MOVIE OF THE WEEK
Let It Snow
Netflix
December is here, which means two things: it’s time for me to once again listen to Counting Crows' Long December every day for the entire month, and we’re all allowed to watch as many Christmas movies as we want and there’s officially nothing the haters can do about it. While we wait for the main event (A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby, available next weekend), Let It Snow is a better than expected Christmas romcom about a day where the weather outside is so frightful that everybody gets stuck in their nice cosy home town. Do some of them unexpectedly fall in love? Do they ever.
FROM THE VAULT Whale Rider 2002
TVNZ OnDemand
It’s almost the 20s, for goodness sake, what are we all doing still waiting for Boxing Day and Easter Weekend to watch all the classic Kiwi family movies on TV? Savvy old state-owned broadcaster TVNZ has just changed the game by bunging up a whole lot of Kiwi favourites to stream OnDemand, so now you can watch Whale Rider or Sione’s Wedding (1 and 2) or Hunt For the Wilderpeople whenever you feel like it. Welcome to the future.
PODCAST OF THE WEEK Cautionary Tales
It comes as no surprise to learn that Cautionary Tales host Tim Harford is good mates with Malcolm Gladwell. Like the host of the hugely popular Revisionist History podcast, Harford is — how do we put this nicely — a giant nerd, author of several popular books about economics. Another thing he has in common with Gladwell is that he can tell a bloody good story.
Each episode of Cautionary Tales tells a story that serves as, yes, a cautionary tale about psychology and human behaviour. Why would a ship captain run his ship aground on some rocks just to save a couple of minutes? How did a crook dressed as an army captain convince a bunch of German soldiers to commit a wartime heist on his behalf? And the best one so far, all about the epic Best Picture farce at the 2017 Oscars.
Harford makes a strong case that it was neither Warren Beatty's nor Faye Dunaway’s fault they read out La La Land instead of Moonlight, and that the incident actually proves Galileo’s theory that the more measures are put in place to prevent an accident, the more likely a mistake is to be made. A truly fascinating, nerdy listen.