At the Movies

I never go to the movies and seldom watch a movie on TV from beginning to end without falling asleep, but I have watched 3 full movies since we arrived in NZ – two at a cinema and 1 DVD.

The first one I saw was “The Help” – I read the book and loved it and tried to get to see the movie at home and then on the plane over, but to no avail. So when it was still on at the Rialto – classy cinema complex in central Tauranga – Pete and I went. It lived up to the book – really good actors who gave the story enough depth to make it believable. The next one – at the Rialto but on my own this time – was The First Grader. I had seen a trailer of it at the Intel conference in July, and then gone to Kenya and spent time in schools in September, and expected a feel-good movie with lots of familiar scenery. It was, and it wasn’t – the story behind the story of the struggles of a freedom fighter to fit in in later life was disturbing, as were the scenes of the Mau Mau uprising. But it ended happily – perhaps a bit too happily, but it would have been unsellable if it had ended realistically.

But the movie that had the most impact was “Boy” – a DVD about the life of a Maori boy on the East Coast of NZ in the 1980s. We saw the DVD with Nic and Ray, his parents and a friend on New Year’s Eve. Parts of it were hilarious – especially to those who have been teachers and have taught “those” kids – I think kids are universal and the child who wants to make him/herself with tall stories is one we’ve all taught. The 80’s names were great, too – the sisters called Dallas and Dynasty and the girlfriend called Chardonnay. The “tattoo” drawn on with a permanent marker, with arb things like “back” and “arm” gave us all a good chuckle. The blending of Michael Jackson’s Thriller dance with the Haka into one dance was hilarious. But the pathos of a story where the Gran is the only stable person, and when she goes away, the oldest child, Boy, having to take responsibility for his sibling and cousins, is too close for comfort. Watching the jailbird father behaving like a child – “shooting” the enemy with driftwood guns, lying to his children and trying to re-establish his youth through drinking and dagga after he is released from jail was just sad. Especially when you see the child wanting to believe him and be like him, but being cast off by him in the end.

We watched it to get a picture of Maori life in modern times, but in the end, it was a universal story – adults who let kids down, grannies who end up looking after all the kids, sad people with no future and no hope. Graham summed it all up when he said “What a sad movie” as it finished.