Television Critic: Attack on London: Hunting The 7/7 Bombers
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RNZ News
15 hours ago
- RNZ News
Palmerston North kids set for international literature quiz
What food did Paddington Bear have with him when he arrived in England? Which teacher in Harry Potter can turn herself into a cat? A group of four bright young minds from Palmerston North are preparing to answer questions like this at the World Kids Lit Quiz in Johannesburg, South Africa. Jimmy Ellingham reports. To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.
The Spinoff
20 hours ago
- The Spinoff
Nine-and-a-half minutes with Chief of War's local star Luciane Buchanan
Tara Ward goes into battle on the Chief of War press junket. Being part of an international press junket for a new TV show is a weird experience. To begin, you open an email filled with instructions about the types of questions you can ask, whether you'll see the 'talent' on camera or simply hear their voice, and how many minutes you have to chat. Then, you're transported into a Zoom waiting room, where you speak with several different but equally upbeat American publicists, who bounce you from one waiting room to another and back again. It's a slick operation run with impressive military precision, as other journalists from around the world also jump in and out and publicists say things like 'head on over for a six-minute wait,' and 'Phoebe, is there an embargo for Korea?' Just when you think you're going to be trapped in that Zoom void for the rest of your life, you're suddenly thrust into the bright sunshine and New Zealand actor Luciane Buchanan is on the screen in front of you. Buchanan is sitting on a balcony somewhere in Hawai'i, a stunning vista of blue skies and calm seas stretching far behind her (I am in Dunedin, it's 6 degrees celsius and my lunch dishes are piled up next to me). Buchanan is immediately warm and friendly, and gives no hint that she's stuck in an endless cycle of interviews with journalists like me, who all want to squeeze what juice they can out of a tightly-managed 10-minute chat about her new Apple TV+ show, Chief of War. Based on true events, Chief of War is a sweeping historical drama that tells the story of the unification and colonisation of Hawai'i at the turn of the 18th century, through the eyes of warrior Ka'iana (Jason Momoa). The nine-part epic has been a passion project for Momoa, who not only stars in the series, but also co-created, co-wrote and co-directed. Chief of War filmed in both Hawai'i and New Zealand, and features several New Zealand actors including Temuera Morrison, Cliff Curtis, Te Ao o Hinepehinga and Te Kohe Tuhaka. Buchanan plays Ka'ahumanu, who was trusted friend to Ka'iana and wife of King Kamehameha, and who also became one of Hawai'i's most powerful political leaders of the 19th century. It's the latest starring role in a big-budget drama for Buchanan, who most recently impressed audiences around the world as Rose in Netflix thriller The Night Agent. It's also a long way from her first acting role at the age of 17, when Buchanan played Billy T James's daughter Cherie in the 2011 biopic Billy. 'I was petrified, I didn't know what I was doing,' Buchanan remembers. As intimidating as that experience was, Buchanan left the three-week Billy shoot with the realisation that she wanted to pursue a career in acting. Roles in shows like Filthy Rich, The Brokenwood Mysteries and The New Legend of Monkey soon followed. Buchanan also co-wrote and starred in the short film Lea Tupu'anga / Mother Tongue, which screened at Sundance Festival. She then decided to try her luck in Los Angeles, where her 2022 breakthrough role in The Night Agent saw her hit the top of IMDb's list of most searched actresses in the world. In fact, Buchanan was sitting in a Los Angeles bar watching a Dodgers game when her manager casually revealed she'd won the role of Ka'ahumanu. Buchanan immediately felt the pressure of bringing such an important historical figure to life on the small screen, and began the 'huge learning curve' of researching Ka'ahumanu's life and understanding the rich and complex history of Hawai'i. 'I'm a big fan of Polynesian history, and I love learning about my Tongan history when I'm sitting around with family, so being able to deep dive into this world felt like a dream,' she says. Buchanan also dedicated herself to learning 'Olelo Hawai'i, the indigenous language of Hawai'i (the first two episodes of Chief of War are spoken only in 'Olelo Hawai'i). Mastering a new language added an immense challenge to the role, but Buchanan was determined to do justice to Ka'ahumanu's legacy. 'I said to myself, what if I went all-in for this character? What if I did everything I possibly could – what would that look like?' she recalls. 'I truly feel proud of myself. I gave it everything.' Chief of War is a large-scale international production, but Buchanan says it was special to film part of the series in Aotearoa, working with the small local crew (some of whom she met all those years ago on Billy) and New Zealand acting icons like Morrison and Curtis. And while she flew to Hawai'i for the Chief of War press tour, Buchanan is now back in Auckland filming a movie – 'New Zealand just keeps on calling me home' – and is so busy that she hasn't had time to catch up on any of her favourite television shows, including Mobland and The Bear. As we speed towards the nine-minute mark, I realise I've forgotten everything from the PR email and have committed the sin of having the chat box on my Zoom call closed. I've missed the crucial PR warning messages of '2 minutes', '1 minute' and 'wrap', and expect the Apple TV+ police to pull up outside my door at any moment. As we say our goodbyes, nine-and-a-half minutes after we first met, Buchanan says what a privilege it was to play Ka'ahumanu, a woman so important to the Hawai'ian people. 'I still pinch myself to this day that I was the lucky one who got to portray her.'
