The Mighties' Movie Night is a monthly film night held at Mighty Mighty. (duh!)

But this month The Mighties are having their first annual video competition. The competition is for videos three minutes or less in length. Entries are still being accepted, email The Mighties (themighties@gmail.com) to get your entry form.

So hurry up and get your camcorders (or cellphones out)!

The awards night is on Wednesday 22nd of October (at 6pm) at Mighty Mighty. And if you come along with your cape on and your undies on outside your trousers* you'll get in for free.

*I suppose spandex with long metal claws or a silver surfboard might do the trick too.

Entry details after the jump:

... and if you like movies, then why not come along to Wednesday nights at the Film Archive and check out the season of films that the Wellingtonista fought over democratically chose from the Archive's collection of NZ features - all 6 movies are roughly related to, shot or set in our fair city.

7pm Wednesdays from tonight until the 5th November, tickets are $8 on the door (or $6 concession), and if you're over 18 you get a free glass of wine with your ticket purchase. Because we like wine with our movies. 'Nuff said!
Tonight's movie is I'll Make You Happy... the rest of the season's details are after the jump.

A wee heads-up about a very interesting (and FREE) film screening this Saturday at 7pm at the Film Archive.

Shot in 1954 by a UK team, The Seekers is a very colonial take on first contact between Maori and Pakeha in a bizarre NZ 'Wild West' style feature film.

Both riveting and shocking viewing (there's eroticised dancing and plasticine moko for a start) it's also one of the few films made in NZ the late fifties/early sixties. A combination of the introduction of television and a lack of government support for independent film making at the time means we have only the occasional international project like The Seekers to show for nearly 15 years of New Zealand’s feature film history.

Witness people falling live into boiling mud, geysers exploding around sailors etc etc - all used for maximum impact to represent our great 'Land of Fury.'

And did I mention it's FREE?!

Ever been sitting in a movie and thought: "Man, this should've ended two hours ago"*

Well then, you will definitely enjoy Mighty Mighty's NEW Monthly Movie Mash!

MONTHLY MOVIE MASH
Wednesday, August 27th 6pm at Mighty Mighty
[koha entry]

The Monthly Movie Mash is a collection of short films made by local film folk (usually with nothing better to do) and will be (as the title suggests) a monthly event.

Not only that but there's going to be a short (3-minute) film competition in October.

The line-up for this month is:

• Re:Generation - a film by Darryl Gray, Michael Roseingrave and Jed Soane. Wellington runner-up in the 2008 48hours contest
• Northwestern Institute of Technology Lecture Series #3: Reconciling Rope Theory with the Gordian Knot Dilemma directed by Adam Brookfield. Another 48 hour film.
• Night of the Hell Hamsters directed by Paul Campion. Filmed in London but written by a couple of Wellingtonians (one of them was me, the other was Michael Roseingrave), this film is quickly becoming a cult classic in the field of Hamster-based horror films.
• A Frank Tale directed by Eric Gambini. I know nothing about this film which make it all the more exciting!

For more details about the competition or if you have a short film you'd like to show at an upcoming Mash email: themighties@gmail.com

*I was going to put in a film I thought was too long but I thought you'd all like to bitch about it in the comments instead.

Here's some info about This is Experimental - also kicking off tomorrow eve.....

A festival of experimental film and film makers (talk about niche-y) If you know someone who's into avant-garde film, please do let them know.

Highlights include a screening and workshop by Guy Sherwin, one of the pre-eminent British film artists of the last 40 years; Free Radical: The films of Len Lye, a programme which screened to overwhelmed audiences in the USA last year; and a collection of 1980s Super 8 Movies from Canada, NZ and USA presented by film maker Martin Rumsby.

Image: Len Lye, Stills Collection; New Zealand Film Archive

Plus The Michael Nicholson Studio Visual Music Project Stage 3: Ops 1–4 video installation - see below....

The Film Festival has been a fixture of Wellington's winter calendar for nearly 40 years and for those of us who organise our lives around glowing rectangles of one kind or another there is no better way to spend a cold and wet afternoon than in the comfy leather chairs at the Embassy, engrossed in a work of art.

