Edge Stories in Ireland
Rangimoana Taylor and a Ngati Ranana group are among the storytellers to be powhiried onto a marae recreated by Dublin school pupils for the ninth (festival of story-tellers), highlighting New Zealand and immigration.
News of New Zealanders via Global Media
Vertical limit
The stunning slopes of Aoraki (Mt Cook) backdrop Kiwi Martin Campbell’s ice action thriller, Vertical Limit. Starring Chris O’Donnel and Nicholas Lea, Vertical Limit is scheduled for 15 December release.
Shorts and sweet
Four NZ films feature in NY’s Shorts International Film Festival, including Felicity Morgan-Rhind’s Donuts for Breakfast. Top shorts will be considered for Oscar noms.
Godless Digest
“The Digest, however, has been less than honest. In a December 1999 story by Raffaele about the Chatham Islands in New Zealand, a fisherman picked up a lobster trap and exclaimed, “Gifts from Maru…
Sam Neill is in LA filming Jurassic 3
The grounds of his temporary residence are described as “park-like”…
Three Foot Six and still growing
Vanity Fair estimates the cost of Lord of the Rings at NZ$623 million. If correct, Wellington company Three Foot Six is producing the second-most expensive movie ever.
Join the army and let the world see you!
New Zealand defence personnel will feature on big screens around the globe – as extras in Lord of the Rings. The soldiers were perfect when the filmmakers needed “big numbers of people who were…
Naked Success
Toa Fraser’s first play, Bare, hits Sydney with “a saltiness that is unmistakably NZ”. Fraser is compared to Raymond Carver and Tom Wolfe, masters of edge and bite.
Top Class
Chopper, New Zealand-born director Andrew Dominik’s acclaimed bio-pic of the maniacal murderer, has received Australian Film Institute noms for Best Film and Best Direction, plus eight other nominations including Best Screenplay (penned by Dominik).
Devils’ Playground
“If they were human they would be regarded as severely dysfunctional.” New Zealander Rod Morris on Tasmanian Devils, the stars of The Devil’s Playground, which has won him a Wildscreen Panda – wildlife film’s…
Direct Success
Saatchi & Saatchi’s Access 50/50 campaign for Telecom scooped a Gold International Echo award from the Direct Marketing Association. Auckland’s Aim Direct also won gold, making a tally of two New Zealand firms among…
Motor Masala hot fave
Peter Riordan is in contention for the Asia-Pacific Travel writers’ prize. His book, Motorcycle Masala is the story of a journey around India on-you guessed it-a motorcycle. The award will be announced at the…
Multiple murders
Anne Perry, formerly Juliet Hulme of the Parker/Hulme case, tours her latest novel Slaves of Obsession in the States. Perry has authored over thirty best-selling murder mysteries.
Guy Pearce’s Kiwi Dad
Yes, Guy is an Australian (he spent fours years on Neighbours to prove it), but his father was a New Zealander who tested planes for the Royal Air Force. Pearce, also Russell Crowe’s side-kick…
Sia in America
Samoan New Zealander Sia Figiel reads from her second book, They Who Do Not Grieve (US edition forthcoming). Figiel won the Commonwealth Writers’ Best First Book Prize for Where We Once Belonged.
Golden Deeds
Catherine Chidgey, novelist and editor, won the Pacific Commonwealth Best First Book award for In a Fishbone Church. Golden Deeds, her second novel has been published by Picador, leading publishers of contemporary fiction world-wide.
Dogs of Auckland
Robert Creeley’s Dogs of Auckland sequence grew from the poet’s extended stay in his wife’s native New Zealand: “Isolation seduces and terrorizes” him. But at times, as toward the end of Edges, Creeley rediscovers…
Truman to Simone
Oscar-nominated Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, The Truman Show) has scripted and will helm Simone. Al Pacino stars alongside a mysterious actress who may or may not be real.
