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The perils of picking the perfect plane movie

The Spinoff

16 hours ago

The Spinoff

The perils of picking the perfect plane movie

The most important part of any holiday is what you choose to watch on the flight there and back, writes Alex Casey. I cannot even begin to express to you how much the guy across the aisle was fanging to watch The Crow (2024). Most of us were still finding our seats, stowing our carry-on and steeling our wills for the 17-hour flight ahead of us, but he was already somehow into double digits on the duration, utterly transfixed by last year's ' unfathomably awful ' Bill Skarsgård reboot. Far from ridiculing this man, I envied him. He demonstrated the same self-assuredness of another passenger I had encountered accidentally sitting in my seat on a previous flight. The screen revealed he was already deep into Michael Jackson's greatest hits playlist and, after the smooth criminal soon found his allocated seat, we all celebrated with an extremely tinny 'Billie Jean' leaking through his flimsy Emirates headphones once more. In-flight entertainment is particularly crucial for New Zealanders. If you are woke enough to know what the hell it even says on those confusing little black books, you probably also know that we require at least the duration of two feature length films to fly anywhere deemed 'overseas'. To get to Japan you will need 11 hours. To get to New York you will need 16 hours. To reach London Heathrow, you'll need at least a full 24 hour day. We're gonna need more than just quizzes to get us through. You'd think this type of long-haul endurance flying would make us savvier than most when it comes to curating our in-flight entertainment. Alas, on a recent 17-hour flight from Auckland to Dubai, I witnessed dozens of New Zealanders completely lose their minds in a prison of indecision. One person watched an entire season of The White Lotus, but completely out of order. Another watched two minutes of Iron Man, then two minutes of Frozen 2, then immediately fell asleep to Avatar 2. To be absolutely clear, I am also one of these people (made a 40+ hour watchlist including Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Joker 2: Folie a Deux, watched five minutes of Lilo and Stitch chased down by an episode of… Scare Tactics??). If you too find yourself riddled with indecision and neuroses, here are eight simple rules to successfully select movies for your next long haul flight. 1. Horror seldom works out One of the craziest mistakes among the many that I made was popping on Steven Soderbergh's Presence, a slow-burning spooky thriller shot from the POV of a ghost, right as the lights went up and the trolleys of sweaty omelettes started trundling past for breakfast. Anything remotely scary requires the right atmosphere to build tension, and hurtling through the sky in a sealed fart tube is simply not it. I also watched the opening scene of The Monkey, and promptly turned it off following the first disembowelment because the children in the row behind me were crying. 2. Backfill the critical darlings If there's a festival, foreign, or Oscar-nominated film on offer, or any film that you nearly paid cold hard cash to see at the cinema: watch it on the plane. You are earning back the price of a $20 ticket with every choice, and given that I put away The Apprentice, Kneecap, The Last Showgirl and The Outrun on just one leg, I earned back a tidy $80 entirely through sitting on my arse. That's not 'girl math' by the way, that's just math. Girl math is the fact that I watched all of The Last Showgirl even though I found it to be quite a bore, all because I still feel bad for how we all treated Pamela Anderson. 