64 LISTENER AUGUST 10 2019- Somewhere between 1986’s Footrot
Flats: A Dog’s Tale and the end of the 20th
century, comedy had largely gone missing
in action in New Zealand cinema. Peter Jack-
son’s splattery efforts like Bad Taste and Brain
Dead offered gooey nuttiness but gore-free
chuckles were largely hard to come by until
2006’s Sione’s Wedding. Written by James Grif-
fin and Oscar Kightley and starring Kightley
and his comrades from the Naked Samoans
theatre crew – who were behind animated
television series bro’Town – the film proved a
$4 million local box office hit. Other success-
ful big-screen funnies soon followed. Some
like Second Hand Wedding, Housebound,
and last year’s The Breaker Upperers did not
require the involvement of one Taika Waititi
(though he executive-produced that last one) to do well. True, Waititi got off
to a modest and quirky start with debut feature Eagle Vs Shark, but then came
Boy, What We Do in the Shadows (co-directed by Jemaine Clement) and Hunt
for the Wilderpeople. The 2016 Wilderpeople made more than $12 million locally
and almost the same again in Australia, with another $7 million from its UK and
US release. It remains our biggest homegrown movie, with Boy the runner-up.
His comedies have tackled serious stuff – absent fathers in particular – but
Waititi has provided a long-term cure for the Cinema of Unease disease. - When 17-year-old Ella
Yelich-O’Connor appeared
resplendent in red on the
cover of the Listener at Christ-
mas 2013 – which followed
her first-ever print interview,
given to the magazine in
March – she’d had a very big
year. She’d actually had the
biggest year anyone in New
Zealand music had ever had,
care of a song called Royals
and a debut album entitled
Pure Heroine. The rocket she’d
ridden wasn’t out of fuel yet
- a few weeks later, she was
at the Grammys, performing
in her particular style, looking
and sounding like no-one else
on the show.
“Her on-stage body lan-
guage suggests a mystical
seizure: St Teresa in ecstasy,”
wrote Diana Wichtel in that
story about her live pres-
ence. At the Grammys she
came away with an arm-full of
trophies to go with the wheel-
barrow of domestic silverware
earned for that breakthrough
song.
She’d first talked to the
Listener as Royals had begun
its viral attack on the world’s
pop charts. Her Next Big
Thing status was being shored
up with a stack of overseas
contracts to go with the one
she had originally signed as
a 12-year-old with Universal
Music New Zealand four years
earlier. It was her voice that
got her noticed. But it was her
songwriting partnership with
producer Joel Little and her
gifts as a literate lyricist that
took her songs from the mean
streets of Devonport into
pop’s international jetstream.
“Although appearing very
knowing and considered on
songs like Royals, with its list
of rejected designer brands
and celebrity extravagances,she also summons
a sense of vulner-
ability and everyday
mundanity that has
the potential to click
with teens of all
ages,” Jim Pickney
presciently wrote in
that first interview.
The hit Royals
(22 million copies
sold, two Grammys)
and the album (3.4
million sales) also
created a long
shadow for the
rest of her career.
Lorde’s 2017 second, more
ambitious album, Melodrama
— powered by the aerobic
single Green Light — debuted
atop the US charts, was criti-
cally acclaimed and made her
the only female nominee
for Album of the Year at the
2018 Grammy Awards. While
it couldn’t hope to match thenumbers
generated by her 2013 break-
through, it surpassed her
debut creatively. Lorde might
have arrived as a mould-
breaking pop star, but she’s
successfully respositioned
herself as an artist the world
is going to be watching for a
long time yet.The year of our Lorde
Comedy returns to the big screen
2002-2019. In its 17
years, the secondary
schools’ assess-
ment system NCEA
has generated
strong criticism in
the Listener that
it dumbed down
aspects of our
children’s education while needlessly stressing
students and teachers with constant assess-
ments. Both Labour and National governments
were mulishly defensive in the face of evi-
dence that the system was too easily “gamed”,
with the inclusion of credits for such things
as picking up rubbish. The chorus for change
has finally led to announcements of reform
with higher-quality teaching of core skills such
as numeracy and literacy and more robust
assessments. There’s still room to add non-core
subjects and activities tailored to students’
vocational aspirations, but New Zealand is
upgrading the quality of learning with the rec-
ognition that young Kiwis’ life opportunities are
dependent on their abilities in key areas.NCEA
80 YEARS
Taika Waititi