Celebrating 20 years: Day one

Somehow I knew that when I brought all my Substack news­let­ters over here and star­ted treat­ing Funerals & Snakes as my digit­al home once again, it would become the train­set that I tinker with rather than the plat­form that I would be writ­ing on every day.

In the past few weeks I have spent more time than I prob­ably should on design tweaks (and hope­fully per­form­ance enhance­ments) and I’m going to kid myself that I have been doing it all for this cel­eb­ra­tion week.

On 4 October 2006, my first film review column was prin­ted in Wellington’s Capital Times mak­ing this week the 20^th anniversary of me becom­ing a pro­fes­sion­al crit­ic. The CT did­n’t have a web­site and I knew I was going to want these thoughts to be avail­able for as long as pos­sible, so I fired up this web­site as a repos­it­ory or archive (or legacy).

During my Capital Times ten­ure, I made it my mis­sion to watch and cri­tique every film released the­at­ric­ally in Wellington and I’ve nev­er coun­ted how many films that means but it’s a lot. The CT gig led to me join­ing the RNZ whānau and from 2015 their web­site got first dibs in exchange for small amounts of money. Then, in 2023, I thought I would try and make my for­tune with Substack and we know how that turned out.

But my heart has always been here. There are 20 years worth of digit­al scars hid­den all over this web­site and every time I come across a page that has­n’t had a hair­cut for a while, I have to get in there and give it a good tidy-up. Websites aren’t monu­ments, they are gar­dens to be ten­ded. Even last week, when the latest design tweak was intro­duced, I real­ised that every page was some­how going to have be checked and updated (and in many cases, replace­ment images found). It won’t hap­pen all at once, but there’s plenty to keep me going.

The first film reviewed in that first column was Danis Tanovic’s ver­sion of an unpro­duced Kieslowski script, L’enfer:

Three sis­ters are estranged from each oth­er and, seem­ingly, from life itself. Sophie (Emmanuelle Béart¹) dis­cov­ers her hus­band is hav­ing an affair; Anne (Marie Gillain), the young­est, has just been dumped by her University pro­fess­or lov­er and Céline (Karin Viard) seems doomed to a lonely exist­ence run­ning errands for her neigh­bours and vis­it­ing their mute moth­er (Carole Bouquet) until a hand­some stranger reads some philo­sophy to her in a bar. The three women’s stor­ies run par­al­lel to each oth­er until the truth is revealed about the fam­ily tragedy that trau­mat­ised them all.

The act­ing is first rate. The often icy Béart digs very deep for a change and Viard has one heart­break­ing scene where she finally opens up to someone and then soon wishes she hasn’t. Oscar-winner Danis Tanovic (No Man’s Land) dir­ects with a sym­path­et­ic eye on Kieslowski’s leg­acy, though the fact that every image seems to have to carry sig­ni­fic­ant meta­phor­ic weight can get a little wearing.

I’d like to point you at an online loc­a­tion where you can stream L’enfer but – like all of Tanovic’s work includ­ing the Oscar-winning No Man’s Land – it is MIA. If you are in Wellington, Aro Street Video still has it on DVD.

Also reviewed in that first Capital Times column: Will Ferrell vehicle, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, “girl-power gym­nastics fantasy” Stick It (star­ring Missy Peregrym and “a decrep­it look­ing Jeff Bridges”), and an early entry in what I call “unwatch­able films about unlisten­able music”, American Hardcore.

Each day this week, I’m going to pick a piece from the archive that I am fond of, wheth­er it is avail­able to stream or not. Forgive the indul­gence but this feels like my life’s work in these pages and I’m really proud of it.

1. This is not the only film called L’enfer that Emmanuelle Béart has appeared in. ↩︎