3. Beware the boxset I saw a couple of confident folks immediately ripping into franchises like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings from the very beginning, implicitly committing to watching the full boxset for the entirety of the flight. Again, I admire and envy the conviction, but I worry about this avenue. What if you fall asleep before they've even taken the hobbits to Isengard? There's also a question of legacy: do you want to forever remember your trip to Europe where you got surprise engaged under the Eiffel Tower as 'The Harry Potter holiday'? Just something to think about. 4. Avoid novelty choices I know a long haul flight is a liminal space, and sometimes crossing certain time zones means you are gifted extra hours on the clock, but that doesn't mean you have to watch Air Fryers: Are They Worth It? because it might make for a funny joke one day. Same goes for buzzed-about stinkers like Megalopolis and It Ends With Us, which I hovered over thinking 'well if not now, then when?' In the immortal words of Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, which the person next to me watched half of before switching to Encanto: 'your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.' 5. Old is often gold Guy Montgomery has a joke about watching 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time on a tiny screen on a long-haul flight, just as Stanley Kubrick intended. While it does feel hugely disrespectful and discordant to experience the classics of cinema on a plane, there's something thrilling about watching something a relic of the past while propelling through the skies in anticipation of the near future. There's also a hallucinogenic quality to so many old movies that they can also work as a drug-free trip when you are sleep-deprived and dehydrated. For example, I watched Whatever Happened To Baby Jane (1967) and had cool dreams of crazed Bette Davis in a nightie waiting for me at immigration. 6. Animal anything always Whenever I got up to stroll the cabins, one thing was abundantly clear: people of all stripes really, really love that movie featuring Steve Coogan and an animated penguin. Any film that could have a pull quote describing 'a true story of wit, warmth, and cute [insert any animal] antics' is always going to over well when you are feeling vulnerable, anxious or homesick in the skies. My personal highlights from this genre were Paddington in Peru and a National Geographic documentary about the close relationship between a Scottish man and a river otter named Molly. Five stars. 7. Let the tears flow freely Being on a long flight strips you of all distractions and reduces you to your base elements: you eat, you sleep, you excrete. It always means you are likely to feel your emotions more deeply, whether that be boiling rage at the nearby passenger picking their nose and eating it, or unbridled joy at the sight of a single slice of fresh fruit. It can also mean you are more prone to tears: and lots of them. I was in full shoulder-shaking sobs during Bridget Jones 4: Mad About the Boy and the cabin crew didn't even blink, ditto during We Live in Time. Beware though: at 30,000 feet, even Harry and the Hendersons will make you weep (reminded me of my dog). 8. Short on time? Go sitcom Find yourself with less than 90 mins before landing? Don't start a movie and promise to finish it when you get home, because you will either forget entirely or have to watch the whole thing from the start again. Instead, beloved sitcoms are your best friend here. With 20 minutes until landing, I cracked open season five of The Office US and watched the weight loss episode, instantly giddy with silent laughter and trails of tears down my cheeks. Sure, much of the episode would be cancelled in 2025, but you're not in 2025 in the sky. You're on plane time.

