don’t take any of it seriously!

There are two misconceptions to art that make it less accessible to people—one, that to enjoy ‘finer’ art we need to know about a stuffy and long art history, and two, that the new stuff that artists are churning out is incomprehensibly abstract to the degree of pointlessness. These things are all completely irrelevant; names, dates and painting techniques are not prerequisites, nor is the ‘insight’ to be able to find depth in a minimalist piece.

Instead, one should look at art without wondering about any of this at all, not what it means, who did it, or where it’s from, but instead let us feel—why and how is an inanimate object of decoration able to make one feel anything at all? And to think—there are beautiful buildings in every city of the world devoted to the display and preservation of these pieces that do nothing more than to let us feel!

So go look at some art, visit a gallery, google ‘art’ and print out the favourite thing you find. Art has been here for us since the first cave painting, and continues as a rare quaintness among the human race, deserving of our appreciation.

Film adaptations of books. I don’t even know. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re bad: it depends so much on the book and the director. I don’t want to be a pretentious English major (box: checked) who dismisses adaptations out of hand, but I’m often really worried about films ruining the sanctity of the book, ruining favourite characters, or missing the point altogether, forever tarnishing my impression of a great work of art.

I’m scared this will be the case with Gatsby. Reviews so far have been mixed: while praising the cinematography and acting, they also emphasise Luhrmann’s characteristic extravagance, “a cinematic buffet of such sense-addling, smack-you-in-the-face-with-a-halibut brazenness,” wrote Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph—“the Gatsby that Gatsby himself would have made.” This seems to be a pretty good representation of what Fitzgerald meant when he talked of the Jazz Age as “the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand dukes and the casualness of chorus girls.”

But the point of Gatsby isn’t the ostentatiousness: it’s that all the ostentatiousness is for nothing. It’s a novel in decline, and it has been in decline from the beginning. I’ve always read the pivotal moment of the book as being told in flashback, when Gatsby first kisses Daisy. If you’re just describing the action it’s a pretty inconsequential scene: they kiss, and that’s it. No dialogue, nothing except the kiss to make it remarkable in a film. But Fitzgerald was the master of lines, and there’s this bit when he says, of Gatsby, that “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.” And that’s the whole novel. With Gatsby’s choice he doomed himself. The novel’s beauty lies in this. He had one moment—this moment—when he both had and lost everything. The Gatsby who Nick et al meet is a hollow king: all his opulence is compensating for an irreparable loss. And yeah, your English teacher was right: this is all an analogy for the American Dream.

My favourite film adaptations aren’t always wholly faithful to their source material: the onus on adaptations is to translate the spirit of the text into another form. Tom Ford’s film of A Single Man superimposes the attempted suicide scene from Isherwood’s earlier The Memorial onto the events in the novel, and this really works: it’s a way of addressing subtle thematic considerations in a way that feels true to the novel, even while it isn’t. But with Gatsby, the meaning of the text is so intrinsically bound up in its form. The impression this novel leaves is far more about how it feels to read it than what happens. With novels like this, I don’t think there’s any way to express all the subtleties of the text without it being gaudy and tasteless, or, worse, a boring two hours of Gatsby and Daisy exchanging desperate looks. It would be like trying to film To the Lighthouse.

Luhrmann’s got it right with the opulence. Yes, the dukes were insouciant, yes, the chorus girls were casual. But Gatsby no longer romps with the mind of God, Nick is simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life, and we are being borne back ceaselessly into the past. This is probably the one situation where a Jay-Z song just won’t cut it.

As a result, I am unable to offer any insight into whether it ‘stays true to the original’. But this isn’t really necessary, anyway. Star Trek Into Darkness is a very good film in its own right. Helmed by the seemingly evergreen J. J. Abrams, Into Darkness epitomises everything great about the Hollywood blockbuster—it’s big, flashy, compelling, and a little bit corny.

The relationship between Captain Kirk (Pine) and his co-pilot Spock (Zachary Quinto) is really the heart of the film. Kirk is impulsive and macho, while Spock favours brains over brawn. If nothing else, the film can be seen as a meditation on the merits of their two very different leadership styles. How should one behave in a time of crisis? Is it morally acceptable to make decisions purely for the greater good?

However, I don’t wish to give the impression that Into Darkness is an intellectual film, because it isn’t. It is a big, silly blockbuster. Still, it is very much worth seeing, not least due to the fine performances of Pine, Quinto, Cumberbatch and Simon Pegg (as Scotty of “Beam me up, Scotty!” fame). The script is tight and the camaraderie enjoyable.

