Utopia, you are standing in it!

Top Gun: Maverick (2022) Director: Joseph Kosinski

“It’s not the plane, it’s the pilot.”

Bucking the trend of recent years, 2022 was actually a pretty extraordinary year for movie-making. There were some real classics like the rebirth of the dark knight in The Batman, a gripping reimagining of Hamlet in The Northman, an arthouse meditation on the death of crumbling communities in The Banshees of Inisherin, a harrowing new German version of All Quiet on the Western Front, and the highly-anticipated sequel to Top Gun (1986), Top Gun: Maverick (2022). Emerging from what felt like an endless pandemic, Top Gun: Maverick is the film that enraptured a beleaguered public –it presents a story that is hopeful, nostalgic, triumphant, emotional, heroic, exhilerating, and aspirational. It would have been easy for Paramount to take the low road with yet another Hollywood deconstruction…

Seriously?

This is how you want to go out? A plotless, sexually-neutered piffle of a stripper movie, barely-scripted, with hardly enough “film” to fill a trailer, much less close to two hours of screen time?

No, I didn’t like it. No, it doesn’t appear that Steven Soderbergh was all that crazy about it, either. At least his lunkheaded “Logan Lucky” had a funny character or two, and was stupid enough that it dared to offend.

The third and final “Magic Mike” movie is just stupid. What “Staying Alive” is to “Saturday Night Fever,” “The Last Dance” is to the gritty, sexy, hustling beefcake that was “Magic Mike.”

If Soderbergh was a musician, we’d call this a “contractual obligation album” and shake our heads about the money we just wasted supporting his “art.”

Even Channing Tatum seems a little embarrassed by all this by the time the third act rolls around.

Hundreds of whales are being killed by the offshore wind industry, and it’s been given a license to do so, with complete impunity. Let’s call it a ‘green light’ for industrial murder.

Offshore outfits along the US Atlantic coast have clocked up something like 178 whale fatalities since construction began and their turbines first started operating back in 2016.

Among the casualties are Humpbacks, Sperm whales and the rare and endangered North Atlantic Right whale.

The whales are being deafened during the construction process, thanks to underwater sonar blasting, and the constant low-frequency noise and vibration these things generate during operation interfere with their (sonar-dependent) navigational ability.

But, as it did with rare and endangered Eagles, the wind industry has been literally granted a license to kill.

In the case of whales, they’re called an ‘Incidental Harassment Authorisation’ – an innocuous-sounding euphemism, which cleverly varnishes over the fact that the…

Hard to imagine a better life. He wrote great songs for decades, songs that have become icons, worked with a great lyricist in Hal David and a great musician who first gave breath to most of his greatest hits, Dionne Warwick.

He was also married to Angie Dickinson, one of the hottest looking actresses of the 1960’s who still looked great in the 1970’s in Police Woman as Sgt “Pepper” Anderson.

I first became aware of his music as a kid when my sister, departing on her Big OE, left me her record player and a bunch of vinyl albums, among which was Burt Bacharach’s Greatest Hits.

There was, and remains, something incredibly catchy about his swirling, orchestral melodies, which sound great just as instrumentals, the true sign of a song’s class. The next song being an example of that, with the old NZBC using a version by a…

A lady with a bone to pick about the villainous role history has assigned Richard III, thanks in large part to Wm. Shakespeare, decides she can find out where the fellow is buried.

Stephen Frears re-teams with Steve Coogan, his “Philomena” partner, for another tale of a plucky lady and her seemingly hopeless quest. Coogan co-wrote and co-stars in this one.

Harry Lloyd plays the ghost of Richard III, killed on Ambion Hill at the Battle of Bosworth Field, guilting our put-upon researcher (Sally Hawkins) into locating just where he might be buried.

IFC has this, which means we’ll get a good chance of seeing it in a cinema on this side of the pond. March is its US opening date.

If the mob are in on it, you can be sure there’s a fast and easy buck to be made, which is why Sicily’s Cosa Nostra long-ago infiltrated Italy’s wind and solar industries. No doubt, providing added valuable protection, wherever it’s needed; no doubt ensuring premium prices for an inferior product. You know, the kind of offer you just can’t refuse?

A decade ago, Matteo Messina Denaro – then the undisputed head of the Cosa Nostra – was targeted by Italian police, which seized €3.5 million in assets including bank accounts in Sicily and Lombardy; and snaffled a further €1.3 billion belonging to his associate, wind-farm and solar-power magnate Vito Nicastri. Denaro and Nicastri ran a web of companies between them, many with direct ownership of large-scale wind and solar operations.

Although he may have been rattled by that financial raid back in 2013, Denaro wasn’t about to lie down; he…

Thank you for the opportunity to make a submission on the Natural and Built Environment Bill.

In my view the strongest part of the Bill is the central place it gives to te Oranga o te Taiao as a concept. This is defined in the legislation as:

(a) the health of the natural environment;
(b) the essential relationship between the health of the natural environment and its capacity to sustain life;
(c) the interconnectedness of all parts of the environment;
(d) the intrinsic relationship between iwi and hapū and te Taiao.

(a) to (c) inclusive warrant support, however the wording in (d) needs reconsideration. As drafted it implies that the only New Zealanders with intrinsic relationships with the natural environment are Māori who are affiliated to specific iwi and hapu tribal structures. This excludes the 84% of New Zealanders who are not Māori, and those Māori for whom iwi or…

The Dorchester Review recently published my article last month “Party Discipline and the King Doctrine”, in which I recount a brief history of party discipline in Canada over the last century, the Reform Act, and the significance of what we witnessed one year ago in January-February 2022, when Conservative MPs ousted Erin O’Toole as leader and when two backbench Liberal MPs overtly and ostentatiously criticised the Prime Minister, both his rhetoric and his policies.

The current minority 44^th Parliament has continued to break barriers and pierce through long-held taboos about partydiscipline in Canadian politics.