How a local TV station became a global powerhouse

Otago Daily Times

a day ago

Otago Daily Times

How a local TV station became a global powerhouse

By Eva Kershaw for Frank Film It's hard to compare Dunedin to Hollywood. However, for four decades, the small, academic city in New Zealand's deep south was home to a powerhouse of global documentary filmmaking. Born in Dunedin's TVNZ studios in the 1970s, Natural History New Zealand – known globally as NHNZ – developed from a government-run unit to an Emmy Award-winning international producer, reflecting not only the growth of an industry, but the evolution of New Zealand's place in global media and the emergence of a strong conservation movement. One of the unit's earliest series followed the critically endangered Chatham Island black robin out of extinction. There were only seven birds left. 'We came in at exactly the right moment to start telling these stories of hope,' says former frontperson Peter Hayden, 'and the audiences around New Zealand loved it.' It was new territory. Dunedin TV was known for children's programme production. TV audiences were not used to seeing their own natural environment on screen; and natural history was virtually unknown. Hayden, now 76, began working for TVNZ's Natural History Unit in 1980. 'Coming down here I thought I'd better go and buy a bloody book about natural history,' he tells Frank Film. 'I went to the Heinemann's Bookshop... and there was no such thing as a natural history section. 'That reflected the knowledge of New Zealanders at the time. We knew nothing.' On the team with Hayden were producer/director Neil Harraway, film-makers Rod Morris and Max Quinn, and the charismatic and committed Dunedinite, managing director Michael Stedman. '[Michael] was our leader,' says Harraway. 'Quite a stroppy little guy.' Using the hidden camera as a 'silent witness' to the natural world, the team put together personable documentaries of the wildlife of Aotearoa: rare footage of takahē and kākāpō, films on bats, sharks, locusts and a range of birdlife. In looking for a logo, they hit upon the kea, chosen for its intelligence, inquisitiveness, and adaptability – critical traits, says Hayden, for the company's survival. From 1981 until the early '90s, what was then called the Natural History Unit produced Wildtrack – a nature programme for both children and adults that won the Feltex Television Award for the best children's programme, three years running. In 1989, the unit produced Under The Ice, the first nature documentary to be filmed under the Antarctic sea ice. 'I don't know what we were thinking,' says Harraway. Under-water camera housing units were yet to be commercially available, 'so some of the local geeks climbed on in and whipped stuff up like this,' says former NHNZ technician Wayne Poll, gesturing to an early model unit kept in the basement of the company's Dunedin offices. Despite NHNZ's ingenuity, television was changing, and production in New Zealand was migrating largely to Auckland. In 1991, TVNZ closed its Dunedin studios. While the Natural History Unit escaped closure, its future was uncertain. Undeterred, Stedman began looking for new funding relationships overseas. Harraway recalls him picking up business cards from the floor and out of waste baskets at a Cannes event. 'Darwin said, it's not going to be the strongest or the most intelligent animal that survives on the planet, it's going to be the most adaptable,' says Morris. 'Michael sort of understood that intuitively, really, that adaptation was where survival of the unit rested.' And adapt they did. In 1992, in an early co-production with Discovery and Rai3, NHNZ produced the Emperors of Antarctica documentary – a pioneering film on Emperor penguins. 'I think Emperors of Antarctica sold to over 100 different territories around the world,' says Quinn, who devised a hand-made cover to insulate the moving parts of his camera in Antarctica's sub-50 degree temperatures. In 1997, the Natural History Unit was purchased by Fox Television, owned by Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch 'brought a bucket of money,' says Morris, and supplied the team with funding for equipment they desperately needed. Stedman forged co-productions in the USA, Europe, Japan, and China. As a fan of science communication, he helped build a post-graduate diploma in natural history film making at the University of Otago. 'We were into science, we were into health, we were into adventure,' says Hayden. As Stedman said in a 2001 TVNZ interview, NHNZ focussed on reading the market in order to make programmes that would appeal to their audiences, 'as opposed to a British system where they would make a programme that they wanted to make and then go and look for a market for it.' At its height, NHNZ had $50 million worth of documentaries in production. It was working on up to 20 films at any one time and employed 200 people. 'When it started, there was about five of us,' recalls Hayden. New Zealand was a hard audience to break into. 'I don't think New Zealanders were seeing a lot of these programmes,' says Hayden. 'I remember Michael saying, you know, you're selling to so many countries, but one of the hardest countries to sell to is your own country.' Internationally, NHNZ's reputation shone. Among numerous other awards, the company's films earned multiple Emmy nominations, and won Emmy awards in 1999 and 2000. In 2011, Stedman's health declined. 'The golden years were over,' says Morris. 'From Fox buying us in 1997, those fantastic years of growth and spreading its wings had sort of got to the end of its road,' says Harraway. 'The market had changed from the good film-making we liked. Reality kind of took hold.' Stedman resigned in 2013, and in the decade following, NHNZ scaled down. In 2022, a much smaller NHNZ was sold to Auckland-based Dame Julie Christie. With the company re-branded to NHNZ Worldwide, just three staff remain in Dunedin. With this month marking three years since Stedman's death in 2022, the original NHNZ team gather around a TV unit, watching a video of Stedman giving a speech. 'It sort of brings the dear old man back to life again,' says Quinn. 'He was an extraordinary person,' says Morris. 'He sponsored us for a period of time so that we could fulfil our dreams.'