Aria noms for Shihad
Shihad, hard edge rockers of Wellington, now Melbourne, have three nominations for the Australian Recording Industry Awards, the Arias: best group, best album and best rock album.
Purapurawhetu: Shining Stars
Purapurawhetu, Briar Grace-Smith’s 1997 award-winning play, has completed a successful tour of Canada and is now on its way to Delphi in Greece. This has been a mega year for Grace-Smith, who received an…
Menace Knox in Chicago
Truly edgey Chris Knox described as “an acerbic, forceful wit, accomplished tunesmith and almost menacingly extroverted showman.”
Framing the truth
Wrestling with the Angel, Michael King’s bio of Janet Frame, has generated acclaim, column inches and voluminous sales in New Zealand and overseas. Stephanie Dowrick describes Frame as “(one of) the two great 20th-century…
Dame Kiri Star Attraction at Arts Fundraiser
Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and her “velvet voice” joined Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, raising $200,000 for the NAC. The Ottawa Citizen describes her as “one of the world’s great opera stars”.
Mr Parsons’ mystery
New Zealand-born thriller writer Julie Parsons featured in a British TV series, True Lives. She was filmed returning to New Zealand, the scene of her father’s mysterious disappearance all those years before…
Tamahori: Edge iconoclast
The Boston Globe profiles the Boston Film/Video Foundation, mentioning Kiwi Lee Tamahori, along with Rose Troche (Go Fish) and Whit Stillman (Barcelona) as an “international iconoclast” from their “Meet the Director” series.
Well done
NZ-bred Fay Weldon needn’t have the Rhode Island Blues over reviews for her latest book: “she writes thoroughly modern fables that throw light and cast doubt on the meaning and wisdom of contemporary pieties.”
Virtual Hobbits
“In a nondescript suburb of New Zealand’s capital, the team at Weta Digital, an offshoot of Peter Jackson’s Wingnut Films, is producing more than 1,200 visual effect shots for the three Lord of…
Post-punk Beat
“New Zealand post-punker Chris Knox and Austin, Texas-based cult figure Daniel Johnston are as indie as indie gets. Both write unflinching lyrics about love, life and madness. Both record their ditties on low-fidelity four-track…
High Dependency Unit and Loraxx play Chicago
The Chicago Independent Arts Festival begins in early October. New Zealand bands High Dependency Unit and Loraxx are going to be there, giving Chicagoites a taste of the Edge.
Dame Kiri at the Meyerson Symphony Centre
Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, star soprano, is appearing in a recital in Dallas. “In recitals it’s a partnership—you and your pianist partner performing for each other. I love that give-and-take, that wonderful feeling of…
Rena Owen on jury at Montreal Film Festival
Feisty Kiwi actress Rena Owen (Once Were Warriors, What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted), sat on the jury of the of the Montreal Film Festival. The jury awarded the festival’s major award, the…
Who is that famous writer living next door?
Michael King spoke about his authorised and hugely successful biography of Janet Frame at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival. Frame a recluse: she writes under her own name, but lives under a pseudonym. Other Kiwi…
A man of many amenities
Hundertwasser, the Austrian architect who lived out his last years in New Zealand and designed the famous toilets in Kawakawa, also left his mark in the curving lines of Bad Blumau, a spa…
The purloined piano?
The Piano secured Jane Campion as a major director and catapulted her from the art-house to the multiplex, but the Oxford Companion to Australian Film recently cast doubt over the originality of the screenplay for…
The Piano plays on
Holly Hunter, who played a mute Scottish widow in Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), muses on the unexpected success of the movies. “It was a $5 million movie in New Zealand, and it ended…
Stunts at 25mph in six inches of water help to demonstrate the Audi Quattro A6
The ad took nine days to film at Bethell’s Beach on the west coast of New Zealand.