NZ Herald
a day ago
- NZ Herald
Book of the day: Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson
Holly Jackson: Preposterous but enjoyable tale. Images / Supplied Jet, the 27-year-old heroine of Not Quite Dead Yet, has a choice to make: she can die now, or die in a week. Someone attacks Jet when she returns to her family home on Halloween night. The way the blows land mean surgery has only a 10% chance of success. The alternative is an inevitable fatal aneurysm in seven days. 'What kind of choice was that?' the terminally flippant Jet asks herself. '[She] couldn't even decide what to have for breakfast most days.' Opting to forgo the operation and take the seven days, Jet is determined to solve her own murder. She wants to prove she can persevere with something to the end; that she wasn't 'born useless and would die that way, too', as her mother says about her when she gives up law school. That's the set-up for Holly Jackson's first adult novel. Her previous books have all been YA, with her first, the phenomenally successful A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, being followed by two popular sequels and turned into a BBC TV series. Jet moves out of the family home, escaping her mother's pleas to have the operation, and moves in with her childhood best friend, Billy. 'Poor sweet Billy' has always been in love with an oblivious Jet and agrees to help her find her killer. Driving around town in Jet's beloved powder-blue pick-up truck, their investigations lead them to suspect, among others, Jet's brother, Jet's brother's wife, employees of her father's construction company and the brother of a former boyfriend. The police, also investigating the 'murder', are always at least one step behind, and the sense of Jet and Billy being two young people against the world while the clock ticks down is nicely done. The grimness of the time bomb in Jet's brain is lightened by her ever-present smart-aleck humour: 'Smashing shit with sledgehammers, pissing [my brother] off, being an asshole because I'm dying and allowed to be, having guns waved in our faces. I'm having fun, aren't you?' Despite Jet's dire prognosis and much swearing, the novel feels more YA than adult. The grown-ups – and, tellingly, it feels accurate to characterise anyone but Jet and Billy as 'the grown-ups' – tend towards caricature. The book's setting of Woodstock, Vermont, was seemingly chosen for its proximity to the UK-based Jackson's American publishers and, despite the prevalence of pick-up trucks and rotting Halloween pumpkins on porches, is so lightly sketched it could be an anonymous town anywhere. Jet's major motivation for solving her own murder seems to be to show her family, especially her mother, that she can complete something hard, and this, too, feels more 17 than 27. But Not Quite Dead Yet is enjoyable. Jackson is not an astoundingly successful author for nothing. She can do pace, twists, snarky humour and pathos with the best of them. She makes you care about the prickly, wise-cracking Jet even as Jet's jokes get progressively more tired and self defeating: 'Come on, she was the one dying, they could at least pity-laugh.' The crime is genuinely perplexing and the efforts Jet and Billy make to solve it get riskier as the days count down, involving them in warehouse fires and precious time wasted in prison cells. Throughout there's the reliable fun of seeing these digital natives outwit the boomer cops with their technological know-how. The solution to the crime is, frankly, preposterous, but you'll be so caught up in Jet's race against time you probably won't mind much anyway. Not just for fans of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder. Not Quite Dead Yet, by Holly Jackson (Michael Joseph, $38), is out now.
