‘Reasonable chance’ city council could move HQ
Blonde: Marilyn biopic a misfit or big hit?
There is a ‘‘reasonable chance’’ that Nelson City Council will be moving Civic House in the nottoo-distant future, its chief executive says, stunning city councillors.
The council revisited its Civic House refurbishment project, which last came to the table in May last year, yesterday. Mayor Rachel Reese expressed clear dismay at the apparent U-turn in advice in just over a year.
In 2021, the council voted to accept a business case for refurbishment and move on to floor-by-floor staged refurbishment of the building.
The council also voted to prioritise refurbishment of the tower block roof and other repairs, and requested two further reports from the chief executive.
None of the prioritised work has since taken place, nor have the two reports from the chief executive been delivered. The overall project had a budget of $16 million, $18m when adjusted for inflation.
However, updated information suggested a more realistic budget for the refurbishment would be $25.6m.
Yesterday, a new report was brought to the table recommending the council revoke its previous decision and approve the development of a new business case ‘‘to take into consideration the impact of changes since the previous business case was approved’’.
Chief executive Pat Dougherty said the new business case would have to look at all potential avenues, including potentially moving to a new site and building a fresh Civic House.
‘‘The informal advice we’ve received is there is a fairly good chance that the roof will be ripped off and some penthouses put up there ... the advice was, ‘there’s a chance you’re going to sell the building, don’t replace the roof until you know what that use is’.’’
The mayor said she could see ‘‘incredulous looks’’ from other councillors at this apparent bombshell – councillor Gaile Noonan said her ‘‘jaw is on the table’’.
Reese questioned why advice had been given, ‘‘but we haven’t seen it, again’’. However, Dougherty said it was a ‘‘verbal conversation’’ rather than a formal report.
‘‘[It was] a phone call, informal, nothing in writing. There is no report, we’re not concealing it.’’
The new business case would take into account the recommendations from the Greenmeadows report, amongst other significant changes brought about by Covid or incoming reforms. A major flaw in the Greenmeadows project was an inadequate business case.
However, Noonan was concerned that prioritised work to address safety issues would also be revoked and therefore not take place – even though ‘‘that work needs to be done anyway, and the budget was there for that’’.
Reese said she remembered saying in the meeting in 2021 for staff not to come back with a budget ‘‘half as much again or double ... because if you are, that means the information provided was not fit for purpose’’.
‘‘That was made really clear, because we have had too many reports which come ... and then [the budget] moves, and it moves, and it moves again. That was one part of the discussion around the Greenmeadows investigation.’’
She said councillors relied on reports being accurate in order to make good decisions.
‘‘In fact the assumptions and information provided in the original report . . . ‘are the numbers you’re quoting in this report something we can rely on in our decision-making?’ And it turns out the answer is no.
‘‘I don’t think we’re going to see a new future report come back and suggest that Civic House is going to be refurbished for the purposes of office accommodation for Nelson City Council . . . so we now have a very different scenario and information, that means that that original report really hasn’t stood up to scrutiny.’’
She said the decision sat in a ‘‘suite’’ of other decisions, including the library project. She recommended receiving the report and doing no more, with apologies to the incoming council.
The item was adjourned until later yesterday evening to allow resolutions to be drafted to set the new council in the best position to make a decision.
Screenwriter and director Andrew Dominik had Blonde in mind for more than a decade. The film is an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel of the same name, a fictional take on Marilyn Monroe’s life that was published in 2000 to great acclaim and some controversy.
Blonde is an immersive and engrossing portrait of, well, someone. Dominik toggles between scenes that are dreamlike and hallucinatory, then adds images that come straight from a nightmare.
But Blonde seldom settles into the expected rhythms of a biopic. If you’ve come to Blonde looking for a ‘‘film about Marilyn Monroe’s life’’ you have come to the wrong place.
This is more slow-burn horror movie than a conventional biopic. Monroe was raped, assaulted, beaten and ripped off throughout her career and her earlier life. As a child, Norma Jeane Mortenson was abandoned by a father she never knew and abused by a mother who was always teetering on the edge of a breakdown. She spent more time in orphanages and children’s homes than she did with her mother, Gladys Pearl.
The names may be drawn from history – and many of the incidents are broadly true – but Dominik treats this material as a fever dream, or a Lynchian fantasy. Where real life ends and invention begins is worse than blurred here. It is often treated as irrelevant.
It’s a troubling approach – to go looking for the merely cinematic within all this actual human cruelty and tragedy. But whether Blonde is ultimately as exploitative as the studio executives who preyed on the real Monroe will never be an easily resolved argument.
What Blonde gets right is an emphasis on how intelligent, insightful and flat-out talented Monroe was. Even within the confines of the roles she was offered, Monroe blazed with smart choices and she carved some indelible characterisations out of some average scripts.
We will never know how much of her very best work was left on the editor’s floor because those shots didn’t match the studio’s idea of what the public wanted.
If she had been born a decade later, or had been surrounded by better people, it is heartbreaking to speculate on the actress and the person that Monroe could have become.
In the lead role, and in nearly every shot, Ana de Armas is just as good as the trailer and publicity suggest. She vanishes into the role – or roles. The line between Norma Jeane and the Marilyn she played is a constant theme of Blonde. De Armas is convincing – and often devastating – as both. It’s a long way off, but an Oscar nomination seems a certainty.
Around de Armas, Bobby Cannavale as
husband No 2, Joe DiMaggio, is especially effective, playing an eventually tyrannical and abusive man as a figure lost in his own fame and incapable of dealing with its absence.
Blonde is exceptionally well crafted and assembled. Technically it is superb and the performances are uniformly wonderful.
Yet I still got to the end of the 166 minutes wishing they hadn’t bothered, or at least that they had stuck to the truth. That could have yielded a more admirable film than this.
Blonde is now available to stream on Netflix.