More Auckland than Kiwi
Dan Slevin
At the movies with Dan Slevin
THE first Sione’s movie arrived in cinemas in 2006 - before I commenced this weekly catalogue of hits and misses - so I have to plead ignorance about the Duck Rockers and their earlier hijinks. I didn’t even try and download it. How lame! So, Sione’s 2: Unfinished Business has to stand on its own two feet and I’m pleased to report that it does just that.
It’s five years on from Sione’s wedding and the boys have been brought back together for a different kind of family gathering but one of them is missing. The minister (the great Nat Lees) gives them a mission: find Bolo (the great David Fane) and bring him back before he does something he will regret. So commences a mad dash around central Auckland in a commandeered taxi - from my memory of Ponsonby/Grey Lynn most of those journeys would have been faster on foot - trying to locate Bolo before all Hell breaks loose.
Sione’s 2 isn’t so much a Kiwi movie as an Auckland one. I don’t think I’ve ever been more aware of the cultural differences between Auckalofa and the rest of New Zealand and - much like the city itself - the film doesn’t bother to acknowledge that there is a rest of the country to acknowledge. Jokes about Glenfield and Grey Lynn abound - and I can’t imagine anywhere other than Auckland having a Maori gourmet fast food oufit called Chur Burger - so my laughs were often one step removed.
The pace flags a little in the final third, but the climax in yet another Auckland bar is satisfying and ties up the loose ends nicely. Heart always trumps brain for me at the pictures and Sione’s 2 has a decent one.
Tomas Alfredson’s adapatation of John Le Carré’s labyrinthine Cold War thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy requires more brain than anything else I’ve seen recently. Don’t doze off whatever you do or you’ll be lost. Gary Oldman - underplaying for perhaps the first time in his career - is the misunderestimated master spy George Smiley, brought out of retirement to find the mole the Soviets have been running inside British intelligence. There are four suspects - Smiley himself having been earlier counted out for not being interesting enough - and any false move would reveal the investigation and spook the spooks.
Cutting over 300 pages of dense tradecraft down to just over two hours of screen time - it took more than six for the famous 1979 BBC adaptation - means plenty of streamlining and at least one trim makes things harder to understand than the opposite. Alfredson and his design team do a magnificent job of making the 1970s - the decade that taste forgot - watchable and British actors seem to be genetically predisposed to the supressed emotion that this sort of cloak and dagger material demands.
THE first Sione’s movie arrived in cinemas in 2006 - before I commenced this weekly catalogue of hits and misses - so I have to plead ignorance about the Duck Rockers and their earlier hijinks. I didn’t even try and download it. How lame! So, Sione’s 2: Unfinished Business has to stand on its own two feet and I’m pleased to report that it does just that.
It’s five years on from Sione’s wedding and the boys have been brought back together for a different kind of family gathering but one of them is missing. The minister (the great Nat Lees) gives them a mission: find Bolo (the great David Fane) and bring him back before he does something he will regret. So commences a mad dash around central Auckland in a commandeered taxi - from my memory of Ponsonby/Grey Lynn most of those journeys would have been faster on foot - trying to locate Bolo before all Hell breaks loose.
Sione’s 2 isn’t so much a Kiwi movie as an Auckland one. I don’t think I’ve ever been more aware of the cultural differences between Auckalofa and the rest of New Zealand and - much like the city itself - the film doesn’t bother to acknowledge that there is a rest of the country to acknowledge. Jokes about Glenfield and Grey Lynn abound - and I can’t imagine anywhere other than Auckland having a Maori gourmet fast food oufit called Chur Burger - so my laughs were often one step removed.
The pace flags a little in the final third, but the climax in yet another Auckland bar is satisfying and ties up the loose ends nicely. Heart always trumps brain for me at the pictures and Sione’s 2 has a decent one.
Tomas Alfredson’s adapatation of John Le Carré’s labyrinthine Cold War thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy requires more brain than anything else I’ve seen recently. Don’t doze off whatever you do or you’ll be lost. Gary Oldman - underplaying for perhaps the first time in his career - is the misunderestimated master spy George Smiley, brought out of retirement to find the mole the Soviets have been running inside British intelligence. There are four suspects - Smiley himself having been earlier counted out for not being interesting enough - and any false move would reveal the investigation and spook the spooks.
Cutting over 300 pages of dense tradecraft down to just over two hours of screen time - it took more than six for the famous 1979 BBC adaptation - means plenty of streamlining and at least one trim makes things harder to understand than the opposite. Alfredson and his design team do a magnificent job of making the 1970s - the decade that taste forgot - watchable and British actors seem to be genetically predisposed to the supressed emotion that this sort of cloak and dagger material demands.
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