Julia on a film she loves – ‘Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging’

Some great comments on films you love. Here is Julia’s discussion of one of her favourites:

Just like chocolate mud cake, Backstreet Boys’ Greatest Hits and sleeping in ‘til lunchtime on the weekends, “Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging”, the 2008 pashfest from director Gurinder Chadha is unquestionably a guilty pleasure. The movie makes no qualms about this; it does not pretend to be anything of more substance. Truth be told, it is dancing on the grave of any film which would aspire to taken as a serious contribution to the “teen coming-of-age genre”, with it’s knickers on it’s head, screaming small-town colloquialisms.

Which is precisely why I love it.

The cringe-worthy opening depicts Georgia Nicolson, inadvertently shaving off an eyebrow, freeing her cat, Angus, from the fridge, and in frustration declaring “Today is the first day of my life as the NEW Georgia.”

The life of the new Georgia is soon to be complicated however, by the arrival of some “quality lushness” – twin brothers from London. Georgia must entrance her Sex God of choice, Robbie (Aaron Johnson), out of the clutches of the coquettish and overbearing “Slaggy Lindsay”, who wears Bazooma enhancers and a thong, imported from Lindsay’s homeland, Vulgaria.

Said entrancement, of course, is no easy feat for a girl of fourteen, with a nose the size of Jupiter, parents (comedians Alan Davies and Karen Taylor) from “well beyond the valley of the bonkers”, whose marriage is in danger after her father is transferred to New Zealand, and a little sister who thinks she is part cat. Of course with some scheming help from her Ace Gang (Eleanor Tomlinson, Georgia Henshaw and Manjeeven Grewal), some snogging lessons, and of course the Angus Advantage, Georgia manages to charm the socks off of her Sex God, and pull off a legendary fifteenth birthday party, simultaneously managing to convince her father’s company to transfer him back home.

Slathered in cheesey predictability this film may be, but this in no way diminishes my enjoyment of it, even through to the ninth and tenth viewings. This film puts on no airs; and delights in it’s own sense of naïveté, which, taken at face value certainly provides plenty of laughs; with the multitude of creative one-liners sprung from the linguistic deviations of Georgia and her friends. Equally satisfying is the generous helping of moments which make you wince and squirm, and outstanding example of which being the 9 inch long string of saliva swinging between the mouths of Georgia and Peter Dyer (Liam Hess) at the end of their snogging lesson.

This young cast delivers a plethora of entertaining moments which Chadha enhances with vibrant cinematography, her stellar assortment of British acts in the soundtrack, and a plot with aspects relatable to both people young and once were young. For me, this eccentric little film will always be “double cool with knobs on.”

Read some more great student writing on english@kkc reading challenges.

The Rights of the Reader

Love this!

NZ Book Month at KKC

March is NZ Book Month and here at Katikati College we will have an extra focus on reading for its duration. New Zealand Book Month is an annual campaign to encourage us all to celebrate books and reading. New Zealand Book Month is the perfect time to discover your next life-changing book, pick up a recommended read, share a favourite book with your friends and family, to start a book club …

You can see what is happening on this blog and here.

Organising the bookshelves

A great book based stop-motion animation.

What’s a film you love?

Often in class we talk about films that we have enjoyed but what is a film that you have truly loved? One film that I would put in this category would be Truly, Madly, Deeply directed by Anthony Minghella. The story focuses on Nina (Juliet Stevenson – a fantastic performance) who can’t break free from her grief over the death of her partner, Jamie (Alan Rickman, pre-Snape), a cellist whom she ‘truly, madly, deeply’ loved.  I don’t know why I loved this film so much as on the surface it is just a romantic comedy but the performances are simply so good that it hooks you in like few movies of this genre do. I do remember that the part of Nina was written for Stephenson and that she is unbelievably good, appearing to be totally grief stricken and that she does not hold back as she sobs and weeps and wails for Jamie. Alan Rickman is predictably terrific and funny, particularly in the scenes with his ghost friends. I haven’t seen this film for many years and I wonder if I would still like it as much but I hope I would. Here’s a scene:

Auschwitz Shifts From Memorializing to Teaching

For nearly 60 years, Auschwitz has told its own story, shaped in the recent aftermath of the Second World War. It now unfolds, unadorned and mostly unexplained, in displays of hair, shoes and other remains of the dead. Past the notorious, mocking gateway, into the brick ranks of the former barracks of the Polish army camp that the Nazis seized and converted into prisons and death chambers, visitors bear witness via this exhibition.

Now those in charge of passing along the legacy of this camp insist that Auschwitz needs an update. Its story needs to be retold, in a different way for a different age.

Partly the change has to do with the simple passage of time, refurbishing an aging display. Partly it’s about the pressures of tourism, and partly about the changing of generations. What is the most visited site and the biggest cemetery in Poland for Jews and non-Jews alike, needs to explain itself better, officials here contend.

A proposed new exhibition at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum here, occupying some of the same barracks or blocks, will retain the piled hair and other remains, which by now have become icons, as inextricable from Auschwitz as the crematoria and railway tracks. But the display will start with an explanatory section on how the camp worked, as a German Nazi bureaucratic institution, a topic now largely absent from the present exhibition, which was devised by survivors during the 1950s.

Back then they wished to erase the memory of their tormenters, as the Nazis had tried to erase them, so they said as little as possible in their exhibition about the Germans who had conceived and run the camp. They focused on mass victimhood but didn’t highlight individual stories or testimonials of the sort that have become commonplace at memorial museums as devices to translate incomprehensible numbers of dead into real people, giving visitors personal stories and characters they can relate to. Those piles, including prostheses, suitcases and so on, also stressed the sheer scale of killing at a time when the world still didn’t comprehend, and much of it refused to admit to, what really happened here.

Read the rest here on the New York Times website.

Apostrophe Man

Michael Morpurgo’s rules for writers

The Guardian asked some of the most esteemed contemporary authors for any golden rules they bring to their writing practice. Here are Michael Morpurgo’s:

1. The prerequisite for me is to keep my well of ideas full. This means living as full and varied a life as possible, to have my antennae out all the time.

 

2. Ted Hughes gave me this advice and it works wonders: record moments, fleeting impressions, overheard dialogue, your own sadnesses and bewilderments and joys.

 

3. A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.

 

4. It is the gestation time which counts.

Read the rest here.

 

D9 – Telegraph Review

More background reading.

District 9 is that modern rarity: an adventure thriller that’s even better than its advertising campaign. For years now, ever since the Alive in Joburg short on which it’s based was released, there has been lots of industry chatter about director Neill Blomkamp’s fantastic premise for an ultra-modern science fiction film; so much so that Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame signed on to produce it in lieu of his adaptation of the Halo videogame.

For months now, its cinema trailer – featuring a huge space ship hovering mysteriously over the South African mega-city while a torrent of anxious newscasters and reporters speculate about its genesis — had had hardened filmgoers, many of them used to mediocre upcoming releases being trumpeted as the holy grail, wowing in unison. For weeks now, its viral marketers, who have festooned bus benches around the country with ‘for humans only’ signs, have whetted appetites.

How they’ve been sated! District 9 is the most imaginative, resonant and dramatically turbo-charged work of science fiction for many a moon. A hybrid of political allegory and B-movie kicks, it reboots motifs from classic extra-terrestrial and urban catastrophe movies such as Silent Running and Planet of the Apes, and transposes them to the contemporary ghetto context that in recent years has given urgency and kinetic charge to the likes of Slumdog Millionaire and City of God. Its tacit message to JJ Abrams, director of Cloverfeld and Star Trek, is simple: game on.

Read the rest here.

‘District 9’ Review: A Great Film On All Levels

It’s a new year and you are all a little bit older and for some of you that means … District Nine!

Have a look at this review from Starpulse:

Well, that wasn’t supposed to happen. “District 9” was supposed to be another tired Man Versus Scary Alien late summer crapfest. Actually, when you think about the plot, it really should be a crapfest. “District 9” has absolutely no business being A Good Film. But, yet, here it is and here we are. We: the late summer movie going audience desperately seeking out… something… anything; one last eensy weensy morsel of precious, precious entertainment to use as an excuse to get out of the wretched heat of a mid-August sun . It: not content to be just A Good Film — but, rather, A Great Film. And, on certain levels, maybe even An Important Film.

Read the rest here.