In Chicago Beach did Fletcher a stately pleasure dome build
Fletcher Construction was the managing partner in the construction of the world’s tallest hotel, the hyper-luxury Burj Al Arab Hotel in the United Arab Emirates. The facade, designed like a giant sail represents an…
Flaming Fox
“It’s difficult to pin down Kerry Fox. For every film-goer who knows her as the murderous medical student in Shallow Grave, there’s another who remembers her as the dumpy author Janet Frame in An Angel…
Edger takes to fringe
New Zealand actress Giarna Te Kanawa in New York plays all five parts in “Verbatim” by William Brandt and Miranda Harcourt, which played in the New York Fringe Festival. “Verbatim” is based on interviews…
Musicking: an activity not a thing
New Zealander Christopher Small’s books have been paradigm-changing events. His latest “Musicking” focuses on what Small believes is music’s ultimate function: “to provide insight into relationships: between and among notes and chords and rhythms…
Striking a Cool Note
The arts festival running concurrently with the games in Sydney features Vaughan William’s Sinfonia Antarctica performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, with narration by Sir Edmund Hillary.
Peerless Mansfield in Chicago
Katherine Mansfield’s intricate and beautiful stories continue to resonante around the world. “The New Zealand-born Mansfield, who died in 1923 at 34, was a peerless observer of the tiny spaces between joy and…
Edge Factor
Canadian-born, New Zealand-raised Anna Paquin is studying English literature of Columbia University and starring in two hot movies X-Men and Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous. Winning the Oscar was “pretty much the flukiest cool…
Proteas in Houston
Not aliens brought back by pathfinder, but an exhibition by New Zealand artist Zoe Calder at the Museum of Natural Science in Houston. Proteaceae are a large family of spectacular plants native to the…
Domestic round
Kiwi ingenuity presents the solution to your sunlight problems: turn the house around! Don Dunick spent fifteen years designing and building the world’s first fully revolving house.
Listen up there, folks!
Jim Cuddy, one of the starring acts at the upcoming Ottawa Folk Festival, praises the depth of folk talent in New Zealand, but claims we’re not sufficiently proud of our “roots music”.
Riff-Raff #2
“I didn’t want a conventional actor, and Richard O’Brien is in some ways very close, in our day, to what Farinelli was in his – a cult hero whom everyone loves,” says Robert Shaw,…
Still Crowe-ing
Does Bill Bryson bring Russell Crowe to mind? For some book reviewers, anything south of the equator can be connected with the Edge’s hunkiest export.
Chris Knox: Not the Hallmark variety
Rolling Stone praises Chris Knox’s latest effort: “You can always count on a rock eccentric to make you scratch your head – but touch your heart? That’s usually not the province of ordinary weirdos,…
Starbright and the Dreameater
Kiwi author Joy Cowley gets a glowing review for her latest childrens’ book whose story “could be a mix of the ‘X-files’ and ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’… The plot may be hokey, especially to…
Canary Breaks Free of its Textual Cage in Mansfield Adaptation
A short story by Katherine Mansfield “The Canary” has been adapted for the theatre by Walk About Theatre Company in Chicago.
Rock at Home
Alex Ross’ investigation of New Zealand music rock: “surface blips in the international musical marketplace give only a hint of an amazingly rich music…
Festival founding flutist celebrates the Hampton summer
Internationally acclaimed New Zealand-born flutist Marya Martin (Winner of the prestigious Young Concert Artists International Auditions) is the flute and artistic artistic director of the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival. Newsday talks to…
Kiwi Museum Authority Leads Berlin’s Jewish Museum
Ken Gorbey of Te Papa, “New Zealand’s enormously successful national museum,” has been appointed artistic leader of of one of the new Berlin’s emblematic projects: the Daniel Liebeskind designed Jewish Museum. Gorbey’s challenge it…
The Dunedin Sound #2
On August 9th, the 34th annual MacCrimmon Piobaireachd recital took place, as always, in the drawing room of Dunvegan Castle in Skye, Scotland, the seat of the 29th Chief of Clan MacLeod. It featured…