Programming a Festival like Wellington may seem easy but I can assure you it's getting tougher every year. The sheer volume of independent film is growing beyond all reason (I read that there were around 5,000 films submitted to Sundance last year) and attention must be paid to all four corners of the globe nowadays.

The glossy programme (doing double-duty this year as Festival Guide Book and Souvenir Programme) is 90 pages long and I direct you to it forthwith - my role here is, with the help of some previews from the Festival office, to point your attention towards some of the unheralded titles available amongst the hundreds on offer. This year I only mention films I have seen and readers are asked to add their picks/hopes/reports in the comments.

The first thing to point out is that, unlike the old days, there is nothing to be gained in trying to guess which films will return for a commercial season. With the loss of the three (otherwise unlamented) Rialto screens in June, there is even less chance of a film coming back than before and the general downturn in attendance this year has made distributors wary. At the moment there are no plans to release The Savages (a well-observed, superbly acted drama with plenty of black humour starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney) and even the Jack Black - Michel Gondry comedy Be Kind Rewind is expected to go straight to DVD post-Festival (although strong local sales may provoke a change of mind). Recommendation: if the big screen experience is important to you, don't wait.

[Preview continues after the jump]

The big guns still dominate proceedings at our cinemas (at least until Thursday when the little art-house films all gang up for the Festival). Last week was hardly worth writing a column about as all the big distributors sensibly made way for Will Smith's annual 4th of July blockbuster, Hancock (Readings, Empire, Regent-on-Manners & Embassy).

This week, the ABBA musical (that had a season at the Civic in Auckland a couple of years ago) Mamma Mia! leads the pack. Justifiably described as a phenomenon since the stage show launched in London in 1996, the film features Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgård and Colin Firth singing and dancing their way through the ABBA back catalogue. It's been trailered for months now, so awareness should be pretty high and it's playing everywhere: Readings, Empire, Penthouse, Embassy, Lighthouse Petone, Regent-on-Manners.

[The rest of this week's new releases summarised after the jump]

Congratulations to team Puppy Guts who have only just gone and won the grand final of the 2008 48Hours film competition with their dance short F*DANCE, making them the first Wellington team to do so.

F*DANCE is the tale of a bad-ass finger dancer (you know, when you make dance moves with your fingers) who loses his mojo and must learn the hard way how to finger his way back to the top.

The film impressed the judges enough to make it to the Wellington finals, and was a Peter Jackson wildcard pick (oo-ooh!) for selection in the national finals.

So what impressed the international judges? Was it the humour? The finger dancing? The special effects? Or was it the splendid montage training scene that featured a gruelling finger-run up the Civic Square steps?

Well, whatever it us, team Puppy Guts have done us proud.

Here at Wellingtonista Towers we associate the word "cheap" with "cheerful". So when this email sailed into our mailbox we were very happy:

hey wellingtonista,

what with the price of cheese these days, i though I'd pass on the word on the grapevine that civic video in Miramar has dropped the price of new release rentals to $3.99 for the foreseeable future

that's one quarter the price of a block of cheese

or the way things are going - a litre of petrol

i have not been promised any free movies or cheese in return for sending this email to you

maybe just pop in and see for yourself the awesomeness of the place. you may even get some free movies. or cheese.

regards

richie

And despite Richie's disregard for capital letters (and no free movies for us either) we pass the savings onto you.

And remember if you have any tips like this one send them through: info@wellingtonista.com

Yet another school holiday looms and Dreamworks' attempt to capture the animated audience (or rather 'the audience for animation') before Pixar's WALL·E emerges in September, is Kung Fu Panda starring the voice of Jack Black. Launched on the croisette at the Cannes Film Festival only a few weeks ago, KFP has been acclaimed by critics (88% at RottenTomatoes) and looks like it will be worth checking out this weekend. Readings, Empire, Regent.

The Paramount continues to slip interesting, single-print, releases into the marketplace: this week's entry is a John Boorman (Deliverance, Excalibur) morality tale, The Tiger's Tail, in which a self-made businessman (Brendan Gleason) discovers he has a sinister double who seems to determined to bring him down.