From Dunedin TV station to global powerhouse: the story of NHNZ

Otago Daily Times

a day ago

Otago Daily Times

From Dunedin TV station to global powerhouse: the story of NHNZ

By Eva Kershaw for Frank Film It's hard to compare Dunedin to Hollywood. However, for four decades, the small, academic city in New Zealand's deep south was home to a powerhouse of global documentary filmmaking. Born in Dunedin's TVNZ studios in the 1970s, Natural History New Zealand – known globally as NHNZ – developed from a government-run unit to an Emmy Award-winning international producer, reflecting not only the growth of an industry, but the evolution of New Zealand's place in global media and the emergence of a strong conservation movement. One of the unit's earliest series followed the critically endangered Chatham Island black robin out of extinction. There were only seven birds left. 'We came in at exactly the right moment to start telling these stories of hope,' says former frontperson Peter Hayden, 'and the audiences around New Zealand loved it.' It was new territory. Dunedin TV was known for children's programme production. TV audiences were not used to seeing their own natural environment on screen; and natural history was virtually unknown. Hayden, now 76, began working for TVNZ's Natural History Unit in 1980. 'Coming down here I thought I'd better go and buy a bloody book about natural history,' he tells Frank Film. 'I went to the Heinemann's Bookshop... and there was no such thing as a natural history section. 'That reflected the knowledge of New Zealanders at the time. We knew nothing.' On the team with Hayden were producer/director Neil Harraway, film-makers Rod Morris and Max Quinn, and the charismatic and committed Dunedinite, managing director Michael Stedman. '[Michael] was our leader,' says Harraway. 'Quite a stroppy little guy.' Using the hidden camera as a 'silent witness' to the natural world, the team put together personable documentaries of the wildlife of Aotearoa: rare footage of takahē and kākāpō, films on bats, sharks, locusts and a range of birdlife. In looking for a logo, they hit upon the kea, chosen for its intelligence, inquisitiveness, and adaptability – critical traits, says Hayden, for the company's survival. From 1981 until the early '90s, what was then called the Natural History Unit produced Wildtrack – a nature programme for both children and adults that won the Feltex Television Award for the best children's programme, three years running. In 1989, the unit produced Under The Ice, the first nature documentary to be filmed under the Antarctic sea ice. 'I don't know what we were thinking,' says Harraway. Under-water camera housing units were yet to be commercially available, 'so some of the local geeks climbed on in and whipped stuff up like this,' says former NHNZ technician Wayne Poll, gesturing to an early model unit kept in the basement of the company's Dunedin offices. Despite NHNZ's ingenuity, television was changing, and production in New Zealand was migrating largely to Auckland. In 1991, TVNZ closed its Dunedin studios. While the Natural History Unit escaped closure, its future was uncertain. Undeterred, Stedman began looking for new funding relationships overseas. Harraway recalls him picking up business cards from the floor and out of waste baskets at a Cannes event. 'Darwin said, it's not going to be the strongest or the most intelligent animal that survives on the planet, it's going to be the most adaptable,' says Morris. 'Michael sort of understood that intuitively, really, that adaptation was where survival of the unit rested.' And adapt they did. In 1992, in an early co-production with Discovery and Rai3, NHNZ produced the Emperors of Antarctica documentary – a pioneering film on Emperor penguins. 'I think Emperors of Antarctica sold to over 100 different territories around the world,' says Quinn, who devised a hand-made cover to insulate the moving parts of his camera in Antarctica's sub-50 degree temperatures. In 1997, the Natural History Unit was purchased by Fox Television, owned by Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch 'brought a bucket of money,' says Morris, and supplied the team with funding for equipment they desperately needed. Stedman forged co-productions in the USA, Europe, Japan, and China. As a fan of science communication, he helped build a post-graduate diploma in natural history film making at the University of Otago. 'We were into science, we were into health, we were into adventure,' says Hayden. As Stedman said in a 2001 TVNZ interview, NHNZ focussed on reading the market in order to make programmes that would appeal to their audiences, 'as opposed to a British system where they would make a programme that they wanted to make and then go and look for a market for it.' At its height, NHNZ had $50 million worth of documentaries in production. It was working on up to 20 films at any one time and employed 200 people. 'When it started, there was about five of us,' recalls Hayden. New Zealand was a hard audience to break into. 'I don't think New Zealanders were seeing a lot of these programmes,' says Hayden. 'I remember Michael saying, you know, you're selling to so many countries, but one of the hardest countries to sell to is your own country.' Internationally, NHNZ's reputation shone. Among numerous other awards, the company's films earned multiple Emmy nominations, and won Emmy awards in 1999 and 2000. In 2011, Stedman's health declined. 'The golden years were over,' says Morris. 'From Fox buying us in 1997, those fantastic years of growth and spreading its wings had sort of got to the end of its road,' says Harraway. 'The market had changed from the good film-making we liked. Reality kind of took hold.' Stedman resigned in 2013, and in the decade following, NHNZ scaled down. In 2022, a much smaller NHNZ was sold to Auckland-based Dame Julie Christie. With the company re-branded to NHNZ Worldwide, just three staff remain in Dunedin. With this month marking three years since Stedman's death in 2022, the original NHNZ team gather around a TV unit, watching a video of Stedman giving a speech. 'It sort of brings the dear old man back to life again,' says Quinn. 'He was an extraordinary person,' says Morris. 'He sponsored us for a period of time so that we could fulfil our dreams.'

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The perils of picking the perfect plane movie

How a local TV station became a global powerhouse

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Tauranga Shines Again At The 2025 Parks Awards

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The perils of picking the perfect plane movie

How a local TV station became a global powerhouse

From Dunedin TV station to global powerhouse: the story of NHNZ

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