On the other hand, the film lacks originality. Captain Kirk seems little more than a genre archetype—the overconfident but talented young cadet who flouts the rules and puts his whole crew in danger, getting “suspended from duty” as a result. How many police procedurals have you seen that in before?

Nevertheless, it seems a little unfair to criticise a film spawned from a 1960s TV show—with 11 previous films based on the same show—for lacking originality. Originality is not the point. Enjoyment is the point, and Into Darkness offers it in spades.

3/5

The film guides the viewer through both the behind-the-scenes of the exhibition itself as well as the paintings and painter. Some of the film’s focus on the exhibition’s location and setup at London’s Royal Academy is a bit dry. While the behind-the-scenes access to preparing the paintings attempts to transport the viewer right inside the gallery, it comes across more ‘class trip’ than genuine.

On the whole however, the rest of the film succeeds in holding the viewer’s attention. I went into the cinema unsure of how the works would be shown—an hour of close-up pans of the paintings? Even the most ardent devotee of Manet’s would be bored. Instead, I was pleasantly introduced to Manet himself, with some excellent on-location filming in the Parisian apartment where he was born. The paintings are given backstories, and aspects are interestingly highlighted to the viewer. While not a full hour, the camera does allow for generous screen time of the paintings themselves, and to see them in glorious HD on a cinema screen is perhaps the biggest advantage of an exhibition film over the real thing.

The selection of Manet’s paintings themselves is quite noteworthy. While some of his best-known paintings such as Olympia were missing from the real exhibition at the Royal Academy, they were still discussed in the film, which created a bit of inconsistency—if you were at the real exhibition, Olympia would not have just materialised in the room. However, a pleasant surprise in the painting collection was the unexpected number of portraits. While Manet is best known for his paintings of candid scenes of human life, the film explains his lesser-known beginnings as a portraitist and his continuation of painting portraits until the very end of his career. The link between these lesser- and better-known paintings is also explained—Manet would use the real people he painted in his portraits later as actors and actresses in his imagined scenes, creating hybrid paintings of a real yet unreal tone.

Perhaps the biggest gripe I have with the film is not the film itself, but the concept of film-exhibition overall. Even though it was great to be able to view artwork on the scale of a movie screen in the comfort of a cinema sofa, I was told by a narrator beforehand what to focus on, whether that be a figure’s hat or a certain shade of blue. While true that some of these snippets of art trivia are interesting, it does removes the joy of looking at a painting purely with your mind and letting it wander over to your own points of interest. Also, although being seated while viewing the paintings was at first immersive, it soon began to feel a bit boring with the lack of walking around that real galleries offer and the tangible break between paintings it provides.

Manet: Portraying Life is an excellent film for anyone even slightly interested in Manet’s work—a comprehensive biography of himself is vibrantly told, and a good selection of his paintings are shown. However, do not expect to leave the cinema with the same sense of renewal that you may feel when leaving a gallery. Exhibitions through films can be informative, but hardly contemplative.

Manet: Portraying Life can still be caught for a few more weeks throughout Lighthouse and Penthouse cinemas in Wellington.

Burrito Bison Revenge (Juicy Beast, 2012)

This incredibly addictive Flash game will definitely eat up your Sunday afternoon, or at least your two-hour-long lecture. Think an ‘endless runner’-type game, except you’re a luchador bison destroying gummy bears in a candy world. Perfect for when you need a quick distraction.

Desktop Dungeons (QCF Design, 2011)

Both endless (it’s all randomly generated) and challenging, this game lets you lead your small, hand-picked group of adventurers to the centre of a monster-filled maze. Requiring both tactics and planning, Desktop Dungeons is an excellent puzzle experience.

Lord of the Rings Online (Turbine, 2007)

As free massively multiplayer online games go, this is absolutely the best. You’ll get a full MMO experience—adventuring with friends, collecting loot, chatting, and probably insomnia—without having to spend a single cent. You’ll only need to download a large-ish client file to play—remember that unsecured Wi-Fi network you walked past last week?

Kingdom Rush (Ironhide Games, 2011); Cursed Treasure 2 (IriySoft, 2011)

These two tower-defence games are as mesmerising as they are strategic. If you’re in need of something to challenge you while not taking up your entire screen and mind, either of these are ideal. The former is colourful and cheery, while the latter is darker and a little more intense. There are countless tower-defence games out there, but these are certainly among the best.

League of Legends (Riot Games, 2009)

If you’re feeling competitive and also don’t mind a steep-ish learning curve while you get to know the ropes, this is the place to be. LoL is an adversarial multiplayer game that requires quick thinking and cooperation within teams. Popular enough to be played professionally while being accessible enough to have around 12 million players daily, if you like multiplayer you’ll love this.