[The rest of this week's new releases after the jump]

Last night a select group of over 500 people at the Paramount were treated to the launch of this year's Wellington Film Festival programme. Following a brief-ish introduction from returning director Bill Gosden, those present were treated to a delightful animated film called Persepolis – an adaptation of Marjane Satrapi's graphic-novel-autobiography which is available in some local stores. Satrapi grew up in pre and post-revolutionary Iran and the film is a vivid and witty portrayal of the way totalitarianism of all extremes can squeeze human beings beyond recognition.

The programme is in a different format this year (A4) which makes it a bit easier on the eye as you scour it for gems. It also has to do double duty this year as the lack of a principal sponsor has meant the elimination of the glossy souvenir guide book.

I woke up this morning to find that last night I had ticked something on every page which is obviously not a sustainable strategy, but I do have until Tuesday (when tickets go on sale via Ticketek outlets) to slim my list down. The programmes are available now at all the Festival venues: Embassy, Paramount, Te Papa, Film Archive and Penthouse and across town over the next few days. The web site seems to be up and down under the load this morning but has a cunning calendar feature to allow you to build a personalised screening schedule over the two and a half weeks between July 18 and Aug 3.

Funerals & Snakes will have a few Festival preview posts over the next few weeks but I also commend you to The Lumière Reader, whose online coverage of the Festival is likely to be unequalled.

When times are quiet in the cinema business (as they have been all year) owners respond by opening more and more films and hoping something will stick. This week sees the Penthouse open yet another contemporary British comedy-drama, funded by the UK Film Council using National Lottery funds (much like Happy-Go-Lucky and Brick Lane which are still screening), Grow Your Own.

Featuring the rapidly-becoming-ubiquitous Eddie Marsan (Vera Drake, Pierrepoint), Grow Your Own is about the inhabitants of a London allotment (where the poor grow their vegetables and/or get away from the Missus) forced to deal with the arrival of a family of refugees. Penthouse and Lighthouse Petone.

[Check out the rest of this week's new releases after the jump]

I ask you now to take a moment to reflect on the loss of that great crime against cinema exhibition, Rialto Wellington, and perhaps raise a glass to celebrate it's final day of screenings. If I can be there to witness it's imminent crumbling beneath a hundred wrecking balls I will (however, I should confess that in need of a few dollars I was the publicist for it's opening back in 1994).

The disastrous architectural and building choices that wrecked many a potentially interesting film should not reflect on many excellent and committed staff who worked there over the years. The Paramount's Kate Larkindale managed the place for a while, as did current San Fran Bathhouse manager Chrisana Love. The first manager was Barbara Sumner, now known as crusading columnist Barbara Sumner Burstyn, who, as legend has it, once faxed a picture of her own naked rear end to a competitor.

[More on Rialto Wellington, after the jump]

A visit to The Children's Bookshop in Kilbirnie with Meg this arvo had me staring at (and snapping on my mobile) a poster advertising Weta Cave's first event - Narnia Day, Sunday 15th June, 1pm-4pm

The details* after the break:

Government house stood quiet and peaceful on a glorious Saturday morning. Golden sunlight lay languidly across the northern lawn as three fine gentlemen of the highest class ran about with high energy clutching glasses of port wine and kicking a ball to each other. Beside the lawn, dappled in light, three stunningly beautiful young women, all in white, sat watching, giggling and discussing the boys as they drank tumblers of whiskey. Or at least they did until the Director yelled cut.

This was the first location of our 48 hour film. We had been very lucky and were able to get Government House (let’s just say we had a man on the inside to help us). The last person allowed to film there was Peter Jackson for The Lovely Bones (and we stole his location, a beautiful little dell).

The grounds, which have been endorsed as a "Garden of National Significance" by the New Zealand Gardens Trust, cover about 12 hectares, some of which is flat lawn or garden, with much of the rest being steep hillside. Exotic species of trees are increasingly being complemented by trees and shrubs native to New Zealand. As well as the Policeman's Lodge at the main gate, other buildings and facilities include a tennis court and pavilion, a small swimming pool, a World War II-era bomb shelter, a squash court, eight cottages and garages.

The “National Significance” did mean some restrictions on us. We couldn’t film the actual building, nor could we film the gates, nor the interiors. Indeed, when C4 came to interview us and film some behind the scenes stuff we had to meet them outside as they weren’t allowed in at all.

Click "Read More" for the rest of our antics: